Future Fundraising Now

How to create ideas that make a difference

Some of my coolest ideas have little chance of making a difference in the world. Because they're complicated. I understand them, but nobody else does.

MarketingProfs Daily Fix Blog points out the difficulty of this situation at Want Your Idea to Be Loved? Keep It Simple:

A great idea is only great when others can understand it and easily act on it. The best ideas are similar to magic; they are amazing yet easily understood on the surface. In a time of an overwhelming abundance of information, data, and options, the more efficiently you can explain your strategy, the better it most likely is.

If your idea is still complicated, it's not finished.

Handwriting on paper is a key to creative success

I thought it was the case, and now there's a study -- reported in Fast Company at The Pen Is Mightier Than The Phone: A Case For Writing Things Out -- that bears me out.

Writing, on paper, using a your own hand, is often better for creativity and for thinking than typing! It's also better for remembering:

By committing your thought to paper, you're also doing more to lock it into place. ... as your hand executes each stroke of each letter, it activates a much larger portion of the brain's thinking, language, and "working memory" regions than typing, which whisks your attention along at a more letters-and-words pace.

For me, every important project I work on has a significant part of its life as ink scrawled onto paper.

Don't let those handwriting muscles atrophy!

Easy ways for fundraisers to stay creative

Here are some great tips for increasing your ability to stay creative, inventive, and fresh-thinking, from The 99% blog: 8 Counter-Intuitive Ways to Improve Your Well-Being & Creativity:

1. Eat breakfast.
2. Sit less.
3. Exercise in the middle of the day.
4. Get an office pet.
5. Shorten your commute.
6. Use ALL of those vacation days.
7. Distance yourself from the problem. (Mentally put yourself far away from it; you'll see it differently.)
8. Explore your dark side. (Negative emotions like anger and sadness can sometimes propel you forward creatively.)

I can vouch for most of these things. They really do work.

How fear of failure strangles your fundraising

Please read this post at TomorrowToday: Innovation: Failing into the Future. The main message: failure is not an option; it's essential if you want to succeed.

You see, almost all new ideas are bad. And not all bad ideas are obviously bad -- you simply have to try them out to see if they're bad or good. If you don't try out a lot of ideas, you won't find the good ones.

The problem is that most of our organizations have been built to ward off failure at all costs, built around the recognition and rewarding of success. This mindset and practice permeates both the formal and informal structures and it is both tacit and implied.

Are you dedicated to avoiding failure? If you are, please note this: You are also dedicated to avoiding real success. As long as failure avoidance is your motive, your success is going to be limited to things someone else discovered in the past -- in some other time when failure was tolerated.

And most things that work in fundraising slowly lose effectiveness over time. So until you develop a taste for failure, you are on a downward glide-path.

Every success comes after a string of failures. In general, the bigger successes follow more failure.

So embrace failure. It's how you succeed.

Give yourself time to be creative

Isn't it great? You never have to be apart from your email, the news, celebrity gossip, or stupid, angry political discourse.

It's not great at all. It's ruining our ability to think new thoughts, have ideas, be creative. We're always plugged in, always running like hamsters in wheels, but never getting anywhere.

That's the important point in a recent article at The 99 Percent: What Happened to Downtime? The Extinction of Deep Thinking & Sacred Space.

The article is worth reading, because it offers suggestions for creating your own "interruption-free spaces." It prescribes these things for people who need to keep space in their lives for being creative:

1. Rituals for unplugging. Create ways to separate yourself from the stream of information and activity. Think Sabbath.
2. Daily doses of deep thinking. Spend some time every day just thinking.
3. Meditation and naps to clear the mind.
4. Self-awareness and psychological investment. We often avoid silence and thinking because we'll have to confront ourselves. Deal with those issues that keep you from being quiet. So you can be quiet.
5. Protect the state of no-intent. Sometimes the best path forward is to stop running ahead. Just do nothing for a while.

Thanks to Kivi's Nonprofit Communications Blog for the tip.

The danger of being more creative

Be more creative!

I hate it when people say that.

I'm all for creativity. No question, we need more of it. Everywhere -- business, government, and especially nonprofits.

The idea of being more creative should get us excited, like a racehorse at the starting gate. We should feel freedom and energy to tackle challenges in new ways, to think big, to broaden our horizons.

