I recently came by the headline, ”Social Networking not the Silver Bullet Expected by Many.” This is news? Who would really think that social networking would be a silver bullet in the first place?

Oh yeah, the same folks who thought a new web site would solve all their fundraising problems at once. Or e-mail. Or video events. Or telemarketing… Need I go on? It’s a bit surprising that after all these years there are still such widespread misconceptions about fundraising and development.

Don’t get me wrong. Social networking is a great new tool and will have an important part to play in accelerating organizational support. It’s just not the magical substitute for all other fundraising efforts. Expecting it to be such merely exposes a lack of understanding about the basic principles of development and confusion between giving methods and giving motives.

Fundraising is essentially the act of asking for and (hopefully) receiving a gift. It is transaction based and transaction focused. This often results in fatigue, discouragement, and a vulnerability to the enticements of “the next big thing.”

Development, on the other hand, encompasses the larger tasks of creating and keeping the right kind of donors. It is relationship based and donor focused. It recognizes tools and strategies as just that: tools and strategies to be applied as needed.

As our society becomes more technologically complex, we gain an increasing variety of methods for carrying out our charitable intentions. In the beginning, the only way people could give was face-to-face — one person helping another. Then came mail, followed by the telegraph. Then phones came along and the rate of change started to snowball. Each new advance has been hailed as either the replacement of all that has gone before or as the end of fundraising as we know it. Neither has ever been true.

What’s true is that people give to people, inspired by a cause. Nowadays, technology gives them a wider choice of how they give, which:
• Gives us more tools to help people expedite their giving
• Makes giving more convenient for many donors
• Complicates the planning and coordination of our work
• Increases the difficulty of tracking results and preferences
But mostly, the growth in giving avenues increases our ability to connect closely with donors and bring them into an interactive partnership.

The effective way to approach any new venue for giving (think SMS — it’s coming) is to look at it in the context of your current donor cultivation strategy first. Apply what you already know about building relationships and use the new tools as they fit your strategy and your donors. Then measure the results and adjust as needed.

Why your donors support you hasn’t changed all that much, just how they execute their giving.

By Sally Funk

We’ve all heard the statements. We may have even said them ourselves:

• “I don’t know why that letter didn’t work better. We worked so hard on it.”
• “We should have won that game. We practiced so hard.”
• “Of course it’s creative, we’ve been working on it for weeks.”
• “This mission statement seems so boring. It shouldn’t be, we’ve been working on it forever.”
• “I don’t like it much, but we’ve worked on it for so long, we don’t have time to come up with anything better.”

We seem to be suffering from a “mis-connect” of equating the level of work with effectiveness (or creativeness) of the project. Perhaps it comes from an over-reliance on the old adage of practice makes perfect. Perhaps we’re just in a rut.

It’s not like a lack of hard work yields the opposite result. More often than not, you just get a shoddy output.

It’s probably because we’re more confident of our ability to accomplish the “work” part than we are of coming up with the “good idea” part. Sometimes it’s easier to grab a mediocre idea and run with it than to turn against the dreaded production schedule and hold out for a better idea. After all, how do you know if that lump of an idea isn’t really a diamond in the rough?

If you’re not quite sure, try the energy test. Bad ideas are often more subject to the law of diminishing returns. They tend to take more effort and more time than seems reasonable, without any noticeable improvement. Really bad ideas are too much like shampooing a skunk – they just get worse the more you try.

In contrast, great ideas seem to generate their own energy, even to the point of appearing to grow on their own, sprouting additional ideas as they develop.

Let’s face it, the most limited resource you have is time. Spending it on a poor idea steals that resource from other projects that desperately need it. You can avoid at least some of the bad ideas that come along with a few basic steps:

• Have a plan – Work out a plan that includes goals and objectives. Compare the ideas that come up to how they advance those goals and objectives.
• Give yourself room to change course – Yes, you can produce an appeal letter (from concept to in the mail) in less than a week. You don’t want to do that very often. Schedule more time for production – four to six weeks for a letter. Schedule even more time for creative (six weeks plus). That does mean you’ll be working on your Christmas appeal in late September, but if the idea fizzles, you’ll have the breathing space to change direction.
• Take a break – If you find yourself thinking, “Well this is better than the other stuff we’ve come up with,” back away. Stand up. Breathe. Take a walk. Let it rest for a day or two. A good idea won’t suffer, but a bad idea will look worse.
• Shoot it down – Try reverse brainstorming. Get a group together, including the fans of the idea, and try to come up with all the reasons it’s a bad idea, all the problems that could arise, and all the ways it could be misunderstood. No judgment of the people behind the idea, but no holds barred about the idea itself. It’s also a good way to troubleshoot a good idea.

