Donor Power Blog

Emotional fundraising: 1 > 2,000,000

Anyone who follows the genocide in Darfur -- or any number of other human catastrophes -- is flabbergasted by the lack of response to the tragedy. How can something so huge not stir more action?

New York Times reporter Nicholas Kristof recently looked at the question in Save the Darfur Puppy (a subscription to TimesSelect is required to read this piece). He says the thing that would get action would be a "suffering puppy with big eyes and floppy ears."

That's the implication of a series of studies by psychologists trying to understand why people -- good, conscientious people -- aren't moved by genocide or famines. Time and again, we've seen that the human conscience just isn't pricked by mass suffering, while an individual child (or puppy) in distress causes our hearts to flutter.

It's true. The suffering of one puppy -- a puppy with a face, that whimpers with pain and quivers with fear -- is something the human mind can grasp and respond to. The suffering of two million refugees -- there's no face, no sound, almost nothing to stir the heart and motivate action.

So what are you going to do?

• You could lecture your donors about their priorities. Of course, that's like the teacher you yells at the students who are present because so many students are absent. And you're wasting your time on the wrong problem.
  
• You could try to change human neurology through education. Good luck.
  
• Or you can work in the real world. Put an actual human face on the tragedy. One person whose suffering is real, visible, and understandable.
  

It just doesn't seem right that one puppy can trump two million human beings on the emotion scale. The puppy also edges out the AIDS epidemic, hunger in America, and rising sea levels.

That's the way it is. You can complain about it all you want, but that won't change anything, or raise much money. Or you can deal with the world as it really is. And raise the funds needed to help solve the problem.

Which choice is the successful fundraiser making?

Technorati Tags: fundraising, Nicholas Kristof, Darfur

Need to replace your older donors?

Everyone seems to worship youth in our culture. Even nonprofit organizations that should know better. As we see here at Barry's Arts Blog and Update, in Further consideration of the Generational Succession issues:

When kids have enormous disposable income ... we wonder why arts organizations long ago concluded that young people as we define them (high school, college and post college up to 30 years) simply don't have the financial resources to be donors to our programs and organization, when that simply doesn't appear to be true....

What's this fixation on young donors, anyway?

The reason younger people aren't present in large numbers among donors is not money. It's their age. They just aren't there yet -- they give seldom (if at all), and when they do, they don't make lasting partnerships with charities. There are exceptions, of course (practicing religious believers give at higher rates even when young), but in general, people don't really become donors until some time in their 50s or 60s.

Seriously, it's time to give up on the under-30 group and move on!

Now it's true that older people dominate the ranks of donors. And older people have the disturbing tendency of eventually dying. So they need to be replaced. The problem is when you look to the under-30 cohort for your replacement donors.

If you found gold in a creek, and then wanted to find another creek with gold, would you try the next creek over -- or one that's 30 miles away?

When you're prospecting for donors to replace your older donors, you should be looking not at young people but at almost-old people.

And in the US, that means Baby Boomers -- who are between 40 and 60 years old.

To reach this group, you can't be complacent: If you sit back and hope that your current messaging to the over-60 group will work as the next generation ages, you're in for some unpleasant surprises.

As Boomers take over the ranks of the old, we're likely to see some real differences in what's effective in fundraising. But you're going to need to offer them higher than ever levels of:

• Relevance
  
• Choice
  
• Specificity
  
• Proof of effectiveness
  

That's the generational change you need to be thinking about. The Boomers are already starting to show up in meaningful numbers on donor lists. In the next 10 years, they'll start to dominate.

And the under-30 group? Wait until they become the over-50 group. Until then, they're pretty much a waste of your time.

(Look through the demographics category in the archives for much, much more on this topic.)

Technorati Tags: philanthropy, fundraising, boomers

Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants

The Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants is at Solidariti this week.

You are not the brand

If your donors did you marketing for you, would they get it right?

Sorry: trick question. The answer is no and yes.

Your donors would almost certainly get all your branding "wrong." Wrong colors. Wrong fonts. They'd never quite get your mission/vision/values. They'd make all kinds of mistakes about your marketplace position.

But they'd nail what about you is powerful to them.

Which do you think matters more in motivating donors: to-the-book branding, or people being real?

