29

Jul

5 Bridge Conference Takeaways


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The Bridge Conference is over, but as usual we left energized by the sessions and the company of over a thousand colleagues dedicated to advancing the missions of great nonprofits through better communications and fundraising. There was no shortage of good ideas and observations at #2010bridge, but these five stood out:

1. The hard ask is so 2006.
How often do you hear “stop begging for money” in a fundraising conference? It was a remarkably common thread at this year’s Bridge. Of course we know we need to ask. But this year’s Bridge brought a heightened focus on the idea that inspiring donors to give isn’t merely a matter of asking; it’s a matter of being an organization that inspires. It’s also about building relationships. In our session on donor-centric communications, Evan Parker of The Nature Conservancy observed that his organization tends to achieve better constituent engagement – and giving – in their social media communications when they don’t ask, so much as they simply talk about the issues and the work.

2. Reinstatement is the new acquisition.
This gem came from Becky Odum of Barton Cotton. Excellent point.

3. The next big thing in fundraising: QR codes.
Or at least there’s a lot of excitement to this effect, and not just at Bridge. QR (“quick response”) codes are those funky looking barcodes that you can scan with your portable device. The codes, when scanned with your portable device, direct you to a mobile site. Think about the possibilities. Just yesterday, Mashable posted a story on how an activist group is using QR codes for a campaign to clean up the Gulf. To see a QR code in action, scan the code above and let me know what you think of the newly launched site ;).

 4. Internal list building is more mainstream; we’re still tweaking conversion.
Online internal list building as a means of augmenting traditional prospecting programs is becoming more mainstream. Most organizations at the conference, it seemed, now have formal programs of online name acquisition. But many are still ironing out effective conversion strategies and processes.

5. If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it. As Tony Elischer pointed out, most of us come to conferences looking for the new. New strategies, new media, new ways to improve our programs. But much of what we do works extremely well. We’d be well served to resist the brute “out with the old and in with the new” mentality and think instead about finding the small 5% or 10% of our program strategies that actually could benefit from the new.

What were your favorite Bridge Conference takeaways this year?

By , 07/29/10 • Posted in Membership Development • Tags: , , ,



15

Jul

5 Ways to Screw Up Your Next Direct Mail Campaign


 

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The road to direct response fundraising failure is paved with good intentions. Here are five ways you can really harm your direct mail results – so be sure to steer clear of these easily avoidable pitfalls as you start work on your fall appeals:

1. Mail early. If you want to stand out from the crowd, get ahead of them, right? Unfortunately it doesn’t work that way in year end fundraising. Successful direct response fundraising is about the right message, at the right time, to the right people. Sending a message at a time when no one is ready for it all but guarantees a weak response. The fact that organizations send year end appeals in the same timeframe doesn’t mean yours won’t get noticed; it means it’s a timeframe that works.

2. Mail late. Q4 is the single most important time of the year for fundraising. Why jeopardize critical funding for your organization’s programs with poor planning? Get started on your year end appeal in the first week of August.

3. Do something “different.” There’s good different and bad different in direct mail fundraising. Good different, for instance, might be recognizing that your control format isn’t performing as well as it used to and testing a proven direct response technique to help boost results such as hand addressing, or a follow-up reminder notice. Bad different, on the other hand, would be testing a completely unproven direct response idea suggested by someone whose direct response experience consists solely of receiving, and occasionally responding to, direct mail.

4. Make your campaign all about you. “The problem is our donors just don’t understand us. If we could make them understand us, I mean really get us, they’d give more.” Sound familiar? It’s the perennial lament of Development committees – and it’s totally backwards. If you want your campaigns to succeed, stop obsessing about getting your donors to understand you and start obsessing about understanding your donors. Forget about writing the perfect explanation of what your organization does and instead focus on making the perfect connection with your donors.

5. Don’t ask for money. It seems obvious, but it’s surprisingly easy to get so caught up in making the case for support that you forget to actually ask for money in your direct mail appeal. Make sure you have a clear, direct ask within the first few paragraphs of your letter and repeat it at least three more times throughout, and definitely in the p.s.

Do you have any do’s and don’ts to share? Cautionary tales? Stunning successes? Questions about improving your direct mail results? By all means, share them here, or drop us a line at topics@nthfactor.com.

By , 07/15/10 • Posted in Direct Response Fundraising • Tags: , ,



9

Jul

The Boss of You


Quick: who do you work for?

Most people, when asked this question, will automatically tell you the name of their employer: “I work for Acme Incorporated, where I’m the VP of Sales and Marketing” (or something like that).

But “who signs your paycheck?” wasn’t really the question. And you, of course, are not most people: your employer is a nonprofit.

This means you don’t work for the Chair of your Board. You don’t work for the person who supervises you. You don’t even work for the nonprofit that employs you.

You work for your organization’s donors.

Your donors believe in something, and they have hired YOU – and everyone else in your organization, from the Executive Director to the administrative assistant – to achieve their vision.

