Donor Power Blog

Why you need to raise restricted funds

If you're like most fundraisers, most of the funds you raise must be unrestricted, undesignated, unearmarked. Meaning your organization, usually your financial people, have sole control over where donors' dollars end up.

The lower the dollar value of your donors, the less control or say they have on this subject. Money from government or foundation sources is often highly designated. Major donors and top benefactors can tell you what they want you to do with their money. But everyday donors -- people whose checks have four digits are less -- well, they just have to trust your wisdom and be okay with the way you allocate their unrestricted gifts.

I hope you're asking why, as the Queer Ideas blog is: Why does it always have to be un-earmarked?

... with organisations like Kiva growing at a fantastic rate by offering choice over how money is allocated and what percentage is added to cover administrative costs, it might not be too long before charities have to start changing the way they work....

Donors are already getting increasing amounts of choice in how they give to the causes they care about. And it's those charities that respond most effectively to the changing environment that are going to succeed.

We all understand the value and importance of unrestricted funds. But are we balancing that with the power of offering restricted funds?

The time when we could count on regular donors to quietly and happily provide no-questions-asked unrestricted funds is coming to an end. The "Have It Your Way" generation is entering its donor years, and they want to fund what they want to fund. And organizations like Kiva, DonorsChoose, and Global Giving are offering hyper-designated giving -- just what they want.

It's time for your money folks to step up and help you figure out how to deal with restricted funds. If they don't, you may find yourself with fewer and fewer funds -- restricted or unrestricted -- to work with.

Technorati Tag: fundraising

What does Gates have that you don't have?

Here's a problem more of us could do with: Last year the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation raised $10.4 million dollars without asking for anything. They didn't even really want it. (See the Chronicle of Philanthropy report: Gates Foundation Raises $10-Million in Unsolicited Gifts.)

Why would so many people give to an organization that doesn't want them to give, offers no easy way to give, and will, in fact, just turn around and give their money to organizations they could have given to themselves in the first place?

They've heard of the Gates Foundation. Or at least they've heard of Gates. A lot of visibility comes with being the world's wealthiest person.

They think Bill Gates is smart. (Anyone who would use live mosquitoes as a visual aid, in a speech is smart in my book.) Donors must figure he's going to make better use of their giving than they can themselves. That may or may not be true -- but it's clearly a perception.

Other smart people have given to the Gates Foundation. Well, one other: Warren Buffett, who's given billions and says he plans to give more. (Buffett dollars are not among the $10.4 million given last year.) That's one heck of an endorsement.

Most of us have a long way to do to get that Gates Foundation magic. But here are some things that can point you in the right direction:

• Do something nobody else does. If your distinctive can only be grasped by professionals, it's not a real distinctive. You have to make regular people say Wow!
• Be really good at it. So good that anyone can see what a difference you're making.
• Help your donors tell your story. They can be your "celebrities" if you give them the tools and something great to talk about.

(Another take at Tactical Philanthropy: Would You Donate to the Gates Foundation?)

Technorati Tags: fundraising, Gates Foundation

Why you should be yourself

A lot of organizations (and not just nonprofits) struggle with who they are. Sometimes it's weak leadership that fails to set a clear direction. Sometimes it's because they're constantly in thrall of the latest fad. Or a consensus-driven culture that never quite gels into unity.

Being unsure and inconsistent about who you are may feel like "flexibility." But there's a downside: Confusion, lack of direction, needless conflict.

The Brains on Fire blog takes a good look at this issue at Being True to Who You Are:

When you stay true to who you are, all the gray is taken out of the world. It's black and white. You put a stake in the ground and stand firm in the knowledge of what you do really well, and what you refuse to do. It becomes so easy to connect with those that have the same beliefs. And you rest easy in those relationships. Because of the trust that is shared.

Being something, rather than being anything, makes life easier, and makes everything you do better. And it's a more authentic mode than blowing in the wind.

Authenticity is attractive. Your donors, at least the best ones, will notice.

Technorati Tag: fundraising

What's your weird green liquor?

Here's some news: Virgin America Airline now offers absinthe in-flight. Since when is an airline adding a particular beverage to its menu news?

In this case it kind of is. In case you hadn't heard, absinthe (also called wormwood and the Green Fairy) has a reputation. It's seen as mysterious, dangerous, mind-altering. It was a banned substance around the world until recently. It only became legal in the US in 2007.

So for Virgin -- which cultivates an edgy, decadent image -- to offer absinthe not only seems mention-worthy, it also fits. It would be downright ghastly if United followed suit. Sort of like Pat Boone singing heavy metal. (Wait; that actually happened, didn't it?)

Here's the important point: They're actually doing something. They had to come up with the idea. They had to go out and get some absinthe.

Too many nonprofits (and businesses) want to skip that doing something part. They want to proclaim what they're like with their brand standards and leave it at that. As if you can go about business as usual, but everyone will think more highly of you. Which is about as effective as if Virgin went around saying Oooh! Absinthe! We're so cool! -- without coming up with some actual absinthe.

Forget the puffery. Nobody is fooled any more. If you want to get people's attention, you need more than a brand image. You've got to do something. And it had better stand out.

Thanks to Donor Engagement blog for the tip.

Technorati Tags: fundraising, branding, absinthe

What it takes to make your message viral

Everyone's clamoring to have their story "go viral." Wouldn't it be great to many millions of people seeing what you do and eagerly passing it along to their friends?

A recent column in Fast Company by Dan Heath and Chip Heath, Three Secrets to Make a Message Go Viral, suggestions three elements a story must have in order to go viral:

1. It's emotional
2. When someone shares it, they feel like they're doing a public service.
3. A "trigger" -- an environmental reminder to talk about it.

Their example is that old (and false) story that there's a gang initiation where members drive around at night with their headlights off, then kill any other driver who flashes their lights at them. It's emotional (raises the possibility of sudden random violence), if you tell someone else, you think you may be saving their life, and it has a trigger -- every once in a while you see a car driving at night with its headlights off. All the elements for a viral.

Getting all that in one package is a tall order. You can't just churn that out like a press release. Some observers believe it's impossible to create a real viral message, that only a magic and rare combination of the right elements and the zeitgeist of the moment have to come together on their own.

I don't think it's impossible. But do think it's so tough it's the next closest thing to impossible.

So if you're thinking of creating a viral message, think hard. You've got a tough assignment ahead of you.

Technorati Tags: fundraising, viral

The little lie in marketing and how to avoid it

Want to know why most advertising is so ineffective? Check out these photos from the West Virginia Surf Report, at Fast Food: Ads vs. Reality:

Here's the Arby's Beef 'n' Cheddar Sandwich as depicted in marketing ... and how it really looks. (Go see the rest; there are a bunch of them.)

I don't know about you, but my first reaction (after a slight gag reflex) was so what? I don't expect the real thing to match the idealized version, and I don't think anybody does.

But isn't that the whole problem with marketing? Isn't that why hardly anyone believes marketing any more?

Most marketers are utterly trapped in a world of fakery. There's no way they could hire a food photographer who wouldn't doll up the food in a way that's miles removed from reality. It simply can't happen.

The honorable thing would be to change the processes in the fast food restaurants to their food bore some resemblance of the marketing. But that would cost too much. At least that's the excuse.

So they tell the white lie to their customers, and nobody cares because nobody believes the lie. In fact hardly anybody can imagine a world where the lie isn't the only thing being said.

When something authentic and true comes along, that's where the customers will go. Imagine seeing a food ad that not only looks yummy, but also looks real. Imagine a fast-food experience that wasn't a total disconnect form the one you saw in the ads.