In the business world, a few companies are starting to learn how to live with this. A recent Washington Post article, Putting the I in Advertising, explores this new world -- where the brand and the customer become interchangeable:

Brands express what we aspire to be and what we believe about ourselves, in a kind of commercial shorthand. Aspirations -- for beauty and coolness and status and joy -- are the stuff of brand loyalty.... So, if a person posts a photo of herself with her Cadillac on the company Web site, she doesn't do it for the company. She does it for herself.

If these things are true about commercial products (and they are), they are 100 times more true for nonprofits!

To you donor, your work only matters to the extent that it's meaningful in her life. You can work all day and night to hammer home why you're so cool and effective, but if you aren't talking about her and what she cares about, you're a long way from getting a gift.

A great brand -- nonprofit or otherwise -- lives in the hearts, minds, and lives of its customers. So if I were you, I'd spend a lot less time figuring out how to express myself, and a lot more trying to figure out who my donors are and how I make their lives more meaningful.

The WaPo article mentions three websites that involve consumers in co-creating a brand. They're worth checking out:

• Willitblend.com (Blendtec blenders)
  
• Cavemanscrib.com (Geico)
  
• Mycadillacstory.com
  

Thanks to The Agitator for the tip.

Technorati Tags: fundraising, cgm, marketing revolution

Nonprofits sing the blues

Don't miss this list at McSweeney's: My Nonprofit R&B Group's Set List.

This, of course, got us thinking at Merkle|Domain, and we've vastly expanded the nonprofit song repertoire:

• Baby, Only U Can Help Me Meet Pro Forma
  
• All Your Lovin' Makes My GYPM Soar
  
• Let's You and Me Prevent Package Fatigue
  
• I Wanna Lay You Down Here at Our Fiscal Year End
  
• Severely-Lapsed Donor Blues
  
• Her Response to My Request for Proposal was "No."
  
• Honey, Your $1 Cash Gift Ain't but a Slap in the Face
  
• There's a Hole in My Soul Where Your Signed Check Should Be
  
• You Can Boost My Percent Response All Night Long
  
• No Lovin' Like Core Donor Lovin'
  
• I Know This First-Class Postage Gets U Hott
  
• R-E-N-E-W-A-L
  
• Girl U Undesignate My Funds
  
• [expletive deleted] Address Labels [expletive deleted]
  
• Let's Dance (Forget the Scanline Requirements)
  
• Use My Courtesy Reply Envelope
  
• My Old Lady Left Me 13+ Months Ago
  

(Thanks to word goddesses Sarah Onofrey and Amanda Shelden.)

Giving circles: threat or opportunity?

Giving circles are groups of donors who study a cause, then pick charities they feel best address their issue(s) and combine their giving to those organization. (More about giving circles here at Wikipedia and they were examined last year on this blog at How donors empower themselves.)

Blackbaud's BlogBaud takes a look at them with some alarm at Giving Circles May Ultimately Hurt Non Profits:

... giving circles make it hard for nonprofits to get access to individuals, where connections and real relationships are built. It's through these personal relationships we build with volunteers and donors that our organizations grow, and how we "move" donors through a variety of stages, ultimately to a place where they are sincerely engaged in what we do. Giving circles take away our access to the individual and limit the interactions we can have at a one-to-one level.

True. Giving circles can separate us from some very involved and conscious donors -- just the kind you want.

But really, there's not much we can do about it. If donors choose this way of giving, they hold all the cards. (And I bet if a giving circle donor were reading this, she'd probably say, Your so-called "real relationships" are just unwanted junkmail to me!)

So rather than pointlessly speak out against giving circles, we can learn to live with them. Here are two ways:

1. Make individual donor relationship so cool, people don't want to lose it. When someone joins a giving circle, they take control. They only get the mail they want. They only hear about the causes they care about. Plus they get to hang out with like-minded people. How many nonprofit direct-mail programs can compete with that? Your could be one of the few, if you're willing to make it that way.
   
2. Market specifically to giving circles. Book publishers market reading circles, going as far as including reading circle discussion guides in books. It works for them, and it could for you. Create material that's useful for groups to read, share, discuss, and take action on.
   

Giving circles are a challenge to our old way of raising funds. But reality-based fundraising can work with them, not against them.

(Read also this post on giving circles at Tactical Philanthropy.)

