WINter doldrums

If your programs are anything like mine, January is the toughest month of the year. It starts slow, after all the majority of folks with interest in giving did so in the blitz of solicitations, materials and holiday spirit last month. Those folks who didn't give in December are now getting the bills for what they did do in December and that certainly serves to provide a dip in giving for those folks.

Phone programs are often paused or at best understaffed for the first half of the month and training some new callers as they work at gearing up again in the second half. Weather, at least up here in the northeast, can be a challenge, at very least short days and long nights make for lower energy days.

So what to do? It is a great time for some reporting on mid fiscal year success! Talk up where you are winning! Create a couple of social media and email messages that talk about what you have accomplished this year. Use the opportunity to solicit one or two larger annual donors who "missed" the last tax year for a gift in the current tax year with the leverage of using them to share the message as a signer or email author.

This reporting can often be done quite successfully via email. I would strongly recommend using a volunteer, creating a campus account for them and sending it as a html message but using text without images (like any other email you get) containing a link or two to more information on your web page and facebook account. This is how we communicate on a daily basis via email so matching that approach will increase the open and reading rates of the message.

Alumni Couples and the school, a match made by cupid?

One of the solicitations that just about every school tries centers around Valentine's Day and couples. Years ago, I saw a number of pieces that were effective in doing this but it has been years since I have seen anything new that worked.

I would suggest that through social media we may have an opportunity to make "everything old new again" and revive the success of this type of effort. To make that social aspect work, I am focusing on facebook and would suggest creating a likeable and shareable post that asks alum to alum couples to share how they met.

Using these stories as a base, you now have additional value to share and push to other alumni with some meat to it. You can then ask them to read through some of those experiences, add their own thoughts or experiences and make a gift in honor or in memory of a loved one with the promise that those names will be shared the week of Valentine's Day as a way of recognizing them and encouraging folks to share that list with those honored, creating additional opportunities for new folks to see and make a gift.

Employment is up don't let your effort down

Lots of good economic news in the last couple of months. While I have not yet quit holding my breath for things to continue to trend upwards, I am at least venturing occasional moments of optimism that the view looks better tomorrow than yesterday.

With that in the front of your mind, consider what steps you have taken over the last 2 or 3 years to retain, steward and cultivate your donors and constituents. Many programs have put additional efforts into communication streams, career services, webinars focused on refreshing skills, networking receptions and many other creative approaches to provide the maximum value possible to continuing a relationship with your institution. As things get better, consider how to continue, improve and expand those efforts.

Some simple steps can certainly continue to grow your base - expand your career services efforts for alumni. As jobs become more available, many of your alumni will find themeselves looking again either for full employment or for the job that they quit trying to find months and months ago. Other alumni are going to be in hiring roles again - looking to fill positions. Make sure that you play a role in connecting the two groups. I think that the benefits will speak for themselves.

When alums report they got a new job, send them something to say congratulations. This can be as simple as a thank you letter from the president or director of alumni relations congratulating them, a free screen saver that shows them to be a proud alum or as complicated as a coffee mug for their desk proudly calling out their educational allegiance. Obviously there are many inbetweens or other creative ideas here - use your imagination and give them something that will be meaningful to your alumni.

Make it clear that you value them and their allegiance and that you are still there for them. Offer monthly resume, interview and job search webinars at no cost. Provide refresher or training courses for more experienced alumni who seek rejoin or improve their position in the workforce but are unsure how to do so in 2012.

Obviously these are just a few simple ideas but they start down the path of building rather than shrinking from engagement and involvement with our alumni. Keep in mind that the majority of jobs being generated right now are in the small business market, an environment where many more folks yield much greater influence than in big business, you just need to get them to tell you about it.

Pinning up the Holiday Season

Over the last several weeks, I have observed the very rapid growth of Pinterest.com with great interest (no rhyming joke needed.) For those of you unfamiliar with the site, it is essentially an image/idea bulletin board that ties to either a twitter or a facebook account (the two most popular social media sites in the world by monthly visits) and allows you to create what amounts to a page of visual bookmarks.

Pinterest allows you to group your postings, share your postings with folks who follow you or are interested in your subject matter and as important, allows for the social sharing of the information including access to and through the original posting location for that image.