Nonprofit marketing is less tempted to play along with the lie, partly because our truth is pretty cool to begin with, partly because we can't really afford to pay for it. But with the lie so pervasive, and with ad agencies eager to get some nonprofit branding work in their portfolio, we're all at risk.

If your brand message -- or any other marketing you do -- is built on an idealized unreality, you're not only unethical, you're ineffective.

Print out these two pictures, the real and the phony, and use it to remind yourself not to fall into that trap.

Technorati Tags: fundraising, marketing

Fundraising for donors

Here's a provocative challenge from Greg Verdino's blog: May I market for you?. Greg says anyone who works in marketing should fill the blank in the sentence I work in marketing for _________ with the word "customers."

Not for the company. The customers. Here's why:

... if you still think in terms of delivering your services for the benefit of your company rather than for the benefit of your customer (or prospective customer), you're missing the point. Smart marketers look at the transaction not as the thing itself, but as the by-product of the thing -- as the benefit gained as the result of a well-built win/win relationship.

If that's how commercial marketers should think, how much more should fundraisers approach their work that way? If you see donors as an unwelcome and painful part of what it takes to get your organization's mission accomplished, your fundraising is dead in the water in these challenging times.

Can you say "I work in fundraising for our donors"?

Technorati Tags: fundraising, marketing

Donors may be helping you -- or hurting you -- more than you think

From the Church of the Customer Blog, here's a chart on customer value taken from the cell phone industry:

See Wominomics.

("Wom" is short for word-of-mouth, the always-powerful force in marketing that has become super-charged by the web and by the fact that so many people don't trust advertising any more as a useful source of information.)

We tend to look at donors as if they're all in that middle column: The only action they take is writing checks. But clearly, there are some in the two outer columns: They're talking you up and helping motivate people around them to become donors. Or they're unhappy with you and they're helping chase away prospects.

It's easy to see what the cell phone companies should do: they should be super-nice to the people in the left column. Discounts, free upgrades, happy surprises. They can afford to invest in that group. And their customers on the right? They should "fire" them. Every day they keep those customers, they lose more money. Either that or start treating them right so they have less to complain about. (Ha ha. That last suggestion was just a joke.)

What should nonprofits do? Pretty much the same thing. Happy, well-treated donors are a lot more likely to be your best advocates. Annoyed, mistreated ones can torpedo you in the marketplace.

Knowing that, I'd bend over backward to have flawless service for donors, and to create a communication program aimed not just at harvesting donations, but at pleasing and rewarding donors.

Technorati Tags: fundraising, WOM

The no-receipt scandal

Here's some really terrible news that I'd like to see a lot more of: A lot of nonprofits are not doing their jobs.

That's how I'm looking at an experiment at Kivi's Nonprofit Communications Blog: The Dismal Results of My Online Giving Experiment.

Kivi converted some credit card miles into $25 donations for charities through Network for Good and only got thank-you messages from 33% of them.

Shame. But not surprising.

We at Merkle occasionally do this experiment too. We get slightly better results (we give "real money," and do it through the mail), but our rate of acknowledgement usually doesn't go much above 50%.

There's no excuse for ignoring a donor's gift. It's impolite -- something along the lines of spitting on the donor's shoes. You may think the gift is small, or donated in a way that's less convenient to you, or at a bad time of year. But you have to assume it's a real good-faith gift, a heart-felt vote of confidence and support of your mission.

And ignoring gifts can catastrophically damage your fundraising results.

A $25 donor, if properly cultivated, is worth somewhere around $250 over the long haul. Not acknowledging that first gift is not how you properly cultivate a donor. Your chance of getting the rest of that $250 shrinks to Lilliputian size.

Now I have a hunch that most readers of this blog (and of Kivi's blog) are among the responsible organizations that correctly and promptly acknowledge their donors. So my little lecture is a bit misplaced. The apathetic, poorly run donor-spitting organizations that don't bother to receipt are not taking part in the conversation about treating donors right.

And that's why I hope to see more reports like Kivi's and that they will name names, publicly shaming this shameful behavior. I'd like it to be that nonprofits that chronically have this problem become generally known for having it.

Maybe that will help shame some otherwise decent organizations into getting their act together. Or (and I'm going to sound like a heartless capitalist here), maybe it'll help hasten the demise of organizations that need to get out of the way of those who can and will get it right.

I think it's only a matter of time before donors do routinely rat out those organizations. We should behave as if that time is already here.

Technorati Tags: fundraising, receipts

How to fake authenticity

A recent email from a small and well-run nonprofit (which will remain anonymous) opens like this:

There is a saying in Central America: "If you impact a man you have transformed an individual. If you impact a woman, you have transformed generations to come."

C'mon! Does anybody in Central America (or anywhere else) walk around uttering anything as clunky as that? What on earth would cause you to claim that they do?

I doubt it's an outright lie. It sounds more like a bad translation: PC-speak, combined with nonprofit-speak and bureaucratese, rendered something people actually say into a mouthful of jargon.

Real sayings as uttered by real people are short, easy to remember, and punchy. Like Waste not, want not or Measure twice, cut once.

When you write something, you have to do a "gut check." Does that sound real? Because when it doesn't, you've all but put a big sign around your neck that says FAKE.

These days, people are so over-assailed by marketing messages, they're learning to tune out and ignore the stuff that's not real. If you don't seem real, you get the same penalty as those who aren't real: You get ignored.

I was thinking I'd paraphrase that saying like this: Teach a man to fish, and he'll hang out in the woods every weekend. Teach a woman to fish, and it's seafood for everyone.

Technorati Tags: fundraising, copywriting

The best marketing isn't all positive

Here's a fun unauthorized commercial for Trader Joe's. It's cool, catchy, and filmed on a cell phone.

(Watch it at YouTube.)

Most people would say this is a superb piece of marketing for Trader Joe's; it's memorable, endearing, and communicates the spirit of the place. Most people would also agree that no ad agency or marketing department would ever create it.

Why? Because among all the happy stuff, it includes complaints about some of the annoying things about Trader Joe's. I'm pretty sure the Trader Joe's messaging guidelines don't include complaints about the parking lots or the stuff you want that's not in stock.

But that's precisely why this is such a great video.

It's not marketing. It's relationship.

Relationships are multi-dimensional. They include positives and negatives. In a good relationship, the positives outweigh the negatives.

The only places where no negatives exist are the fake worlds of advertising, marketing, and branding.

And nobody believes them any more.

I'm not sure this all leads us toward creating fundraising messages that include a copy point about the downside of supporting our organization. But it might tell us not to be afraid of what donors and supporters say about us in public, even if they complain.

See Logic+Emotion, The Best Little Ad Trader Joe's Never Made for more on the video.

Technorati Tags: fundraising, marketing, Trader Joe's

Mr. Fundraiser, tear down those walls!

One of the reasons its hard to connect with donors is we build walls between ourselves and our donors. The commercial world has the same problem, as noted in the Logic+Emotion blog at Walls of Separation.

There are nonprofit versions of every one of these walls. And each of these walls diminishes the fundraising effectiveness of those nonprofits.

I can think of a couple more walls that many nonprofits put up:

1. Unrestricted funds. Many are so hell-bent on raising only unrestricted funds from their donors that they can't even think clearly about connecting with donors about how donors can and should and want to make the world a better place. Fundraising becomes an exercise in evasion.
2. Silo mentality. Too many organizations can't align their direct mail, their online marketing, their public relations campaigns, their events -- because those all happen in different (often mutually suspicious or even hostile) departments. That guarantees a confusing experience for the many donors you have that cross your departmental lines.