Technorati Tags: fundraising, giving circles

The secrets to fundraising

Go get yourself a copy of How to Succeed in Fundraising by Really Trying (PDF). It's a handy little booklet for folks doing face-to-face major donor fundraising. Here's what it covers:

• Make a good case
  
• Set a manageable campaign goal
  
• Customize
  
• Do your homework
  
• Use challenge gifts as great incentives
  
• Don't be shy
  
• Be honest -- it's the best policy
  
• Be direct
  
• Listen to suggestions
  
• Know your prospects
  

This high-end fundraising is different from the general-donor work we usually discuss here. But that's just the details. The substance is the same. All fundraising comes down to:

• Know your audience.
  
• Don't be afraid of them.
  
• Treat them with respect.
  
• Give them an offer they can't refuse.
  

It works every time.

Technorati Tags: fundraising, major donors

It's the relevance, not the medium

Who else is looking for a new, more effective medium for your fundraising or marketing? Direct mail, the bread and butter for most nonprofits, is getting tougher -- rising costs, more crowded competitive space, and maxed-out list universes -- the squeeze is on. Finding an effective new medium (or two) would sure help, right?

Just remember, a new medium is not a magic bullet. As brilliantly riffed by Roy Williams in his MondayMorningMemo: The Media Is Not the Message, the real issue is what you say, not where you say it:

Relevance is what determines whether an ad works or not. Every medium fails when it delivers a message no one cares about.

He then enlarges on the importance of the message in something you should make part of your fundraising catechism:

• Ads that fail in one medium would usually have failed in any other.
  
• The medium is not the message.
  
• The message is the message.
  
• And the message is what matters most.
  

Yep, Marshall McLuhan was wrong.

There's no way around it. You have to have a relevant message, or you're sunk. Get that part right, and then you can start looking for media that take you forward.

Technorati Tags: philanthropy, relevance

Don't use no bad English

The bly.com blog (a copywriting blog) asks an interesting question: Must Copywriters Use Good English?

On the table is this groaner, heard on the radio: "Monthly payments are as low as $300 a month."

Must we use good English? As far as I'm concerned, the short answer is no.

The longer answer is, Good English is preferable but there are other things that are more important. Like:

• Clarity.
  
• Emotion.
  
• Sounding natural and making a connection with the reader.
  

It's possible for these things to come in conflict with "Good English."

Suppose you came up with this sentence: Who can I depend on? It contains one error (it should be "whom") plus one pseudo-error (it ends with a preposition; fussy schoolmarm-types care about that, but it's not really an error). The corrected version would be On whom can I depend? That sounds awkward, pedantic, and excessively formal. Normal people don't talk that way; it simultaneously pulls attention away from the meaning and puts up a barrier between the writer and reader.

I'd take the error-infested version over the correct one any day. Or, perhaps, I'd recast the sentence to avoid the issue entirely and be correct and sound good.

Flat-out errors can make you look stupid -- though I suspect they do a lot less harm than some fear. And using "Good English" signals that you're careful with your thoughts and words. It's also a "class marker" a secret identity badge that shows you're educated, not one of the riffraff.

If you want to motivate people to voluntarily part of with their money on your behalf, your personal pride in your education and parentage of no place in your communications. It's more important to be friendly, passionate, clear than it is to be "correct."

First things first. Good English is second.

Technorati Tags: grammar, copywriting

Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants

The Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants is back at its original home this week, the Nonprofit Communications blog.

How to think like a donor

What do you have to offer donors? According to Todd Baker in a recent FundRaising Success article titled The Pursuit of Brand Happiness, tour brand promise to donors is the meaning you give them when you enable them to make the world better. Just one problem:

... too many organizations focus their core message on their internal processes, such as distributing, coordinating, managing, constructing and facilitating, while the most powerful thing they have to say is left unspoken. People become inspired to join causes because of the impact of nonprofit processes, not the processes themselves.

It's so hard for many nonprofits to get their minds around this. You spend all your energy developing and improving great processes. These processes are what allow you to succeed. They're often what set you apart from similar organizations.

Here's a quick thought experiment you can do to help yourself get mentally and emotionally closer to your donors:

Think back to the time in your life when you were a novice. Before career advancement was important. Before you knew the "rules" and limitations. Before you learned how complicated your cause really is.

Then examine these questions:

• What was it then that motivated you to get involved in the cause?
  
