Fundraising and the Essence of TIME
Technology … what in the world would we do without it? As fundraisers, it’s supposed to make our jobs easier. It gives us more options for communicating with our constituents and for storing more “pertinent” information on their behaviors and motivations.
The truth, however, is that technology has made our jobs much more difficult, and quite frankly, I’m not so sure it’s made our industry better. As marketers and fundraisers, we now spend more time analyzing data and trying to predict consumer behavior than we do raising money.
If you think that’s bad, just look at what technology has done to consumers. It’s allowed us to inundate them with information – information they haven’t asked for, but which we want them to have. The average consumer today receives an estimated 3,000 marketing messages in a 24-hour period, as compared 650 about 24 years ago.
The problem is that the one thing technology hasn’t been able to change is time. Time is constant … only 24 hours in a day. Available shopping time has also remained constant. Yet, everything else around the consumer has changed.
Consider that donors today are exactly like their grandparents. The amount of time they have to make a donation is constant. What’s different, however, are the options available to them and the amount of time they have to react. In 1985, a person had 2.12 minutes to consider each marketing message the received, whereas today they have only 30 seconds to decide.
Just think of how many hours we spend planning the next fundraising campaign … the countless hours spent analyzing the data, segmenting the universe, developing the offer, debating whether to write a 2- or 4-page letter, reviewing motifs for yet more name and address labels, designing and redesigning creative and producing the package. And yet, it could all be over in 30 seconds.
Successful fundraising today requires that we master the one thing technology hasn’t been able to do … slow down time. And, how do you that? … By capturing your donor’s imagination immediately and by becoming more relevant with your donors.
For more information on this topic, you should read Stopwatch Marketing by John Rosen and AnnaMaria Turano.
-Greg Fox