Tear 'em down!

Technorati Tag: fundraising

How to handle gifts through donor advised funds

I've recently become the proud owner of a donor-advised fund. It's a nifty "product," managed by a financial services company, that allows you to park your giving in one place (one check, one receipt), then parcel it out the to causes you support at your leisure.

Speaking as a donor, let me tell you: It's darn cool, and hugely satisfying.

Your organization should be taking this kind of giving seriously.

There's a lot of money flowing through donor-advised funds. The Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund is the third-largest US nonprofit, right behind United Way and The Salvation Army. The fund run by Schwab comes in at #9 and Vanguard is at #16, and others are sprinkled throughout the Philanthropy 400 list of the largest of the largest nonprofits. Community and other foundations are a nonprofit version; there are hundreds of these, the largest of which is the National Christian Foundation.

Point is, more and more donors are choosing to give this way. Here are some things you should do about it:

Make it easy to give

• Is your organization's "real" name the same as the name people know you by? I've been thoroughly surprised by how often an organization I know and support is registered by a different name. That makes the organization hard to find. It also makes you wonder what the heck is going on with it.
• Make sure your tax ID number is easy to find. The donor needs it in order to make the gift.
• I'd put a page on the website called something like How to donate through a donor-advised fund or community foundation and make it easy to find.

Acknowledge donors correctly

• Anonymous giving is an easy option with donor-advised funds, so when gifts aren't anonymous, the donor expects to be acknowledged.
• Don't send a receipt. The donor was receipted when they deposited their money in the fund.
• Do send a nice letter. If the gift was large enough, assign a rep, or do whatever you do for large gifts.
• Offer the donor some choices: Does she want to be on your mailing list (if she isn't already)? Give communications choices, like how much and what type of contact you'll have with her. Don't assume the donor wants no contact -- but don't assume she wants contact either.

Technorati Tag: donor advised funds

Who will tell your story?

Here's something to think about:

Great marketers of the future will not be measured by how well they tell stories to their audience, but rather by how well their audience tells stories about them.

(From a presentation by Tim Smith, posted here.)

Want to jump over this recession and start growing like crazy? Do something so cool, so show-stopping and exciting that people can't help but talk about it.

Thanks to Andy Sernovitz for the tip.

Technorati Tag: fundraising

It's not about the "perfect shot" any more

posted by Andrew Rogers

The Wall Street Journal's inauguration-day edition has an interesting article about Emmett Beliveau, executive director of President Obama's inaugural committee and a former campaign advance man. Almost in passing, the piece makes a vital point:

Working on another Democrat's Senate campaign in the fall of 2006, he met Mr. Obama, and their collaboration began. Both men eschewed the standard campaign mantra begun with Ronald Reagan to go for the "perfect shot" at a big event. With Mr. Beliveau's roots as a field operative and Mr. Obama's as a community organizer, the pair focused more on the attendees. "Starting in Iowa, we wanted everyone to leave feeling good about Barack Obama," Mr. Beliveau. "It was never about playing to the camera but to the people," says his advance deputy, David Cusack.

That says a lot about the changing nature of American politics, but it says even more about the Obama campaign's insight into the changes in our media. With today's decentralized news sources and the rise of bloggers, social-networkers (Twitter's "tweets-per-second" count was five times the normal rate as Obama was being inaugurated), and "citizen journalists," the days when Michael Deaver could carefully stage the precise image that showed up on the TV news that night are long gone.

Your brand is no longer the image you lovingly create in your "perfect shot."

The people talking about you -- in the media, on blogs, or in their own homes -- may not recognize your perfect shot and almost certainly don't care about it. They're driven by how you make them feel. Are you "playing to the camera," or focused on making sure everyone leaves feeling good about what they're achieving by interacting with you.

Technorati Tags: fundraising, inauguration, branding

Do donors want to do anything specific?

Want to know one problem with fundraising? Quick spin through today's mail here at the Donor Power Fortress of Charity will show you. Here are the calls to action from several pieces of direct-mail fundraising. All are from legitimate, reputable nonprofits. Note the common theme:

Yes, I want to help [ORGANIZATION] bring medical humanitarian relief around the world. I am making a tax-deductible gift of:

Yes, I care about the world's children! To help continue lifesaving programs supported by [ORGANIZATION], I have enclosed a tax-deductible, year-end gift of:

Yes, I want to support excellence and quality at [UNIVERSITY] with a gift of:

YES! I want to help fund medical breakthroughs and fight [DISEASE]. Enclosed is my check for:

Yes! I care about kids in [LOCAL AREA] and want them to enjoy their school days. Enclosed is my gift of:

The common theme is nothing. That's what these organizations are asking people to do. They're asking donors to shell out their hard-earned money on nothing specific.

Suppose you got a piece of direct mail from a book seller, and on the reply coupon it said:

Yes! Send me a very special book!

Why is non-specific fundraising so common?

Maybe because nonprofits need to raise unrestricted funds from general donors -- their larger institutional donors grab all the specific goodies.

Maybe because they're afraid they can't share that much power with donors -- donors might not fund the "right" stuff.

It's entirely possible that in direct-response testing, a less-specific statement performed better. That happens sometimes. In that case, they should periodically re-test the idea -- and make sure the specific and restricted call to action is no less emotional than the general one.

Donors are going to be less and less interested in the nonspecific offer. Now is the time to learn how to give them what they want.

Technorati Tags: fundraising, offers, direct response

How to serve your donors

How do nonprofits serve donors? There's a good picture of it at Carol Weisman's Blog On Fundraising, Philanthropy and Governance: What Great Donor Customer Service Looks Like.

A donor gave a memorial gift in honor of an acquaintance's mother. An alert employee at the nonprofit had looked up the obituary and seen that it was in fact the acquaintance's father who had died -- and corrected the gift attribution.

Big deal? Not really. But you can imagine how the donor feels: Special, served, helped, appreciated. How likely is she to give again?

There isn't a lot to the service basics: Thank people promptly. Get their data right. Quickly and accurately comply with their wishes. All important, but not exactly the kind of stuff that will delight donors.

You don't have your customers over a barrel like the cell phone companies or airlines do. There's not a lot you can do in the course of normal life to either antagonize or delight them.

So these unexpected extra-mile actions may be your best avenue of service. Do your front-line donor service people have the attitude and empowerment to do that?

Technorati Tags: fundraising, customer service

Perks can tighten your relationship with donors

Here's a trend from the commercial world, uncovered by trendwatching.com, that's worth a look: They call it "Perkonomics," and define it like this:

A new breed of perks and privileges, added to brands' regular offerings, is satisfying consumers' ever-growing desire for novel forms of status and/or convenience, across all industries. The benefits for brands are equally promising: from escaping commoditization, to showing empathy in turbulent times.

In most situations, donors don't give in order to get perks. In fact, if they perceive that you're spending their donations on things other than the Cause, perks can backfire. But if you give them the right kind of perks, they can cement the relationship. Things like:

• Information. Insider stuff. Proof that their giving matters. Knowledge that's not easily found otherwise.
• Access. Let them tour your project sites. Give them backstage passes. Time with your most interesting people. Stuff that will give them bragging rights with their friends.
• Gifts from corporate partners -- things that clearly aren't costing you anything, like coupons or discounts from appropriate businesses.

It's worth trying. It's an easy way to reward donors and make them feel all the more connected to your cause.

Technorati Tags: fundraising, perks, trends

Making your story about your donors

If you know only one thing about fundraising, you should know this: Fundraising is about donors, not about fundraisers.

