How blogs can work for your nonprofit

People keep talking about blogs. Somehow, blogs are supposed to be a powerful new marketing engine. Yet when you look around, you can find plenty of examples of blogs doing some great anti-marketing -- they've ravaged Dell and Alaska Airlines -- but it's tough to find real marketing success.

At last, here's a post-mortem of a blog/marketing success, along with some great analysis of why it worked: Blogging Doubled Stormhoek Sales in Less Than Twelve Months.

Stormhoek, a South African wine that's sold in the UK, gave free bottles of wine to bloggers. No strings attached. The bloggers were free to say anything they wanted about the wine. They were even free to drink it up and say nothing at all.

And Stormhoek sales doubled.

Hugh MacLeod, the blogger and consultant who came up with the scheme, explains it this way:

No, bloggers and their friends didn't start suddenly descending on supermarkets, buying the wine in large numbers. That's not how it works. What happened is that by interfacing with the blogosphere, it fundementally changed how Stormhoek looked at treating their primary customers (the supermarket chains) and the end-users (the supermarkets' customers). It caused an internal disruption, both within the company and the actual trade.

Notice that he doesn't claim the blog tactic changed customer behavior the way advertising is supposed to (in fact, he emphatically denies that happened). Instead, it changed Stormhoek. It did almost the exact opposite of what traditional marketing and advertising are meant to do. Rather than push our truth and our greatness onto our audience -- and hope they "get it" -- this new marketing technique "realigned" the company with its customers. And the change happened on the supply side, not the demand side.

If you're paying attention, you should about now be doing one of two things:

1. Standing up on your chair and cheering like a maniac.
   
2. Curling up in a fetal position under your desk.
   

Because this is the way marketing is going. It's a fundamental shift of power, and the marketers are the ones who are losing power. That's you and me, brother or sister! The change that's happening in marketing will also roll through fundraising.

That means death to the brandmeisters with their irrelevant brand guideline books. The day is coming when all our energy will go into understanding and serving our donors -- not our self-expression.

That means death to irrelevant churn-and-burn fundraising. In the new world, it's going to be all about finding and holding on to donors who really care about our causes -- not just flipping gifts through a caging facility.

That means death to organizations that get away with the ethical bare minimum, knowing that donors don't really know what's going on. These new donors are not going to be interested in organizations they don't know and trust.

Scary?

Yes. Very.

But also very exciting. That's where fundraising will go. Get ready!

Comments

[Adam]

You don't tell me how the change is actually gonna happen. Please expand, gimme the Pt II of this story. Frankly, I don't see the majority of funders as being sophisticated enough to use web tech to their advantage in grantmaking - make me a believer.

[Jeff Brooks]

I don't know how the change is going to happen for you. I don't know how it's going to happen for me, either. But we're starting to see examples, and Stormhoek is just one. This stuff is human interaction, so it's messy, unique, and changing all the time. You're probably right that your funders are not using the web very much or very well. But that's going to change. Seems to me our choice right now is get out ahead of the change, or catch up with it later.

Are there any believers out there who've experienced what blogging can do for a nonprofit?