MainSpring Media Communications, Inc.

Choices, Choices, Choices

2012-02-10T21:19:00.002-05:00

I was opening my mail from the last week today and realized that we are starting the winter fundraising year as I had 6 different solicitations in my pile. Of interest was that 3 were from places that I have supported already and the other 3 were from places that I have never given to.

Of the three that I had never given to, none of the three made a effort to address the nature of our relationship thus far and only one made an effort to build a case for why I should give from a general standpoint.

Of the three that I had supported at some point, two made a clear case for giving while one made at least a case for what good they do.

The interesting thing is that of the six pieces, at least 4 came from organizations that have my electronic information as well. Yet, not one of them made any effort to contact me in a similar timeframe that way or to tie the mailing effort to an electronic appeal or informational effort.

That lack of connectivity and messaging combined with the fact that the only way I have ever given to the three that I have given to is online, leaves the door open for many other organizations. If you are not now doing so, at very least ensure that you match solicitation method to giving method on top of what else you are doing. IE if you have a donor who gives online, ensure that when you mail to them, you also email them and in the mail appeal reflect that effort.

pin it to win it

2012-02-02T20:21:00.002-05:00

I know, I know, I used the play on Winning on my last post as well and that Charlie Sheen line is totally used up already. That may be, but "winning" still registers on Google trends above where it stood prior to Charlie. Of more interest here, Pinterest is now growing rapidly as a search term.

Of course in social media relationships, the vast majority of "importance" is driven by referals - in common terms, who is making it rain. For the month of January, Pinterest did just that, bringing in the visitors at a higher rate than Youtube, Google+ and LinkedIn combined!

So to continue the conversation that I started last time, the question is how do we leverage this growing tool? It does have some limitations and in some ways that is encouraging because they will start to make the adjustments needed to fix those challenges and that is only going to help continue that growth trend.

WINter doldrums

2012-01-24T09:20:00.003-05:00

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?

2012-01-13T13:18:00.004-05:00

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

2012-01-06T19:58:00.002-05:00

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

2011-12-21T12:05:00.002-05:00

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

2011-12-09T13:37:00.002-05:00

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

2011-12-02T22:58:00.002-05:00

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

2011-11-17T22:40:00.003-05:00

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.

How to reach them (a mini case study)

2011-11-04T20:29:00.002-04:00

We recently launched an online community and discovered a couple of interesting things: Today's alum has no worries about creating a profile, having their information "out there" on the web like folks did a decade or so ago. They are very capable of logging in and creating a profile, following directions (so long as the directions look and act like facebook)to do so with minimal help.

What they don't do is pay attention to the marketing for it.

The product is a basic online community for an institution that has not had one for internal political reasons. It provides directory, broadcast email, giving page upgrades, class notes and online event registration. Of those, we already had an Email Service Provider and an online giving page (albeit a 1998 version of one)as features that we had access to outside of a community.

The original plan was to do an email based beta launch mid October to the 14,000ish alumni who are actively engaged with the university (defined by donations, email opens and event attendance.) We planned to ask them to help us push it to their contacts via personal emails, engagement tools within the directory and social media as we know that our alumni are more connected to each other than to us.

This was to be followed a week later by a print letter sent presort first class to that same population reinforcing that same message. At that same time, a letter was dropped at the non-profit rate to the balance of the population ~130,000 alumni. This was expected to arrive between 10 and 17 days later providing a naturally staged launch to be reinforced by the alumni e-digest announcement of the launch in that same time frame.

The reality was a series of production delays that meant the first launch of the product was the e-digest announcement to 53,500 constituents where this was the lead story. Out of that, 5,600 read the digest, 102 clicked through to the community and 62 registered. The following day, a single point email was sent to the same list reinforcing the community launch. 672 folks registered in the next 12 hours.

The letters are in the mail and history tells me that we will see 3 or 4 times the responses to that as to the stand alone email. That said, the interesting point for me is the comparison between the reaction to the single message email and the e-digest. With a almost 10:1 difference in response, it demonstrates what I have held for a long time as a basic belief, what folks tell you they want and how they act don't align.

By that I mean that everyone tells you they are overwhelmed by email and they want digest format information. The problem is that they are overwhelmed by information and digest formats are just too much more. By providing information in small bites with a clear purpose and call to action we dramatically increased the portion who took the action we were seeking.

I will update this in a month once the mail results from both campaigns are in. Keep this in mind - where is your calendar year end ask? Does it have legs of its own or is it part of a multi-themed message? Can you afford to have it where it is?

data targeting

2011-10-18T09:25:00.002-04:00

Yesterday Stephanie posted a link on the MainSpring facebook page reflecting a post from the CoolData blog regarding targeted fundraising communications. I think this is an good starting point for many of us and something that more folks than not are already doing. In the fundraising world, we are all well aware of the different potential values of LYBUNTS as opposed to NonDonors and in recent years increased focus has been placed on recurrence rather than just recency.

The question ultimately becomes who should you be spending your time with from those folks who have not given you a clear answer on interest. There are two ways to approach this and both have value:

Assume that what you are doing now is effective and engaging. This is the simplest approach, keep doing what you are doing but limit the audience to folks who act like those folks you are already connecting with. This can be done with some simple data analysis, creating a profile and statistical model of the folks who are currently giving and then use that model to score the balance of your data and identify who is most likely to respond.

Assume what you are doing now is part of the issue. There is certainly a portion of your alumni population who are not into you. Accept that. There is another good portion though that have been turned off to you but still have interest. The challenge is to figure out how to identify them and it is made even more challenging because they have not responded to what you have been doing because they have not responded to what you have been doing.

The challenge is to break that cycle. Opportunities exist but require an engagement strategy that is flexible, open and completely different from what you have been doing. I would suggest starting with a focus group. This allows you to get some of the non-engaged alumni in the room to shares views and only requires a small input. Your objective is to get them to share what would garner their attention and interest. Start small - make the goal to establish what would make them interested enough to provide an email address to you. Create a number of different approaches, use the focus group to narrow and tailor the messaging. Send that messaging to a sampling of the folks who are not engaged and use that to identify who responds. Repeat this several times and then use the compiled profile to provide a statistical model and lay it over the total population.

It is not fast, but it isn't expensive either and will work. Following these steps, last spring, we collected gifts from 600 constituents who had never given and have seen over 100 of them renew again this fiscal year.

email testing

2011-09-28T21:12:00.004-04:00

One of the many things that we do in the marketing aspect of our jobs is sampling. I am sure that better than 50% of annual giving offices test aspects in their direct mail program. Surprisingly, I find that many don't do similar in the phone program. Obviously it is much more complicated to test comparable scripts as you have a substantial additional variable in the caller(s) but it is an area where there is substantial opportunity for improvement and growth for most programs.

Even greater opportunity and less experimentation seems to exist in the email solicitation environment. Email is ideal for testing - it provides short term feedback with clear and direct results that can be tied back to the individual recipient. In addition, many email service providers (ESPs) provide tools that will allow for a/b testing wherein you can test a portion of the message, with subject line being the most common, and then send the majority of the list the more effective test variable. Thus, rather than mail or phone testing where we can make adjustments for the next solicitation, in email we can test and make adjustments within and between solicitations.

If you are not doing or taking advantage of this, start doing so today. Other easy portions to test are: time of day, day of week, sender (consider that many of us send solicitations from generic accounts but in our own actions limit the messages we open from non-people accounts), subject, format (text or html) and within format, the look - again how many friends or business partners send you email with a fancy layout and pictures included.

As a reminder, only test one item at a time and make sure that you send enough to make the results meaningful. Plan on doing one a month for the rest of the fiscal year. Create and layout a schedule for your electronic communications, identifying the audience the message and what you wish to test each month. Track and record your results on that same sheet and give yourself a resource to use in May or June (note that this is before, not after, the end of 2011-12) when you do the same thing for 2012-13.

Renewals in threes

2011-09-22T20:53:00.003-04:00

Every fundraising program out there depends upon donor renewals to survive. They provide the base that we build from. But not all renewals are equal. Some are closely connected with you and give of their own accord. Others are more distant than many of your non-donors.

How you communicate with this wide range of folks who all fall under that renewal or LYBUNT grouping needs to match the range of their engagement with you.

Those who have giving to you in their list of priorities before you ask, are of course on your radar to grow gifts from. The most effective way to do so is often a recurring gift program (monthly, quarterly, etc...) and the best time to get them started on doing so is month 11 of the "year" since their last gift. Start by asking for a renewal and then ask them if they would be comfortable doing that each of the next 12 months. Odds are good they won't but try suggesting that they do 1/10th of it each month - you just grew that gift by 20% if they agree! Use the same case for support that you are putting in front of the folks you need to convince to give in the stewardship materials - these folks are inverted in communications with you - they give then you need to tell them why they should. This is usually phrased to them as the impact of their gift, but it is crucial to long term success and truly is the solicitation for the next gift.

Those who are revolving donors (give 2 out of 3 of 3 out of 5 years for example) often need a greater nudge. The challenge with many of these folks is getting their attention. You are not a top level priority which means that you are actively competing with other causes for their eyeballs, energy and money. Identify what is working for you - is it mail, phone, email, social media? Where are these donors coming from and what is the case for support that is having the greatest effect. Build a 12 month campaign around that case just for this audience. In years after they lapse, don't increase solicitations, increase engagement pieces. Most importantly increase not decrease the communication. Give them reason to value you and show them you value them no matter the state of their support. Have a top end board or presidential piece going out? Test sending it to a portion of this audience with the ask appropriately tailored. You may be amazed what shows up as a result.

Those who made either a first gift ever or a first gift in a long time, defined by me as the point when my returns to the population match or exceed future donors (those who have never given) in futility, are a much greater challenge. Start by soliciting them how they gave - ideally match when as well but given institutional fiscal year constraints that may not be the best approach to hit an annual goal even if it is the best approach for long term success. If their gift last year was through the mail, ask that way and try following up with a query based email or call - why did you give last year, do you plan to do so again this year and what motivated you to make a gift style questions. Your goal is to get them to think of you again and do so in a positive light. Follow up shortly after with another solicitation that is clearly tied to the first and serves as much as a reminder as an outright stand alone piece. When that doesn't work (and no matter who you are or how effective you try to be, odds are better that it won't than it will) look at what the case for support they gave to was and write a personal letter from you or a student "volunteer" that talks about why their support mattered and how it made a difference to that case. Follow that up with a phone program or personal phone call.

Three audiences, three simple steps, three populations that will provide the support you need to grow your giving year after year.

video marketing

2011-09-08T20:14:00.002-04:00

I spent a good part of the day today working on the video that will be my calendar year end electronic effort. It is a song parody and we are producing it using student performers and labor such that we can claim substantial student input and effort in the creation of the piece. It is a soft ask - uses the song I need a Dollar by Aloe Blacc as the base so makes a really clear point without needing much case for support in other communications.

We are printing up a bunch of t-shirts that the students in the video will wear at points and we will give away to the students. The shirts will ask folks to scan them and will include a QR code leading to the short string for texting a gift.

The biggest portion of this though is going to be the marketing plan we are putting together. The key to this is to roll it out in a way that will generate social media and viral buzz. Our current plan is to roll it out via a google beta style campaign where we share it with a small number of folks close to us and ask them to share it with their friends. We are going to create a contest to recognize/track the alum who has the greatest impact and are looking at offering them some form of special access to the men's basketball program (our biggest draw.) 10 days after the intial "soft" launch, we will do a social media and email blitz - putting up ads on facebook, emailing the link out to folks and sharing it via the e-digest, internal web digest and creating a second competion using the "forward to a friend" tool for a similar prize.

At the heart of these efforts is the realization that the conversation has moved. It is no longer driven exclusively by the 1.5 way communication that email provides but begins with the 2.0 access of social media which can and needs to be reinforced with email. The video will be loaded to a youtube channel and folks will be encouraged to add their own videos to the channel (subject to our approval/review) and in January a direct mail campaign may also be implemented if success is either huge or minimal.

A Meaningful contact

2011-09-01T21:06:00.002-04:00

I live on Long Island and recently had the opportunity to experience my second hurricane (the first was Gloria.) As it turned out, we were fortunate and the actual impact of Irene was far, far less than was predicted. As a result, I found myself in my office on Tuesday morning reading my email.

To my great surprise, one of the first messages that I got was from the president of my Alma Mater - Allegheny College. It was a very, very simple message:

I hope this message finds you and your family well after the recent hurricane.

All of us at Allegheny College are thinking of you.

James H. Mullen, Jr.
President

A couple of key points about it really caught my attention - it came from a "person" address. I can't say for certain that it is actually his email address (and am skeptical enough given bounces and some of the just plain crazy folks we all have that it is not) or a really well created f aux version of his email. It really doesn't matter because it accomplished the first thing they were looking to do - got me to read it. I did so, in great part because it "felt" real. So many of the messages that we get and send in annual giving are from generic accounts, yet looking at my own email and what I respond to on a daily basis quickly reveals that they are almost all from people not organizations.

Second to that, it was about me. Simple statement asserting concern and that people out there care. No expectation of feedback, no request for input or institutional message, just a simple declaration about me. I liked that - made me feel good and a part of the family rather than someone being cultivated. Interestingly it was very similar to the text from my sister: Hope all is ok, let us know if we can help.

Sometimes simple, direct and real means so much more.

Irene's impact and renewals

2011-08-28T08:23:00.005-04:00

I am sitting on my couch listening to the wind howl outside and hoping that my power stays on while I watch my 5 year old's reaction to the wind and rain. He asks how long this will last and I tell him that it is supposed to go until the middle of the afternoon. He replies with a whiny that long?

The reality of course is that the storm will end shortly, the immediate clean up will take a week or two and I am sure that we will all hear a very large number associated with the "cost" of Irene. For many a small business owner who is in the construction, landscaping and home improvement business this might be a terrific stimulus, it is certainly going to create some short term jobs.

My focus though is on the fundraising aspect of it. The vast majority of us in the annual giving arena are dependent upon folks making gifts from their checking accounts. While I am sure that a small number of leadership annual donors are giving from assets, most of our support is "current operating" to that donor. My concern with this storm, especially for those of us with an east coast/northeastern centric donor base is on the timing of the storm.

I have every expectation of starting fall calling in a couple of weeks. My second major mail appeal of the fiscal year is on the slate to drop on Sept. 7th and has an email lead and social networking follow up to it already scheduled.

That is all going to have to change. 83% of my donors are in the northeast corridor and almost all are going to have some damage/cost associated with the storm. I am not sure yet what adjustment I will make and thus far it looks like the impact will be temporary. That said, it will put me behind and that is always a concern as you never know if you can catch up.

My approach on the next work day (be it tomorrow or later this week) is going to be to put a proposal in for additional budget to get one more appeal out this fall. The idea is to ask for the money while your managers are still well aware of the concerns and likely to be willing to fund something reasonable to help overcome projected concerns.

That appeal is going to be a monthly approach to folks who missed their renewal month (defined as the month of their gift last year for a LYBUNT or 2 years ago for SYBUNT 1) making the case for participation this year. We already do a month before appeal asking for renewals and increased gifts so this is going to serve as a "last chance" appeal to get them to renew and I expect to see it return between 4 and 5% participation and total gifts of about 50% of their last gift totals.

Video and the Conversation

2011-08-19T21:01:00.002-04:00

I have seen a number of terrific videos for fundraising in the last couple of months. One point, with clear messages and a call to action that carries clear meaning weight and importance. In several cases I was interested enough to reach out to the office that was using it and ask about the results.

To my great surprise not one of the 4 that I took this action with had produced more than a small handful of gifts and none of them produced any money beyond participation level support. That set of results is in clear contrast to the message and flow of the videos and this got me to thinking. Why aren't these communications that do everything that we have been taught needs to be included in a piece providing results?

Investigating further, I found a very common theme very quickly - nobody was watching them. In each case, they had launched a campaign using email to push the video and in each case they were planning for that email to stand alone. Rather than utilizing a multimedia cross platform approach to get as many eyeballs on the message as possible each was pushing the video through electronic means to the exclusion of all others. In one case they had sent email to upwards of 50,000 alumni and had a total of 139 views at a cost of more than $7,000 for the video production and a total of 7 gifts for less than $200.

By implementing a simple mailing to those who are most mail responsive and integrating that video into other appeals, be it as a PS or a follow up email or letter from a phone program call, you can leverage your video, utilize it for a much longer period of time and get folks who are warm and interested to watch it. This will dramatically increase your opens and ultimately your gifts.

e-stewardship

2011-08-12T14:48:00.002-04:00

There are a million ways to say thank you and for the most part non-profits do a good job of ensuring that donors feel recognized. If like me you have given to a charity who didn't make you feel good about giving, I am sure that you have made similar decisions regarding the destination of those dollars the next time they came calling for support.

One of the many things that we all recognize about electronic communication, be it email, text messages, web sites or social networking, is that the cost basis for communications in this medium can be as low as nothing and even at the high end is far and away the most cost efficient method to communicate. Even better it can as closely as possible approximate the feeling and connections of 1 to 1 communication with large numbers of constituents quickly and easily.

And we do take advantage of all of that, when we want money. And that is good. It works. We know that the average online donor gives more than the average mail donor and that they will give more often as well.

What we don't do is take advantage of this all that well to say thank you and keep them tied in. This is evidenced by the transition post online gift to mail gifts, my humble opinion on which is that we acknowledge the gift well and then often drop them into a mail communication stream that slowly changes the nature of the communications.

Some ideas to consider: Follow up survey soliciting opinions regarding institutional issues to all donors providing them with a summary of responses each quarter. A social media page with an invite only approval process that provides insider information on institutional issues (can easily be done using the media communications coming out of the media relations office but releasing the information to the public at the same time as the media.) A "concierge" page for donors that provides them with a person and email address (keep it generic so that anyone can cover vacations etc.) that will take care of campus based issues and connections.

Not all donors are going to take advantage of these and other ideas but for those that do you have an added set of connections that will help ensure that they open and respond to your solicitations the next time you ask.

Now if only I could convince my wife to think of bringing me home a starbucks when she stops to get one - time to start a text messaging campaign of my own!

Back to basics: Renewals

2011-08-05T07:35:00.003-04:00

One of the simplest things that you can do to increase your online giving is a monthly renewal email. Many folks do a renewal letter series - letters sent out the month in which the donor gave last year. If you don't already do so, please begin. This is among the easiest appeals and you can expect to see response rates upwards of 10% or more with a very low cost basis.