That's the point at A Beautiful Experience: Egonomics 101 - it's all about THEM -- and the good news is, we have new ways to make it about them:

Old: send messages out to consumers.

New: engage your customers and get them to tell their story.

Do you have a story that people want to tell? (Is it something real people really want to tell, or is that just wishful thinking on your part?)

Have you found a way for your donors to tell their part of that story?

Is your website compelling, easy to use, and interactive?

Technorati Tags: fundraising, nptech

Great service keeps donors from leaving you

The commercial world is waking up to the harsh news that customers are less tolerant of poor service than ever before. Things they used to get away with are now costing them customers. (This is very good news to all us customers.)

The Think Customers blog looks at this trend at Wake Up People--Customers Demand Great Service, noting recent survey results that say 87% of consumers say they've stopped doing business with a company after getting poor service (that's up from 80% in 2007 and 68% in 2006):

... organizations that provide a positive customer experience will not only see brand loyalty and return on their investment, they'll likely weather this economic storm.

The same applies to nonprofits. Service matters more than ever.

Great service from a nonprofit? It's not as tough to provide as it is for an airline or cellphone provider. It comes down to doing just a handful of things:

• Spell their name right. (Get all the data right.)
  
• Send receipts out quickly.
  
• Act on all requests and questions quickly.
  
• Report back on the impact of their giving.
  

That doesn't sound too difficult. But nonprofits routinely fail to serve their donors in even these simple ways. You used to get away with it. Not for long. Donors are bringing their service-hungry expectations to the table. If you can't meet them, they'll go elsewhere, just as they are in the commercial world.

See also Poor service? You're busted.

Technorati Tags: fundraising, customer service

To get people talking, do something amazing

This is just cool. Studio Brussels (Belgium) called attention to its campaign to raise funds for clean water in the developing world with a crazy guerrilla tactic. Check it out:

The campaign raised nearly $5 million dollars -- that's from Belgium, a country with only 10 million people.

Such an odd, edgy idea. How many nonprofits would authorize a kid invading TV studios while they're on the air? Isn't the a bit risky? Won't people be offended?

If you want unusual results, you have to take unusual steps.

Technorati Tags: fundraising, WOM

Irrelevant charities, or extra-relevant donors?

Interesting post at The Chronicle of Philanthropy's Prospecting blog: Fund-Raising Lessons: Are Charities About to Become Irrelevant?

Web sites like Kiva.org and ModestNeeds.org, which enable donors to give directly to needy people and then get updates about their progress, are part of a trend that is making nonprofit organizations increasingly irrelevant.... With Kiva, you don't get telemarketing calls and e-mails. The donor controls the relationship.... It's much more fun to give to Kiva than the Red Cross.

I'm not sure it's a question of charities becoming irrelevant. It's a question of charities letting donors become more relevant. You can look at these new-fangled, donor-empowering organizations two ways:

1. A nonprofit can become a virtually invisible pass-through for donor generosity.
   
2. A nonprofit can become a highly visible source of vision, information, and shaping for donor generosity.
   

I think both can work as fundraising models. But #2 is the one that does more good in the world. That's where I'd rather be involved.

Donors are great people. But most of them are not experts in the causes they support. They're looking to you to be expert, to apply their generosity for maximum impact. Or even to invent some new better way to change the world that they'd never dreamed of.

The best nonprofits bring vision and expertise to the table, then set donors free to help them make good things happen.

Technorati Tag: fundraising

Donor makes his own way to do good deeds

Interesting story about donor power in The Seattle Times: Filtering out a global problem.

It's about Leon McLaughlin, a 53-year-old Seattle shoeshine who supplies water filtration machines to impoverished communities. He basically conceived of the mission, researched it, figured out how to make it happen, and now pursues his mission with passion:

It's like you have a coffee shop on every corner, but instead you have clean water in every village," he said.

It's an inspiring story, but that's not why I'm pointing it out to you. There are two interesting things about it:

1. I'd bet we're going to see more donors like this guy: Passionate, driven folks who zero in on some issue and take it upon themselves to do something about it. Previous generations might have been happy to hand over some dough and let the charities spend it. These new donors, they want to give a lot more than money. And they want more involvement. Are you ready for them?
   
2. McLaughlin's partner for getting the water filtration machines to the field is World Vision. I don't know if it was an easy or difficult decision to work with him, but either way, my hat (were I wearing one) is off to them. A lot of nonprofits would shun that level of donor involvement at the project level. Their loss. Everybody's loss.
   

Technorati Tag: fundraising

How to create a good donor experience

What's it like to be one of your donors? Do they have to fight their way through voicemail hell to talk? Do you screw everything up like a plumber? Are you casually cruel like an airline?

You don't have to be a sadist to create experiences like those (though I'm sure it helps). Bad experience comes from companies not caring about what their customers go through.

If you don't care about it, I can almost guarantee you're creating unpleasant experiences for your donors.

A few smart companies are starting to figure this out. And a blog they're reading is Customer Experience Matters, which recently posted Introducing The 6 Laws Of Customer Experience:

1. Every interaction creates a personal reaction.
   
2. People are instinctively self-centered.
   
3. Customer familiarity breeds alignment.
   
4. Unengaged employees don't create engaged customers.
   
5. Employees do what is measured, incented, and celebrated.
   
6. You can't fake it.
   

This list is not aimed at the nonprofit sector. Nevertheless, it would be smart to pay attention these things. Because donor experience really does matter.

We don't typically have a lot of front-line interactions with donors the way retailers and service companies do, but that's no excuse to ignore the one-to-one touches we have with donors. Do the people who take calls from donors really get it? Do they understand your cause well enough to answer questions? Do they love donors? Do they have the authority and access to comply with donor requests?

Pay attention to these things. They matter as much as doing your fundraising and marketing right.

See also How poor service destroys your reputation.

Technorati Tags: fundraising, customer service

How nonprofits can go viral in one easy lesson

Here's how not to "go viral": Try to go viral.

That's pretty much what contrarian ad-guy Joseph Jaffe says in his Adweek column, Conversation Killers: Why most viral marketing amounts to lazy, clueless chatter.

Don't try to go viral; do something that's worth spreading. (Then make it easy to spread.) As Jaffe says:

... all content has the ability to be wildly viral, that is, embraced, internalized, evangelized and disseminated. Rather than plan with the end in mind, might I suggest instead that we focus on the idea itself and the means to achieve that end. In other words, getting back to basics to generate compelling, relevant and engaging content and then liberating it to be embedded, hacked, mashed and showcased accordingly.

People love to share cool stuff. It's that simple. Don't set out to create something "viral." Just do something cool. It's that easy. And that difficult.

Technorati Tags: fundraising, viral marketing

The growing power of word-of-mouth marketing

You've probably heard about a "new" marketing discipline: word of mouth.

It's actually the oldest marketing tactic of all, but some smart marketers are rediscovering its power -- now supercharged by the Web -- and bringing a strong theoretical framework to it.

That's a very good thing, assuming what you have to sell (or raise funds for) is worth mentioning. In fact, it's just exciting. Or, as you'll see in Andy Sernovitz's Damn, I Wish I'd Thought of That! -- Word of mouth marketing is still awesome.

According to Andy, word of mouth (shortened to WOM by those who talk about it a lot) is awesome because:

1. It's is the only kind of marketing based on earning love and respect.
   
2. WOM only works for great companies that make great stuff and provide great service.
   
3. WOM only works for good marketers. Traditional advertising continues as long as you pay for it, even if it sucks. WOM only spreads if it's genuinely fantastic.
   