But it seldom works that way when someone says Be more creative.

Because, sadly, what "be more creative" really means, almost every time you hear it, is this: Do the work in a way nobody has ever done it before.

Examples of what "be more creative" has meant in real-life fundraising:

• Leave out the reply coupon. It's not creative.
  
• Don't ask donors for specific amounts of money. That's old hat.
• Let's stop doing boring old uncreative direct mail. Social media is way more creative.

In other words, "I'm bored with the conventions. I want change."

That's not freedom. It doesn't help you think big. It never opens up new vistas. It's just a ticket for the express train to fundraising failure.

Here's why: When you ignore the body of knowledge we have about fundraising and about donors, your chance of spectacular failure skyrockets. No matter how "creative" it is.

An inexperienced tennis player hates the net. It's just in the way; you keep hitting the ball into it. And don't get me started about the boundary lines -- the game would be so much more fun without them!

An experienced tennis player loves the net. And the lines. Because they give the game shape, focus, and speed.

The truly creative fundraiser works with the knowledge we have. It gives focus to your creativity and innovation.

So be more creative. But in the smart, innovative, knowledge-based way.

The easiest way to make your fundraising work better

Fundraising is hard. But there's one extremely easy way to make yours much, much better. This little-known but amazing technique is uncovered in Karen Zapp's Nonprofit Blog at Quickest way to KILL response.

The secret? Don't write or review fundraising copy by committee.

Really, that one move will raise your quality to astounding heights. Because committees are always destructive to clarity, emotion, power, and everything else you need for fundraising.

It goes like this:

Each person makes changes based on their personal preferences, whether based on data from testing or not. Besides that, how many members of this committee are representative of your target audience?

Don't believe me? Test it. It will work.

Fire your committee.

How to get creatively unstuck

If you're a normal human being, you sometimes get stuck while working on projects, especially at the beginning. Here are some good hints from The Nth Factor for ways to get going: Eight Ways to Jump Start Your Fundraising Creative:

1. Go to work -- on the program side -- for your organization for a day.
2. Reverse the way you build your case for support. Start narrow -- tell a single story conveying your impact on an individual level -- and then expand to the larger discussion of what your organization is doing.
3. Check your idea file.
4. Share with and learn from other nonprofits and colleagues.
5. Read up. What's going on in the news about your issues?
6. Remember that donors don't want to hear about your programs; they want to know what you accomplish.
7. Spend an hour with your results. Data is one of the best places to look for messaging and campaign ideas.
8. Take a walk.

I can vouch for these; I do most of them regularly. You'd be amazed at the power of taking a walk.

Unchain yourself from your desk for better work results

Sometimes working at your desk just doesn't work. So heck, just stop working there. Work someplace else. That's the idea from The 99% blog, at Are You An Armchair Creative?

That's right, just sit in a comfy chair. No laptop, no phone, just a notebook and a pen. Or nothing at all:

The armchair takes me into a different space, where my mind can drift and I can see the big picture of the projects I'm working on, notice the patterns that emerge and my gut feeling about the best way forward. When I get up from the armchair, everything is clearer and sharper. My body feels lighter, and more energized. And I get a hell of a lot done when I return to the other chair.

A change of posture, a change of scenery -- can change your outlook and restart stalled or stale thinking.

It really works wonders. Don't worry about what your coworkers say. You'll do better work if you have the courage to break away from your desk.

Yes, you need to get out of the office -- probably right now

If your office is like most offices, it's not a good place for doing your best work. Check out 100 Reasons Why You Don't Get Your Best Ideas At Work at the Heart of Innovation blog. That's right, 100 reasons. Here are just a few of them:

• Too many distractions and interruptions.
• Boring meetings that put you in a bad mood.
• It's too noisy.
• You are too busy deleting spam.
• Your office or cubicle feels like a jail cell.
• You're too busy filling out forms.
• Not enough coffee.
• There's a call on Line 2.
• You have to stay focused on the "job at hand".
• Those bright, annoying, overhead fluorescent lights.

I sometimes wonder if modern office design is part of an al Qaeda plot to bring down the West through stifled creativity and crushed productivity.

A solution? Have other places you can go to get stuff done, to think, to dream, to concentrate. That can make all the difference.