Whether you have a letter or not, I would strongly suggest a multimedia campaign on renewals beginning with an email the month before they renew that contains a simple message providing an update from campus, the amount and fund they gave to last year along with the date of their gift. One of the regular questions I get on this is what if they made multiple gifts last year. If you have a very large population of donors with multiple gifts then I would create a segment to allow for that in the email, if you don't, call them. Add it to your own list of appeals and make 10 or 15 calls each month to those donors (they are making multiple gifts so most likely are at least friendly toward you) as a remind and follow up with a handwritten note.

The text of this appeal ideally provides "insider" information. Do you have a press release stream or some other information that is being released to the public that you might be able to use as the update? What you are looking for is something that makes the donors feel special in a "I knew about that first" kind of way.

You follow this email with a renewal letter the first week of the month in which that donor gave last year and then a phone program call two weeks later leading with a message reminding them and that you will be calling again. Limit the calling to 3 or 4 attempts - you are looking to make this convenient to them not chase them to the ground. They will give but you need to be respectful not desperate.

Implementing this set of steps will increase your LYBUNT renewals between 10 and 20%. The vast majority of that increase will come from the revolving donors who give for a year or two, then lapse for a year or two and from your newer LYBUNTS who have not yet made you a top priority.

Let me know if you have ideas of steps that are working for you or if you would like to see samples of any of these materials. Good luck!

student gift officers

2011-07-21T21:00:00.004-04:00

Chances are that your office has a personal solicitation component on a leadership giving level. It is usually also a safe assumption that you solicit those folks through other methods. Inclusion in direct mail, phone and email is pretty standard for leadership annual giving prospects.

Have you considered creating a prospecting program using student callers as gift officers for either especially warm but "tapped out" prospects or for those elusive alumni who your leadership gift staff have been unable to land on a consistent basis?

This is simple in idea. Even better it is easy to implement and will generate results, after all your donors give to support the students at the heart of it so creating a closer relationship with a student is only going to create positive feelings.

The concept is basic. Using a small number of your better phone program callers, identify a population of alumni whom you want to specifically cultivate this year. Assign them to the callers, matching of school, major, activities, hometown etc.. is a crucial component of this.

Once you have each caller assigned to a prospect pool, provide the caller with the information about their prospects in a print format and give them a disposable cell phone to be used only for this calling. The callers are given instructions and rules that match your needs (ours are only talk on/answer that phone when you would talk with your grandma and not to share any personal information regarding where they live, personal phone numbers etc...) Using that disposable cell, the students call their prospects and engage them in a conversation/survey. This is centered around the alums interest in being part of this program and ascertaining their interest in the school.

The students are responsible for checking in with you on a monthly basis and with the alumni on a quarterly basis. Their job is to solicit each of the alumni before the end of the year and to develop a relationship with that alum over that time.

This leverages your students, increases the alumni engagement and will generate gifts and commitment from alumni who have not otherwise been reachable. Give it a try this fall!

Mining your summer

2011-07-14T21:23:00.002-04:00

One of the many things that I try to get accomplished each summer is a data mining project. At the very least, I use this time to create a solicitation list for the phone program donor acquisition efforts. The most data challenged among us can do this with no more resources than a computer with excel, a complete list of every constituent who has a phone number (seems self explanatory but is a good reminder of the first step) an email and meets the source (alum, parent, friend) criteria for that effort.

Within that list get the following data fields:

Work phone

Spouse name

Job title

Children's names

ID number

Now you are simply going to do a basic sort on the fields (other than ID) and then replace each of the data points (anything that is not a null or empty) with the number 1. Then you are going to simply add up the total of those values for each of the IDs. Once you have the totals for each (=sum(cell1, cell2, cell3, cell4) highlight the column with the formulas, right click on the sheet and paste special, values right over the column of formulas.

With that done, you now have a really simple ranking for your non donors based upon information that you know if more likely than not self reported and whom you can contact via phone, mail and email.

Those records with the highest score are the most likely to give while those with lower scores are less likely to give. Start your phone program efforts with the highs, work your way toward the lows and don't worry about the folks who didn't make the list until you have exhausted these records.

There are of course many far more complicated ways and approaches for data mining but this is a simple immediate and free approach that will provide real and measurable results tomorrow.

Not your grandma's PURLs

2011-06-29T21:00:00.005-04:00

Over the last year I have spoken to a number of folks who have implemented a PURL campaign with great expectations and then gotten a response rate in the single digits and little to no engagement or results. My first question of them has always been "who did you use" and they have almost to a person responded with the name of a printer. Now not holding anything against the commercial print world - have some very good relationships there and there are many things that those folks excel at. This is not one of them. Let me say that again to be clear - printers are NOT the source for PURL creation.

In order to make a PURL campaign effective and work it requires work. This includes a creative implementation, a smart and effective marketing campaign (including but not limited to print) and customization of the PURL program. That customization needs to include expertise in programming and marketing, not print production and that means working with a media company with extensive experience in the digital production environment.

In addition, the campaign needs to be focused and built around a meaningful aspect or reflection on the institution. This can be based on historical role, religion, service, athletics or countless other aspects of what makes the organization or a segment of the constituency similar and interested. What won't work is what carried PURLs for the first 2 or 3 years of their use: novelty and pride.

You need to establish value to the end user - odds are good that they have seen several PURLs already so this is much harder than it once was. You can make inroads into this through planning, selecting a PURL domain and building a campaign around it that shares information and provides as much to the user as you ask them to provide to you.

As you build out the campaign consider the mobile platform and implementation - statistics show that 40% of all emails opened are on a mobile device and you can increase that open on mobile platforms through utilization of QR codes in the print and online materials you market it with. The PURL and associated pages need to be mobile browser friendly and you need to consider that it will be responded to on a mobile platform in an environment full of distractions.

How you market this also needs to change - what works for you already and how do you incorporate this into that? Is it facebook ads? Is it direct mail? Your electronic newsletter? Direct email? Put the PURL into everything that you send for 3 months. Provide incentives for folks to answer it and forward it to friends. Include it in your phone calls and follow up materials.

Finally, the back end of the campaign matters. A lot. Make sure that you have real time access to the data, make sure that you have it programmed to provide what you want. This is not an inexpensive tool, don't cut corners to save a few dollars in exchange for substantial drops in reporting and results.

PURLs can be powerful and useful tools to engage and solicit constituents but the free lunch they were once providing has gotten up and danced away making vendor/partner selection a crucial aspect of implementation.

Bumpy thoughts from my deck

2011-06-26T14:58:00.005-04:00

Sitting here this afternoon on my deck watching my boys play and looking at the yard. As I listen to the two of them (they are 7 and almost 5) playing a series of made up games, I am struck by the persistence of the younger one. No matter how many times the older changes the rules or makes it impossible for his younger brother to win, the younger one keeps trying.

There are many days when I think that this applies to much of what we do with donors. We each have those donors who are going to give no matter what we do, and usually a couple who really do make that gift each year in spite rather than because of the organization they are supporting.

It makes me wonder if we can get in front of those donors and help smooth the road or if, much like my younger son, who yelled at me for "interfering" in the game when a particularly unfair rule change was implemented they see that as a part of the relationship.

Maybe like with the sibling relationships, the best approach is to make sure that they know you love and value them and if they don't want the road to be smoothed out, leave it bumpy.

8 days and counting

2011-06-22T09:09:00.002-04:00

Fiscal year end for most of us is next week. We saw increases in both donors and dollars this year and did so on a reduced budget and hope that many of you are also seeing some positive signs from your constituencies.

I will keep this short as I am sure that many of you have phone calls to make, emails to send and other final push efforts to get the gifts that you usually get this week in the door. I have a simple and direct suggestion for you to implement the second week of July - a fiscal year end/start postcard.

The postcard goes to anyone who has ever given to your organization that you still feel you have a good address for. It contains a fun image of your students (have used thank you images, graduation images, event images, classroom images) and very simple text on the back - Thanks to you or thanks to our donors we achieved our goal of XXXX last year and have begun the new academic year so are once again counting on your support.

Sending this message out has substantially reduced fiscal year confusion for donors, serves as an additional thank you and contributes around 150 gifts each year (include a unique trackable link to your giving pages and watch the mail to see who gives in the week after this goes out.)

As importantly, it allows you to reset the counter with your donors the same way that you do on your tracking reports. It is a new year, we are starting over with an empty bucket and counting on your support to fill it up. This same approach can certainly be done on social media - try running it as a facebook ad and via email if cost is a substantial concern.

This year or last year?

2011-06-02T14:29:00.003-04:00

June is a month of transition. Campuses have, for the most part anyhow, completed the academic year - the majority of commencements are over and done, recent graduates headed out into the world with a degree and for at least some, a job. Others are returning to campus, yours or another, this fall to pursue a further degree. For the majority of us, our fiscal year is coming to a close at the other end of the month and if you don't yet have your final push in place, there is still time (albeit not much) to make a difference in your final numbers. Assuming that many of you are similar to me, you are also 50 or 60% in next year at this point, working on appeals to go out either over the summer (or if your year is like mine, this month which is month 1 rather than 12 out of the year) or early in the fall.

There is another group that you may not have considered yet but perhaps we all should be, it is a whole group of students you have not met yet; incoming freshman. They are beginning the final process of getting ready for school - there will be tons of excitement in their households about your institution and anything and everything that goes to them is read and digested.

Have you considered reaching out to them and welcoming them? For the majority of us, they are our alumni once they set foot on campus regardless of graduation status. The opportunity to set up a relationship with them from the start can be a powerful and meaningful step forward toward building a culture of giving.

Challenges to doing so are often campus based - connecting with admissions, gaining development access to the admitted students, crafting, producing and sending a communication that has meaning.

Consider what you can do and do it. Step at a time. These are your alumni, currently in a student role, but your connection and responsibility for them lasts for a lifetime, nobody else on campus owns the relationship for more than 4 years - make sure that the rest of your campus and your students are aware of that!

The Conversation

2011-05-23T20:10:00.003-04:00

More and more I find that we tend to get so caught up in the technology that we lose the purpose of our dialogue. I find a number of issues at work that get in our way.

The first is the need to get the communication out the door - so many shops don't have a plan. This is easily corrected of course but requires the dedication to put a plan together. It needn't even be strategic to start - a simple operations plan will at least help to end the scramble from one project to the next.

The second, and more challenging many places is the "silo" effect that is created by having different folks responsible for different parts of the solicitation process. The phone guy has it in his best interest for folks to give through the phone, the mail lady most wants folks to give through the mail the leadership giving folks via personal ask and the email guru needs them to give via the web.

In the ideal world, that is counterbalanced by the overall team effort to get to a goal. The reality is that often doesn't happen the way it should with the result being a very disjointed conversation for the donor.

Take a look at your communications - do they read as a conversation? Each should hit upon a different point and part of the dialogue but they should connect to and through one another. If they do then you are all set. If they don't, where and why does it break down and how can you connect the dots to make the conversation work for you?

email segmentation

2011-05-13T14:33:00.004-04:00

More and more I am seeing email campaigns going out the way letters did in 1998 - personalized but generic. They are coming from institutional accounts without a signator. They contain "Dear Name", and may even include a merged reference or two but we make them one size fits all messages.

To those of us on the marketing end, this makes sense - free messaging to a large portion of our databases. Throw as much of that as you can toward the wall and some will stick. Some will even provide decent returns depending upon the time of year. This has been further overshadowed by the growth and increasing comfort level of our donors giving online. If you track the source of your online gifts (and if you don't, I would highly recommend at least the use of tracking links - one for each of the major vehicles you solicit through) you know that overall growth is being overshadowed by cross platform donations. That is to say that more and more of the online donors are doing so as a result of a mail piece or a phone call or a text message while the number giving to direct online solicitations is relatively flat.

From a cost standpoint, email is still far and away the most efficient fundraising tool for most of our offices and results can be grown. Treat email like you would direct mail with a kicked up tracking tool. At the very least segment your message content, language and approach by generation. At the best segment by domain (send me something different to my work than to my home/online account), age, giving history, program, signator, "from" account, and subject line.

I know that I am far more likely to open an email from a person. It is not an accident that a huge portion of the SPAM that I get (take a look in your junk folder to see this) is from what sounds like a person. Now most of the time that name does not match the username for the sending account but that is something you can correct. Have an IT policy that doesn't allow you to do so? That will be the subject of my next post as it is a common challenge I hear all the time and just doesn't hold water.

Young Alumni C(c)hallenges

2011-05-06T12:56:00.002-04:00

The reality is that our young alumni give. Just not to us. They support many of the same causes that they did as students, many of the them continuing to volunteer time and effort in addition to dollars to causes that they became involved with while on your campus. What they don't do is give to you. For that matter many of them don't even consider it or for that matter consider you a charity. They have been trained from a very young age to view you (and everyone else like you) as a service provider. They have paid for a service, received the service and are ready to move on.

They don't send in gifts to Samsung after buying their first tv, or to motorola after paying for their phone so why should they send one to you?

There are places that have history to counter that view - nobody walk across an ivy stage without plenty of understanding of the philanthropic component of the institution. Even so, they struggle with a "what do you need my small $ for" response.

Ideally you catch their attention and educate them while they are applying to be on your campus and while they are a captive campus audience on why giving matters, what you do with the dollars raised (you do know, right?) and how they have benefited from the philanthropic largess of others.

Most likely you have tried and have reached some but missed many. So now what? This is where the big C in the title can be an invaluable approach. Identify something that your younger alumni and current students can and will care about - it may not be your priority but MUST be theirs. Find a donor willing to make a commitment of a substantial (we are talking institution changing) amount to that aspect of the experience if and only if, participation goals are met.

Market it. Sell it. Solicit volunteers, leverage them. Make sure that every single young alum knows about it. Hold them to achieving multi year goals of participation growth to generate the payments needed to make that donors support happen. Use Microsites, blogs, social media, social media giving tools, texting and text giving. This is a major undertaking over the course of years - 3 or 5 even.

You can use this approach to achieve cultural changes - include your current students - they will care the most as they are currently the most affected by the possibility of change.

Why donors give

2011-04-28T20:26:00.002-04:00

I had my weekly meeting this afternoon with the folks who provide my communications interfaces and at the conclusion of the meeting, I asked them to spend 5 minutes brainstorming with me about my August direct mail appeal. I know when it will drop - third week in August, that it will mail non-profit rate and that I see considerably better results from a letter rather than creative mailing piece but wanted their help sharing creative ideas for something that we had not already tried integrated with the parts that we know have been effective. This is my second appeal of the upcoming FY2012 and I am actually a couple of weeks behind on getting it started but was not happy with any of my own ideas going into the conversation.

What struck me right away was that everyone in the room jumped immediately to freemium or premium based mailings. I do a mailing label mailing every other year and we did so 12 months ago so am not whatever against bribing donors but it did strike me that the innate tendency was to think in those terms. Ideas that were thrown out (feel free to use!) included soliciting corporate partners for back to school discounts, customized postcards, branded stamps or notepads or sunglasses.

My initial reaction was to discount each of these and as I was doing so, it occurred to me that we were all missing the question that we should be asking - why do donors give? Certainly some do give to get free stuff but is that the primary reason they give or does the free stuff just serve as a reminder? Maybe I am looking at it glass half full but I choose to believe that folks give when they get free stuff because the stuff servers as a reminder of the organization rather than as a direct cause and effect.

I am however very sure that donors give because they believe in a cause. Going back to our meeting, I suggested that we do 4 letters - one from a student in each class year presenting their view on the upcoming academic year - what they were planning and what they were looking forward to. It was suggested that we take that idea and use it in a reply card attached to a page split into 4 sections with a picture of each along with a shortened version of the above. This then left the issue of the letter - how do we tie it into that reply piece? The idea of doing it from an alumni parent came up and made sense - allows for the message to tie in and provides a voice from a unique audience with multiple connections.

Thus we reach the answer - donors give because they believe in what you provide, what you do and why you do it. Do your communications support that premise?

video as a fundraising tool

2011-04-14T21:16:00.003-04:00

Over the last decade video has gone from an optional item on the list of things we want to deal with to a standard portion of the fundraising toolkit.

Whats that? You are not yet using video you say? No worries. It can be done simply, easily and cheaply and with almost everyone in your audience on one of the forms of high speed internet.

The most cost effective option will be using a student or student group to create content. If you have a tv or video club/department they may be very supportive or willing to help you and will usually do so at cost (or maybe for the cost of a small prize - you would be amazed what will show up if you dangle an ipad 2 out there for the best piece.) The challenge with this approach is usually distribution - how do you get it out there and provide the marketing to support the video presentation. Tip - have the video created on campus and hire a marketing company to help get the word out about it.

A good alternate option is to take a look at what is already out there, create a youtube channel and then provide access to that existing content through that interface. You can then create a marketing campaign around that channel that uses the emails, postcards and letters to solicit and the youtube channel to provide the content/case. This is an easy, simple very cost effective approach but it does mean that you may need to be a little MacGyver and a little Sherlock Holmes to find the pieces that present the school in the light you are looking for.

While both of the above provide low cost offerings, this is often a "you get what you pay for" world and hiring a firm to plan, produce and film the video will pay dividends. Bringing in an external consultant who has expertise in this arena can be an important next step. Think American Idol - we watch the raw footage of the auditions and audition tapes and hear the talent but by the end of the show we can see the talent - makeup, hair, stylists etc can completely change how the performer appears. Look at your employer as the performer here - the right production and marketing team will polish the edges and shine the surfaces so you look your best.

No matter which way you choose to go here (and I am a strong advocate for all of the above) be sure that you have a plan to get an oar in the water next academic year - it is right around the corner and if you don't someone else (check out some of the other nonprofits you support to see what is out there from your competition) will get that 3 or 4 minutes of their time and eventually their support.

Expectations

2011-04-07T20:25:00.002-04:00

If your division/department/office is anything like mine, you occasionally to consistently hear that we should have more online donors or we need a few more donors for this project or that project - send an email. More often than not, someone spends a lot of time and effort putting together an email solicitation, writing text, pulling images, putting together a nice looking appeal. The message goes out, a handful of gifts come back in and everyone remarks something along the lines of "that was less than I/we expected" or "those are kind of disappointing results. Then everyone goes back to their other projects and the whole cycle repeats a couple of months later for another dean or vp.

So why do we do it? We all know that fundraising is a conversation with give and take and the most successful efforts are those that start with it being the donors idea to support us. This knee jerk style reaction is not only not effective but harmful - it reduces the chances that those constituents who are engaged with us will actually open the next communication in our conversation with them.

