Donor Power Blog

When copyediting wrecks copy

Seth Godin makes another of his good points, this time about the role of copyeditors, in Sucking all the juice out.

Seems a copyeditor got her hands on something he'd written and turned it all "boring and dry and mechanical." Trouble is, many copyeditors (and all kinds of others) think their job is to "normalize" copy, taking out everything that makes it eccentric, unusual, and non-standard -- that is, everything that gives it life and makes it memorable:

If the job description of your lawyer or boss or editor or client is to make sure everything is pure and perfect and proven and beyond reproach, they are making things worse, not better.

Amen. Just say no to boring copy. And to the people who think it's their job to make copy boring.

The world is filled with lifeless, dull writing. If you have a writer who's capable of the kind of crazy, energetic writing that grabs attention -- leave it alone. Correct the spelling. Put the commas in the right places. Fix any inaccuracies. But leave the rest alone!

Technorati Tags: fundraising, copyediting

How much asking is too much?

It's one of the most self-destructive myths active in fundraising: That if you ask donors too often they'll stop giving. Or, as Step by Step Fundraising calls it, The Myth of the Dried Up Well.

If you're relevant, honest, and respectful to your donors, you can't ask too much.

Or, as Step by Step put it:

If your organization is one of your donor’s favorites (and if you’re doing your job well, it should be), they WANT to support you and see you be successful. They care about your mission and they know it takes resources for you to fulfill it.

And they will be a well that you can visit as often as is needed.

Don't worry about too much asking. Worry about too little relevance.

Technorati Tag: marketing revolution

Another way advertising can hurt you

Get your head around this trippy inference, expressed at The Power of Influence: Coming soon - Advertising damages your brand. Here's how it goes:

Brands that need to use traditional advertising are not getting (enough) personal recommendation to succeed.... Brands that have to rely on traditional advertising are not as good as ones that succeed through word of mouth.... Advertising will actually damage a brand's reputation

Not as weird as it might sound. You may have noticed the impulse in people around you: Folks sometimes distrust brands that seem "over-marketed." They search for better, more obscure, the recommended-by-someone-cool.

A generation ago, advertising helped "validate" brands. Not so much any more.

What does this mean to nonprofits? We seldom have the budgets to overexpose ourselves and saturate television with spots. But do we ever "try too hard" and create the impression that we don't really have much to offer?

If we get our cues from the advertising world, we probably make the same mistakes they make. But more imortant -- and more likely -- we should be asking ourselves if we're offering donors something truly remarkable to do. Something that would actually spread through word-of-mouth, making advertising unnecessary.

Technorati Tags: advertising, fundraising

You need to write like a human being

So often, fundraising copy just sounds wooden, artificial, and inhuman.

Here's a sample, pulled at random from the Donor Power Fortress of Charity Junk Mail Vault:

Winter disasters and other emergencies are on the way. And your gift to [name of charity deleted] is critically important. Please send your gift of $35, $25, $50 or more right way. Use the enclosed envelope, or simply call [phone number deleted].

There's nothing flat-out bad about this copy. It's clear and readable, which is more than you can say for a lot of copy that gets written and published. There's just one thing:

It doesn't sound like a human being. No mentally healthy person would speak those sentences. It sounds like a robot.

Here's what we need to get into our heads: Nobody wants to hear from a robot any more than they have to! We waste too many hours with voice-mail menus, voice-recognition bots, auto-generated emails, and inhuman notifications from our banks, insurance companies, utilities, and others.

It's soul-crushing. People shouldn't have to put up with it. Increasingly, they're refusing to put up with it.

There's nothing forcing you to write that way. When you write to donors -- whether you're asking for money, thanking them for a gift, telling them what their giving accomplished, or even taking care of details -- keep it natural, warm, and human. Make sure you're awake from the organizational stupor that can strike.

And then write like a human. Your donors will thank you for it.

Technorati Tags: fundraising, copywriting

Another nonprofit guarantee

I'm pleased to report another nonprofit guarantee has cropped up out there, as reported in The Chronicle of Philanthropy: Keeping Promises to Donors.

The smart organization that's offering a guarantee is DonorsChoose, which I've written about a lot.

Here's how this guarantee works: When you donate to DonorsChoose, you get real feedback from the classrooms whose projects you fund (it's very cool). But sometimes, around 2% of the time, something goes wrong and there's no feedback to the donor. In that case, DonorsChoose contacts the donor with the offer to fund a different project at the organization's expense. The funds to make this possible are from a grant made specifically for that purpose (nice touch).

Charles Best, founder of DonorsChoose, said of the guarantee, "Proactively admitting a screw-up generates a whole lot of good will. Instances abound of donors saying they will give more."

It's still not the iron-clad, no-questions-asked donor guarantee that donors are eventually going to demand.

But it's another step in the right direction.

Technorati Tags: guarantee, DonorsChoose

When donors gossip

If you know they're watching, you're nicer. That's more or less what a recent study found, as reported by Reuters: Worried about gossip? It could influence generosity.

Study subjects were asked to distribute tokens with monetary value between themselves and someone else. Half were told that what they did was going to be discussed...

Participants who were told that the receiver would be communicating their economic decision with the third party were significantly more generous in their allocations of the tokens than participants who were not led to believe that their decisions would be discussed.

So once they thought others would know what they were up to, their philanthropic behavior improved. Big surprise, huh?

One of the reasons donors give is because they are part of a community. Call it gossip, or call it social interchange, but communities keep tabs on their members -- and members keep their eyes on their communities.

It's easy in our numbers-driven direct-response fundraising world to see donor transactions as isolated, private events. That's what they are -- sometimes. But more often, a donor gives for more than purely internal motives.

