Want donors to do your marketing for you?

Wouldn't you just love to have an army of donor-evangelists who are so dedicated to your organization that they not only give to you, but also find and motivate others to give?

Before you answer that, consider this:

• Your donor evangelists are not likely to confine themselves to your brand-approved fonts.
  
• They'll probably stray from your official color palette.
  
• Don't count on them using your logo correctly.
  
• Do you think they'll use your approved style guide?
  
• And your hard-earned mission, vision, values, and value proposition? Forget it!
  

As The Viral Garden put it, Control is Evangelism's Kryptonite:

The challenge for companies is to reach that point where they are sharing, and then shifting marketing control, to their community. When that tipping point is reached, evangelism can begin to grow and spread.

Evangelism, word-of-mouth, donor-generated media: These things can rocket an organization to beyond-belief levels of success for little or no cost. But they take place outside of your control.

You may have spent a lot of time and money sharpening your brand and messaging to perfection. If it's important to you to keep everything said about your organization square on target, you're not going to get much donor evangelism.

Having no control doesn't guarantee you a crowd of excited evangelists blogging their hearts out about you. But tight control on your marketing pretty much guarantees that you won't have that.

What's more important to you?

Technorati Tags: fundraising, customer evangelism

Comments

[mikemuses]

Great post, but...

There's something I think that needs to be added. You see Fiskars have quite a simple product, and it's easily understood, so that aspect of their brand is very easy for other people to talk about.

If you are still at the stage with your organisation where people DON'T know exactly what you do, or worse, they THINK they know, but in fact are wrong, then all you will get is extra confusion.

So I would say, before you delightedly encourage anyone and everyone to get out there and start evangelising about you, make sure they know at least the basics. Don't sweat the logos, typefaces and key words, but if, for example, you run a hospice and used to fund cancer research, but stopped the funding side of your work, make sure they know.

[Mack Collier]

Great post. The fear over losing control is the hinging point for almost every company/organization that doesn't embrace and empower its community of customers to market for them. Loss of control is the tradeoff, in return you get BETTER and MORE EFFECTIVE marketing, which COSTS LESS. But again, many companies/organizations will never get to the massive benefits of creating and embracing evangelists, because they won't/can't give up control.

Check out the story of the Fiskateers by Googling them. One of the best marketing stories I've seen in years. Fiskars LITERALLY turned promotion of their scrapbooking products COMPLETELY over to their evangelists. Fiskars took four evangelists, set them up with a blog, and let them run with it. It's become so popular, they are scheduling nationwide scrapbooking tours, having local shops begging them to come give seminars, and even SIGNING AUTOGRAPHS along their tour for fellow scrapbookers that have come to know them from their online community.

It's absolutely amazing what they have done, but it all happened because Fiskars was gutsy enough to completely turn control over to their evangelists. Very few companies can do that.