So what to do? Track backwards and create some reports showing how this knee jerk reaction has worked in the past. Have them in hand for the next "emergency" conversation. Prepare a plan with multiple touch points to replace that approach. Have a template created for a letter or postcard, have a basic version of your phone script ready for editing, create a multiple contact email outline with communication components. Know what this will cost.

Keep expectations realistic. Keep communications as conversations. Keep fundraising.

fiscal year end targets part 2 - acquisition

2011-03-31T21:49:00.004-04:00

So now that you have your loyal donors covered, how and what do we say to those folks who have not shown that loyalty to us as donors?

Step 1: Identify those who are connected. One of the biggest things that we can gain from the now completed transition to an electronic communication delivery system is the ability to quickly and easily identify who is interested. Through the vast majority of e-communication delivery systems, you now have the ability to identify at the very least, who is reading your communications. In many you can identify click through rates, and then track that prospect on into your web pages to identify areas and length of interest. Given any of this data, create a simple list of those folks whom you know have been engaging with you and prioritize if possible based upon clicks - the more interaction, the higher the value of the prospect.

Step 2: Create a case for support that either includes the fiscal year end as a meaningful component or ignore it altogether. In general, I lean toward the second - you care about your fiscal year, is there any reason that someone who is not a donor (or for that matter someone who is) would care about it?

Step 3: Share that case specifically with the folks who have levels of interaction and provide them with a direction - what do you want them to do, why, how and what impact will it have? You know that these folks have been interested in you and your message but that doesn't mean that they will all give. When folks do give, send them a personal thank you email from your own account. Recognize that they have stepped forward to help you.

Step 4: Go back to your loyals and ask them to help. Share the case for support and ask them to share it with their friends who have a connection. Maybe they don't pay attention to your messaging but they just might read and respond to it when it comes from their friend. If you want to get really ambitious you can create a contest for the loyals to see who can have the biggest impact. Take a page out of little league, make it an annual contest and provide a trophy to the winning person with a new name added every year at reunion - fun, cheap and motivating!

Northeast Annual Giving Conference 2011

2011-03-25T16:23:00.002-04:00

I think we can say that the Northeast Annual Giving Conference that took place last week at Marist College was a success from our perspective, and I am sure the attendees would agree. We kicked off the conference by hosting a cocktail reception the night before. The turnout was so great I am sure we exceeded capacity for the space we were in! Everyone seemed to enjoy mingling and talking with folks from different schools. I know we did! It was certainly a fun, relaxing evening before a busy day.

Bob Burdenski started the day as the keynote speaker with his talk on “Making Room In Our Annual Giving Thinking” leaving us all thinking about how much Annual Giving has and is changing. Throughout the day the conference speakers covered a range of topics from Annual Giving Strategies to Social Media to Young Alumni Fundraising. It was a day packed with valuable takeaways and some time for sponsors (like us!) to showcase some of our work in fundraising to the conference attendees. Thanks to all who came by our booth to learn more about MainSpring. We enjoyed meeting and talking with all of you.

The conference chair this year was Jeanine Thompson. She and the entire committee proved to be extremely helpful and accommodating. Thank you from MainSpring for letting us be a part of the conference. We are looking forward to NEAGC 2012, and we hope to see you there!

fiscal year end targets part 1 - loyals

2011-03-24T16:52:00.003-04:00

Most of us are either in or about to enter the final quarter of the 2010-11 fiscal year. For those of you luck enough to be on a calendar year for your fiscal year "Huzzah" for you! The rest of us are just going to have to settle for creating a sense of urgency in our donors to match that of our own.

The good news is that employment continues to get better, the bad news is that it needs to get better. We each have a list of donors who give every year no matter what - pull that list up and review it, who are you still missing? Do they typically give at the end of the fiscal year? Those are easy. Who is missing from the list of donors well after they usually give? Even the best programs have a short list of folks who drop off every year from their very most much loyal donors (yes I did say that) but you can really limit the damage done by reaching out to them now. Split the list into those who missed the 2010 calendar year and those who just have not given in the 2011 fiscal year.

Folks who missed 2010 altogether but had given for 5 or more years consecutively prior, pick up the phone and call. There is a reason for the lapse - if you don't know what it is, find out. Fix it if you can. If you can't be compassionate and help connect them to whomever or whatever you can to address the situation. Follow up a month later with a personal email checking in on them (this is soft shoe work - no hard ask) and ensuring that everything you can do has been done. Follow this if appropriate to their situation with a handwritten appeal a couple of weeks before the end of the fiscal year soliciting their participation at an individually appropriate level while making a basic case for why this will matter.

Folks who gave last year but missed this year include in a simple email campaign - reach out and ask why they lapsed, give them your name and number and ensure your phone is answered either by you or a support staff person for the week or so after this goes out - listen to them and respond as best you can. Follow up with a similar fiscal year end effort as above. Simple steps, taken from grandma with a modern twist that will cut your donor loss from this population dramatically.

What not to do - lessons from the inbox

2011-03-18T13:08:00.002-04:00

Short story today. Earlier this week it was announced that St. John's would be in the NCAA tournament for the first time since a vacated appearance in 2002-2003. This is a huge deal at the NYC school that has one of the oldest and richest round ball histories in intercollegiate athletics and has suffered through the worst decade in the schools 100 years of basketball since the 19 rolled to a 20.

The suggestion was made to the athletic development folks that an email should be sent to alumni asking them to support basketball at this time. They created an email that was simple and direct and then sent it from the annual giving account.

The results? 56,000 emails sent, 17 unsubscribes, 6 complaints, 57 clicks on the make a gift link - 2 gifts.

In case you missed that, I said 2 gifts. That works out to a response rate of 0.00357% - and yes that is % - already multiplied by 100. Incidentaly my complaint rate was 0.01% sounds great until you realize that it is 3 times the rate of response I am looking for.

What went wrong? The message is clear. Just off target. It needed to say thank you. Thank you for staying with us. Thank you for believing in us. Thank you for supporting us. Thank you to all of our donors over the last decade. Thank you to all of our donors over the next decade - is that you?

The men's team lost to an outstanding performance by a Gonzaga team last night that had more of everything than they did. Every fan of St. John's will tell you (maybe in a day or two) that the season exceeded expectations. If you told them in August that this is how the season would end, they would have been thrilled. Once the women's team looses, I will send out an email congratulating both teams on seasons that ended in the NCAAs. It will contain an ask, a case for support and a thank you. It will generate more than 2 donors. More importantly it will be inclusive of all and will keep in mind who it is going to not just what we want from it.

Pride

2011-03-10T20:38:00.002-05:00

Short post today - I have spent a good part of the last couple of days watching the various conference basketball tournaments. One theme runs through almost all of them - pride. For a small number of schools that pride will lead to a national championship every few years. For the vast majority of schools, and there are 350 or so Division I Men's basketball teams that pride is associate with making the NCAA tournament. For most of those schools, be they winners of the Patriot, Horizon, WAC, Mountain West or one of the many other smaller conferences, there is a huge opportunity and value associated with that TV time created by the tournament.

That pride doesn't lead directly to gifts - but it does lead to interest. It likely is the difference between the next mailing hitting the circular file unopened and landing in the basket of mail to be checked this weekend with the bills. So how do you leverage that pride? Social media ads would be one easy, quick and cheap way to do so, as is email or a voice broadcast message. Make sure that your constituents are aware of the success - and pair it with a message that connects back to your mission. Make sure everyone knows when your team will be on national or regional tv and in that message, let them know that your team completed 1,000 hours of community service in the off season working with the elderly or that your coach has created a scholarship for disadvantaged youth who are academically qualified. Whatever your mission message is tie it into the story of the team.

Their pride has their attention, your mission will get their money.

NEAGC 2011 next week!

2011-03-09T10:40:00.001-05:00

MainSpring is headed to the Northeast Annual Giving Conference next week at Marist College. This is our third year as a sponsor for this conference – it’s a great one-day conference with informative sessions, knowledgeable speakers, and plenty of opportunities to network with colleagues in Annual Giving. Lindsay (our director of sales) and I will be attending from MainSpring. We’ll be talking with attendees and sitting in on the sessions; we’re even hosting a cocktail reception the night before! Should be a great time all-around. Stay tuned for our takeaways and maybe a few photos. To learn more about the NEAGC conference, go to: http://www.marist.edu/alumni/neagc/index.html

jobs equal gifts?

2011-03-03T22:48:00.002-05:00

You may have seen some of the headlines from earlier today regarding the job outlook - in short for the first time since 2008, there are substantially fewer people looking for work and the general feedback from industry is that the orange is juiced - productivity capacity has been reached so the next step to increase revenue is to hire additional employees.

As most of us who work in Annual Giving know, jobs = income = confidence = disposable income = gifts. While I think that competition for dollars means that we will continue to see slides in participation, I do see that same formula continuing and overall giving at the bottom and middle of the gift pyramid picking up.

The opportunity that I see right now goes back to the career services sector. For the last couple of years many of us have been leaning on career services to provide us with "go to" people when we speak with folks who are out of work. The opportunity now is to get in front of the job opportunities with a proactive career services push.

I called the Associate Director of Career services that I work with today and asked her for some case studies - provide me with some stories to tell about folks getting jobs by working with them. Internally, I have been able to sell it as additional exposure and possible funding, externally, I am putting together a campaign of e-stories that will positively highlite what the university is doing and demonstrate what we might do for other unemployed or underemployed alumni. The key is to be relevant now. If jobs are going to be available, I want and need to be a resource. Helping someone find a job today provides real, current relevant value. That leads to gifts.

How cool would a microsite shared between Career Services and Annual Giving be - something that provides consistent updates on the stories and impact that the university is having on folks and allows your biggest fans (thinking folks you connected to a job here) to promote you on social media to the rest of your alumni. Simple, direct and immediate. Jobs will equal gifts if you make them.

Lessons the mouse might want to pay attention to...

2011-02-27T22:17:00.003-05:00

I spent the last week in Florida visiting my inlaws who retired down there in June of last year. As the parent of 3 small children, I was informed it was required that I visit the Magic Kingdom while I was in the general vicinity. So off to Disney we went.

Getting an audience with the mouse is not cheap - my inlaws live an hour away in the Villages (if you are nearing retirement age, I strongly suggest you check that out - like a cross between the big easy and the first week in college but with golf included) so we planned out the trip, used our Disney Rewards dollars to buy $362 worth of tickets, paid the $14 to park and got in line to ride the tram and then the monorail into the Kingdom. We realized it would be crowded, it was the day after President's Day so at least anyone in NY was off school and we all know how much new yorkers love the mouse (at least the folks we know do!)

We walked into the park at 9:00 when it opened and had a good 90 minutes before it got crowded. The mouse makes it easy to spend money - every vendor in the park will take anything from plastic to cash to your next born, ok just kidding about that I think....

Everything was smooth until lunch when the wheels came off - and yes this is where this post gets relevant - we were having a great time despite the crowds sore feet and waiting in line (fast pass is a great idea but what's with the 1 at a time limit?) when we sat down to eat. In short it took 20 minutes for us to be seated for a 1:05 reservation, then another hour for them to make 4 sandwiches, and they got my order wrong, then proceed to "suggest" a tip by including it on the $70 bill (keep in mind that 2 of the 4 are kids meals.)

Very simply, my attitude went from this is great, to what the hell. They would have been better served to tell me to get a hot dog on the corner, at least then my expectations would have been met. My relevance here is the following - do your constituents feel good all the way through their interactions with you? Are you doing everything you can to make your donors feel special only to let them down at the ticket window or at the registrars office? Take a look at the organizational points of contact and identify where your week links are - what can you do to address them? You don't know now who might be a million dollar donor to your next campaign or one in 40 years, don't lose the gift today by not treating them well. The mouse needs to fix this part of his house or the almost $400 in tickets will be spent elsewhere next time, don't provide your donors with the excuse to support someone else.

Data is your friend - no really!

2011-02-11T15:55:00.003-05:00

I have spent the last two days at work creating and testing a model to use for our phone program in order to target future donors (folks who have not previously given for the glass half full set.) As I am doing so, it occurs to me that we all work very hard to get the right solicitor and approvals for our solicitations focussed on ensuring that the message matches what we are supposed to be putting out from a wording and branding standpoint but that more often than not, we are guessing at whom we are soliciting matching that message.

I would suggest some five simple targeting steps that we could (and should) all be doing:

Match date to their last (or most frequent) date. This can be driven by specific date (think anniversary card/e-card/email) or month - renewal letters.

Match vehicle to their last way of giving - you have donors who give consistently through a single vehicle - let that guide how you solicit them. You also have donors who are wildly inconsistent in how they give - consider how you can maximize the return from them and approach them that way.

Thank your consistent donors. In your appeals. In your other communications. Just because. Send them a birthday card or an anniversary card. They view you as important to them, ensure that they know you view them as important to you. Gifts will come in from these efforts even without a response device being included.

Review your email metrics. Center your online fundraising communications around those who are interacting with you - remember this is a portion of a conversation and those who are already reading your communications are speaking with you.

Take a look at the tools available in facebook ads. At the very least use the targeting tool to identify how many of your constituents have identified themselves as being associated with you. At the very best start to solicit those who are not likers of your page - for St. John's that is an audience of 43,000 out of the 49,160 alumni on facebook - you can solicit them to like your page or make a gift but use this to engage them.

the lessons of 2010-11

2011-02-03T20:18:00.003-05:00

Calendar year end solicitations are done. Fiscal year end projects have begun. What have we learned over the course of the 2010-11 year? I know that my top 10 list is as follows:

Online giving continues to grow in both count and dollars

Social networking is where the fish are but we are all afraid to throw in the baited hook

Phone programs continue to see a decline in contact rates and increases in dollars (albeit small)

Text giving is joining the party for cause based fundraising - Haiti signaled it's arrival in general and that trend has continued

Mobile options are mandatory - up to 40% of your eyeballs are on mobile devices

Direct mail is not dead yet

Face to face fundraising is a big part of the past... and the future.

Email is no longer for the very young but works for the very old

Video is the new norm in online communications

Everything old is new again - try a hand addressed envelope, an email actually from your account and making hand dialed phone calls when all else seems to fail.

Any one see anything missing or have something that they would like to add?

QR Codes

2011-01-28T12:39:00.003-05:00

For starters I am going to assume that everyone knows what QR codes are (for those of you who don't, they are the funny little fuzzy boxes located on many marketing pieces that can connect a mobile phone to information.) I have seen them for some time and for those of you on campuses with your students, take a look at some of the kaplan or food service provider marketing targeting the students to see what they are.

QR codes are tremendously powerful things - they can take you to a web page, to a phone number, to a text message or even to send a text message - try it to the right.

The system is simple, download a reader app (I use barcode scanner by Zxing free in the droid market) and uses the camera in your phone to scan the data and provide it to the processor.

The fact that you can use it in print, on the web and really anywhere that your constituents are with their phone, means that you have tremendous flexibility.

The newest iteration of these has to do with the flexibility of the code - it is actually possible to make the code a piece of art - think of the use on shirts, in design etc. Would your grandmother know what to do with it? Probably not. Would your students and young alumni? Without question. Have text giving as an option? Use a QR code to drive them to it - they simply need to scan click send twice and are done. How easy is that!

targeted email acquisition

2011-01-20T21:40:00.002-05:00

One of the long term "holy grails" of electronic fundraising is that we have to spend nothing to bring in thousands of new donors. For a little while in the late 90s many folks felt that mail was on the way out and that email would be the replacement.

Moving into the 2010s it is obvious that that prediction wasn't right. We tend to hear the same things associated with the social media tools now. I fully expect that email, direct mail, the phone program and that oldest of all, the personal visit will continue to exist and for that matter thrive 15 years from now.

I had a conversation with my communications team last week regarding our email communications and my interest in focusing our communications on the future donor group. As we talked about it, the idea was presented that we take a look at the folks who are actively engaged in our communications who have not given - something new that we have insight into that we didn't until a couple of years ago.

We have targeted a population of about 6,000 future and long lapsed donors and will be presenting them with a multimedia campaign utilizing email, direct mail and phone calls to generate additional participation. I will update this post as the campaign progresses with successes and failures throughout the semester.

Anyone have thoughts or ideas that have worked for them?

Snow day communications

2011-01-13T19:41:00.003-05:00

For those of us in the New York metro area, yesterday was a snow day. We got 9" in the city but 20" at my home and most activities were delayed or canceled (other than city schools.) How does this relate to this blog you ask? As I was driving into work again this morning, I was thinking about all of the folks that I have worked with over the almost 5 years I have been at St. John's (for those of you who watch Survivor, think that torch walk at the end.)

As I took that walk along my own personal memory lane - long drive, lots of snow - it occurred to me that my relationships with my coworkers have been greatly defined by how we communicate as an institution. In March of 2006 one of the first things that new employees did was to be added to the "Emergency contact list" this was the old school phone chain list that was used to let us know when something (mostly weather) happened that impacted our work day. Each person had a spot in the chain based upon seniority and supervisory responsibility and the chain worked with everyone having a role in it and a sense of responsibility for others. We usually learned about days off etc. early that morning and never before 10 PM the night before as it took a long time and lots of conversations between links in the chain to get the message out.

Fast forward to 2011 - I learned that we had yesterday off through a text message and two pre-recorded voicemails from folks that I have no connections to or with on campus. I learned about it at 3:20 on Tuesday afternoon - more than an hour before the end of the day before the day off. Office morale promptly went up - was like a bonus vacation day was offered. Office productivity stopped. From 3:20 till 4:30 nothing was accomplished while we all talked about the snow day.

So the "old" method was less efficient but created a greater sense of involvement and community. The new method is highly efficient - everyone learned about the news within 5 minutes of the decision being made - but does nothing to create a sense of connection between and within the community. In fact, we spent more than an hour talking about how great it was going to be not being together!

I would suggest that this is something that we need to take into consideration in a lot of our work. How does the communication that we are sending fit into the conversation? Is it efficiently communicating to a large group of folks to the detriment of communicating with them? Are you building networks within the community like the phone chain or creating a group of individuals with common information but nothing in common? The face to face nature of fundraising and charitable support mandates that we work toward the second within a society running toward the first.

The Best of 2010?

2010-12-31T00:04:00.007-05:00

It's that time of year when we reflect on what we've done and resolve to do things a little differently... a little bit better. If I've learned anything from my previous new year's resolutions, it is that working in a team makes it much easier to keep the resolution. Also, as tempting as it may be to make your list a mile long (at least that's tempting for me!), in order to really make a change we should probably focus on one or two professional and personal goals. I can't help much with the latter except to wish you good luck, but I can help with the former. If more effective fundraising is a goal of yours like it is mine, then let's try to work on that together. I think we have a lot that we can learn from one another, and so I'd like to compose a "best of 2010" list.

