By Barry McLeish

Raising money is hard. In fact, older fund raisers tell me it is as hard as it has ever been. What’s more, these conditions may be like this for years in the future. It’s not unusual for fund development officers to make 8 to 12 telephone calls trying to get to a decision maker. Tactics and strategies that worked in the past often do not work. Many donors seem to flee when fund raisers call.

For many organizations it may be time to rethink how they sell and do business.

When most organizations face economic obstacles they often concentrate on improving their causal products and organizational processes and strategies. The hope is that by concentrating on new products and reorganizing what systems and processes an organization has, these new offers to the public will capture their imagination in a way previous ones did not and turn the economic tide.

This type of response looks inward and tries to answer the questions at hand by fixing the organization first. Though not necessarily wrong, perhaps there is another side of the coin to be explored. Could not as much be gained by looking externally – outside of one’s organization and its leadership – and taking a hard view at one’s environment and the public the organization hopes to serve? What are the major shapers of the future as they relate to your organization? What visions and strategies will be required to take advantage of the environment?

Here is an interesting story - still being played out - that illustrates this:

I work with a large successful resident year-round camp. Its attendance numbers this summer slipped a fraction below what the leadership projected. This situation gave them pause and we had a series of conversations around the topic of refining some programs, improving customer service activities, and amplifying their marketing tactics.

Something else happened: the day camp the organization runs in a nearby city grew by almost 80%. We were stunned! However, the environment spoke in unmistakable ways. More families had both spouses working. Those working were also working part time jobs. There was no time to take care of the children and they had to be put somewhere. The camp was a trustworthy neighbor to the City, had a great reputation, and had a history of local support. When the situation demanded it, the Camp was there.

There’s more to this story: some of the City fathers have asked the Camp to run an after-school program for young people who are between school and waiting for their parents to come home from work.

The environment for this organization has changed in ways they could not have predicted nor expected. Consequently their way of doing business, their programs, and their marketing plans have changed. All because their environment spoke to them and they listened.

Tags: Nonprofit marketing strategy, Fundraising strategy

By Barry McLeish

Great achievements in the nonprofit world often occur when institutions harness their own internal energy and simultaneously, that of individuals around them and deal purposefully with an aspect of our nation or of any nation that needs intervention. Collectively they create for the briefest of moments a joint and reciprocally driven, caring, trusting community. Being accountable for the common good and the welfare of those needing help is assumed by all parties in the community and is a part of their underlying ideals and beliefs.

This has been my personal experience as a donor to a variety of causes. The urgency and ego of “me” is subsumed in the “we” as, bundled together with other donors and volunteers, I have contributed to solving an impending or immediate social problem, or have helped take advantage of a new opportunity that benefits a group of individuals in need. Just recently my wife and I helped in building a needed hospital overseas for a group of individual who did not have ready access to such facilities. Thousands of men and women – as donors and volunteers - had similar experiences after the Asian tsunami, the Kashmir earthquake, and the New Orleans flooding disaster.

However, what do you do as a development director when there is not an all-consuming crisis to draw everyone together? Are potential donors and volunteers increasingly becoming too narrowly self-serving in their approach to life to care for those who cannot succeed at the same level without the benefit of an event that demands their involvement? There is reason for some concern - some data suggests that major donors are retreating from giving and being much more cautious in their outlook on nonprofit involvement. Some authors have suggested that Americans could give billions more without decreasing their self worth.

However, a number of Americans choose not to follow suit. Why? One key may lie within us as development professionals. Regardless of how well those in need are served, many organizations have done a poor job in engaging donors’, customers’, and volunteers’ in a satisfactory way.

Is this the case with your organization?

While it may be true that for some donors their current involvement with causes they support is heavily in flux; it is equally true that many of these causes are changing their methods of operation to allow donors and volunteers access to their organizations mix and inner workings in a way previously not thought of as previously possible or appropriate.

Philanthropic tastes are changing and contribute to this churn, especially given the large number of individuals who no longer feel content to simply give financial gifts to charities. For many donors, being philanthropic now means not only choosing where their financial gifts to charities will go, but showing active interest, concern, and involvement with the recipient organization, with subsequent follow-up on how their gift is used.

A massive social and cultural revolution is at work, particularly in the way individuals relate to nonprofit organizations and each other, affecting what they will and will not support and what they expect from their philanthropic involvement.

Do you know what your donors expect from your organization? If not, why don’t you make a goal of talking to your ten most important donors and /or volunteers and find out why they are involved with your cause.