This may be one of the reasons large disasters like Hurricane Katrina motivate so many people to donate: Everyone's doing it; I guess I'd better do it too.

You probably don't want to encourage donors to rat each other out. But what can you do to foster the community that encourages giving?

Technorati Tag: fundraising

Your website isn't enough

A well-built website is wonderful thing. But it's only a start, according to the Connection Café in Think Outside the Site. Your online strategy should also include:

• Micro (or program oriented) sites
  
• Editorial calendars for email and web content
  
• Presence on social networking sites like Facebook
  
• Social media sites like Flickr
  
• Marketing through search engines
  
• Blogs, Twitter
  

Your website is really just a brochure. It just sits there; one piece of a larger communication nexus. If you build the coolest website on the planet, but that's your entire online strategy, it's not going to do you a lot of good.

Technorati Tags: fundraising, websites

I'm it, and now you are

I got tagged by one of those goofy blog memes, where you're asked to post something odd and tag more people to do the same. A long time ago, I vowed I wouldn't participate in such exercises. Then I realized I enjoyed reading them in other people's blogs when I saw them.

So today I break my vow. Here's what I've been tagged to do:

1. Pick up the nearest book.
   
2. Open to page 123.
   
3. Find the fifth sentence.
   
4. Post the next three sentences.
   
5. Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.
   

(At least I don't have to reveal something embarrassing.)

I'm thankful that the nearest book wasn't some geeky fundraising, marketing, or nonprofit management book -- there are plenty of those around. That would have been so boring.

The nearest book, A Manual of Eastern Orthodox Prayers, was less than 123 pages long. So I picked up the next nearest book, The Secret History of the English Language by M.J. Harper, which yielded a delightfully out-of-context passage:

How many Latin-speakers do you suppose a 2nd-century shepherd in the Auvergne is going to come across in the course of his lifetime? What, in your opinion, is the likelihood of him meeting, then marrying, a Latin-speaking shepherdess and raising Latin-speaking children? Apparently they all did.

The person who tagged me was Michael Hovnanian of the Bass Blog.

I tag the following bloggers:

• Tom or Roger at The Agitator
  
• "A fundraiser" at Don't Tell the Donor
  
• Katya at Nonprofit Marketing Blog
  
• Kivi at Nonprofit Communications Blog
  
• Sean at Tactical Philanthropy
  

This tagging has no teeth -- no curse if you don't obey or good luck if you do. But it could be interesting if you want to play along.

Just where are donors with social media, anyway?

Before you get too wound up about your lack of a social media strategy, check out what a recent survey, reported in The Chronicle of Philanthropy, said: Few Charity Supporters Read Nonprofit Blogs (subscription required) ...

Only a small percentage of charity supporters -- 6 percent -- read blogs, social-networking sites, or RSS feeds to keep up with the organizations they care about, according to a new survey.

But 43 percent of the people surveyed said that they were interested in receiving such information through social-media tools.

You know me and surveys (always take them with a grain of salt). But this does point out that these spiffy new Web 2.0 tools are still pretty exotic and unusual among donors.

Unless you have an unusually young or tech-savvy donorbase, your investments in these things are still pretty speculative. Spending in those areas is not likely to bring a lot of ROI. Yet.

Gold rushes are exciting, I'm told. Everybody putting all their effort into the same dream at the same time and same place. In the end, though, most of the panicky speculators go home disappointed. Other than a few lucky prospectors, the people who make the money are the ones who took it slow, didn't lose their heads, paid attention.

So keep your eyes open. The charitable giving landscape is changing. But don't bet the farm on sudden change, or change in one particular direction.

Technorati Tags: fundraising, web 2.0

3 more things nonprofits can learn from political direct mail

Posted by guest blogger Andrew Rogers

(Continuing from yesterday's post.)

4. Governing is campaigning

President Clinton received much criticism from certain quarters for his alleged reliance on polls and focus groups -- even famously using them to choose his family vacation spot. But at least since the days of FDR's fireside chats, savvy politicians have understood that communicating with voters, and particularly with your base of dedicated supporters, can't wait for election years: it is an essential part of democratic governance.

How does that translate to nonprofits? By making sure donor communication is a fully-integrated part of how you plan and carry out your mission, not an unpleasant burden to face when it's time for the Annual Fund Drive. If our organizations are tools that donors use to build the world they want to live in, donor-powered fundraising is their seat in your boardroom.

5. Get local

Segmenting your file based on donor behavior is a key to harnessing donor power. But political campaigns and organizations do a lot of communications based on geography, keyed to a donor's state, congressional or legislative district, down to the precinct or even the block level.

If yours is a community-based organization, do your donors know what's happening at the shelter or food bank around the corner? If you're a larger organization, do you have local events you can report on, or major donors you can profile in a regional "special edition" of your newsletter? How can you make sure you're part of your donors' neighborhood?

6. Donors have their own motivations

Conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly has been quoted, perhaps apocryphally, as saying "I'm very open-minded. I'll let people oppose the E.R.A. for any reason they want to." Political parties, candidates, and organizations recognize that people support them for reasons as diverse as the people themselves. There's no "one best reason" to be a Democrat.

Are you concerned that your donors support you for "the right reason" -- which could be that they have a full and complete understanding of how you do the work you do? As Jeff has written many times, you shouldn't try to "educate" your donors into giving. Accept the compliment that they are willing to invest their resources in you because you share their values and are working to achieve their dreams.

There's no more solid basis for a partnership than that.

Andrew Rogers is an associate creative director and writer at Merkle.

Technorati Tag: political fundraising