• How did it feel to care the way you did?
  
• What did you tell your friends about the cause?
  
• Were your motives then any less pure or valuable than they are now?
  

That's roughly where your donors are. (Though they're likely less committed than you.) If you can get back into that old mindset, you can communicate better with donors about the thing they actually care about.

Technorati Tags: fundraising, philanthropy, brand promise

Do your donors think you're indifferent?

Want to know the quickest way to get rid of donors? Here's a hint from the CustomersAreAlways blog in The One Thing That Scares Customers Away. The post cites a study on the reasons customers stopped doing business with a given company. They were:

• Death - 1%
  
• A move or relocation - 2%
  
• A relationship with a salesperson - 4%
  
• Price and other relevant costs - 11%
  
• Dissatisfaction with the product - 14%
  
• Attitude of indifference from someone representing the company - 68%
  

Perceived indifference is by far the most common reason customers give up on a company. It sends customers away nearly five times more often than dissatisfaction with a product.

It's important to note here that indifference only be perceived. People cannot know other people's motives; they can only deduce them from the actions they see. So you can care passionately and still be perceived as indifferent.

Nonprofits don't usually have intense face-to-face interactions with donors. But there's a critical point in the donor relationship where they can easily appear indifference: That point is what happens immediately after a donor gives. It can play out in these ways:

• Late (or non-existent) receipt.
  
• Thank you letters that are more intent on educating the donor than thanking her.
  
• Lack of (or just lackluster) reporting back on the impact of the donor's giving.
  

These things signal indifference; they're the charity equivalent of the airline gate agent who shrugs off the fact that you aren't getting home tonight.

The donor took a risk (she doesn't know for sure that you're legitimate), grasped your issue, caught your passion, and made a sacrifice to send you a gift. Did you acknowledge that -- or did you shrug and say "eh"?

Technorati Tags: fundraising, philanthropy

Five steps to bad writing

When was the last time you read some lifeless, confusing, ineffective fundraising copy? For me it was this morning. In my mail. Just another lousy appeal letter from an organization that really wants to do a good job.

Bad copy is everywhere.

The weird thing is, when copy is bad, it's seldom because of a lack of writing skill or attention to the job. Bad copy is nearly always actively forced into badness.

There's a blog about this very thing. It's called Bad Language, and recently posted The fall and rise of the case study. It's talking about corporate case studies, a very different creature from fundraising, but a lot of the same forces for badness are at play in both media. Including these:

• Too many cooks.
  
• Too many steps.
  
• Overzealous brand policing.
  
• One size fits all. No sense of different audiences and different media.
  
• Over-loaded content.
  

Want good copy? Call off the dogs and let your writer write.

Technorati Tags: fundraising, copywriting

List rental: What are the hidden costs?

If you have a list of donors, you have some valuable information. Are you maximizing that value?

Some would say you are if you're offering that list for rental by other organizations. List rental can be a significant source of revenue if your list is large and your donors responsive. And list rental makes the direct-mail fundraising world go 'round -- without it, it would be very hard to find sources of new donors.

But there's more to this issue. An article in the Fund$Raiser Cyberzine, Donor List Selling or Exchanging With Other Non-Profit Organizations says "the name belongs to the donor." Now there's a concept:

These days, "donor choice" is not only a "buzz" expression in the non-profit world, but it is in fact the frame of mind most donors have.... However, they have no choice when their good names are indiscriminately given or sold to charities they do not know, and for the most part, would not be likely to support.

It's possible -- very likely, in fact -- that your donors would be less than happy if they knew you were "selling" their names. And if you're doing it, there's a chance they'll figure it out. What is it costing you? More or less than you're getting in rental fees?

Think about doing one of these things:

1. Institute a "no rental" policy for your list. Participate in list exchanges only. (Though the difference between exchange and rental may not be meaningful to donors.)
   
2. Test the cost of rental. Set aside a panel of your rentable file and don't put them on the market. Compare their long-term donor performance to a parallel group that gets the regular treatment. If you know what renting out their names costs you will help you think about what you should do.
   
3. Be up-front with donors. Tell them your organization sometimes shares names with other organizations. Ask for their permission to do it with their names. Honesty is good.
   

Technorati Tags: philanthropy, list rental, direct mail

Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants

Don't miss this week's Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants. over at Zen and the art of Nonprofit Technology.