By Barry McLeish

Is listening to your donors, volunteers, customers, and clients a priority to you and your development and marketing team?

The reason it should be is pretty important. You and I are devoting a lot of dollars, time, and energy to our organization and hopefully, trying to define and manage what people think of us. Some call this “brand management.” Unfortunately, you may have the cart before the horse. Your brand is whatever your stakeholders are currently saying about you and your organization. They decide what your brand is more than you do.

Do you know what your donors, volunteers, customers, and clients think your brand is about? I only know one way to really find this information out and that is by listening.

Let me quote someone I have never met but would love to – the quote is from Ricardo Guimaraes, founder of Thymus Branding:

• The value of a brand belongs to the market and not to the company. The company in this sense is a tool to create value for the brand. Brand in this sense – it lives outside the company, not in the company. When I say that the management is not prepared for dealing with the brand, it is because in their mind-set they are managing a closed structure that is the company. The brand is an open structure – they don’t know how to manage an open structure. (Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, Groundswell, (Boston: Harvard Business Press, 2008)

You and I know that there is a lot of money being spent already on market research by many organizations – for profit and nonprofit. You most likely familiar with some of the problems that come along with research; bias of surveys, limitations of focus groups, too much information, and on and on.

My concern is a little different: there are lots of ways to listen. It is obviously important for you as a marketer to know what the donor, volunteer, or customer is feeling when they deal with your cause. However, most of us do not have a plan for listening. You must clarify your objectives for listening first. Don’t just try to gather a lot of information and hope for insights – doing this means you will fail. And because of the relative ease of working online, don’t just start monitoring your community of stakeholders looking for tidbits.

First, decide what is feasible given the community of people who are your stakeholders. A constituency over 65 years of age necessitates one path; a clientele between 14 and 19 years of age necessitates another path.
Second, what are your goals for listening? Are you going to just listen looking for information, are you looking for ways to create a viral (word-of-mouth) campaign, or are you trying to energize your best donors to give more?

Third, is this a flash-in-the-pan exercise or are you going to begin a process of routinely engaging your constituents in listening exercises and ultimately creating an ongoing dialogue with them? Your strategy here matters, especially if you’re looking for relationships with your stakeholders to change in the future.

Finally, are you going to use social media, phone interviews, face-to-face – what applications are you going to use?

Decide today that your organization is going to be one that listens to its stakeholders – all of the time. Good luck in the days ahead.

By Barry McLeish

Does every organization need a competitive marketing strategy? Can an organization afford not to have one? According to Michael E. Porter in his book, Competitive Strategy, you have a strategy whether you define it or not:

"Every firm competing in an industry has a competitive strategy, whether explicit or implicit. This strategy may have been developed explicitly through a planning process or it may have evolved implicitly through the activities of the various functional departments of the firm. Left to its own devices, each functional department will inevitably pursue approaches dictated by its professional orientation and the incentives of those in charge. However, the sum of these departmental approaches rarely equals the best strategy."

Unless an organization defines and enacts a strategy and thereby tries to control its outcome, one operates for it that it does not control. While most nonprofit executives agree with the Porter quote and its intent that organizations have a strategy whether they participate in the process or not, the typical executive's agreement with the statement does not go much further than talk. Many nonprofit directors do not have a formally stated strategy. Ask them for it and they can't give it to you. For some, this is because they have had no training in developing such a strategy. They just don't know how to undertake such a task. For others, the problem is not getting them to agree they need some type of strategy; the problem is getting them to agree to take control of the competitive situation and all that this implies. And sadly, there is still a whole school of nonprofit thinking that says no such plan is needed; that marketing is "wrong" and therefore nonexistent. Given today's environment, this seems to be a naive assumption. In fact, this attitude often means the director doesn't care if he or she reaches the organization's corporate goals, (or more likely, they have no measurable objectives to serve as guides in reaching these goals).

Why the need for a marketing strategy? Perhaps the answer is no more difficult than a strategy helps enables an organization to go where it has decided it wants to. Without a conscious plan in place, competitive direction is ultimately the sum total of those operating decisions managers make every day:

• Someone asks for your organizational help and you help.
• Your company is asked to jointly sponsor an event and you do so.
• The nonprofit down the road has an annual report so you print one, too.

These aren't necessarily bad decisions. The organization is going somewhere. Three years from now, it will be someplace. The problem is where the organization finds itself will most likely have been dictated by the opportunities or threats the organization faced in the intervening three years. By default, these everyday occurrences will have dictated its market position.

Good luck in the days ahead.

Tags: Nonprofit marketing strategy, Fundraising strategy