Let me start by sharing one of our "best" appeals from 2010. We developed an interactive micro-site for Spelman College's Founder's Day challenge. Spelman secured 3,612 donors in the 23 days that the micro-site was live for the challenge. And as you might guess, it was the combination of an integrated solicitation strategy using mail, phone, email, Twitter, and Facebook AND the interactive micro-site to serve as the "campaign headquarters" that facilitated Spelman's success. To read more about this campaign, go to my post from April.

So let me ask you - what was your best appeal from 2010 and why was it the best? Submit a comment to this post, and let's help one another start 2011 with renewed energy and enthusiasm. (Scott... maybe you can go first? :)

Best wishes to all of you for a safe, healthy, and prosperous new year!

5 things you can still do to help ring in a happy 2011

2010-12-29T22:04:00.002-05:00

#5 - Make sure your giving site is up and working. Check for broken links, errors on pages, talk to the gift preprocessing team and make sure that they are getting and seeing everything that they need to. Make a small gift and check all of your post gift communications - serves two purposes, helps make sure that everything is in order now and allows you to see how your gift processing and receipting processes are working in this very busy season - maybe a need to make a change or two before 12/31/11.

#4 - Ensure that everyone who has their name and number out there for all to see puts up a message letting donors know what to do and who to call if they want to make a gift up to 11:59 PM on the 31st - odds are nobody is going to use it but the perception is great and chances are that if someone does call, they are not going to be looking to make a $10 gift.

#3 - Send a simple text based email from you personally (use a tool to send it) to anyone with a pledge thanking them for the commitment and reminding them that the calendar (and tax) year ends Friday night. Make it friendly, casual and sound like a service.

#2 - Voice broadcast messages. Try it - simple, short and direct. Ask that donors remember you in the next couple of days and thank them for helping you achieve a great 2010.

#1 - 33% of all online gifts will be made in the next 48 hours. Make sure that you ask donors to send some of that in your direction via all electronic channels - have an alum post something on social networking sites - odds are good your constituents are wishing each other a happy new year and will see your message.

under the snow, the flowers grow

2010-12-22T22:19:00.002-05:00

You may not yet be done with the end of calendar year solicitations - as per my last post, I am officially not - my final ask of 2010 will be delivered between 8 and 10 am on the 31st to 6,000 or so alumni who have strong history of support without a 2010 gift (note that I am focussed on the donor centric calendar year, not my fiscal year construct.)

But that being said, it is completed, scheduled to send (along with an email tomorrow am with a more christmas centric giving message) and as of the middle of this afternoon, we are all on break until January 3.

While I am not at work, I am thinking about what I planned in our office retreat last February for us to do this spring. My own personal assignment to me over the next week and a half is to analyze what worked (I have access to reports and the Email Service Provider that we utilize from home) and so I will spend a couple of hours looking at what worked and what didn't work. I will make some changes to what we have planned based upon those results.

In executive summary format, what is working for me is simplicity - text based emails, messages from people rather than accounts and multi-platform messaging. The plan includes more and stronger reporting on where people are coming to the giving form from along with some smaller more targeted campaigns for specific funds. I will be working with on and off campus "signers" to center more around text messages from people rather than accounts to take advantage of what has been effective to date.

By taking advantage of this time to step back from the every day for a few days, I can plant those bulbs that will blossom into flowers as the spring unfolds. Fiscal year end is right around the corner - make sure that you are prepared.

calendar year end donor behavior

2010-12-14T19:24:00.002-05:00

Recently the Network for Good released The Online Giving Study: A Call to Reinvent Donor Relationships it covers a wide variety of online giving behavior and interactions, essentially pointing out that people give to people. The greater the level of the "personality" of the organization exhibited online, the greater the chance and size of the donation.

Of more relevance to the current time of year, 33% of online giving is processed in December with just over 20% within the 48 hours of the 30th and 31st. Donors who give online typically provide a larger gift and are typically more comfortable with recurring gifts - ultimately leading to a larger lifetime contribution.

The end of the year is a great time to encourage that type of gift for all of next year - "make a commitment today that will help us for all of 2011."

Message timing is perhaps the most crucial component - create a "year end" version of the homepage (or your portion of the website if that is not possible) for the last couple of weeks of the year. This focuses on giving and placing your best case forward - emphasize to the folks who visit you online that giving at this time of year is crucial to your success and as someone who values you, they matter.

Create a countdown effort - provide a goal, a measure of the progress to it and a clear expectation that your donors are going to make a difference for you. Utilize social networks, identify a series of supporters who can do grassroots work to support your cause and encourage them to encourage others.

Time your emails to be effective - early in the morning/at the start of the workday. Get it in on top of the rush of the day but avoid being bucketed with the overnight spam. This is especially important on the 31st - get your message in early in the day - remember that over 10% of online gifts will be made that day - keeping your needs and cause on the top of the list keeps it on top of mind and the money flowing through your page.

Postal Tracking Intelligent Mail Barcodes

2010-12-09T20:35:00.005-05:00

One of the more interesting features of the current offering from the USPS is the ability to track deliver dates on mail. If you are like me, you currently do so by seeding yourself and your staff in the mailing and then "know" that folks got the mail because you got yours. While that does give you a pretty good idea of the general arrival of the piece and may allow you to send follow up communications shortly after the arrival of the mail, you are aiming at a middle of the road delivery date and are assuming that the mail arrived.

That is going to change by May of 2011 as the implementation of this new feature becomes the standard for the USPS. This provides a new service to fundraisers, you know that the message was delivered and when it arrived on a single address level. Thus, if I send out mail to 10,000 people all over the country, I know that they won't all arrive on the same day but with this tracking capability, I know what day they are delivered to each and every one of the 10,000 addresses.

Ok, now what? I can now really target my communications to follow up on the mail message. I can set triggered emails to go out based upon the arrival of that mail - that day, the next day, a week later - whatever time frame fits your program.

Have a phone program doing precall pieces - how great would it be to be able to time it so that your call arrives a preset number of days after the mail is delivered?

Want to increase the number of pieces that are opened? Try an email that provides a WIFM (what's in it for me) based upon an action taken from the mailing. ie the email arrives the same day as the mailing and requests that they go to the bit.ly that is contained in the letter and enter the code word from the email in order to be entered into a drawing for an organizationally branded ipad.

Have cell numbers and a text outreach tool? How about being able to text your supporters and tell them to look out for a letter from you today - on the day that letter is going to arrive!

No matter what the cross market combination, this new option will quietly herald an additional set of options for marketing that can change how we utilize direct mail.

Netvibes - best free tool you never heard of

2010-11-30T19:40:00.002-05:00

I rarely (this would be the first time ever) promote any particular online tool but this is one that I just have to share. http://www.netvibes.com is a free online media tracking tool that provides a wide range of information about what is out there about any particular set of key words. I use it to track the external communications regarding St. John's and find that it provides me with a wide range of current information all in the same place.

As it is free, there is no reason not to try it out - for that matter, you can run a search on whatever you want for free and then create a log in (still free!) after you have seen what it will provide.

There are 5 tabs within the tool and the "main" tab is in my mind the least useful. It contains what amounts to a customizable home page with feeds from each of your personal accounts and provides a terrific customizable set of options, allowing you to view your twitter feed, facebook account, news, etc on a single page. While not a waste of space, it is really about you, not the search focus you are looking for and is all available through other venues as well - nothing unique here.

The next three tabs are the heart of the product and provide news ,videos and conversations on whatever search terms you entered. These are updated consistently, are more accurate than most of the free search services that I have used otherwise and the tab style provision is terrific.

Following my own search terms tonight for St. John's it shows me a couple of pretty cool results. Twitter provides me with a nice blog post on the conversations tab while the news tab leads with a terrific flickr image search and the video tab includes links through to the you tube videos from last christmas and the fireworks on campus as viewed by an alum.

Each tab has multiple widgets that are customizable, placeable and removable. Multiple searches are supported with a drop down allowing you to select a different set of searches such that you can follow either specific terms (ie STJ basketball) or multiple organizations.

The tool is terrific, the cost is perfect and the Netvibes folks don't spam or otherwise harass you once the account is set up. Give it a try, you will be glad you did!

Back to basics - calendar year end

2010-11-22T19:50:00.002-05:00

So we all know that people give at this time of year. Lots of them. Many do so because this is when they make their charitable decisions for the year. Others because it is good for their pocket and conscience come April. Still others do so in the spirit of the holiday season.

No matter the reason they give, in the next 6 weeks they do. It is each of our jobs to get as many of them to pick our organization as one of the places they choose to direct some (most of us want as many as possible) of the dollars they are giving away to.

We all do the fancy mailer, the calendar year end postcard, maybe thanksgiving (or thanks for giving) cards the reminders about the end of the year, maybe even an email between christmas and new years with some kind of countdown theme. How do you make yourself stand out and just as importantly how do you get the donors to choose you?

Make a case for support? Center on past donors? Create a video? Thank, thank thank? Yes. You won't go wrong doing any of those but to truly have an impact, you need to make it more personal. Put the time in to identify relationships throughout the year, identify effective solicitors (be they volunteers or internal) and assign each a manageable pool, I would suggest 15 or 20 each, that have both the capacity to make an impact and the relationship that you can leverage to get them to think about doing so. Supply each volunteer with a letter that is pre-written and merged or even printed without a date or signature a suggestion for an email ask and a simple phone script along with the data for each contact method and ask them to solicit that list at minimum through each medium and ideally until they get a response for a gift at the leadership level. Your job is to be the nudge - follow up with your volunteers daily if need be for the month. Identify where they are and what the next step is and remind, cajole, beg, plead, whatever you need to do to get this done. With a short list of 10 volunteers each soliciting 20 prospects they have a relationship with, it is not impossible to get 100 gifts of more than $1,000 each.

Simple math makes that a $100,000 effort - should you start planning for it next year?

It's the conversation that matters

2010-11-17T23:16:00.002-05:00

So many of the things that we do require a focus on the masses and getting the case for support and an ask in front of as many folks as we can knowing that our response rates will be pretty consistent from year to year based upon consistency and recency of our donors giving. Because we are having multiple dialogues with hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands depending upon the size of our constituent bases, it is easy to forget that our constituents are only having 1 conversation with us.

Take a step back from your need to get this months phone completed in time to send next months calendar year end letter and follow up email and look at how they read when placed into a direct string of communications. If you reached the constituent on the phone, did you recognize that in the letter? Does your letter continue the conversation or start it again fresh? Does your year end email assume that they read the letter or assume that they didn't? Did you remember the phone call that the alum and one of your students had in November when you wrote the email? You can be that your alum does.

The next generation of communications and personalization is knowing when you contacted them and what you said in order to keep the conversation flowing. This is easy to do in the phone and online and much more challenging in direct mail so use that - send an email and follow up with different messages for opens than from those who don't. Create multiple click through opportunities and have different secondary communications based upon actions. Make that phone call but pull out the current status of the prospect record and use that in the mail campaign when you create that letter.

While you can't do exactly the same in mail, you can get a pretty good handle on who opens your mail by looking at historical data - find the folks who have made multiple mail gifts - odds are good they are reading you message. Take the risk of assuming that they read the last one and reference that material directly in your email.

Each of these steps will create lift in the prior appeal results and helps to make an annual solicitation calendar an annual conversation with solicitations in it. This increases the readership of your communications and leads to more gifts, which leads to more conversation opportunities which leads to more gifts... nice hamster wheel to be stuck in!

Fiscal year end - is video the new norm?

2010-11-11T21:01:00.002-05:00

I spent part of the day today working out the details for what our fiscal year end appeal will be. Not the mail - that is long since decided. Not the email - that too was created and designed 9 months ago. I am speaking of our electronic campaign - one of my opportunity pieces that I reserve funds for at the start of the year.

This is one of the times of year when I like to add something fun to the mix. I don't expect that it will return huge donors or dollars, rather I expect that it will create good will and maybe reach some of the folks that our "normal" efforts don't.

I raised this issue last week to my staff and asked that folks think about options. At about 8:45 this morning one of my assistant directors stuck his head in and said he had an idea - The 12 Days of Giving. If we replace each item in the song with a designation, we could have a pretty neat appeal concept. I asked him to research it and come back with options. He found this on google. As a Catholic institution that works perfectly.

So now I have to create something that fits good taste and yet has enough interest to make it work. My writer is reworking the song and I asked our communications team to come up with some executable options for a video. That will be sent on the 20th of December with a follow up communication every day after emphasizing that days item. As an example, scholarship replaces the partridge in a pear tree for the first day and we are looking at highlighting a student who has a scholarship that allows them to continue at St. John's and end with an ask for scholarship.

The original idea was to do these focus pieces via email but I am thinking that we lead and end with an email and use facebook and a special twitter feed for the other 10 days - will keep you in the know as things progress.

Anyone else have something fun in the works that you might want to share as we build toward fiscal year end?

Back to basics - thank you

2010-11-04T21:48:00.002-04:00

As I was trick or treating with my kids on Sunday it occurred to me that what I was struggling to get them to do - ask politely and then say thank you no matter WHAT you get (or in the words of my 4 year old - you get what you get and you don't get upset) is really something that many of us struggle with as well.

When you planned out this year, what portion of your budget did you set aside to spend on saying thank you? I can give you the answer for me - .5%. And 90% of that goes to a postcard thank you for donors of under $20 who are not receipted by gift processing.

I imagine that for most folks the answer is similar - a small portion. "But Scott, we thank them on every appeal" you say - as do I. But I don't teach my kids to walk up to the door soliciting candy and say "thank you for the candy that you gave me last year, trick or treat" that would sound fake and really kind of disturbing - yet we all do it in every printed appeal.

Who are your most valuable donors? LYBUNTS would be the simplest answer - I can debate consistency and longevity (and would love to do so if anyone is up for it) but in basic terms, it is your LYBUNT population. Do you do anything to simply make them feel special? Newsletter for donors? Pre-announcements of press releases? Creation of a thank you communication?

I know many folks do this on the phone and many folks are rightfully proud of the effort and speak in strong terms of how good donors and callers feel from this effort. Is there a reason that we don't do the same in the mail? As a portion of the calendar year end effort do a simple mailing from a student thanking them for helping that student achieve their goal. No ask. No reply card or device. Just a thank you.

Do the same for your online folks. Spend the money to thank them - how many times are you asking and how fancy do you get in doing so? Match that level of sophistication with a thank you - if you are using flash video to solicit, send a video interview with a student expressing how much it matters to them to have donor support. Send it in a way that you can track who views it and follow up with a second and even a third message to those who have not yet done so.

Trick or Treat? The real trick is to remember to say thank you for the treat.

The mail effect

2010-10-28T21:00:00.002-04:00

Working on your online fundraising plan? Did you include the direct mail solicitation in the appeals? What direct mail solicitation you ask?

Think about it. What is your response rate to e-appeals? With only a tiny number of exceptions, it is less than 1%. What is your response rate to direct mail appeals? I would expect for many of you it is over 2% (if it isn't call me - I am happy to provide you with some consulting services to get you upwards of 2% for the year.) Thus, we have a gap.

So what to do about it? The best part of online fundraising is the feedback that you are able to gather about interests. There is a common phenomena in online fundraising regarding clicks - no matter how clear the link or how good the giving form, a substantial number of folks click links to giving forms but don't convert into donors. Thus, we have a gap.

You have the ability to produce small, targeted direct mail appeals going to folks who provide indications that they are interested in particular aspects by clicking, opening or reading information centered on particular areas of your institution. These may be measurable in tens or hundreds and you need to work to avoid the "big brother" appearance that will freak out donors so careful planning is appropriate. The best part of this is that you can plan for this set of appeals as a follow up to every electronic appeal or even communication that you send so it is quick, easy and cheap - most of us can do it from our office or at very least through school resources rather than an outsourced vendor.

social sharing

2010-10-19T21:09:00.003-04:00

We have all done it. We all like to do it. What is it? "liking" something via a social media outlet. Are you "liked"? I am sure that your family and friends do. But that isn't really the important answer to the question. Do folks consistently like your social media comments?

Popularity of your statements matters - SocialTwist recently published a study results demonstrating the common sense result that folks are more likely to click on links supported by peers "likes" than not. Realizing that this seems like an obvious statement, I will take it the next step - how do you create content that is "likable"?

1. Keep your audience in mind - we all have many folks who clicked the fan link but how many of them and who among them consistently pay attention to you? Know who those folks are and be sure to aim your messages at them.

2. Keep it simple. Social media is immediate, now and gone. A short simple statement supported by links or opportunities to learn more is going to go further and last longer than a doctoral dissertation will - if your writers are academically centered, use some students as a filter - if they won't read it, neither will a good part of the audience - see #1.

3. Make it fun. Even better if you can get some humor included but at least keep it light, fun and enjoyable. With rare exceptions folks don't want to hear about your troubles. People achieving success is far more fun and entertaining to read about.

4. Ask them to like it. It seems self evident, but we tend to shy away from asking folks to do this. Your donors will happily share your content but you may need to give them a little push to start doing so - it matters to you and increases your reach - tell them, thank them and remind them and they will step up and spread your message.

Dr. Doofenshmirtz

2010-10-12T19:29:00.002-04:00

Sitting in my living room tonight watching Phineas and Ferb - http://tv.disney.go.com/disneychannel/phineasandferb/ with my 6 year old son (not sure which of us came up with the idea first as I love that show) and it occurred to me that we all need a bit more Dr. Doofenshmirtz in the stories that we tell about our institutions. Technically Dr. Doofenshmirtz is the antagonist of the show - running a company named Doofenshmirtz Evil Incorporated (with a very catchy jingle) but what he adds to the story is what makes the show unique. Without his line of plot manipulations (he is evil and trying to take over the world - albeit with a fog machine in the current episode) this cartoon would be essentially the same as every other cartoon on the air for elementary aged children. Granted the show has really good writing (don't take my word for it - Disney channel at 7 est every night) and incorporates much adult humor and double meanings to punch lines but it is the addition of the completely out of the box character of Dr. Doofenshmirtz that makes it pop.

What is your Dr. Doofenshmirtz? Who on your campus can you use to help demonstrate what makes your institution unique? Keep in mind that the average college graduate has at least 3 different institutions seeking their support not to mention the countless other not-for-profits seeking their investment. Find something and someone that helps to tell your story and play that out throughout the year. This can (and needs to be) woven through the general themes of support and case for support but by carrying a character through the institutional story, you help to bring the institution to life and produce more of the feeling of the "face to face" than you otherwise get from letter text.