Survey: nearly 2/3 of nonprofits intend to fail

That's right: Nonprofits Fail to Track Marketing Impact, Getting Attention Survey Shows.

The survey found this: only 37% of nonprofits track their marketing. That's a little like saying "63% of car owners don't look out the window while they drive."

Really. If you're not paying attention to what you're doing in your marketing, only divine intervention is going to save you from wasting a ton of money and doing stupid, ineffective (or worse) things. In other words, you are going to fail. And you won't even know it until it's too late.

Marketing is tough to do right. Measuring it can be complicated. But you can't just forego it. That's irresponsible -- a betrayal of your mission and your donors. So please, do what it takes to measure your marketing.

Technorati Tags: measurement, philanthropy

Give 'American Idol' a break

There's been a lot of talk about the "American Idol" Idol Gives Back charity program.

It was self-serving. It was exploitive. It was just plan bad television. It's not going lead to lasting change or turn millions of young people into committed philanthropists.

But I liked Trent Stamp's Take on the whole thing best in A Tad Pitchy, But They Made It Their Own:

Because they raised a ton of money, and they did it for a bunch of reputable charities. That’s it. These charities didn’t have the tens of millions of dollars yesterday morning that they do today. That’s enough for me. They’ll spend it well, and good work will be done. Yes, the ends justify the means. This time.

We can get all in a lather about something like this, and it's a pretty easy target for all its faults. But why do that? Aren't we just imposing our personal distaste on this tacky corner of pop culture that horned in on our fundraising space?

Unless they're unethical, ineffective, or criminal -- give them a break. They're doing good deeds.

Technorati Tags: philanthropy, American Idol

Don't manage donors -- manage information

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is magic, if you believe everything you hear. (Which, of course, you don't.)

CRM is a surprisingly loose term, but it pretty much means "using data to sell more stuff to customers."

And naturally, there's a version of it for nonprofits: DRM.

This is good news. It will give us the ability to talk to the right donors about the right things at the right time.

But wait -- are we thinking right about this?

The Ageless Marketing blog pokes a finger at the phrase "customer relationship management" in On Collaborative Stakeholder Relationships:

The word "manage" suggests pretensions of control.... Relationships tend wither and grow weak when one party tries to "manage" the relationship.

In contrast, [great companies] strive for share of heart. They fervently believe that if they interact honorably with customers, customers will reward them with loyalty, which in fact is likely -- though not necessarily -- to increase share of wallet.

Semantic hair-splitting? Maybe. But the labels we give things influence how we think about them.

With DRM, the thing you need to manage is data -- information about donors. Not the relationship. If you use data in smart ways, you can be more relevant to donors. But they are in control of the relationship.

Technorati Tags: crm, philanthropy

How to position yourself as human

What are you doing to persuade your donors that you aren't human?

If you're doing that, there's a good chance it's your tagline or positioning statement.

The What's Your Brand Mantra takes a good look at this issue in Succinct Positioning, giving three rules for positioning a brand (go see, it's worth reading). I want to focus on one of them:

Use consumer language. Too many times I've worked with clients who've insisted that we use certain phrases in the positioning that make sense internally but not to customers....

Sound familiar? Many nonprofits have a carefully worded positioning, and -- by golly -- they're going to hammer home those exact words at every possible opportunity. Even if they make little sense to donors. Even if it's something no mentally healthy person would ever say out loud.

It seems with many organizations, the harder they work to articulate their position, the more awkward and un-human it sounds. But the harder (and/or more expensive) it was to do it, the more committed they are to it -- meaning they repeat a robotic phrase over and over as if to emphasize their status as a non-human organization.

Consider this: a positioning reality-check. Get a tape recorder, and record a lot of different people (mainly people who aren't organization insiders) saying your tagline or positioning statement. Look for three things:

1. Do people make funny faces when they say it? That's a sign that it makes them feel stupid, weird, or unnatural to say it. It's not in normal language.
   
2. Do they stumble over the words? That's a sign that it's not well articulated and not enough like normal speech.
   
3. When you listen to the recording, does it start to sound ridiculous or false? These qualities may not be obvious when you see it on paper, but they'll stand out as you hear it repeated.
   