Remember, good ideas come from a deep understanding of your organization and you organization’s supporters. New isn’t always better. Different isn’t always better. Better is better.

By Sally Funk

OK, the books are closed for last year and you’ve finished sending out the end of year receipts. But, before you dive into the activities for the coming year, take some time and review your end of year reports.

What’s that?

• You don’t run end of calendar year reports because you run on a fiscal year?
• Your only year-end reports are run by accounting?
• You’ve tried pulling year-end reports, but they don’t make any sense?
• You don’t know what (or how) to pull that kind of information? Or how you would use it if you could?

Three reasons why you should run calendar year end reports

1. Even if your fiscal year is different, your donors think of their giving in terms of the calendar year, so it just makes sense to measure their behavior this way. The only exceptions are schools, where people actually do think in terms of the school year.

2. Some trends, like continuity and frequency are best measured using a year-to-year comparison.

3. It’s an opportune time to look back at the year’s efforts (while you can still remember them) and evaluate their relative effectiveness. What worked? What didn’t? How could you improve on them?

What reports should you run – and what should you be looking for?

Don’t let the thought of year-end reports intimidate you. Start with the basics: productivity and progress. Productivity is taking a look at what you did last year to see if it worked, and how you can improve on it this year. Progress is the impact your efforts had on your support base. Simply put, are more people involved in supporting your work?

Productivity

Make a list of everything you did last year to raise funds and increase your base of support.

For each one, figure out:
• How much it cost
• How much it raised
• How many people were involved
• Did it achieve its purpose?
• Were there any surprises?
• How does it compare to what happened in the year before?
• What should or could be changed next time?

Progress

Compare this past year to the previous year (or several years for an overall trend).
• Do you have more donors this year than last?
• Did they give more, or less? (totals and averages)
• Did they give more often?
• Did you bring more people onboard? (Find)
• Did you get more new donors? (Win)
• Did more donors continue giving from the previous year? (Keep)
• Did current donors increase their involvement? (Lift)
• If not, what can you do to fix the problem?
• If so, what can you do to continue the growth?

What if you can’t get this information? Don’t give up. Make this year the year to make the changes needed so you can get the information next year. There are some common areas that create obstacles to getting the information you need.

Process – You have the software and the codes set up, but people aren't entering them properly. This is often because no one told the data entry people that this information is important. A little training and team-building may be in order.

Coding – This can be one of two problems: either the coding is improperly set up, or it is not being printed on response documents (or assigned to electronic response avenues). Either way, the data entry folks don’t have information to enter, so they enter whatever seems right to them.

Software – It’s possible that you’ve outgrown your software, and there are no available fields for the necessary codes. It might be that your software isn’t configured to fit your organization’s needs, or that the configuration and coding have been changed so many times that it no longer makes sense. In the worst case, your software simply might not be working properly.

If all this sounds like a good idea, but you don’t have the internal resources to figure it out or set it up, contact us at McConkey-Johnston International for expert assistance and solutions based on your organization’s needs.

By Sally Funk

I can see Pikes Peak from my window. At over 14,000 feet, it towers over every other mountain nearby. Yet, like many who live in this area, I’ve only been to the top once. Thousands more have never ascended its heights, although a handful do go up regularly. It’s not that it is particularly hard to do — in addition to a well-maintained hiking trail, there is a road and a train that go all the way up to the coffee shop (yes, coffee shop) on top. It’s just one of those, “one of these days…” goals.

Rather like “best practices” in our organizations. We talk about them a great deal, discussing how to define them, how they can be measured, whether they actually apply to the situation our organization is currently facing, and so forth. But surprisingly few organizations actually achieve the regular practice of “best practices.”

It’s not that there’s anything wrong with best practices. It’s more that, for most organizations, the step from here to there is just too big. When you’re out on the flatlands struggling to meet minimum requirements, it’s hard to imagine climbing the mountain.

Perhaps what we really need are intermediate steps.