4. WOM is honest and true. Word of mouth holds you to the highest ethical standards. Liars and cheaters always get busted.
   
5. The good guys win. Word of mouth rewards those who deserve it.
   

Really, here's a kind of marketing you can't fake. You can't make something seem better than it is. You can't bludgeon your way to success with raw advertising dollars. A book of "brand standards" is even more meaningless than ever.

If your work is boring, mediocre, and unremarkable, you aren't going to get WOM. No matter how hard you try.

The scary part: WOM is becoming more important than all the other marketing disciplines. Consumers are taking control, and donors will follow. If you want to be ready for the awesome change that's going to be, the place to concentrate is how remarkable your work is.

Technorati Tags: fundraising, WOM

How nonprofits can join the marketing revolution

A while back Seth Godin took part in a live chat session at The Chronicle of Philanthropy.

It was good. You can read the transcript at Marketing Nonprofit Causes. Here are three Seth-quotes I thought especially worth a second look:

On the biggest mistakes nonprofits make in their marketing:

The biggest mistake nonprofits make is that they're so busy not making mistakes they end up being boring. Boring and selfish and self-absorbed, all while they're working so hard to make the world better.

On nonprofits and marketing:

All you do is marketing. You market to the people you serve.... You market to the people who fund you. And you market to the people you need to hire or get approvals from. In fact, if you were great at marketing, everything in your organization would change. Once nonprofits realize that they are marketers, not bureaucrats or truck drivers or procurement agencies, everything changes.

On marketing causes that "aren't particularly sexy":

Make them sexy! Why on earth would someone support something that they think is boring when something that interests/excites them more is available? They won't. I think making a road sexy isn't so hard. Or a library. The key is to focus on the BENEFIT, not the tool.

Technorati Tags: fundraising, Seth Godin

Donors will be looking for something cool to do -- how about you?

This will blow your mind. Watch this video, then ask yourself: What does this "cognitive surplus" mean for nonprofits? I think we should get out the champagne and celebrate. But it's a little bit scary too. You'll see what I mean.

Thanks to Steven Screen and Lifehacker for the tip.

Technorati Tag: fundraising

Another way advertising can hurt you

Get your head around this trippy inference, expressed at The Power of Influence: Coming soon - Advertising damages your brand. Here's how it goes:

Brands that need to use traditional advertising are not getting (enough) personal recommendation to succeed.... Brands that have to rely on traditional advertising are not as good as ones that succeed through word of mouth.... Advertising will actually damage a brand's reputation

Not as weird as it might sound. You may have noticed the impulse in people around you: Folks sometimes distrust brands that seem "over-marketed." They search for better, more obscure, the recommended-by-someone-cool.

A generation ago, advertising helped "validate" brands. Not so much any more.

What does this mean to nonprofits? We seldom have the budgets to overexpose ourselves and saturate television with spots. But do we ever "try too hard" and create the impression that we don't really have much to offer?

If we get our cues from the advertising world, we probably make the same mistakes they make. But more imortant -- and more likely -- we should be asking ourselves if we're offering donors something truly remarkable to do. Something that would actually spread through word-of-mouth, making advertising unnecessary.

Technorati Tags: advertising, fundraising

Poor service: the global warming of fundraising

The connection between carbon emissions and climate change aren't obvious. One day you're happily spewing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The next, polar bears are dying, and it takes rigorous science to show that there's a connection.

Donor service is the "global warming" of fundraising. You could be getting it wrong in a big way and have no sense at all that there's a problem. Then one day your donorfile starts to crash, and there's no good explanation.

It seems obvious that customers who have good experiences with a company are more likely to return to that company. Now there's a study from Forrester Research that shows it to be true. (Reported at the Customer Experience Matters blog, The Holy Grail: A Link Between Customer Experience And Loyalty.)

The study didn't look at the service and loyalty at nonprofits, but it's reasonable to assume that there's a similar link between the service donors experience and their retention.

Sadly, service is often the invisible factor at many nonprofits. There are many that have dynamite, world-changing programs, top-notch marketing, effective fundraising -- and sucky, screwed up service. They're virtually chasing donors away, and they don't even know it.

What's bad service from a nonprofit? It's messy data (misspelled names, duplicate records, errors in posting donations). It's not following donor instructions, or taking weeks to get it right. It's not answering the phone. Or having a website that's to hard to use.

It's not easy to focus on an invisible problem. Your organization might even have its own "Rush Limbaughs" who strenuously argue that there's nothing to worry about and no need to change.

But if you want to make a difference, pay attention to service.

You can download the Forrester study here, though it's going to cost you.

Technorati Tags: fundraising, service

The power small ideas

When you're anxious to come up with big ideas, sometimes you miss the power of little ideas. The Damn, I Wish I'd Thought of That! points out, "It only takes one little thing to generate massive word of mouth." See One little thing:

Don't over-think your word of mouth. Don't let your marketing committee complicate it.... Find one, great, simple idea why people should talk about you. Then tell everyone.

One little thing, like the bud vase in the new VW Beetle.

What one surprising, amazing, cool detail could inspire donors to talk about you?

Technorati Tags: fundraising, ideas

How not to have a boring blog

What do most nonprofits blog about when they have blogs? Well, they talk about their cool programs. If that's you, take a look at this post on calacanis.com: Note to self: stop promoting, start thinking again (or "Scoble's Law")...

...people are really engaging me in discussions about what I'm writing, traffic is spiking, and so are inbound links.... Based on this I'm formulating the "Scoble's Law" which is currently stated as: The less you talk about yourself, the more folks will talk about you.

(For the non-geeks among us, Robert Scoble writes Scobleizer, a mind-bendingly popular blog on tech issues.)

That's advice many nonprofits could use -- and not just for blogging. Stop talking about yourself. It's boring. Talk about the world your donors live in. That's interesting. That's how you inspire donors to support you.

Thanks to JournaMarketing for the tip.

Technorati Tags: fundraising, blogs

Should you let donors vote for board members?

Interesting discussion over at Tactical Philanthropy: Donors and Proxy Voting.

The question is whether it might not make sense to give donors the chance to vote for board members, much as stockholders do for corporations:

"... if donors were given voting rights, that they would be more engaged and likely to give more money over time."

I think it's a dynamite idea, even though the choice of board members is not likely to be very exciting to most donors. Really, on what basis would the average donor choose one board member over another?

Even so, I've never yet seen giving donors power of any kind not work. My guess is very few donors would exercise their proxy vote. But that they'd appreciate the chance, and that would lead to more giving, higher gift amounts, and better retention. That's what happens pretty much every time you show donors that you respect them.

Commentary at Tactical Philanthropy seems to be running against the idea, because of the assumption that given the chance, donors are going to do something stupid. Like elect a moron to the board. Or force the nonprofit to betray its own mission.

Worst-case scenario thinking always takes you to such bogus places.

If I ran a nonprofit, I'd look for every way possible to involve donors. I'd want more than their money. I'd want their ideas, their hearts, their thinking.

If you're afraid your donors are going to screw you, you're in trouble. While you're protecting yourself from your donors' predations, they'll be flocking to the smart organizations that respect them.

Technorati Tag: fundraising

Trend: breakthrough products that everyone wants

An interesting article in the current Trendwatching.com on the "Expectation Economy which is described as:

... well-informed consumers ... who have a long list of high expectations that they apply to each and every good, service and experience on offer. [They] expect not just basic standards of quality, but the 'best of the best.'

It's cool companies, often doing things nobody's thought up yet, and doing a very good job at it. (Here's one I discovered through this paper: DailyLit, a site that sells books in a spiffy new way.)