The growth in this makes sense - it provides a virtual scrapbook with dynamic content. My question for fundraising is how do we leverage this tool to provide effective and meaningful input for us?

Immediate thoughts are research - who is posting about you and what, dissemination of images and information in a very different environment from what we usually use, engagement - by creating albums centric to events or happenings, we can allow our constituents to share and identify what matters and how it matters to them while sharing it with others. If anyone has seen or is using Pinterest as a way to engage, solicit or otherwise interact, please share.

Happy Holiday's!

Go ahead and take one - they're free

At this time of year many of us print or more accurately mail a holiday appeal. In keeping with the spirit of the season, this often includes a freemium. That encompasses a wide range of possibilities, be it a calendar, notepad, cards, mailing or present labels, some combination of these or maybe something bigger and more expensive.

For many folks, this process started back in June or July with image selection, printing specs and quotes and may just now be wrapping up with the completion of final segments. I am also going to assume that you expect substantial return from the appeal utilizing these items. I know that in my office we see around $200,000 a year in return from our President's Christmas appeal including the university calendar.

My thought is that we need to provide as many related items as possible using these efforts. For instance, we print a full color 12 month calendar each year and mail it to recent donors along with major gift prospects and select individuals chosen by contact staff and the president's office. I had those same, approved, captioned images turned into a screen saver, desktop wallpaper and a one page wall calendar. The digital version will be added to the calendar year end solicitations (well a link to download them) as a no cost, easy additional item, adding some value to my email. The single page calendar will be mailed to the balance of the donor ever file the week between christmas and new years with the expectation that it will arrive in mailboxes the first week of January carrying a message of give now to an audience that is outside of my year end group and hopefully beating the holiday bills into the donors hands.

Each of these are easy items to create with low cost and flow easily in the process from their more visible and expensive calendar cousin. In addition, it allows me to maximize the eyeballs on and value of those images that we are espousing as representative of the university in a productive way.

Put some datamining onto your wish list

I had three separate conversations today that touched upon the use of datamining to more effectively segment or target appeals. The simplest of these was centered around reducing costs on an appeal, the most complex was identifying the most appropriate solicitation method for approaching lapsed prospects with a very short (think 2011) timeline for getting it completed.

In each of these conversations, the most interesting component to me was how accepted the concept was. Six or seven years ago when I started to do a lot with using statistical analysis as a way to inform my segmenting and mailing decisions, everytime that I would bring it up, I needed to explain what I meant, why it would help and then provide some sort of defense regarding it actually working. In my conversations today, each person whom I spoke with readily agreed that it made sense to do. I see this as a huge step in the maturation of the profession and expect that it is one of the long term positive outcomes from the current economic mess. Doing more with less each year has required that we get better at it and the declining participation numbers are going to continue to hone that effort.

I have posted the how before, so please search the archives of this blog for tips on implementation. I would suggest that no matter the level of sophistication, taking steps to increase response and decrease costs have little downside and substantial upside. I challenge each of you to put trying it on your list of things to do and get started. To that end, call me if you need help figuring out how to get this going - 718-990-6240.

Social media postings

I am presenting at LI philanthropy day tomorrow and the subject is social media on a shoestring. Or rather, the title. The good news is that there is a ton of material, the bad news is that I really don't know who I am presenting to and so picking 75 minutes worth of it for an unknown audience is a bit concerning.

As I was sorting through the piles of material and thousands of ideas that I have assembled, I realized one of the most key challenges is getting and maintaining the social media conversation. So I looked at my own conversations and what attracted me to respond to posts and I realized why it is so hard to get folks to read institutional/organizational postings: They are boring.

No really, they are. I manage a couple of sites and if I wasn't responsible for posting to them, I would pay minimal attention to much of what I put up (sorry for that...) the basic problem is that it isn't personal. We all have that friend who posts everything they do - what they had for breakfast, that they then brushed their teeth and then made lunch to take to work etc.... Most likely you also have that friend whose posts just shill for their Pampered Chef side business. In any case neither of those are folks you interact with, they just provide that background noise factor.

Conversely, those friends who you respond to, post a variety of material, sometimes relevant, sometimes not. Sometimes about themselves, sometimes not. In any case, they mix "me" and "not me." We need to let go of the institutional need for it to relate directly back to us and just carry on a conversation about the world. That is how you achieve full social media engagement.