So the next time you sit down to write a membership renewal letter, or a cultivation newsletter, or a fundraising email, remember this:

You are writing to your boss.

For insights and ideas on communicating with your real boss, join me on July 27th in Washington, D.C. at the AFP / DMAW Bridge Conference, where Robin Kornhaber and Jeff Costantino from Legacy, Evan Parker from The Nature Conservancy, and I will be sharing helpful case studies and tips in our session Six Steps for Building Donor-Centric Direct Response and Communications Strategies. Hope to see you there!

By , 07/09/10 • Posted in Donor Communications • Tags: , ,



21

Jun

Looking for Membership and Advocacy Ideas?


MKDM‘s annual Idea Book is here!

Highlighting some of our most effective membership and advocacy campaigns for national and regional nonprofits, the book is part portfolio, part how-to guide, part idea-generator – and it’s yours for free.

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To order your free copy, email your name, organization/company and mailing address to ideabook@mkdmc.com.

By , 06/21/10 • Posted in Direct Response Fundraising • Tags: , , , , , ,



15

Jun

10 Ideas in 20 Minutes from Fundraising Day


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Last week, I spoke at Fundraising Day in New York with Dennis Lonergan and Jeff Brooks in the session 30 Ideas in 60 Minutes. If you weren’t able to catch our session, you can read the 10 tips I shared right here in Fundraising Success.

One excellent question we received during our session was how smaller organizations could go about testing the ideas we presented. Answer: many can’t conduct statistically valid tests (see Eliza’s earlier post about testing and statistical validity). Fortunately, you don’t need a large budget or donor file to implement a smart direct response program. 

Instead, let larger organizations “pay” for your testing by mirroring best practices demonstrated in their programs. Be sure to share your gratitude – and keep the ideas coming – by giving regularly to their programs.

By , 06/15/10 • Posted in Direct Response Fundraising • Tags: , ,



8

Jun

Want to lift your direct mail results? Unbrand.


When you really want to get noticed in the mail, sometimes – just sometimes – the best way to do this is to toss aside the things you usually do to get noticed.

Ditch your logo. Forget your official fonts. Chuck your PMS colors. Unbrand.

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Instead, think totally unembellished, pure and simple words on paper. Once a year, have a meaningful conversation with your donors undistracted by the usual marketing devices. You’ll likely find that occasionally un-marketing can be very good marketing indeed.

Join me this Friday June 11 at Fundraising Day in New York where Dennis Lonergan, Jeff Brooks and I will be sharing 29 more direct response fundraising ideas that can make a big impact in your program.

By , 06/08/10 • Posted in Direct Response Fundraising • Tags: , ,



24

May

So your donors don’t “get” you. What else is new?


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In membership development and advocacy, the things that deliver the best results don’t always align with an organization’s favorite way of speaking about itself or its work. Sometimes an organization’s most important programs or messages – the ones that strike at the very heart of its mission – are the least appealing to donors.

So what do you do when the messages you most want to convey don’t dazzle as many of your donors as you’d like?

  1. For starters, recognize it. Realize that there will always be some degree of disconnect between your organization and its donors. That donors don’t always “get” you isn’t even a problem to be solved, so much as it is a reality to be recognized.
  2. Keep on working to find the common ground between what represents your organization best and what excites its donors the most.
  3. At the same time, work on defining whether and how much your organization is willing to compromise on message for results and vice versa.

While you’re at it, think about your metrics for defining results. Because while you may think of results in terms of dollars raised and actions taken, your program director and even your executive director may occasionally have different definitions of success.

By , 05/24/10 • Posted in Membership Development • Tags: ,



9

May

A Lesson in Online Constituency Building From … Major Gifts


 

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The tools of traditional offline direct response fundraising produce terrifically concrete and immediate results. We solicit our donors, they respond, we measure our results. As the name itself implies, it’s a direct, largely black and white, medium. We either meet our fundraising goals or we don’t.

While direct response produces wonderfully immediate and measurable results, it can also produce not-so-wonderful linear thinking when it comes to membership development strategy. Every new media breakthrough brings out our dreamers just as much as it brings out our skeptics: “Sure (insert new media here) is all good and well,” they say, “but how do I actually raise money with it?”

Direct response is an excellent membership development tool, of course. And I believe that a healthy measure of skepticism can serve us well too. But we can also benefit from approaching new prospective membership development tools with a little imagination, and a little patience.

The good news is, as online constituency-building establishes its place in membership development, the direct response world is doing just this. It’s recognizing that there’s more than simply drawing a straight line from Solicitation to Gift. Our programs now embrace, or at least accommodate, the in-between state of participation – i.e. non-giving relationships centered around action, conversation, or other engagement – now made possible on a large scale online, as a deliberate first step on the path to giving.

Revolutionary? Not really.