Let me know if you have a great Dr. Doofenshmirtz that I can feature next week or are stuck for a character and we can talk through who you could use to help provide a road map for others - hope to hear from you!

facebook ads

2010-09-30T20:33:00.003-04:00

I know that I have touched on this already but I spent some time in the last couple of days looking into data mining of facebook "likers". This has been enlightening from the standpoint of what data is available and beyond that into how you can use it. I do a fair amount of data mining and am very comfortable with the how, what and why of it. What I have learned about facebook is that there is a wealth of data present. What else I have learned is that you can't get to 99% of it directly. You are able to mine interactions and you can get some very surface level data via API about connections but the really juicy stuff is behind the blue curtain.

So what can you do? Utilize the features of facebook ads. This is the profit center future of facebook and they provide an abundance of resources for you to utilize including:

http://www.facebook.com/advertising/

http://www.facebook.com/ads/adboard/

http://www.facebook.com/FacebookAds (watch the video at the top)

Once you have an ad up your real goal is to get folks to "like" it - that pulls what you are advertising into their data stream, shares it with their friends and means that you don't have to pay for their ongoing connection with you. While using facebook this morning to trade posts with an old friend, I came across the key to this - provide a carrot (what I saw this am was from a candle company and they were giving away a free candle) in the ad and to be entered into the drawing for it, all you need to do is "like" it.

Simple, easy and direct way to get folks who have interest in you (they did click on your ad) to take a small step in you direction. Starting work on it tomorrow - want to join me?

back to basics - the from line

2010-09-14T20:29:00.003-04:00

At this time of year most of our shops are running full bore - phone program calling past donors every night, direct mail well underway and hopefully in mailboxes or better yet coming back to you in USPS crates. I am sure that you have any number of direct mail pieces out there and probably a campaign built out for online engagement.

I am sure that you have thought in depth about the subject of the email and probably to a great length about who "signs" it but my experience has been that there is typically little or passing thought going into the from line. Yet consider that for the vast majority of the users - that is the first part of your email they see. I know that for me, 90% of my judgement of the value of an email is around who it is from. If it comes from a "generic" account it is a much lower priority than if it comes from a person - even more so if it is a person that I know.

So how do you identify a "person" for the email to come from? Can you create a campus account for class agents? or other volunteers? is there a way to use your phone program callers? Most software today will allow you to track who spoke with who and based upon outcomes you can track who had a good call and who might react well to further contact from the caller - not phone program follow up but true additional contacts. what about using a campus employee that folks would know? A long time faculty member? a beloved administrator? Think creatively about who knows who and who you can put in that role.

My one piece of advice is to create an account for that person(s) that you can manage for them - don't crush their email account with responses and bounces. Have fun and test, test, test - try it up against a generic control and see what you get for opens, gifts and clicks and then try it again!

pricing strategies vs ask structures

2010-09-08T20:52:00.002-04:00

I realize that this is a bit off topic for online fundraising but as it does strike right at the meat of annual giving programs - how much to ask for - I think that it fits.

Yesterday I read an article in Bloomsberg Businessweek about what Apple is - a tech or a design company with the author concluding that Apple is a pricing company. That's right, what they sell most is pricing. The example used to demonstrate this is the I-pod Touch, recently released with three price points. Each of those prices is above the price of the I-phone, that by the way does all of the same things as the touch plus has the little bonus of making phone calls.

They manage to do this by using pricing decoys, reference prices, bundling and obscurity. The final two clearly only work with physical product but the first two can be used in establishing buy in to ask amounts within an array.

Pricing tools can be used to establish a gift level that you want them to give at in the following manner - ask high and provide a reason for them to give that is real but not likely to be successful then follow with an ask that is what you actually want them to do accompanied by a reason for giving that is highly motivating.

Take a look at your ask structure and the support for each amount - have you tried to structure it like that? If so, let us know if it worked, if not, give it a shot - it works for Apple!

fundraising season (somewhere between summer and fall)

2010-08-30T20:18:00.002-04:00

So fundraising season has started. Not here in NY state where kids start school somewhere around thanksgiving but in most of the country children are either back to school or going back this week.

To me that is the bell ringing on the start of educational fundraising season. Shortly children will be bringing home those absurd bags containing "fundraising" sales items - short for load of junk that you need to convince your family and neighbors without children of their own that they really need to buy from your child to support schools on top of what they pay in taxes. I may be a bit jaded here as I would sooooo rather that my child come home with a pledge card and a reason for me to give or ask others to do so. In any case - it is the start of fundraising season!

I think that we all recognize that we make hay in the fall. How are you incorporating your online giving and more importantly online asks into that process? Recently, I have talked about tying the phone program to online support and online support to the phone program. Are you doing the same with direct mail? Lead a piece with an email or follow it up with a second or supporting ask? Do you know what works best for you? If not here is my suggestion:

Split the file for your fall appeal with email in two. For half the file send a lead email providing a simple, direct informational message with an ask. Think elevator conversation - you find yourself in the elevator with a donor and they ask you about the school, what do you say, and how do you make the ask before the doors open and the donor gets off. For the other half of the file modify the message slightly to reinforce the letter. Track results from each. Which did better? Which letter did better? Which campaign did better?

Have you done this yet? if so what worked best for you? For me it has depended upon whom the letter is from. If from a volunteer, pre email works better, when from a Dean or the President the post email works better. Would love to hear your thoughts!

phoning in online gifts

2010-08-19T20:28:00.002-04:00

Is your phone program promoting and supporting your online giving? Most likely the answer is yes - if like most folks you end the call with a credit card ask I strongly suggest use of an online giving option for folks who are not comfortable providing a credit card either to a random caller, to a student or on the phone no matter who called. At least a portion of these folks who are nervous about supplying a credit card can be convinced to make an online gift - establish a phone program site on the annual giving portion of your main web site. Provide "commiters" with pictures of your callers, a link directly to a pledge payment page and a clear and direct confirmation number to reach in order to confirm that the call did originate with you.

Push out emails at the end of the calling shift confirming commitments providing a link to the payment page and to the caller site with merged fields providing the details of the call signed by the caller. That alone will increase the connections between the alum and the caller and result in additional payments plus some very interesting follow up comments from the alum to the caller - especially if the callers are students.

That is all great when the contact starts with a call. What if the contact starts with an email? Unlike precall letters where we we have to assume they are read, with emails we can know - create two different scripts, one for those who opened the email, one for those who did not and update the calling software daily as part of the caller assignment process. This allows you to identify who has read information and can have a follow up "what questions do you have" and who either didn't see it or chose to ignore it and needs a bit more information. As a more advanced version, this email can provide multiple links based upon past giving and you can use that to help identify and focus conversations within the opens scripts. Those who opened the email and clicked a link can have an ask that is based upon that link as the first ask and then based upon either their last gift or area of giving as a second.

This is just a quick overview of how you can target and focus your efforts on the both sides of a phone program utilizing online communications.

promises, promises

2010-08-11T20:37:00.006-04:00

I know that I promised last time that I would follow up with a post about the use of a pig and social media to engage current students and I will do so in the very near future but I was sidetracked with an interesting presentation today. In the interest of fairness, I will call today's presenting company Vision but that is not their actual name.

The heart of the presentation was centered around appeals based in where the constituents are - getting something in front of them that they have the opportunity to use where, when and how they are most interested. Consider someone who uses facebook, an iphone and a laptop. Do you have any tools that would interact with them in each environment, placing giving opportunities in front of them that match their activity on their terms?

While Vision was providing a great deal of this interactivity, they are by no means the only option that could do that, it was just a very eye opening set of options - think of an application that sits on a smart phone, is integrated to a database that shares information with a version of the same app that connects to facebook while also providing the opportunity for a traditional web login. It is fun, interactive and plays/functions much like a game application on a mobile device, while providing options to collect sports team scores and information to keep it current and valuable.

The key to this working is making it valuable to the user - provide them with usable content that is tied to you but doesn't need to be based upon you - what do they actually want and how do you provide that connection? By providing that connection, you retain the right to possess that small piece of important space on the phone, facebook and bookmark that makes you relevant and meaningful every day.

Social Seniors

2010-08-02T12:21:00.002-04:00

When you saw my title, did you assume that I meant seniors as in senior class gift? That post will be up shortly as we are clearly entering "that" time of year to begin the annual conversation about what a senior gift is, what it should support and how you go about soliciting it.

At this time, I want to talk about the other seniors - folks who graduated into the school of life more than 60 years ago. We all assume that social media are primarily for the young but the numbers clearly show otherwise with last year's third and fourth most visited pages on the web for folks 65+ being facebook and youtube (read the complete article supporting this point at mashable: http://mashable.com/2009/12/10/seniors-online-habits/ )

Take a look at your presence on those sites through those eyes - are you providing content that would be of interest? For the vast majority of schools that I looked at (including my own) the answer is a definitive no. Yet for most of us in the fundraising world, this group remains the bread and butter of our donor base. As the fastest growing age group - looking at you boomers - this is something that it is in our best interest to address, but how?

I suggest creating a simple ad on facebook soliciting that information and then target it through the ads tool to your alumni in that age group - link it to a page that provides a unique experience and survey for them, including asking for them to serve as a volunteer base for building this further. Simple, cheap and engaging, social media is not just for the young, but for the young at heart.

ads are for likers

2010-07-25T07:26:00.002-04:00

Several months ago facebook yet again changed their format such that we are no longer fans but rather "likers" of something. As I talk with folks about facebook this seems to guarantee some smirks and a chuckle or two about the term. The fact that they have been able to get away with this kind of absurd language shows just how ingrained facebook has become.

Utilization of facebook is certainly a challenge and I would respond to Stephanie's suggestion that we need to decide what our goal is as a crucial step but one that is already made for us - it must be to keep traffic within the facebook app. Once you have mastered getting attention, driving traffic within the app to your page or cause, then you can begin to utilize that page to create what you are looking for in terms of action. There is nothing that you can do on your own site that you can't do on your page so why work harder than you need to in order to achieve your goal? Keeping folks within facebook through the ad keeps them local and comfortable with what you are attempting to accomplish while allowing you to leverage their activity to their friends who may not have seen or been included in your ad segment.

As an example, consider a simple, direct goal of raising $1,000 for scholarship this week. You create a case for support that is essentially a text (ask a student for help with this - you will be amazed at both the language that they use and how they are able to make the message work) find a simple image that supports that case - branding is a challenge here - can you put your logo onto the image that supports the case? Keep in mind that loyalty is not going to raise the $1k in this format and from this audience so a big picture of your logo is simply filling space, not motivating action.

If you link that ad to your giving form, you have not maximized your impact nor have you been able to share more details and expand that case for support. If you link it to your page, you can provide a full multimedia look at what you are selling, clearly share the giving link, including adding an application that lets folks who find this motivating share with their friends and that is where you can really grow this in a manner that is totally different from your own site - your donors become your advocates and sales team rather than simply supporters.

In my next post I am going to talk a bit about what I learned in Denver, about pigs, facebook and student engagement; how you can get hundreds of students to follow you before they ever take a class on campus.

Facebook ads - design and strategy

2010-07-15T16:32:00.001-04:00

The look and feel of your Facebook ad might not be your first consideration when putting together a strategy, but as Scott suggested it should be given priority. Scott and I were discussing Facebook ads offline, and he brought up a good point - consider all of the segmenting we do with mail and email solicitations - why can't and why shouldn't that also apply to Facebook ads? It should. If we’re paying per click, then let’s make sure the click is a valid prospect who wants to attend an event, become a fan of your page, or go to your external website for a particular purpose (like giving). Take advantage of the fact that we can be very targeted and strategic with the placement of Facebook ads, and consider which segments are active in Facebook and what those segments want to see. I can honestly say that I've probably only noticed a dozen or so of the hundreds of Facebook ads that I see when I’m logged in. And it’s not due to tunnel vision - I'm always looking for a deal, a new gadget, or the next best purchase for my 21 month old. So that tells me that in order for me to even glance at an ad, it has to be 1) visually appealing. In order for me to click it needs to be 2) relevant to me. Seems obvious right? Let's consider more detailed strategies for design and layout. A few gimmes:

branding - we need a graphic that ties back into your brand and is easily identifiable as your institution
copy - 135 characters goes by pretty quickly (that’s 38 right there) so make them thought provoking teasers to take the next step
destination url – make sure you drive people directly to the information you reference in the ad – if they have to click around to find it, you will lose them.

Now consider your segments – what does your Facebook population look like? Do you know which constituents are on Facebook? If you don’t, then you could start with a few general ads and maybe a few specific ads that target certain constituent groups who are likely to be active on Facebook. As you get more comfortable, try building more ads that are more segmented. We can’t personalize the ads, but we can include things like class year, school affiliation, degree, etc - things that will catch the attention of a specific target audience.

Finally, there’s the “like” link which is akin to a college t-shirt, hat, bumper sticker, etc. It’s a way to share your pride and show your affiliation with a group or institution online. And the best part is that the “like” link has that viral marketing effect – if one of your friends likes something, you’re more likely to give it a second thought yourself.

So yes, the design of these ads goes hand in hand with your strategic planning for the ads and segmentation.

While this should probably be discussed in a new post, I want to be sure to mention that when developing Facebook ads it’s important to consider your end goal. Are we driving constituents to our Facebook page to build a stronger group of fans to whom we can promote events, giving and other institution-related information or are we driving them to our external website to take another action? Fortunately, we can test both options using Facebook ads and see what is successful with different segments. I’m sure Scott has some valuable insights to add...

facebook ads

2010-07-13T22:16:00.002-04:00

As I prepare for the 4th iteration as a faculty member of the Academic Impressions "Doing More with Less Strategic Planning for Annual Giving," I am struggling with social networking. I realize that this hardly makes me unique in fundraising and aim to do something about that. I have previously talked about using social networking to drive support through event based efforts and still think that is a very strong strategy but isn't one that we can all take advantage of.

At the conference next week I plan to talk about utilizing ads on facebook as one possible strategy so I thought I would run through that here today as well. This is intentionally the elevator version and I hope that Stephanie will chime in with how we can more effectively design and create that ad to utilize the space and opportunity that exists here.

Facebook ads are really very simple - you get the opportunity to place a specific, designed focussed message in front of a targeted audience that you select when you create the ad. Only those folks who meet the criteria you have created have the message displayed and you can choose from a series of options regarding what you pay for and how much. For fundraising purposes, I recommend paying for clicks and make sure that the message is clear and the case solid - that will drive down the number of clicks but drive up the conversion dollars (dollars raised per click.) As you have the ability to target this, don't try to be everything to everybody in one appeal - you pay per action your constituents take not per segment so make the segments meaningful.

My recommendation is to spend some time looking through the facebook ads that appear when you utilize your account (you do have one right?) and identify where your organization needs to be in terms of design and style. Once you have that, consider what other options you have (ie age, gender, campus...) and design a couple of ads to test that. Create a general one for everyone else and see which costs the most, which raises the most and what makes sense for you. This is a terrific place to play with messaging and testing of look and appeal as you have some great metrics and can see what folks do, not just what they say.

Learn more at: http://www.facebook.com/advertising/

Summer time giving

2010-07-06T20:35:00.002-04:00

For many of us the summer is a time for relaxation and rest and I hope that everyone has a chance to take a vacation, catch their breath and start the new year with new energy. That said, depending upon your fiscal year, the summer months represent somewhere between 1/6 and 1/4 of your fiscal year. Given the current economy, those months represent opportunity that we can not afford to pass by.

My suggestion is to spend a good part of that time working in programs with lower impact to build for the future - for the vast majority of us, that is at least in part online giving programs. I would suggest that for many of us it has to do with social networking and how to use it for fundraising. Short of hosting a catastrophe nobody has yet completely untangled this puzzle but I have a suggestion on how to make steps in that direction.

My feeling is that social networking sites are not now or anytime soon going to be the panacea of fundraising results for higher education. Instead, they can be used to share the message of other things going on. How you ask? Use a group of alumni (young are suggested but take a look at the profile of your facebook fan (actually liker but that sounds bad)) to establish a fundraising event - can be as simple as a trike-a-thon or as complex as a walk for the homeless. Ask them to each take responsibility for raising pledges/commitments for this effort. Let them reach out to friends and connections via social networking. Your role is to plan the event and use the advertising features of facebook and email to get this in front of as many of the other folks in your constituent base as possible.

Will this result in millions of dollars raised? Probably not. Will this start the process of your constituents reaching out to one another on your behalf through social networks to raise money - absolutely. And that is the first big step on this path.

Happy New Fiscal Year!

2010-07-01T22:40:00.002-04:00

July 1st represents a new beginning for the vast majority of higher education as we have wrapped up last fiscal year and are starting a new year. I actually work on a June 1 to May 31 fiscal year right now but even so, wish you all a happy new year today.

As the fiscal year has ended and the new year has not really started we all find ourselves in a kind of purgatory of between yearedness. As you are awaiting final reports and numbers, I would suggest that this is an excellent time to do a bit of program review - not taking a statistical look at the results, costs and efforts (although I do strongly advise that once the numbers have been finalized) but doing a bit of opinion review of your programs and efforts. What went well? What did not? What do you need to focus more energy on? In looking at my own program, I find the following points of pride and points of concern - what are yours?

Positives:

Direct Mail dollars and costs - up in dollars per piece and down in total cost

Online donors increased

Increase in Leadership donor count overall and via Annual campaigns efforts

Renewals of donors over $100

Concerns:

Donors - decreased everywhere

Phone program declines in donors and dollars

reduction in budget

reduction in commitments from donors - dollars and longer term pledges at the annual giving level

This is by no means a comprehensive list - just a top of the head concerns - what do I need to be sure that I am focussed on this year.

I would greatly appreciate anyone who is willing to share your lists. In any case, best of luck this fiscal year!

3,612 donors in 23 days

2010-04-30T15:22:00.003-04:00

We just wrapped up a project for Spelman College around their Founders Day challenge. Spelman secured an anonymous donor who would give $300,000 if Spelman could achieve 5,000 donors by the College's Founders Day. MainSpring developed a micro-site for Spelman to boost awareness and participation for the final 23 days of the challenge. Based on a concept developed for young alumni by the Rice Annual Fund, the micro-site was designed to be interactive - alumnae could go to the site to respond to a questionnaire and upload photos, post comments to other questionnaires, learn more about the challenge, see the current donor totals and see a list of donors. On the backend, Spelman had the ability to log into a secure, administrative module to review and approved submitted questionnaires, photos and comments before they could be posted to the site. Emails, calls, mailers, tweets and Facebook posts sent by Spelman staff, alumnae and friends drove alumnae to the site during the final 23 days. Over the 23 day period, Spelman secured 3,612 donors and surpassed the 5,000 donor goal.

