No-hype fundraising

Here's a useful comparison from the Church of the Customer Blog: Hype vs. excitement.

Marketers often depend on hype to get attention. It works less well every day. Partly because there's so much hype about everything all the time that you simply can't raise your voice above the din. But mostly because most people have seen hype proven so many times to be empty that they simply dismiss it out of hand.

Hype hardly works any more. But you can create similar buzz and success instead with genuine excitement. Here are some of the differences between the two:

Hype is:	Excitement is:
An impossible promise	A realistic promise
Sales-driven	Value-driven
Exclamation points	Passion
Obnoxious	Contagious
Cause for mistrust	Cause for belief
Overuse of adverbs	Adverb-free
Narcissistic	Optimistic
Segway	Bike Friday
Contrived	Authentic
Unsustainable	Fuel for the future

Hype is something marketers do, while excitement is something that happens in the minds of customers.

If you think this doesn't apply to nonprofit fundraising, you haven't been paying attention. Frankly, a lot of nonprofits seem to be allergic to both hype and excitement. Others are enthusiastic participants in the careening hype bandwagon: basing their fundraising and marketing on high-flown claims and noise rather than solid, real, remarkable, exciting programs that people will support and spread around.

Creating excitement is a lot harder than creating hype. But it's becoming a normal cost of doing business. In business as well as in fundraising.

Technorati Tags: fundraising, marketing, hype

Comments

[Karen Zapp]

Jeff,

You’ve hit on another topic too many nonprofits struggle with.

Maybe every so often the creative department and/or fundraising department ought to have a “stranger” review a page on their website. Look at a letter. Or read an email. And then have the “outsider” answer a few questions. A few ideas are . . .

- If you had received this at home, would you have gotten past the first sentence? Did you find it interesting or exciting? Or did you read it only because I asked you to and then share your opinion?
- Tell us in a sentence or two what we do; what’s our mission
- What are we asking you to do in this letter, email, or on this web page?
- Did you like the tone of our letter? Did any part of it “rub you the wrong way?”

They could even ask people [strangers] they meet while networking at nonprofit conferences to share a candid opinion of their marketing materials. And then return the favor. Whoever reads and evaluates ought to think like a donor and not like a professional fundraiser. Walk in a prospective donor’s shoes.

Karen Zapp, Fundraising Copywriter
http://www.PKscribe.com