Major gift fundraising – one of the earliest forms of development to be defined as the field became organized and professionalized many decades ago – has long practiced a staged approach to fundraising that is at the heart of today’s online constituency-building strategy. Its best practitioners share a number of qualities that can be uniquely instructional to us as we shape our approaches to identifying action-takers and converting them to donors online.

For instance …

Major gifts people are patient. They don’t look at their watches when they’re talking to a prospective donor. They never interrupt a good conversation with an ask.

Major gifts people embrace the journey. They trust that if they make it a good one, and travel with the right person, they’ll arrive at their destination.

Major gifts people are strategic. They always have a plan, and they are always thinking three moves ahead.

As we establish new models for direct response membership development encompassing online constituency building, let’s not forget that sometimes the most valuable models for our future aren’t actually new at all. They are alive and thriving in our present.

By , 05/09/10 • Posted in Online Giving & Action • Tags: ,



25

Apr

Your Strategic Planning Checklist for April


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For organizations with a July to June fiscal year, April is the time in your 12-month strategic planning cycle to fine tune details for your new fiscal year and start work on your summer-into-fall campaigns. Fortunately if you’ve stayed on top of your monthly tasks (sorry for posting this one late!), April should be a breeze:

1. Hold your Q3/Q4 interdepartmental strategy session. With the second quarter well underway, it’s time to start planning for Q3 and Q4 membership and advocacy campaigns. Assemble all the key program, marketing, communications and development people in your organization and hold a “blue sky” session on upcoming issues and how to talk about them with your members and prospects. Don’t worry about logistics and implementation (that’s next month). Just focus on ideas and “what ifs” for now.

2. Fine tune your FY11 membership plan. By now you have a solid draft of your campaign plan and budget for the new fiscal year. Continue collecting data, pricing and information to fine tune your FY11 performance goals and budgets.

3. Schedule interviews with prospective new vendors. By now you’ve also received proposals in response to any new vendor RFPs that you circulated last month. Review the proposals and schedule presentations with your top candidates for next month, with an eye toward selecting new vendors (or deciding to stay with existing ones) by the end of May.

4. Continue to monitor progress toward fiscal year end goals and adjust strategies if needed. If it looks like you’re not going to meet your fiscal year end goals, it’s not too late to do something about it. But the key is spotting problems now. If, by the end of April, you’re not on track to meet your fiscal year end goals, it’s time to rally a corrective campaign.

Stay tuned for your May strategic planning tasks from us next week.

And if you haven’t signed up already, be sure to register for the AFP’s Fundraising Day in New York on June 11 and the AFP/DMAW  Bridge Conference in DC July 26-28 – and stop by my sessions on membership development and donor-centric communications. Hope to see you there!

By , 04/25/10 • Posted in Development Planning • Tags: , , , ,



13

Apr

Rethinking Reinstatement


Good direct response membership programs put a great deal of effort into recapturing lapsed donors, constructing dedicated, and often complex, plans for special solicitation and monitoring of lapsed donors – a.k.a. The Reinstatement Program.

That’s because it’s almost always less expensive to reinstate a lapsed donor than it is to acquire a brand new one. Plus, reinstated donors often have a greater lifetime value than their counterparts. But for all the effort our programs put into saying “we want you back” to our donors when they’re practically gone, oddly enough, many don’t put the same effort into saying “stay” to the donors who are still on the fence. Nor do many programs define what being on the fence is, for that matter.

Do you wait for donors to lapse to focus special analytics, strategy and creative – i.e. a whole reinstatement program – on them? If so, rethink your reinstatement strategy, and think about starting earlier, by starting a PREinstatement Program.

Here are three steps to get you started:

1. Know the vulnerable times in your donor relationships with your organization. Preventing donors from lapsing means understanding when and why they typically lapse. For instance, a universally vulnerable time in the donor life cycle is immediately after a donor’s initial gift. What’s the relationship between recency and attrition for your organization? Look more closely at your donor giving data and you may find, for instance, that once a donor goes 13 months without giving, their likelihood of never giving again spikes significantly. Simply doing the analysis to quantify the relationship between recency and attrition is a huge step toward developing corrective strategies.

2. Develop and test strategies to prevent donors from lapsing. Now that you’ve identified the vulnerable times in a donor’s relationship with your organization, you can intervene. For instance, if you find that the 13-month giving lag tends to signify an ultimate lapse, think about what you can do to reengage donors who fit this particular profile. A standing preinstatement phone call, mailing, or email every month with a special offer to individuals who fit the profile?

3. Measure your results. After you’ve defined your preinstatement candidates and developed your preinstatement strategies, measure your results. Don’t be daunted if it takes a few different approaches to make an impact. Above all, measure your attrition rates before launching your preinstatement program and after. Though you are likely to improve results over time with testing, you’ll probably make your biggest impact right in the beginning, simply by recognizing and addressing pre-lapse signals.

By , 04/13/10 • Posted in Direct Response Fundraising • Tags: , , ,



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