As far as I know, no nonprofits have entered the rarified level of expectation organizations, though a few are close. Those that grab that territory first are going to take off.

Here's how I think you can get there if you're willing:

1. Do something nobody else does -- but be sure it's something donors actually care to be involved in. Sure, you could be the first to initiate a kumquat exchange between inner-city American kids and untouchable farmworkers in rural Bangladesh -- is that something donors want to do?
   
2. Or, if you're doing something that's like what others do, do it with a twist -- either be far more effective than anyone else, or put donors in control in a cool way.
   
3. Either way, build your program about things donors understand, love, and care about.
   
4. And great design helps. A lot.
   

Trendwatching.com advises this way to find your greatness:

Find competitors and non-competitors, big and small, who are setting consumer expectations much higher than you've ever been able to. They're more fun. They have better design. Their stuff tastes, looks, feels better. Their customer service actually responds to emails. They're cheaper. Then compile what you think are now the global standards for whatever it is you do, and from there start thinking about new goods, services and experiences that at least incorporate those standards, and preferably outdo them.

Technorati Tags: fundraising, trends

Compassion harnesses the power of blogs

A brilliant move by Compassion, the child-sponsorship organization: They made February "Compassion Blog Month." (I'm sorry I didn't find out about it until it's over!)

Here's what Compassion did: They sent 15 Christian bloggers to Uganda, where they blogged live -- and, no doubt, they'll keep talking about for a good long while.

It's not cheap to send 15 people from North America to Africa. And those bloggers, being bloggers, might not toe the Compassion line. (Did I say "might not"? How about "will not"?)

Looked at with old economy eyes, Compassion is taking a huge risk, letting go of its marketing to 15 different near-strangers who might do anything. Looked at with modern eyes, Compassion is smart: willing to give up control in favor of being talked about by real people.

Child sponsorship organizations know exactly how much it should cost to acquire a sponsor. So you know they're going to be tracking this effort closely. If they do it again next year, that's a sign it worked.

They also offered free stuff to other bloggers who talked about their "Compassion experience." They even launched a blog of their own. All around, it's a pioneering effort for a nonprofit, and I wish them luck.

Thanks to Church Marketing Sucks for the tip.

Technorati Tags: fundraising, blogging, nptech

Do donors want to provide nonprofit operating costs?

If you don't follow the comments here at the Donor Power Blog, you might want to, because we get some good ones. Commenting on my recent post on Kiva's too-much-money problem, my former colleague Jeff Schreifels challenges my assertion that Kiva has too much money because their marketing is so good.

Jeff says, rather, that the problem is Kiva has failed to raise enough operating funds to keep the organization running optimally. That is, if they would spend a little more of what they raise on administering their programs, they'd be able to keep up with the funds they're raising:

We have been so brainwashed by organizations like GuideStar and Charity Navigator who tell us effective organizations are those that have ... low fundraising to cost ratios. But is that really the true measure? I believe the true measure is in the effectiveness of the project or work of the non-profit. I believe people understand that their gifts have to also go to overhead to MAKE their gifts work.

It's true that GuideStar and Charity Navigator, the most popular charity evaluation sites, emphasize efficiency, sometimes at the expense of ignoring effectiveness. Are they "brainwashing" donors, or simply following donors demands?

The questions this raises for Kiva (and all nonprofits, really) are these:

• Would Kiva accomplish more good in the world if they spent more on administration?
  
• Would donors rather see Kiva accomplish more, or would they rather maximize the efficiency of their giving?
  

My guess: Given the choice, Kiva's donors would gladly fund more administration costs if they knew that would lead to more good work happening.

One organization that handles this well is DonorsChoose. They add an optional "fulfillment fee" of 15-25% to donors' gifts, which donors can pay or not. As their How It Works page says:

Donors' inclusion of the fulfillment fee is essential to the existence and success of DonorsChoose.org. Thankfully, 90% of our contributors choose to include it, and income thus earned allows us to continue our work.

The magic that Kiva is missing out on here is giving donors the power. You just might be amazed at how open-minded, helpful, and flexible donors will be when you put the reins in their hands.

Technorati Tags: fundraising, Kiva

Is everybody talking about you yet?

The mysterious Don't Tell The Donor blogger has a column now in The NonProfit Times, the first of which asks an interesting question: Our Donors Are Talking -- What Are We Afraid Of?

How would you feel if you discovered that 500 of your donors had created a group on a social networking Web site like Facebook to publicly discuss their experiences donating to your organization?

"A Fundraiser" thinks you'd freak. I hope you'd throw a party. The point is, sooner or later, this is going to happen. And it won't be on your terms. People will just start talking about you -- and their topics will be the things that matter to them, not what your brand guidelines mandate as the talking points.

So here's what to start doing now:

• Do something worth talking about. Something good, not a scandal.
  
• Serve donors flawlessly. No mistakes. No long delays. Get everything right.
  
• Respect donors. Treat 'em like they're your Mom.
  

Then get out of the way and let them talk. You'll have little to fear and a lot to gain.

Technorati Tags: fundraising, cgm, nptech

How to motivate giving circles to support you

Maybe you've met a giving circle or two. They are groups of people who pool their donations and decide together where to give. Obviously the donor dynamic is very different from the way it works with individual direct mail. It creates much more sophisticated and demanding donors with a strong investment mentality.

A recent post at About Nonprofit Charitable Orgs is about ways to reach giving circles: Giving Circles Are Looking for Good Nonprofit Brands. If you want to cultivate giving circles, here's what you need to let them know:

• Your philosophy, mission, and core values.
  
• That your organization is continuously learning.
  
• Your track record of success.
  
• That you enable donors to engage in true partnership with your cause.
  
• That you can demonstrate fiscal responsibility and ethical standards.
  

A little different from the simpler-is-better world of direct-response fundraising.

It's probably worthwhile to reach out to giving circles. More about them at Giving Circles Network.

(See also Giving circles: threat or opportunity?.)

Technorati Tags: fundraising, giving circles

How to have Kiva's problem

How many nonprofits have this problem: So much revenue from donors that you're struggling to spend it all.

Of all the problems you might face, this has to be one of the better ones.

Yes, it's happening -- even now, when many nonprofits are struggling. And one organization that has the problem of too much money is Kiva. (Read about it in this New York Times Magazine article: Extra Helping.)

Kiva (reviewed on this blog here), raises funds to lend money to small business owners in developing country. Less than three years old, the organization has grown explosively. According to the Times article, they've gathered more than $19.5 million from more than 220,000 people. Over the past holiday season, they sold around $2 million worth of gift certificates. Now they're scrambling to keep up with the demand.

Sure, Kiva has been pretty lucky, getting incredible buzz and high-visibility endorsements from everyone ranging from Oprah to Bill Clinton. But that kind of "luck" comes from being smart, being worth talking about, and being one of the first.

Want to have the too-much-money problem? See if you can put the Kiva formula to work for your cause:

• Make sure you're offering something donors understand and want to do. This is partly a matter of positioning, but it's also a matter of having a cool reality to start with. (It's worth pointing out that micro-enterprise loans have historically been a tough sell in direct mail.)
  
• Put donors in control. Give them clear and detailed control over where their gifts go. This is where the Web really comes into its own, making a lot of information easy to work with.
  
• Give donors tons of feedback. Make donations only the beginning of a rewarding back-and-forth conversation.
  
• Make sure you have a strong social aspect to giving. Kiva makes it easy for people to talk about and share what they're doing.
  

Much, much easier said than done. But if you'd like to be the organization that has too much revenue while others struggle -- it's a place to start.