   (For a treasure-trove of good, bad, and ugly taglines, see What your tagline should do for you.)

   
   

   Technorati Tags: fundraising, positioning

Nonprofit CEOs should be donors' best friends

Is your CEO a passionate advocate for donors? Building a donor-powered organization is going to be an uphill battle if he or she isn't.

The Dogster and Catster blog looked at this issue in the commercial world: CEO as Customer Evangelist.

The blog cites Craig Newmark of Craigslist, who, as his company has grown massively, has shifted his focus more and more to his customers. It's a recipe for commercial success:

... companies that are committ[ed] to involving their users (aka your customers...) uphold [the relationship between leaders and customers] no matter how big they get. I expect a hallmark of good companies in the coming decades will be how directly tuned in company leadership is to their customers' wants, wishes and feelings.

Same for nonprofits. More so, in fact. Remember, the only tangible thing you have to offer donors is a tax deduction -- which few donors care about and even fewer are motivated by. Everything else you have for them is intangible: How you make them feel.

Most nonprofit CEOs are passionate advocates for the cause -- as they should be. But too often at the expense of paying attention to donors, focusing on their needs. And that lack of attention spreads. It doesn't take long for the organizational culture to pretty much ignore donors. Or even think of them with contempt -- our donors just don't get it! (The organization that reaches that stage is one that doesn't have much of a future.)

When the leader says donors matter -- and proves it by spending time, energy, and focus on them -- things can change for the positive. And give the organization a future with the more demanding donors that are showing up everywhere these days.

Tell your CEO.

Thanks to Return Customer for the tip.

Technorati Tags: fundraising, customer advocacy, philanthropy

How to survive donor complaints

Check out my column in the May edition of FundRaising Success, titled How to Survive Donor Complaints.

Short version: Getting complaints from donors isn't the end of the world. There are some very good and some unbelievably bad ways to handle complaints.

Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants: It's all about the barnyard

This week's Carnival had an unusual challenge: use the word "barnyard" in your post. And the bloggers produced. Here are seven great posts, all of which use the word, some with surprising grace.

• Cause-Related Marketing examines Microsoft's "i'm Initiative" in Windows Live Messenger and Multiple Charities.
  
• Don't Tell the Donor shares about the Mint Jubilee Gala, which is held just before the Kentucky Derby, in Not your average barnyard gala.
  
• e.politics takes a look at the crazy world of forbidden information that wants to spread online in Defying the Copy-Protection Police with a Wave of Online Civil Disobedience.
  
• Getting Attention shows how organizations get attention in How Can Your Nonprofit Become King of the Barnyard?
  
• Katya's Nonprofit Marketing Blog reveals the power of creative thinking in Tips for tipping boring communications upside down.
  
• Nonprofit Communications helps us be smarter about how we use the internet in Don't Overlook Easy Ways to Track Your Online Marketing.
  
• Perspectives From the Pipeline looks at the lives of nonprofit leaders in Why We Don't Want To Be Executive Directors When We Grow Up.
  

  Next week, the Carnival moves to Zen and the art of Nonprofit Technology. Submit your posts by filling out this form at blogcarnival.com. Or email it to npc.carnival AT yahoo DOT com. Deadline is Friday, 8 p.m. ET.

You owe your donors passion

Passion is exciting. And it can accomplish the "impossible." Most of us would rather be passionate and be identified with passion people and organizations.

The Unconventional Thinking blog takes a look at passion in the corporate world, comparing it to Janis Joplin: Janis Joplin, Inc. Joplin pulsed with passion. Compared to most companies?

Passion? There's not a trace. Electricity? It's like all the wires were cut. Dreams? What do dreams have to do with business? No, the typical office is a virtual graveyard. Quiet, predictable, passionless.

Sadly, that could also describe many nonprofits: Gray, cautious, bureaucratic, passionless.

If companies can be passionate (some are), nonprofits should be all the more so: All they do is make money. We change the world!

Most nonprofits are founded in passion -- from a burning vision of some way they could make the world better. But time and growth causes many to lose it. It's natural -- passion is hard, exhausting work. It's even a little dangerous (after all, one of the meanings of the word is suffering.

But listen: You don't deserve one cent of your donors' money if you aren't a white-hot source of jaw-dropping passion. That's your function in their lives. Their lives are consumed with their jobs, their relationships, their commutes -- a lot of pretty mundane stuff. But they want to matter, to improve the world, to give back. And that's where you come in. If you're passionate enough.