Take receipting, for example. The IRS requires organizations to provide receipts for gifts of $250 or more, which provides an external definition of the minimum required practice. Best practice for sending receipts is a 24-hour turnaround from receiving a gift to the mailing of the receipt. There’s a huge chasm between those two benchmarks.

Wouldn’t it be more useful to step away from the “all or nothing” perspective and adopt a stair step of functionality levels something like:

1. Minimum requirement – what is legally required.
2. Marginally functional – the bare bones of what’s needed to make the effort work. In our receipt sample, this would be sending receipts to all donors monthly or annually.
3. Adequately acceptable – working at a level that allows a strategy to work mostly as designed, but not as effectively as desired. For our receipts, that would be a one-week turnaround.
4. Commonly effective – this is the difference between “working” and “working well.” For receipts, this would be 2 - 4 days. Most organizations should be able to reach this level and reap the benefits of the improved effectiveness.
5. Best practice – that “extra” — of innovation, excellence and ingenuity — that takes your strategy to the top.

This approach can provide a diagnostic tool for evaluating strategies and efforts in light of short and long term performance objectives. It also breaks down improvement goals to a manageable size.

Some might argue that his can encourage a mindset of settling for less than the best and giving up on the goal of excellence. But consider which is better: a choice between a seemingly unobtainable “best” and the wholly inadequate status quo, or an achievable small improvement, followed by others, building to a culture of innovation?

Tags: nonprofit best practices

By Sally Funk

Websites, social networking, e-mail, instant messaging, smart phones, video streaming, even telemarketing – how’s a slow, increasingly expensive media supposed to compete? A long time ago, in a very different world, direct mail was easily the most efficient, cost-effective method for reaching a large group of people with a compelling message. Those days are already long gone.

But is direct mail actually dying? Perhaps not.

After all, there is something satisfyingly tangible about holding that letter in your hand that the “virtual” world just can’t deliver. Some things just seem more real when they’re on paper – and there are some people who just like that feeling. Then there are the people (some are your donors) who are not yet online or who prefer to avoid the online world altogether.

The good news is that the sloppy, clumsy, one-size-fits-all, just plain ugly mail that earned the nickname “junk mail” is definitely on the way out. But the direct mail that will survive in the days to come won’t be at all like your Great Aunt Bertha’s direct mail.

Except that – in some ways – it will. Because the factors that made direct mail effective for many years still apply – not just to paper and ink, but to the newer avenues of electronic mass communication. The difference isn’t so much between an envelope and stamp versus the Internet as it between old and new ways of approaching direct response communication.

We used to think in terms of the organization controlling the message and inspiring response from our supporters. Today, it’s the donors and stakeholders who have the control. Thanks to the variety of media available, they can now choose both how they receive information and how they respond to it.

This means that you still have to master the details of delivering your message and managing the response for each of the various media avenues our donors use. Plus, you have to be able to execute your strategy along parallel avenues – both sending and receiving – and integrate them into a single message with multiple interaction points.

But competent execution is no longer enough. To be successful, you need to understand the foundational elements that have always been at the core of effective direct response communication:

1. Know your audience – Preferences, demographics, giving history, and interests all give you help in getting your message to your stakeholders. Yes, you may need to segment and personalize.
2. Tell your story – Who are you and what do you do? How are you changing the world? The neighborhood? What do gifts accomplish?
3. Ask! – Be specific. Tell them what to do: write a check, click on the ”donate now” button. Tell them how you’ll use their gift.
4. Make it easy to respond –Sometimes this comes down to making sure the response card fits in the envelope, or that the link to the web site actually works. Find the hurdles and remove them.
5. Measure and adapt – Folks will tell you what they like – and dislike – by their response (or lack of it). Really look at your response numbers.

• Compare groups.
• Compare different appeals. What works for regular donors may not work as well for lapsed donors or for new donors.
• Figure out where your “point of no return” is (when lapsed donors no longer respond) and stop spending money on people who are no interested.
• Figure out the unique characteristics of your stakeholders. (Hey, that sounds a little like #1…)

Each of these principles go hand in hand with solid execution. Whether the media is paper or electronic, it is crucial to take full advantage of the strengths and mitigate the weakness of each. This includes coordinating your message across multiple media and providing multiple response avenues. This type of integrated interaction is already possible – and appreciated. Tomorrow, it will be expected.

Direct mail isn’t dead yet – but it’s going to take more work, and more thought.