Technorati Tags: fundraising, Kiva

You can't control the conversation

So what is this "Web 2.0 conversation" we keep hearing about? Interesting answer at Beyond Madison Avenue, in The Real Digital Revolution:

All the noise you hear ... about "conversations" is often just a fancy term for people sharing objective opinions of products on review sites, blogs and other digital media. The "conversation" is when the marketer responds to criticism with a pledge to try harder or some such.... But enough "conversations" about how bad your product is, no amount of clever advertising or radical media placement is going to save it.

It doesn't matter what the brand is trying to say about a company; the customers have their own say about it. And customers will believe other customers more than they believe the marketing.

It's only a matter of time before nonprofits start getting the same treatment of being rated, commented on, and critiqued in public by donors. (I've seen a couple of sites that make a run at doing this, but none that really make it count; if you know of any, tell me about it!) If you're ready for this, it'll be good. If not, ouch.

Here's what to do:

1. Pay a lot of attention to your donor experience. What does it feel like to donate to your organization? Do they get acknowledged promptly? Do they learn about the impact of their giving? Do they get choices about what their money does and how you'll communicate with them?
   
2. Make sure what you do is really, really cool. That's partly a matter of describing what you do in a way that wins hearts and minds. It's doing something nobody else does, or doing it in a better way. Or doing it in a way that more closely involves donors.
   
3. Don't have a scandal. That's right, just take that scandal right off your calendar. It will follow you around for a looooong time if it happens.
   

Attempts to force-fed them your "brand standards" are meaningless at best. (At worst, they'll just remind donors why they don't trust you.)

Technorati Tags: fundraising, Web 2.0

Put donors first for great fundraising

In the commercial world, smart companies are thinking about their customers' experiences. Think the iPhone. Think Starbucks. They go beyond the mere utility of what they sell to something less tangible, more exciting. And they're making a ton of money doing it.

A Beautiful Experience challenges nonprofits to think this way at Breaking new ground for non-profits and donor experience management:

... put your donors at the middle of your planning process and create an experience for them that creates meaning in their lives. It's a shift in thinking that the world's most powerful brands have already adopted. It might be time that you took a look at it as well.

I'm trying to imagine what it would look like if a nonprofit put donors in the middle if their thinking. For some reason, all I can see is a mountain of revenue funding more good deeds than ever.

The organizations that pull this off -- putting donors in the middle -- will experience skyrocketing growth.

Throw off the tired belief that your mission and your donors are somehow at odds! Embrace your donors.

Raising money the old way (mass-market, low relevance, one-to-many direct mail) is getting harder and harder to do. The future lies with those who serve the donors.

Technorati Tags: fundraising, experience

What happens when you get caught with your ethics down

You may have heard by now what Holden Karnofsky, co-founder of GiveWell, did. In various places, often anonymously, he praised GiveWell and even knocked other nonprofit organizations. When he did so at MetaFilter, a large online community, he got caught.

What followed was not pretty. If you dare, you can read what the enraged community at MetaFilter had to say about Holden, his education, his morals, his intelligence, and pretty much everything else about him and his organization here.

(GiveWell is an organization that seeks to hold nonprofits responsible for getting results, and loudly proclaims a belief in "transparency" -- one reason the backlash against Holden is so rancorous.)

To his credit, Holden quickly apologized at the GiveWell Blog: I had a lapse in judgment, did a horrible thing, and I apologize. For the most part, the folks at MetaFilter are not buying the apology. (It probably didn't help that Holden showed up at their site and offered to give them money to set things right.)

Even though you might be able to do what Holden did and get away with it, don't do it. It's unethical.

And if that isn't enough to persuade you, just take a look at the savage treatment Holden, GiveWell, and anything connected to them have received in the past few days. It's probably safe to say that the reputations of Holden and GiveWell are meaningfully and perhaps permanently damaged. It's hard enough to raise funds without getting stuck with baggage like that.

The Net is a great tool, but you've got to use it right!

Another thought: If you're very young and in the profession for the first time, get adult supervision. Really, a lot of this looks to me like the work of a zealous youngster who believed he was smarter than everyone else. A few years having to work with older, more seasoned folks might have imparted some wisdom.

More commentary on this case at The Agitator, Gift Hub, and Give and Take. I blogged about GiveWell last March -- GiveWell: another front opens in the donor revolution -- and I ranted at Holden last October: When charitable giving is no good.

Technorati Tags: fundraising, GiveWell, npethics

The phony world of advertising

Have you noticed that almost all advertising is a lie? Not so much a deliberate attempt to deceive -- more like a wacked-out delusion.

Example: What's more like your experience at McDonalds:

• Someone leaping in the air and crying I'm lovin' it! (TM)
  
• An over-lit, plasticized space where grim, zombie-like employees have trouble taking your order and returning the right change?
  

The credibility of advertising is so low, nobody even thinks twice about how unreal it is.

That's because so much branding and marketing is done in a vacuum -- a hollow exercise in serving up consumers' felt needs with little connection to reality. That's the subject of a recent strategy+business article: Keeping Marketing's Promises:

... the fundamental problem with advertising: It's a phoniness-generating machine....

Stop saying what your offerings are through advertising, and start creating places -- permanent or temporary, physical or virtual, fee-based or free -- where people can experience what those offerings, as well as your enterprise, actually are.

Most nonprofits can't afford the expensive services of the phoniness generating machine. And that's a good thing. But we do need to take another step: We need to create something real for our donors.

So make sure your brand is reality, not a marketing construct.

Then work to build honest-to-goodness real-life connections between your cause and your donors.

And don't worry about the advertising.

Technorati Tags: advertising, fundraising, branding

Museum opens the books to anyone who cares

Can a nonprofit organization share too much information? Maybe. But I doubt it.

One organization that's trying to find out if there can be TMI is the Indianapolis Museum of Art, which has an online Dashboard of facts about the museum. Lots of facts, including these:

• The museum uses 41,614 kilowatt hours of electricity per day.
  
• The museum has 418 artworks with gaps in their WWII-Era Provenance.
  
• There have been 53,843 views of the museum's videos on YouTube.
  

That's just three pieces of the tons of information they offer. It would be easy to say it's too much, that it's too arcane, too detailed, to boring for donors to care about.

But remember, one person's boring factoid is another's hobby. Or hobbyhorse. By putting it all out there, the Indianapolis Museum is telling its public that anyone who cares is an insider. Is it possible someone will go ballistic about their electricity use, or their ownership of possibly plundered art? Sure. But it's not likely. And their openness defuses these things -- much more effectively than trying to keep secrets.

If the information is too much, nobody will look at it. Even so, the very fact that they're sharing it makes people respect the museum more. And who knows what info-sated donors might choose to do for an organization they feel trusts and respects them?

Thanks to The Artful Manager for the tip.

Technorati Tags: fundraising, Indianapolis Museum of Art

How to generate real publicity

Nearly every day, I get press releases by email, with cover notes that start something like, "Because you blog about nonprofit issues...." In nearly every case, it's immediately obvious that the PR flack who sent it doesn't read my blog at all. Otherwise they'd know I don't cover the kind of thing they're sending me.

They're just carpet-bombing every blog they can find that's remotely related to their client's need for publicity. Send out enough, and you're sure to get some coverage. And it doesn't cost anything to add one more blog to your list -- even if the chance that blogger wants to hear from you is pretty close to nil.

That's the problem with PR. It typically tries to overcome relevance and reality with brute force of numbers.