The takeaway lesson? The combination of an integrated solicitation strategy using mail, phone, email, Twitter, and Facebook and an interactive micro-site to serve as the "campaign headquarters" facilitated Spelman's successful execution of this campaign. For Spelman, alumnae participation through dialogue was critical to their success. The high number of questionnaires filled out (56 and still going even after the challenge ended!) indicates that Spelman alumnae were eager to participate by sharing their thoughts and feelings. It is important to note that the last question of the questionnaire was: “How will you inspire other sisters to participate in the Challenge?” This prompted alumnae to continue the conversation and almost every single questionnaire response indicated the intention to reach out to others via Facebook and Twitter. This type of grass roots word of mouth is priceless and the micro-site was the platform to prompt and encourage alumnae to be the voice of Spelman.

To check out the site, go to: everywomaneveryyear.org

This blog has moved

2010-04-29T08:48:00.001-04:00

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mini-campaigns

2010-04-25T08:35:00.002-04:00

There are few things that I consistently speak about and focus on internally and externally as often as mini-campaigns. I look upon these as discreet focused efforts to accomplish a discrete goal. In higher education, we often take these on to complete endowment of a scholarship or faculty chair. The current trend is to look at causes based on or connected to your campus that you can support this way.

This trend is something that I see as an overall positive - it moves us as an industry in the direction of making a case for support, moving away from the historical "because you owe us" loyalty argument. While that line of reasoning was successful for a number of years, to me it is now right up there with "to increase our US News ranking", old, played out and really, really, really weak for younger (defined as since the early 90s) alumni.

Most of the folks who graduated in the last 20 years did so with substantial loan debt, no matter how successful your fundraising efforts, they saw the out of pocket cost for their education increase rapidly, in some cases by 2 digit percentages each year they were in school. As we all know, for the most part, (there are exceptions to every rule) this is a portion of the alumni body that is no where near as consistent with financial support as our older alumni.

Try breaking them up into mini campaigns. Take a look at what they did as students, identify some of the causes that they may have been interested in and find the students currently associated with those causes - utilize those students to tell the story as to why the alums should support that area.

No data? Try a targeted PURL campaign - let your alumni identify that they are interested (by responding) which causes they were interested in as students and are interested in today (survey questions) and provide them with the opportunity to raise their hand as volunteers for that cause today (information or thank you page in the PURL.)

Easy, quick, simple and affordable - usually can be done for less than $1.50 per alum - money that you will more than make up over the next 24-36 months through funding appeals, often just from new donors!

What I learned today (or why I like to take advantage of speaking opportunities)

2010-04-14T19:50:00.003-04:00

My webinar on PURLS this afternoon went really well - always worry in doing webinars about the ability to generate enough energy and interest in order to keep the webinar going with no audience response. Kind of makes me understand why radio talk show hosts usually either have a side-kick or go to the phones or both.

In any case, my presentation was on utilizing PURLS to engage and empower and I spent a couple of weeks putting information together and doing research on this topic. In doing so, I looked at for profit, non profit and higher education use of the tool and found one consistent thing that puzzles me.

Many places have paid good money to put a PURL based marketing campaign out. Many places have paid good money to a printer or other vendor to push the mail and email communications out to get folks the address. Yet nobody seems happy with the marketing effort.

Almost everything that I see has over-generalization, everyone seems to be trying either for a one size fits all PURL or for a limited marketing stream. Yet we are selling a "Personal" URL. It seems to make so much sense for this to utilize variable data printing to provide each individual with unique marketing materials customized to their record in the same way the PURL is.

It is a good first step to identify a PURL that may connect with folks. The next step is to identify imagery that would do the same. The example that I used on the webinar was related to my own Alma Mater, Allegheny College. Utilizing a PURL of scott.vandeusen.gatoralumni.com would connect to some extent. That on a postcard with a picture of campus might have some additional connection, but that PURL on a postcard with a picture of my fraternity brothers taken from one of the yearbooks when I was a student would have far greater connection and likelihood of me opening and interacting with it.

Fishing in your own pond

2010-04-07T13:25:00.002-04:00

Most of us run several internal campaigns each year. These have mixed levels of success, often based upon institutional and program history. They include (but are not limited to) employee efforts, current students (seniors being the focus but not exclusive) and local community.

Efforts on each of these have the additional opportunity of adding in a personal element - while non of us, no matter how well resourced, can visit each of the thousands of alumni and parents, it is very viable to reach out to these internal constituencies and make personal communication reality. This can readily be expanded to utilization of a small group of volunteer solicitors who can carry the lion's share of the face to face contacts.

To that end however, these are often more challenging audiences to engage through marketing efforts. They already know the "basics" of who, what, where and when that you can use to update and inform external audiences. They often have much greater knowledge of specific areas, programs and departments than you possess.

Take advantage of these informed constituents by providing them with additional information - can you include them in press releases when they go to the media? can you provide them with annual access to the president or a networking reception? The most valuable items that you possess are informational - how can you at your institution provide constituents who support you with access to that information and how can you make sure that others identify and understand how to establish that connection for themselves?

Consider using an internally centered PURL campaign to collect updated information and allow them to opt into additional information flow. Utilize your volunteers to send it out to the folks that are connected to them and lay out a distinct list of unique (and free to you) opportunities that they will be able to take advantage of as a donor. If they make a gift, provide them with a free (this is not free to you) item that they can wear/carry/use to encourage others to give. Provide them with the information about why they should give, access to an easy way to do it and recognition and resource access for doing so.

Presidential presentations with PURLs

2010-03-25T20:21:00.003-04:00

I am in the middle of two projects right now, a PURL mini campaign in which I am soliciting members of the president's society (St. John's students who are the most involved) and creating a web presentation on how to utilize PURLS to increase contacts and response.

In both cases, I am looking at how I can creatively get folks to open materials, whom to segment and what methodology to utilize - is best practice an email and then a postcard? I know that mail responses are 300% better than postcard and 500% better then email responses for me - maybe it should be in a letter format? But how?

I had the brainstorm last week for the mini campaign at STJ to utilize an envelope that is wedding invitation reply size - small, simple, cheap and just begs to be opened, if the USPS doesn't lose them on me, with the president's office as the return address. That should solve that.

What to tell folks for 75 minutes about how to implement and utilize a PURL then? I will start off with the simple suggestion that it is simply a new way to raise curiosity. Maybe we should start off with spelling folks who are not connected names wrong and tell them they can update it by logging in. Would engender open rates through the roof - of course they would all be upset but I bet a huge portion of them would correct their information before they quit. Maybe worth trying with hardcore nondonors... have to think about that one!

In all reality, this simple offers a new opportunity to catch folks attention. It can be combined with VDP (variable data printing) to create an eye catching appeal that will generate responses but what I am really going to focus on is what is next - once they open that PURL what value are you providing - most likely only going to get this shot once for the less connected folks so you better make it good. I am connecting mine to microsites that offer a wiki or blog style interface and encourage alumni to interact. I am seeding that site with alumni who are already close to me - don't want folks to have the feeling of walking into an empty room. Maybe I will even be lucky enough to get the president to leave a message of thanks to the alums for their support as students. In any case, I am creating opportunities for engagement, adding value and web 2.0 style interaction to my solicitation. Ask me in June how it went.

Conference Preparation and Ideas

2010-03-16T21:39:00.002-04:00

I like to present at conferences on a consistent basis because it leads to much greater thinking and review of what I am doing and why I do it that way. I am presenting at the Northeast Annual Giving Conference (NEAGC) on Thursday on direct mail and am finding that this holds true with my presentation this time. Of particular interest is the subject of PURLS. While I am talking about mail, the PURL is one of many points of integration that I am going to emphasize.

I would really strongly recommend to anyone who has not already done so to try at least a PURL. The campaign can be as simple as a year end email and postcard series that encourages folks to make a gift before the end of your fiscal year. You can get very complicated on the landing page and all of the online components here but that is not my focus this week - I am really looking at how do you leverage the electronic tools to maintain a steady "stream" of fiscal year end communications to encourage donations.

Utilizing the back end of the PURL campaign you can readily monitor who has interest in giving and then follow up with a combination of postcard and emails. Even better, utilizing variable data printing through an on-demand online printer (they are out there) you can provide unique imagery, and focus it on those who have opened the PURL with a "come back we still need you" style message as compared to those who have not done so and then within the groups, match the postcard imagery to that which has meaning to them. ie: athletic alumni get an image showing the athletics facilities full of students and verbiage saying imagine how much less appealing this picture would be without the students - your gift ensures that won't happen.

You can also use email imagery and verbiage to test this - using a/b testing on email identify the imagery that resonates best and then try using that same imagery on postcards. We know a great deal about our constituents and can learn a great about their behavior this way but inherently don't do so in the way that our for-profit colleagues do. The actions are simple and affordable - take advantage of it before another non-profit comes along that will.

Electronic Thank You Messaging

2010-03-05T10:17:00.002-05:00

Thank you. Two simple words that can mean everything and the lack of them can make a world of difference in the other direction. As a parent of 3 small children, I spend my fair share of time sounding like my own parents. "What are the magic words?" comes out of my mouth before I even think about it.

How do we ensure that every action is appropriately acknowledged? Big gifts are usually covered, pretty sure nobody has every had a problem remembering to say thank you to donors when there are 5, 6 or more 0s associated with the gift. But what happens when that gift is follow by a dot and two 0s? How are you handling donors of $5 or even $1?

ABC news carried a story recently about an alumnae who left Lake Forest College $7 million in her will and she is typical of many planned gifts - they were unaware that it was on the way, she had little to no gift history and lived a frugal and modest lifestyle. The appreciated assets that provided the basis of this gift do not show up on any screening nor was there any indication that she would be capable of this level of support. We all need to treat every donor as though they are that "secret millionaire" because we just never know who really will be.

I provide donors under $20 with a unique postcard thank you every month. This is on top of what is provided by the stewardship office, coming out of the annual giving budget. I find that this group is in the short term the least likely to renew so the extra expense makes sense and that additional thank you carries more weight with that audience than with donors of larger amounts. It is not expected and that makes it all the more meaningful.

Budget an issue, do this via email - how many donors of less than $20 or even $50 do you have? Can you do a monthly email from you or a member of the annual giving staff to those donors? It can be as simple as a mail merge from outlook and take an hour a month to send but it is personal, direct and will engender responses, opening the dialogue to larger things, you never know who may be the seven figure donor you had no idea was out there.

Grandma was right - "thank you" are magic words!

Reunion e-appeals

2010-03-01T12:24:00.013-05:00

Reunion is a great time to use electronic tools to their fullest capacity because you have a similar message to deliver to specific target audiences with only slight content differences. I recommend starting reunion planning with a "version" mindset. With variable data programming you can adjust one primary email template and/or one main Flash video appeal to work for all of your reunion classes. Depending on your reunion program, you may even be able to reuse the appeals for a few years in a row before you need to revamp the design and layout because your target audiences will change each year.

So use variable data programming to your advantage to tap into the alumni nostalgia that Scott mentioned. In your emails, address each alum by name, mention their class year and include a few specific memories from their time at the institution, and if you want to get really fancy, include photos from their time on campus as well. Customization like this will bring alumni back to their days on campus and get them excited about reconnecting with old friends and the institution. Emails could come from classmates leading the reunion efforts to bolster that feeling of community.
Use emails to drive alumni to e-solicitations or e-briefs© that take alums back in time to their college days. Use emails to drive alumni to Facebook pages and web pages with more detailed information. Finally, use emails as simple save-the-dates and reminders to book travel and register for events. In all of these appeals - the emails, e-solicitations, and e-briefs© - think personal and think customization through variable data programming.

Finally, consider a post-reunion follow-up to thank those who attended and to tell those who couldn't make it that they were missed. Photography from the events is critical in the follow-up and an email to a Facebook page or a Flash-based photo book with commenting capabilities is a great way to continue the excitement after reunions and build towards a solicitation to all those who didn't make their reunion gift.

Reunion

2010-02-22T09:17:00.002-05:00

For many of us the single largest annual party that we are responsible for is the university reunion event. I am right there with you in that and have seen dramatic changes over the past decade in how we communicate about these programs. Let me start by saying that it is and will always be my firm opinion that folks attend reunions and make reunion gifts because of their relationships with classmates and the memory of what once was. Thus, it is our job to help rekindle those memories and reconnect those classmates such that the opportunities to create access to substantial resources for the organization exist.

I have seen any number of approaches and will say that there is no "right" approach but certain elements dramatically increase the potential for positive results. Those are: imagery - faces of "when", Names - who do you recall and the opportunity to connect. Social networking tools provide us with the opportunities to do all of these things. In fact, for those of us in the "facebook" generation, we do these on a daily basis.

I advocate starting with a 10th reunion program and building out how you plan to utilize the tools - blogging, photoblogs, facebook, and twitter can be connected into a structure that provides the connections and the opportunities that we need. Once you have that basic structure in place, start to expand it to the older classes - don't assume that because folks are older that they can't or won't learn to use these tools. Much like email in the 90s, we found that many retirees were highly fluent - it was how they stayed connected to grandchildren. As those grandchildren have moved into social media, we can and should expect the grandparents to follow.

I would advocate a mailing strategy that encourages the creation of a committee that you host and teach how to use these tools. Then using a postcard driven reunion mailing effort, once a month for 6 months or so the year prior to the reunion, start to push the existence of the tools by highlighting conversations and communications that are going on (you may need to jump start this with committee members talking to each other) and then offer a monthly "setup" conference call where you talk alumni through how to create a facebook account and connect it to your reunion page.

While time consumptive at the front, this approach provides alumni access to the information that you want to share through one another - exactly what and why we are using the reunion opportunity to gather them. That additional effort and connection, will pay off down the line with larger and more participatory reunion gifts.

Education can be cause based

2010-02-10T16:11:00.001-05:00

In many of the recent posts on here we have touched on cause based opportunities to demonstrate successes in online fundraising. In reading through several other boards recently, it was clear from some of the conversations, that folks were not entirely clear on what that "cause based" meant. In my references to cause based efforts, I am referring to campaigns that surround a specific, typically urgent and finite effort - Katrina was one of the first really successful cause based online fundraising campaigns in the modern era (defined by me as since the rise of the social media tools.)

As the vast majority of the audience of this blog is in higher education, cause based efforts are often competition to what we are working to raise dollars for. I am sure that many of you can relate to reading or listening to comments from your phone program over the last month and hearing the repeated objection of: "I just gave to Haitian relief so this is not a good time."

Between the media coverage and the sense of urgency to provide aid, this can be a difficult if not insurmountable objection to overcome. The strength of cause based fundraising is rooted in the combination of urgency, publicity and accountability. There is usually a very immediate need, and results can usually be seen and documented in real and quick time, especially online. Nothing like a youtube video of aid workers wearing the logo of the charity doing what you promised the donation was going to be used for to ensure that donors feel that their gift was important and meaningful.

So how to compete? In the higher education world, most of us work with and within systems that provide ongoing cause based efforts - most of us have a strong, impactful and impressive community service effort, often not only providing services but adding in a powerful integration of education as well. We can clearly and directly state that not only are we contributing to helping with the disaster of today but helping to educate the leaders who will help to prevent recurrence of the tragedy tomorrow. Use those students, get them to share the youtube videos that they are creating and posting for friends and family, share their stories and proudly talk about the impact that your institution has. Cause based fundraising should be a strength not a weakness but it is up to us to make it so.

Thoughts from a direct mail presentation

2010-02-10T15:25:00.003-05:00

I just completed presenting a webinar on direct mail and had a really interesting question asked at the end: "If the PS is such an important and effect part of the direct mail appeal, how do you carry that over into email fundraising."

My immediate and, I still think correct, answer is it is not the use of a PS. That got me to thinking about why the PS works so well in mail but clearly does not have the same impact on email and my first thought was that a PS on an email would be absurd - by it's very nature, the entire email IS a PS - simple direct and to the point. The PS works because it calls attention to a message within the message. By grabbing the readers eye it ensures that the call to action (please make a gift, please attend an event, etc...) is acted upon even if they don't read the balance of the piece.

Electronic communications are by their very nature different. Whether text based email or html, messages are short and direct with opportunities for action to be taken based upon links that provide additional content, forms or images. That said, many of us use templates that have links along the side or bottom and a simple direct statement or message contained in the text. It is my experience that those are wasted links - they rarely generate clicks. Keep in mind that an email is and is within a much busier environment than a letter - distractions are all over the screen and we are rarely getting the readers complete attention.

So how do we grab readers eyeballs and focus them on the action items in email? Maybe we need to look at taking a page from the Red Cross and Haiti - their solicitations didn't seek to inform, just ask. They let other streams provide the information and the email serve the sole purpose of asking them for the gift. In higher education we have the same opportunities using our electronic magazine/newsletters, university magazines and even local papers. Segment, target and mail based upon other interactions and established interests.

Dare to try something new

2010-02-03T12:02:00.003-05:00

Mobile giving to Haiti through the Red Cross alone hit $29 million according to the Chronicle for Philanthropy. Nearly $30 million collected in $10 gifts via text message to just one non-profit! I think this speaks volumes to the philanthropic nature of the American public but also is indicative of our collective willingness to make a small donation via cell phone. Certainly there is an opportunity here for higher education to add to its bank of fundraising tools. I don't think we've yet maximized the potential for online giving but, yes, I am recommending that we consider yet another tool - text message giving. This doesn't necessarily mean we implement it tomorrow, but we prepare today so that we can be in a better position to execute on a mobile giving campaign down the road - and that timeframe will likely be a little different for every institution.

The steps to preparing are fairly obvious:
- Collecting mobile phone numbers
- Collecting permission to text constituents
- Evaluating a provider (I'd love to hear from readers who have positive feedback on any of the providers.)

There's no reason not to start preparing now.

As seniors graduate, they will move from location to location and will not likely have a landline - but they will keep their mobile number. Same goes for young alumni who are likely changing jobs along their career path. So while we're collecting that number for the phone program, let's start collecting text message permission also.

As you plan an "update contact information" campaign with giveaways, make the prize dependent on the ability to text the winner so that you can ensure the entries will have correct mobile numbers.