And anyway, if your organization isn't passionate from top to bottom, you're basically lame -- you may be good at what you do, but not good enough. Janis Joplin was a kick-butt musician, but that's not what made her great. It was her passion that made her stand out among all the other kick-butt musicians.

You don't have to have a screwed-up life and die young in some gruesome, tragic way.

But you'd better be passionate.

Technorati Tags: fundraising, passion, philanthropy

Can you sell a boring product?

Can you get people excited about a boring topic? If you can, you're a fundraiser. If you can't, now's a great time to learn.

At the Brand Autopsy blog, there's a great exercise: Word of Mouth for Boring Products. The assignment is to create a word-of-mouth campaign for gauze pads. That's right -- make gauze pads so interesting, people will talk about them.

Here's the exercise:

• Create a company that thinks different about the Gauze Pads product category.
  
• Give the company a name and design its breakthrough Gauze Pad product.
  
• Compellingly define what makes your Gauze Pads different from any other competing product in its category.
  
• Develop a basic marketing campaign that will introduce these remarkable Gauze Pads so that consumers will remark about them to all their friends and family.
  
• Be prudent. Your marketing budget is practically non-existent. You are a start-up after all.
  

Give it a try. If you prefer, make it into a fundraising offer, rather than a commercial product. (Frankly, if you've been in fundraising for more than a few months, you've tackled assignments at least this tough.)

Just a couple of thoughts:

• If you think it's boring, your marketing will be boring.
  
• Ask "why" five times. That's how you can get to the emotional core of why this "boring" topic is actually full of pathos and passion.
  

Technorati Tags: philanthropy, wom

Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants

This week's Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants is up and running, hosted at The Bamboo Project Blog.

Next week, the carnival will be here. Excellent, recent posts on all (nonprofit) topics will be considered. And here's the twist: If your post contains the word "barnyard," you will get some special considerations:

• Your post will be more likely to be chosen for the carnival (it still has to be excellent, but barnyard-inclusion could be a tie-breaker!).
  
• Your post will have extra-prominent listing in the carnival (you'll be in the big top, as it were).
  
• You'll receive the admiration of your blogging peers and many discerning readers.
  

The easy way to submit your post is to fill out this form at blogcarnival.com. The not quite so easy (but still functional) way is to send your post URL to npc.carnival AT yahoo DOT com. Deadline is Friday, 8 p.m. ET.

It's the emotion, not just the facts

A great reminder in the Nonprofit Consultant Blog: Just the facts, Ma'am? We love facts, but they just don't do the job:

... too many of us get so caught up in our fabulous statistics and data that we forget that we are in an essentially emotional business.

Yes, brag about how successful your organization is, and how many people you serve, and how it has improved their lives -- but then illustrate that with a real client story.... Funders are human too.

Interesting thing is, Ken is focusing mainly on grant-seeking. Yes, even in that rarified, professionalized world, decisions are made on the basis of emotions. How much more so with individual donors -- folks who aren't being paid to engage with us, who likely don't have a clearly articulated funding objective, who read our messages while standing over a waste-basket?

Be smart, be disciplined, have the best-run programs around. You owe that to your mission and to your donors. But when it comes to getting people to join you with their donations, it's not the facts, it's the emotions.

Don't forget that.

Technorati Tags: philanthropy, emotion

How to get un-stuck creatively

Ever get stuck? Go outside. That what it says a the Brain Based Biz blog at Tap Into Your Naturalistic Intelligence.

It's worked for me for years. But I didn't know why until now. It seems going outside boosts your creativity in several ways:

• You get more oxygen to your brain, and that helps it functions well.
  
• Outdoor things (like animals, birds, plants, scenery) can give you new ideas.
  
• Your subconscious gets freed to work on your challenges.
  
• Being outside reduces stress, which helps you think better.
  
• Walking stimulates blood flow, which means more oxygen to your brain.
  

Nice, huh? It's pleasant, and it works.

There are two other re-starters that work for me. (I'll wait for someone to research why they work.):

1. Drink a glass of cold water.
   
2. Do something useless and unrelated to what you're stuck at -- read something funny, listen to music, whatever.
   

Technorati Tag: fundraising