Which is just one reason, as the Church of the Customer Blog notes, PR is useless. Useful PR would be about doing things so remarkable that people remark about them; about getting the small stuff right in the first place:

The best PR comes from the smallest of actions by the root-level people. They smile when they first meet you. They call you by your name. They compliment competitors. They don't blame you for their system's misgivings. When forced to make a decision, they always, always, always do the right thing, even if it's not in the economic or political interests of their employer. They break the rules when it's obvious they must.

For nonprofits this might mean:

• Treating your donors with the same care, attention to detail, and respect you offer those you serve. (If you aren't treating them right, you need to go get a real job right now.)
  
• Giving your donors a chance to meaningfully change the world in specific ways with true feedback.
  
• Making it easy and pleasant for donors to communicate with you.
  
• Getting the small stuff right: No duplicate records. No misrecorded gifts. No request accidentally ignored.
  

Doing those thing will buy you more PR than all the clueless flacks (and many of the smart ones) put together.

Technorati Tags: fundraising, PR

Make it easy for people to slander you

If you've ever read a really bad review on Amazon, you might wonder why they let it stay. Don't bad reviews dissuade people from buying? Not really. They've discovered that giving people a place to talk helps sell stuff. More than that, the bad reviews often stir up passionate counter-reviews.

Are you letting all this happen? That's the important point at the Damn, I Wish I'd Thought of That! Blog: Are your biggest fans able to defend you?

If you don't have a message board, blog, or reviews on your web site, there is no way for your fans to step up and defend your company. Instead of hiding from negative reviews, put them in-house, inside your own community, where your fans are waiting to defend you.

If you do anything notable at all, people will talk. Some of them will complain. A few will even spread outright falsehoods about you. Others will leap to your defense.

We used to live in bubbles, where these discussions happened in isolation, where we could create fantasy brands that had nothing to do with what people actually thought and said.

The new organizations that are taking off are those that exist in the context of real-life conversations.

Why not encourage conversation, and brave the inevitable negatives? Make it easy, fun, and rewarding for people to talk about you. You have nothing to lose but your isolation.

Technorati Tags: fundraising, nptech

How to reach the new donor

Are donors changing? A report from nfpSynergy, a UK think tank, says they are: The 21st Century Donor (PDF download; registration required).

Among several other recommendations, here are some of the ways the report gives for reaching these new donors:

• Demonstrate and communicate value-for-money and impact, so that donors can see how their contribution makes a difference....
  
• Engage donors by motivation and giving 'products'.... Donors like and respond to opportunities to give where the price, the rewards, the package and the relationship are all clearly set out.
  
• Make donors stakeholders, with a real say in how they give and how their money gets spent.
  
• Stress what a donor can expect out of the giving experience: this might be about the emotional return of giving, the recognition process or the involvement.
  

These "21st century donors" roughly correspond to the coming wave of baby boomer donors. They're going to demand more for their gift: More information, more choice, more feedback.

It would be wise to start adjusting to the change.

Thanks to Modern Donor for the tip.

Technorati Tags: fundraising, boomers

Shoe seller shows the power of humanity

You may have read about this one, reported here at the Get Elastic blog: Good Customer Service Still The Best Word-Of-Mouth Marketing Strategy.

It's about a woman who bought some shoes from Zappos, then wasn't able to return them because her mother died. She emailed Zappos. Rather than stick to their policy, they arranged to have UPS pick up the shoes she wanted to return. Here's what she wrote in her personal blog about what happened next:

Yesterday, when I came home from town, a florist delivery man was just leaving. It was a beautiful arrangement in a basket with white lilies and roses and carnations. Big and lush and fragrant. I opened the card, and it was from Zappos. I burst into tears. I'm a sucker for kindness, and if that isn't one of the nicest things I've ever had happen to me, I don't know what is. So...

IF YOU BUY SHOES ONLINE, GET THEM FROM ZAPPOS.

Admit it: This story makes you want to buy shoes from Zappos, doesn't it? A company that can be that real with a customer deserves your business.

Here's what this means to nonprofits: Really getting it right with your donors sometimes isn't about telling them about your cause. Sometimes it's just being human. Sometimes it means breaking out of the box of brand and policy.

Here's a case where a customer had a personal blog, and the story has spread in a big way. But even if she'd only told her immediate circle about her experience, that would have been a lot of people wanting to buy from Zappos. The power of treating people right is enormous.

I don't have any inside knowledge on Zappos, but I'll bet almost anything that their focus on treating customers right also affects their marketing: They want to mold themselves to their customers' needs, not bend and shape and "teach" customers to be better customers.

Thanks to The WOMMA Word for the tip.

Technorati Tags: fundraising, customer service, Zappos

Marketing: Be everywhere, or be relevant?

A recent article in Fast Company, Socialized Media looks at advertisers entering online social networks (like Facebook) in order to make their marketing messages part of the conversation.

Now who (beside the advertisers) wants that? Advertisers seem to be treating social networks not as communities of people by just another medium in which to make noise. As usual, they're missing the point:

... if we're not helping people live better lives, we are not helping ourselves. If all we are doing is interrupting people who don't have time for interruptions, we can't expect their attention.... If all we are doing is pelting people with endlessly irrelevant messages, we can't claim their loyalty.

As fundraisers, we might feel we can shrug off the criticism aimed at commercial advertisers. After all, we aren't the ones plastering our messages on every possible surface, from the walls of public restrooms to the bottoms of the plastic bins at airport security lines.

But to tell the truth, the main reason we aren't doing that is we can't afford to. We're just as capable as they are of indiscriminately spraying out half-baked and irrelevant messages -- because we often believe, as they do, that if we say it often enough and loudly enough, people will listen and do what we want them to do.

That's not how it works any more. The new way is to be relevant, share information, take part in natural conversations, and provide something great.

The commercial world needs to stop yelling about how great their products are and start listening to real people.

So does the nonprofit world.

Technorati Tags: fundraising, advertising, Facebook

The best fundraisers probably aren't fundraisers

Seems some nonprofits are tapping their program staff to raise funds. Seems also that it's working. That's what a recent article in The Boston Globe, At nonprofits, asking for money becomes part of the job, says:

As the public faces of their organizations, staffers are particularly well-positioned to identify prospective givers, build long-term relationships with them, and give them a hands-on view of the nonprofit's mission.... After all, staff members often do the work that stirs donors' passions, such as conducting cancer research, keeping the Charles River clean, or playing the violin.

Three cheers for this trend! I hope it's real.

Front-line staff may not be experts at fundraising, but most of them I know more than make up for that in passion and knowledge about the cause.

Donors want to give to real things. They want connections. They want to change the world. They want experiences.

Not just marketing.

In my book, a real violinist (better yet, a real bassist) beats the best marketing money can buy every time. Even if he's a little tongue-tied and awkward and doesn't quite know how to close the deal. Because he's real, and marketing is, well, marketing.

So far, we're probably talking about face-to-face major donor fundraising. But really, what can we do to connect all the donors (or at least a lot more of them) with real-life mojo?

Here are some ideas:

• Make staff available online for questions. Have an "ask the expert" feature on your website. Promote online chat with your experts. Even publish the email addresses of some of them to donors.
  
• You can also do this over the phone through conference calls.
  
• Encourage them to have a blog. It's a lot of work, but if they're into doing it, it can be a great way to give donors a true insider's look at the organization. (Want to see something cool? Visit the CSO Bass Blog, run by a bassist in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. It's like hanging out and drinking beer with the guy -- who just happens to be a musician in one of the world's great orchestras.)
  
• Feature staff people in your newsletter.
  

Technorati Tags: fundraising, philanthropy