I was in Atlanta last week visiting with a few institutions and discussed text message fundraising quite a bit. There are some valid concerns - 1) the provider costs, 2) that we'll move a $100 donor to a $10 gift level, 3) it'll be difficult to tie text donations into participation totals if the donors don't self-identify. These are valid concerns, but I believe that we can work through them - if we don't try and risk failing, we're never going to hit one out of the park, as Scott said in his last post. And doesn't every institution have a group of non-donors who aren't responding to what is currently being done? Mobile giving could be the way to get them on board. Through creative mini-campaigns and integration of mobile giving into your other fundraising efforts, you could chip away at that chunk of non-donors in $5 or $10 increments.

As fundraisers competiting in a growing pool of non-profits, we need to be more aggressive and consider how to use tools in a different way and how to incorporate new tools into our plans.

iPad the next big thing?

2010-01-27T22:22:00.002-05:00

I am sure that many of the "techies" out there spent the last month scrambling, checking out each of the IT sites that claim to provide insight into upcoming technology releases to learn what Apple was going to announce today. Without getting into a longer debate over different technology platforms, one thing is clear - we are watching a race to integrate our household entertainment devices with our mobile entertainment devices and the social communication tools that we have all become accustomed to.

My phone now serves as my primary facebook interface and based upon the tool introduced today, I am not alone. So this raises the question for me, how are those of us in the fundraising profession working to build the communication channels that will allow us to be literally in our donors pocket?

According to http://twitter.com/mgive/status/7911649657 the red cross has raised more than $21 million $10 a text at a time this month. I am sure that number is low already as it is several days old and that tragedy has caught the imagination of the american people. How do those of us in higher education learn from that effort?

I see several opportunities - the red cross got their name and opportunity to help out quickly and in many venues. Each time I log onto any mobile platform that is in front of me and they are not limiting the effort based upon who they think will help, rather opening it up to much larger audiences and letting folks who care about that issue self identify. That is something that we do very poorly in higher ed - we spend so much of our focus and effort on predefined constituent groups (alumni, parents, employees) that we often miss that there are many other folks who value what we do - often to a much greater level than our "defined" populations.

Much as Apple released the iPad with the expectation that folks would see that as the next step in social communication, we need to get out there and try some new things - not everything is the next iPhone - anyone remember appleTV? but if you don't try and risk failing, you are never going to hit it out of the park either.

Don't ask till they tell

2010-01-19T14:42:00.003-05:00

Stephanie spoke quite eloquently about the need to communicate with constituents on a consistent basis in her last post. I too have found that the more communication that occurs, the more effective the fundraising associated with it is. To those of us who are long time Annual Giving folks this is not exactly rocket science but it is amazing how often we find institutions putting the cart in front of the horse and soliciting gifts in the first or second email a constituent gets from them.

I would take this a step farther and suggest that there should be a established rule within your communications efforts regarding when solicitation via electronic communications should be initiated. To that end, I suggest at least the following structure - most of the following are best practice electronic address maintenance anyhow but are good steps:

Only allow opt-in communications - folks who choose to be part of your lists are looking to hear from you and are offering you the chance to continue to communicate with them.
If you have addresses that have not chosen to opt-in yet continue to provide them with communications providing them with the opportunity to do so but be mindful that these need to be creative and engaging - you are selling your communication stream to them and if you are seen as harassing rather than communicating, you will only sink the chances of getting what you want - their permission.
Introduce yourself to new and renewed contacts via a welcome/welcome back stream of communications. In these messages lay out what you expect to tell them, when you expect to tell it to them and what is in it for them to allow you that access.
Ask their opinion and provide opportunities for feedback - the 2.0 portion of the web has dramatically increased expectations that they will be asked rather than told. Use of survey tools is highly effective when mixed with outbound communications and text driven communication opportunities - provide them with the chance to email a person and share their opinions.
Just like with a personal visit, asking for support should be a portion of the conversation but you probably don't want to lead with it. If someone is going to visit with you in your office to sell or ask you for something, they are probably not going to shake your hand and introduce them self and in the next breath ask for your gift - don't send a welcome message and a solicitation in the same manner.
There is no magic time but I have found that three months of online engagement seems to be a comfortable period for folks. After hearing from you for three months a solicitation as a standalone message is acceptable form. That said, you may want to establish a schedule of some sort that works for your constituents to have a solicitation "in the can" for that purpose - just like the welcome message.

Success in online fundraising is like many of the other portions of engagement - it takes time, care and consideration to gain the trust of our constituents and donors and how you treat them will pay you back many fold down the line.

Staying in the loop

2010-01-08T07:17:00.002-05:00

Happy New Year and thank you for continuing to follow our blog in 2010! I hope all of you had a relaxing and happy holiday.

With the start of 2010, MainSpring celebrated its 5th birthday, and so I sat down to reflect on what we have learned. If I can pick only one thing from all of our work, it would be this: frequent touches, reaching out to constituents frequently, leads to success. I think Scott mentioned it in a previous post, but it warrants a little more discussion in my opinion. As I look at all the results we've generated for clients, the best results are linked to clients with whom we've worked for many years building an online strategy based on constituent behavior data and adapted to new technologies. While the combination of tools and messaging may change, one thing stays the same - the frequency of communication. In all of these cases, I can see that we reach out to constituents - donors and non-donors - monthly and in some cases twice a month throughout the year with news and event information, solicitations, and pure stewardship messages. How or why are frequent touches important? I think one reason is that people want to be in the "know," they want to feel like they are a part of something. And when people feel connected, they are more likely to participate by sharing their thoughts, their time and their dollars. Of course the message needs to be relevant and engaging too...

So as you consider your plan for the rest of the fiscal year and look to the new fiscal year, I think it would be worth your time to consider how you are keeping constituents in the loop. A consistent stream of online communications through email, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and your website will help bring constituents in the door and will keep them connected.

Happy New Year and all that

2009-12-29T20:32:00.003-05:00

Happy New Year to all! With two days left in the calendar year - for many of you likely only 1 (or for the really lucky, 0) working days left, you have probably completed what you are going to do for solicitations in the 2009 calendar year. If not completely sent (I have 1 last segment that goes out on the morning of the 31st to donors who have given on the 31st before) they are at least completed and ready to be sent.

I would suggest that after you enjoy a couple of days off (and I really do suggest enjoying them!) that you should start the new year by adding a task to your calendar - review your electronic communication.

There are two components to this task; what do people receive and what do people open? Click throughs are the third component to the "stool" of email analysis but trail the first two in importance in the nonprofit world as compared to the commercial sales world.

What do people receive is important as we tend to cluster our communications around points of interest to us - fiscal year end, calendar year end, graduation, matriculation and events. Are those what we want to read about as recipients though? Maybe, more likely not as often as they are.

What do your people open? I am looking at and talking about all electronic communications here. Which messages are getting through and what is viewed as priority by your constituents?That this is important can be demonstrated very simply by going back to your own email from the last week - you may need to open the deleted file to find the messages we are looking for - and see how many of them are from places that you have a legitimate relationship with but just did not resonate with you at this time.

Is there a connection between the two? Do folks who get more messages open more? Is there a point of saturation when folks stop paying attention to your messages? Starting to identify who opens and reads your online communications is the first step in expanding your online community.

Calendar Year end and family obligations

2009-12-22T14:54:00.002-05:00

I must start with an apology to those of you who consistently read this - or as has been the case for the last three weeks, wait to read this. My wife and I added our third child early in December and as a result, I have been away from work helping to get everything accomplished at home that needs to be done to both welcome our daughter and ensure that both of my sons (who are 5 and 3) have everything that they need for it to be a magical Christmas.

In the time away from work, I have spent a fair amount of time looking at the holiday communications, the calendar year end appeals and the sales pitches that are all competing for attention in my inbox. I have noticed several trends:

Flash is everywhere and not one piece of it was worth the time it took to write it.

Even the best emails (Allegheny College sent me a great piece) have horrible lead emails.Subject lines do matter - not that anyone sending me anything seems to have noticed.

We seem to have a really hard time connecting people to people.

In the last three weeks, I have gotten a total of 17 pitches for me to buy or give based upon the end of the calendar year (or christmas.) Out of those pieces I did not get one complete piece that would have attracted my attention if I was not in this line of work and working on this blog. I am going to focus on the trends above as the starting points for us but they are by no means comprehensive.

Several pieces had terrific looking flash presentations, once I got to them. The problem I find with flash is the lack of personalization - I am getting a wonderful presentation about a non-profit but it is essentially a television commercial. Those places that I give to, attended or have interacted with may or do know a fair amount more about me than other folks in their data yet we rarely create multiple presentations and segment. I got a really nice e-greeting card from one school wishing me "Happy Holiday's", I am not sensitive to the use of the specific holiday or not but this was a religiously affiliated school and the card came from a member of the clergy - wouldn't "Merry Christmas" have resonated better?

Lead emails - like direct mail, electronic mail has multiple points of contact - carrier in mail is to the combination of sender name and subject line on email, body of message is the same in both, if it isn't compelling and relevant, it isn't getting read, links to multimedia presentations can also be in both but the immediacy of email is that the links are clicked the day they are sent and delivery is near simultaneous for the population. Even assuming the best connected community with a strong sense of interconnectedness, only a portion of your messages are going to be read and opened.

The vast majority of the messages were from an entity - "office of xxxx" or Customer Service or just the largest entity - YYY College or University. If, you, like I, get a decent number of requests and sales pitches, this is the first giveaway that this is servicing the sender not the recipient. Primary contacts from an entity are nearly always sales pitches; be it from Amazon or St. Judes, both are asking me to do something for them. Email offers a terrific opportunity for 1 to 1 communication, messages from individuals. These can be from a volunteer - set up a free webmail account to use for it under their name, or from a high level employee - create a mirror account with a middle initial in it to use as a fundraising account from a dean or president.

Try a text message from a named account against the flash or html piece, include variable data and write it like an email, not a mail piece. Keeping your mind and eye on just these three items in your electronic communication stream is crucial to long term success and is a significant part of a donor focused fundraising program.

The social networking trap - or why we are afraid

2009-11-27T11:45:00.007-05:00

As I reflected in my pre-turkey post, I was contemplating Stephanie's post regarding use of Social Networking in the fundraising environment. After a couple of days with family, I have collected my thoughts on the matter.

In sum, I see a couple of significant hurdles:

1) Internal Perception - the view of social networking within most of the higher education community is that of trepidation. We proceed carefully in a world that is moving at internet speed to innovate and change. This is a result of the higher education approach to the world that is only now coming out of the dark ages of monks and scribes. This approach creates a huge gap between where our constituents are and where we think they are.

2) Investment in media - we all have a web presence that we pay/paid a significant sum of money for. For most of us that is likely an aggregate effort between some consultant help and full time employees. That investment has been further enhanced through the development and implementation of an online community that was often more successful in concept than in actuality. This has lead to a sense of investment already made and often the results from a funding standpoint have not met the expectations.

3) "Our folks on not on there." - VPs, presidents and major gift officers - in sum those who bring in the large dollars, are not familiar with these tools and even when they are, realize that the vast majority of our dollars are not going to result from the folks who are on the sites. While this is true today, those of us in Annual Giving realize that the next generation of major donors will most likely come from younger graduates who are making their decisions today about which charities they are going to support. This is true, for now. While we need to "fish where the fish are" from a major gift/dollars standpoint, this holds true for communications with younger alumni as well.

4) Lack of understanding about how to utilize these to further the advancement process. - these are specialized tools that have no cost to implement and much like email a decade ago, the view persists that making this a portion of someone already on staff's job is the way to approach it. While a small select group of institutions have been able to make significant headway in email fundraising without adding additional resources, tools and staffing, they tend to be places that have extraordinary success and investment in other aspects of fundraising. This is the largest gap in higher education implementation of fundraising tools through social networking.

The solution is simple, the process to do so is complicated. Success will come to those places that invest in creation, implementation, and execution in the social networking arena. That can come in the form of hiring staff, outsourcing implementation or even finding some volunteers from your alumni body to manage your efforts. We all know they are out there. The folks who are interested in us will find us and the communication stream is as close to 1 to 1 as possible, allowing two way communication and providing considerable connection. We remain afraid.

the other side of the fence

2009-11-24T21:05:00.003-05:00

I have been working on a response to Stephanie building on her comments about social networking and how we can use some of the readily available tools as part of the efforts to build a community that supports each of our causes. In doing so, I spent some time working on creating and maintaining a group on LinkedIn, Online Fundraising Exchange (if you are on LinkedIn, find me and join the group) to learn more about how parts of that environment work.

I sat down tonight to put the ideas together and checked my email as is my habit in the early part of the evening. I had three messages (a clear sign that many of the folks that I work with are already relaxing for the holiday), 1 confirming the shipment of a Christmas present for my wife, 1 from LinkedIn telling me that a colleague had accepted my invitation to connect and 1 from my Alma Mater, Allegheny College.

I have given to Allegheny every year since I graduated - more than a decade of annual gifts. The total dollar value of those gifts is modest to say the least but I am a consistent and easy donor to work with. I give the same way every year, as the result of a fiscal year end mailing that I cross over into an online gift. The piece that they sent was the first non-online community piece that I had seen from them this fall. I get a monthly email from their online community telling me about the classnotes that have been submitted from folks the year ahead and year behind me so am accustomed to seeing email from the college.

What struck me as unique about this email right away was the look - a picture - more like a postcard than an email. While it was picture of the campus, it was not an area that I would have chosen as a signature location on campus and it used a merge area looking kind of like a name plate for a donor recognition plaque to personalize it. While I appreciate the effort to personalize the piece, I was a bit dismayed that it looked more like a mailing label stuck to the picture than a smooth digital merge field.

The flash portion of the piece that it linked me to played smoothly with nice controls (watch it here: Allegheny College - post your thoughts on the piece please!) and was relevant to me - the images all have meaning and it clearly comes from folks at the school that have a good grasp on what makes the College unique. That said, I was disappointed in how it left me feeling - distant. I felt like I was watching an admissions video more than an appeal for my support. It did not connect me to folks in a personal fashion, did not provide me with any opportunity to connect to other alumni or communicate with the College, it simply ended with a completed form including my name and address along with a suggested gift of $50. Since I just spoke with the phonathon caller who asked me for $100, I thought that was an interesting amount - have an email in to the annual giving folks there to ask what the thought was behind that.

Reflecting on what was wrong about the piece, I come up with the following thought; I expect more from online communications that telling me what is happening. I have become accustomed to the interaction of the social networking tools - I want to be able to post and hear back from friends and connections right now, I want to be given the opportunity to read those classnotes and comment back to the note writer, I want control of the content of what I see and when I see it. I was disappointed that rather than playing on the communication they are already providing, I was sent a one way communication that reads as "old" media - no matter how well done, it missed the target completely.

Stephanie and I were talking this afternoon prior to this email and the subject of continuity came up - how many years of working with a client does it take to provide consistent results, her response: 3 or more. I thought that was striking comment and even more so in light of my reaction to this solicitation piece. Striking but not surprising - my expectations were set by the monthly communication that I am already getting. If the email had linked me to a microsite and asked me for my unique experience that would be shared with others, I would probably have ended with a gift - give me the chance to share and be shared with - continue the work that is going on rather than changing directions when you want to solicit me and success will follow.

I will get back to work on my social networking post and get that up for our return to work on Monday the 30th - Happy Thanksgiving to all!

Why are we afraid?

2009-11-10T14:12:00.004-05:00

I had great conversations with two clients this week about leveraging Facebook to increase engagement and giving. During both discussions, I mentioned using Causes in Facebook as a possible way to increase exposure and giving. Both clients expressed reservations about using Facebook to promote a giving message, yet both were interested in using Facebook to increase engagement. After doing a quick search for a cause for my alma mater and others, it looks like many institutions share the same reservations.

I'm not sure that we should throw out the idea altogether - I think it's worth exploring why we are afraid and how we can temper those fears. With over 300 million users and more than 10 million becoming fans of pages daily, Facebook is a powerful tool for fundraisers. Your constituents - young and older - are using Facebook, and by maintaining a presence on the site for your institution with updated content, event info, and other links, your institution will build engagement. So why not include a way for "fans" to support the institution? Are we afraid of invading a social tool with a giving message? Or that asking for support will lead to decreased engagement? Don't misunderstand my questions - I believe these are valid concerns and that further discussion will resolve them and pave the way for more effective fundraising through this medium.

The first concern - that Facebook is a private social space that should remain separate from the fundraising arena and that mixing the two will be seen as an invasion of privacy - is a valid fear. But let's do a quick reality check - this is already happening. Causes has already signed up 11,000 non-profit partners and Facebook cites over 35M monthly active users of Causes. That means it's highly likely that your constituents have received a petition to support a cause and are petitioning friends to support causes already. Causes can be initiated by individuals as well as non-profits themselves, and they range from well-known non-profits like Habitat for Humanity to small, community causes around a community library or a local school drive. Facebook members are participating in Causes every day – why shouldn't they have an opportunity to join your cause?

The second concern - that asking for support on Facebook will turn people off - is also a valid fear that I believe can be resolved with a better understanding of the way Causes works. The premise behind the application is to help individuals start a campaign for collective action through social networks. Through Facebook, individuals can set up a cause and designate a 501(c)3 beneficiary. Individuals can then petition friends to support their cause. Charitable organizations can also start a cause to benefit your organization. When you do this you will be best served if you become an official non-profit partner with Causes so that you have access to a personal dashboard that tracks donation activity to your causes. Through your dashboard, you can send petitions for support as well. (We can get into the ins and outs of petitioning in the next post.) Before you jump into petitioning, add the cause to your fan page. Don't worry, there's no blinking arrow pointing to a donate now button on your page - it's simply another item on your wall. If you're afraid of turning people off with a giving message, just leave the petitioning to your fans for now.

What next? Test it out! Start slowly by establishing your cause and linking it to your Facebook page so that fans can support your institution through Facebook. As you become more comfortable, consider approaching alumni leaders to join the cause and send petitions to friends. Once you have some experience under your belt, you can begin to develop more complex strategies that include things like setting up multiple causes for specific initiatives (i.e. senior class giving), fundraising invitations, donor matches and birthday wishes that will further enable fans to support your institution.

I welcome your feedback – comments and questions – and I hope that you will consider how your institution can use Facebook and Causes to grow engagement and dollars.

Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook

2009-11-02T20:54:00.002-05:00

After spending a couple of weeks working on integration between Twitter and LinkedIn, I am amazed at how much can be done with a little knowledge, a lot of curiosity and some willingness to try different options and ways to integrate social networking tools. I realize that many of you reading this may not have either the time or the comfort level required to do some of this on your own but that is not an obstacle. Simply find a student or tech savvy employee on your or the advancement staff and enlist their help if you wish to improve what you are doing and how you are generating conversation and activity on your social networking sites. In any case, take a look at what you are doing and how you can amplify that conversation.

What is really important here in any case is what value are you able to derive from your presence on the sites. I know that my supervisors pay a tremendous amount of attention to the number of fans of our facebook page, how many members we have in LinkedIn and how many people are following us on Twitter. In the light of the traditional focus on numbers that we track in advancement that is the logic thought process. Unfortunately it is the wrong metric to be using.

While each of the major Social Networking platforms also provides measuring stick opportunities, those are limited to a single platform and don't really provide much in terms of meaning to you as an advancement professional. I strongly suggest that we all need to work on ways to identify what value there is for providing resources to our employer. The best of the sites for this process is Meetup.com. Meetup exists purely for the point of connecting each person to one another online with an endgame goal of meeting in real life. I realize that this is still a couple of steps short of providing resources for you to apply to your mission but it is a good transition measure - from talking online to meeting in person.

I am working on running a report that compares folks who are self identified to me as being on one or more Social Networking site and includes real time interaction and giving. At this point, the most obvious (and predicatable) outcome is that the more active the user online, the more valuable they are.

In my small sample, that has not proven to be true. In fact, the more active they are online, the less likely they are to have offline interaction with us. Does this hold true for other schools? Please feel welcome to reach out to me if you need help to identify what your results are.

Social networks and fundraising

2009-10-29T08:50:00.000-04:00

I spent the end of last week in Washington DC for a St. John's alumni event. While I was in DC (where I worked for almost 4 years at American University) I set up a visit with a colleague from Catholic University who work in Annual Giving. Catholic is a companion School to St. John's and we had been following them on facebook for some time. As a result I asked him to coordinate a meeting with the alumni office folks who run their facebook page.

This is step one of the social networking - using the folks that you have relationships with to increase the knowledge base that you possess. Using that resource was invaluable in this case as it gave me the background to approach the internal constraints that I have on getting this done and present them with a plan and an approach that has already been tested and that I am able to show potential results from.

That approach is as follows:
Use Twitter as the base for all posts. By setting up the RSS feeds between twitter and facebook you are able to pull the status updates from twitter into facebook. Using http://hootsuite.com/ as the upload client, you can schedule the tweets and thus schedule your facebook status updates. The RSS feeds create a cascade effect with a delay between the tweet and the status update. This can be done using a facebook ap that uses the #fb tag to carry those items through into status updates.

Post questions on a daily basis - generate traffic through a consistent contest and Q&A basis - think morning drive radio show. Same question category every day, keep it light and fun with real time announcement of prizes. Plan this out - have a weekly meeting to establish how you are going to do this and then use that scheduling process to ensure that you follow through.

Use a blog page as a way to establish an externally viewable listing of your communication history. Post each of your email digests and general messages to the blog - simple, free and easy as a way to ensure that the monthly newsletter and electronic communications that you send to your alumni who have provided you with an email can also be viewed by those who simply visit your page or are fans on a social network without you needing to post them again and again and again to accomplish that. Again, leverage the technology - use RSS feeds and the blog tools to make that happen automatically whenever the messages are sent.

Create a home page that cleanly integrates these pieces and youtube channels or other networks that you are using. The vast majority of your content can be generated and refreshed through the posts, updates and emails that you are already sending - rather than adding to the content needs, the social networking sites can be used to increase value and engagement while expanding your reach, at the same time limiting the work needed to do so.

budget cuts? what to do...

2009-10-14T08:13:00.004-04:00

If my day to day workplace is anything like most of yours, this month has been a bit of a downer. At St. John's we freeze our student data in the middle of October, providing advancement with the listing of new student names and current parent records and more importantly providing a snapshot of the current fiscal health of the university. While last fall was disastrous from a fundraising standpoint for our industry, this fall has greater potential for long term impact. Budget cuts are either here or coming and with the employment picture what it is, likely here for a couple of years.

Those of us on the front lines of fundraising realize that our most important step is to invest in programs, practice and people. We need to keep ourselves relevant to our donors and provide a concrete, responsible, grounded case for support to all prospects regardless of gift history. In addition to that, you need to make your organization relevant to your alumni today. Career Services, accurate and detailed reporting on the use and value of support and networking opportunities are three simple and controllable items that can provide ongoing relevance.

Unfortunately, budget cuts often target those items that provide this relevance because they are difficult to directly tie back to quantifiable benefits. It is easy to justify the cost of the phone program or a mailer or even a new online effort as they all end with direct and clear results - dollars and donors that you can balance against the cost of the effort. It is much more difficult to make a strong case for investing in stewardship, donor relations and communications efforts.

So what to do?

I advocate for a comprehensive approach - collaborate with your internal partners to create pieces that serve multiple functions. Identify several other offices that are looking to communicate with similar constituent bases. Think globally - we all work with the other aspects of advancement at our institutions but who else wants to communicate with external constituents? I would suggest the following offices may be worth a conversation: institutional research, academic deans, admissions/enrollment, career services, communications/marketing.

I am sure that there are others that are unique to your institution but you may notice a trend in the offices that I listed - almost all of them have a stake in the items that you are looking to provide - accountability, current services and networking opportunities. Use that common ground and shared efforts to maximize budgets and return on investment for you. This may require some sacrifice in direct control of the pieces but typically we are all better served to get something in our constituent's hands than not to. You will achieve benefits in increased communication and relationships that will carry value long after the current budget issue has passed and may just make a couple of new friends as well!

Wanted: Your E-Opinions

2009-09-29T21:16:00.013-04:00

Let me first apologize for my prolonged absence from MainSpringBoard. It has been a busy September at MainSpring and like the saying goes here - time sure does fly when you're on the road! As we turn the corner from planning to executing on year-end e-appeals, I'd like to take a minute to ask some questions of our readers to get your opinions on e-campaigns - after all we fundraisers do share information. So take a look at these questions and tell us what you think. We've developed quite a following for this blog - perhaps it's the brilliant commentary or that Scott just has a lot of friends - in either case, other fundraisers reading this will benefit from your answers. So comment away!

Is email the best communication tool for online engagement? How does generational data impact that opinion?
How many electronic solicitations do you send a year?
Do you prefer html or Flash solicitations? Or a combination?
If a combination - what's your ratio of email to Flash?

Alumni Relations Communications

2009-09-16T08:47:00.003-04:00

For so much of what we do in the online world we tend to focus on the fundraising aspect of the communications. I would like to suggest that inclusion in a linked, comprehensive campaign of pieces and communications that are strictly Alumni centric rather than part of an engagement effort driven by the annual giving program is a critical portion of creating the online community that we are all seeking to aquire.

As someone who has programmatic responsibility for both areas, I am a huge believer in tying them together and combining the communications into an "institutional stream" rather than trying to build up two distinct individual branches on the same tree. I do this in the phone and mail programs through integration of event information and invitations into the phone calls (every record loaded in the phone program has the unique set of events that individual will be invited to over the next 3 months loaded with it) and in the mail program through what we have come to call solicitivations - invitations that include a clear, direct ask and a reply slip for making a gift.

Online, we should begin to take that same approach - use of microsites that provide engagement with the institution but just as importantly with other alumni can play a huge role in providing the connections that help to build and sustain a successful alumni program. The use of email and crossing the platforms into social networking as a way to get folks to pay attention allows for communications to reach folks who are already engaged with you. Just as important though is inclusion of these efforts in print materials - provide links and stories in the magazine, include buckslips in your mailings pushing folks toward these communication channels.

At the end of the day, our alumni are becoming increasingly savvy to our efforts to engage and drive them into making a gift. The best and most effective way to work with that is to coordinate our programs and tools such that we are providing them with a single stream of communication that contains multiple opportunities and options for engagement at many levels and in many ways. Please keep in mind that for most of us, the stated goal of the advancement shop is to provide and maximize the resources available to our students from external audiences, doing so does not always mean cash in the door.

Leadership Annual Giving communications

2009-09-09T19:50:00.003-04:00

So you have your plan for the year - you know what you are sending, who you are sending it to and when it will go out - if you are where we really should be (and this is a do as I say, not as I do item right now) you should have at least a three year plan with goals and expectations and some form of outline on how you expect to meet those objectives.

Within that, I would expect that you have established a process for your mailings, phone solicitations and electronic fundraising efforts. Some of us are lucky enough to have internal assets in place to handle these, some of us are lucky enough to have an established vendor who provides the services that are needed and many of us need to establish who we are going to use on a case by case basis.

No matter the process, in online pieces and process I am a big believer in consistency. Create a look, feel and style that you really like and use a single production process for the entire year. If you are planning to use video, audio or other media files (and you really should be) line up the pieces, people and assets that you need to make that happen and get more recorded than you think you need. Then record a whole bunch more!

The title of this post is Leadership Annual Giving communications so if you have gotten this far, I am sure that you are asking how that ties in. I am putting the final touches on a webinar on leadership annual giving at the end of the month and as I work on that and think about this, it occurs to me that we tend to leave our leadership annual donors out in the "cold" from an online fundraising standpoint. I have seen a couple of pieces aimed in that direction but they have tended to be the same piece that was sent to other audiences with a higher ask and maybe a couple of minor edits to the imagery to make them look "classier."

I would suggest that we need to rethink that entire process. I have several ideas - v-flash, video thank you messages from students who benefited from your support, virtual campus tours, customized HTML - segment your donors by area of support and create segments that are merged into the message based on designation, custom messages from volunteers, messages from deans or other campus leaders, integration with the news feeds - get your leadership donors information at the same time that the press gets it - when they read it in the paper the next day they will feel a part of the inner circle.

What do you all do? What is working for you - it can be associated with stewardship, solicitation, informational, or other communications.

new and renew

2009-08-30T22:39:00.002-04:00

As most of us working on campuses look around this week, we can see the renewal of the education cycle - new students are most likely already with you, other students are returning for a new year. Hopefully you are feeling a new surge of energy and interest in expanding your programs and seeing growth in giving and donors.

Many of us are still waiting for "the other shoe to drop" as decisions are still to be made regarding budgets, expense and in more cases than I would have expected, goals. If you are still waiting on final decisions or outcomes in regard to these areas, please take heart - you are not alone. But what to do?

Your first best course of action is usually to focus on renewals - do you have a program in place to renew your donors on the anniversary of their gift last year? If not, consider a very simple letter that goes out to all donors eleven months after their last "annual" gift last year. Thank them for their support, remind them that it has already been almost a year and that you depend upon them to provide support again this year and provide a simple reply device. This has provided upwards of a 25% response everywhere I have been. Over time, you can get more advanced, using this as the opportunity to increase gift amounts and even as an ideal time to get second gifts from donors who "jumped the gun" on giving.

If you already have some version of that in place, take a good look at your SYBUNT population - pull out donors who have a string of more than 5 years of consecutive giving at some point and start survey calling them - find out why they stopped giving and what you need to do to get them to start giving again. DO IT. if at all possible.

Online (that is the focus of this blog) do some simple data mining - who is opening your online communications, who is giving online - are they the same folks? I am going to venture a guess that they are not. Many of your online donors are getting to the giving page via phone and mail solicitations rather than through online solicitations. There will be a second component of this as well - many of your highly engaged online alumni, will be giving through the mail and phone programs. The first group are paying attention to you on their time and prefer non digital media but are comfortable with online commerce so give in that simpler fashion. The second group is where you can make some inroads into online giving. Put a simple case together as to why it makes more sense for the donor (not for you) to give online and put it into the next newsletter - see who reads it and make some follow up effort to those folks to get their opinion on it - these can be personal phone calls or emails directly from you seeking to gain their opinion in a one to one fashion. That will both inform you and serve to further engage the donor.

Each of these steps can be undertaken at little to no additional cost, will provide measurable and notable response while continuing to engage your constituent base. In times of uncertainty regarding budgets and goals, continuing to expand and enhance programs can be accomplished.

Off to college

2009-08-27T23:24:00.006-04:00

Going to college is another great example of a priority point, to borrow Scott's terminology, for both parents and students.

For parents, sending a child to college is a major milestone - one that comes with pride and a big price tag. Sending a child to college affects disposable income and thus philanthropic habits, and to Scott's point, we should solicit parents keeping in mind that they are already making a large financial investment in the institution. In addition to parents of current and former students of your institution, it's likely that alumni from the classes in the 70's and 80's are sending their children to a college and that their household budget has changed. Wouldn't it be interesting to survey parent donors to find out why they support the institution when they are already sending checks for tuition and then use the responses to build future appeals? I wonder too if we surveyed all alumni to determine who among them have children in college if we could more effectively target those alumni in future solicitations.

Current students - starting with the freshman class - are also an important constituent group to consider because in just 4-3-2-or 1 short year they will be your alumni. As such, we should be considering how to form a relationship with these students while they are on campus. I'm talking about more than just student work opportunities in the call center. The annual giving office has a four year head start to teach future alumni about the importance of giving back. Francine Cronin and the Emory Annual Fund did an incredible job of educating and engaging students with blue piggy banks. If you haven't heard about her Blue Pig campaign, I recommend you check this out today. For the last two years, the Emory Annual Fund has handed out blue piggy banks to all freshman when they arrive on campus. the idea is that they will "feed the pig" with their spare change and help fund book awards for other students. So beginning on the first day of their freshman year, Emory students will be taught the importance of giving back to Emory even if it's just with spare change. And - this is critical - they will have fun doing it! The campaign leverages Facebook and Twitter, and the Emory Annual Fund even staged a "pignapping" last year with a $3500 ransom to increase engagement among current students. It is a great way to educate current students on the importance of giving back and to familiarize them with the annual fund.

All of this life point talk leads back to building and maintaining lifelong relationships with constituents. In order to acquire and retain their support constitutents have to feel like members of the community. If any of you have success stories like Emory's Blue Pig campaign, please post a comment so that we can share strategies and hit the ground running with current students this year.

Words from the road

2009-08-25T23:09:00.002-04:00

I write from a hotel room in Indiana - my family and I are on the way back from a trip to Denver for my sister's wedding. In the course of countless miles of travel, I have had much time to think about many things. What I have learned first and foremost is that there are many rest stops along interstate 80 - everyone of them with a bathroom and when traveling with a recently potty trained 2 year old, you get a great view of every one.

Immediately after that thought had finished processing, I realized that this is a great time to take a look at the priority points in peoples lives and what impact that has upon our fundraising success. By priority points, I am referring to the points in our lives when events occur that impact our decision making process. This trip is a minor version of that - I and my family have extended our vacation this year and allocated substantial additional financial resources to this trip in order to be in Denver to celebrate my sister's marriage with her and her new husband. That decision is going to have substantial impact on our disposable household income for the next 6 months.

While in my case, this was associated with a siblings life event, these priority points would include birth of a child, death of a parent, job change (new or lost), sale or purchase of a house - there are many more that I have not listed but I think that the idea is clear. These points often have dramatic implications on the philanthropic behavior of our donors by changing both the focus of their philanthropic support - think having a child or losing a parent, and the amount of available resource - think my vacation example or losing a job.

Stephanie did a good job outlining how using surveys and other contact points can be of great importance in identifying folks with interest from populations that have not been engaged with you recently. I think that we all need to take these a step further and really focus them on current and recently lapsed donors. Developing the streams of communication that will lead to you being notified about these events so that you can react appropriately (does your alumni office send condolence or birthday cards) and solicit appropriately. If a donor tells you in the fall that they are not going to be able to give that year because of one of these points, think how much more effective your follow up communications can be if you are able to address that reason in future communications. I am not saying not to ask, just to be respectful of their input.

Be it through a PURL, a simple text email leading to a survey of life points, an HTML email leading to a microsite that encourages sharing of these items with other alumni through a mini-blog or even through the phone program, capturing and using these points to increase the value and effectiveness of future communications is an important step to building and maintaining the lifelong relationship that helps to distinguish our alumni relationships from all others.

Tomorrow's donors

2009-08-14T10:58:00.012-04:00

"Simply because they are your alumni today doesn't mean they will be your donors tomorrow." True. But as your alumni, they have the potential to be donors. You have a leg up on other charities because they have an experience with your institution. Sure, they may gripe about a professor, a parking ticket, or a misspelled name in a mailer, but you can overcome that with an effective message. If you can reach them. We can find new addresses, phone numbers and email addresses until the cows come home, but if we don't start to think about how to better steward our future donors... if we don't try to learn and somehow notate how they want to hear from us and what they want to hear about, well, then they will continue to just be constituents.

Eco-Option™, our comprehensive approach to green fundraising, provides a paperless, eco-friendly communication option for your alumni. I'd bet that many of them are concerned about their carbon footprint and would like to have the option to go paperless with their alma mater. And, after giving them the option, some might even cross over from the "future" to the "current" donor category. By giving them the option to tell you how they want to hear from you and honoring that, you immediately open the lines of communication. Now your messages reach them and the dialogue begins.

Sure, this is all easy for me to say - I'm on the other side with the flashy graphics and videos. If the institutional roadblocks are stopping you from taking a donor driven approach - then I'd say look for external help from a vendor to test out the theory so that you have results to back up the need to change things internally. Three client projects come to mind in which the electronic appeal asked for non-donor feedback - two were PURL campaigns with survey questions and one was an email campaign asking for non-donors to email a response back. The first PURL campaign for client A generated 6x greater completion rate for non-donors compared to a previous solicitation we sent to that same non-donor audience (or we can call it a 500% increased response rate from non-donors to sound even more impressive!). The second PURL campaign for client B generated a 14x greater response rate from non-donors compared to a previous appeal sent to the same non-donor audience (1300% increase in non-donor response). Client C's email campaign generated close to a 9x greater response from non-donors compared to a previous solicitation sent to the same non-donor audience (~800% increase in non-donor response). In all three examples, we saw high non-donor completion rates. Why? Probably because we were asking for them to give us their opinion and not their dollars. Now as we follow through and send materials to them that relate to their feedback, we will likely see greater non-donor participation and giving. With client C we're already seeing improved email open rates and completion rates from non-donors. After the email campaign, we sent an e-solicitation and the completion rate increased by 60%.

I believe that it is difficult to become donor-centered in our thinking and even more difficult in practice, but it's a critical step to ensure that today's alumni become tomorrow's donors.

To learn more details about Eco-Option™, click here.