Future Fundraising Now

Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants

The Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants for this month is up, at Joanne's Nonprofits Blog.

How to make your nonprofit blog work

I've you have an blog, or you're thinking about starting one, don't miss this recent post by Britt Bravo at BlogHer: 10 Elements of an Effective Nonprofit or Do-Good Blog. The ten elements are here, but you'll want the details:

1. Make it easy to subscribe
2. Make it easy to share
3. Make it easy to put faces and names to blog posts
4. Make it easy to find out more information about your organization, or project
5. Make it easy to skim, but irresistible read
6. Link to other bloggers
7. Facilitate commenting
8. Post about a range topics (i.e. it's not just about you)
9. Engage your community and participate in other online communities
10. Track your impact

Podcast: Things to do that will make you a better fundraiser

Here are ten practical things you can do -- starting today -- that will make you into a better fundraiser:

1. Donate.
2. Send and receive snail-mail.
3. Sign up for lots of email from other nonprofits.
4. Participate in online social networking sites.
5. Hang around with older people.
6. Become aware of the cultural context of your audience.
7. Go to church.
8. Read the popular press.
9. Pay attention to how you ask people for favors.
10. Work at becoming a better writer.

You can start doing some of these things today.

To listen, click here to download the audio file or visit the Fundraising Is Beautiful page here, where you'll find several listening and subscription options.

Or subscribe with iTunes:

You don't really have that much empathy

Seth talks about the downside of empathy -- or rather thinking you have it when you don't.

Being certain about how someone else feels or what motivates them is foolish. Don't declare that you know exactly why someone made a choice or predict what someone is going to do next, and why.... you're probably going to be wrong.

Fundraisers do this all the time, making wild assumptions about how donors feel. Like this:

Donors are so ticked off by the large amount of mail we send, they're lapsing at higher rates than ever.

Maybe it's not the frequency of your mail. Maybe it's that your messages are dull and irrelevant. Maybe you aren't sending enough mail. You simply don't know how they feel. Your false claim of empathy will lead you to make possibly disastrous decisions, solving the wrong problem.

Even worse, we often project our feelings onto our donors. As in, I hate (or love) this message. That's exactly how other people are going to feel.

Not necessarily. In fact, your feelings about fundraising messages are likely a good counter-indicator of how your donors will feel.

The point is, you don't have enough empathy to accurately predict how donors feel about things. It's far better to gather facts about their behavior -- and act accordingly.

7-step easy template for a successful fundraising letter

Here are your simple instructions for a direct-mail fundraising letter that will raise buckets of money for your nonprofit organization:

1. Make a list of everything that's cool and praise-worthy about your organization.
2. Throw that list in the trash.
3. Write down everything that's cool and praise-worthy about your donors.
4. Figure out exactly what you want your donors to do.
5. Figure out why they would want to do it (given the ways in which they're cool) and write it down. (This piece of writing, by the way, is probably the P.S. of your letter.)
6. Repeat steps 4 and 5 a whole bunch of times.
7. Keep the best ones, string them together.

Congratulations! You have a darn good fundraising letter!

Domino effect: stupid nonprofit ad

Well, it's not as bad as their 9/11 vs. tsunami fiasco, but this World Wildlife Foundation ad achieves a noteworthy level of stupidity:

(Or watch ithere.)

The video was produced by a London ad agency, and that explains a lot: We see the danger of abstraction that ad agencies seem unable to keep out of nonprofit marketing. This video's task is a tough one: It seeks to motivate people to "get involved" in various campaigns, apparently by writing letters. That lack of specificity certainly makes it hard to craft a compelling call to action.

But reducing action to visual symbolism doesn't get people closer to action. It pushes them farther away.

When you write a letter, it's an act of communication. It goes somewhere and is read by somebody, who, we hope, takes a proper action as a result.

Your letter is not a big colorful domino that starts knocks over other colorful dominos, that begin knocking over bulldozers, slitting open fish nets, and rescuing a polar bear trapped on an ice floe.

The ad may be cool to look at, but reality -- boring old literal reality of people making the world a better place in specific ways -- is far more compelling. And far more likely to motivate people to action.

If you need to make a video that works to stir real people to real action, find someone who isn't bored with reality.

Thanks to Osocio for the tip.

Research is not a waste of time, money

News flash! Knowing what you're doing is good!

A recent story in the Chronicle of Philanthropy says so: Donor Research Plays a Key Role in College Fund-Raising Success, Study Finds ...

Colleges that win the most contributions ... have done so in part by spending more money than other institutions to hire full-time staff members to conduct research on alumni and other potential donors, according to a new survey.

Of course, that's like saying pedestrians who look both ways before they cross the street have a lower rate of getting hit by cars.

The study mentioned, by WealthEngine is available here: 2009 Best Practices in Prospect Research in Higher Education Fundraising (registration required).

Blocking social media at work is going to strangle you

If your organization is one of those that block employee access to social media sites, Shel Holtz' blog says Knock it off at Why the 54% of companies blocking access to social media should knock it off.

Some reasons:

• Access to social media improves productivity. ("Who died and put CIOs in charge of worker productivity anyway?")
• Blocking kills engagement.
• Access to social media is not an automatic invitation to viruses and malware.
• Millennials will not work for companies that block.
• Bandwidth is a bogus issue.

If you've got a problem employee you're afraid will while away the whole day on Facebook -- guess what: That guy is already spending the day playing solitaire.

Blocking social media virtually guarantees that you won't figure out the way fundraising is going to be done in the coming years. If that's what your IT people want, you need new IT people.

Open the window. Let the flowers bloom.

Thanks to FundraisingTwip on Twitter for the tip.

Design so people can read

Here's an excellent set of design principles from Direct Creative Blog: Design and legibility: 7 tips for high ad readership. The focus is on print (publication) ad design, but you'll find these things useful any time you're putting ink to paper with the intent of communicating clearly:

• Assist the left to right Eye Rhythm. (Using serif type, avoiding steeply angled type, not too wide leading.)
• Avoid unnecessary Fixations and generate necessary ones. (Only use things like italics, underlines, and bold subheads, where you want to eye to stop.)
• Work within the natural Eye Span. (Use narrow columns with 5 to 8 words per line.)
• Divide the copy into logical Thought Units.
• Stick to standard Configurations. (Don't use all caps or put spaces between letters.)
• Use Familiar type and layouts.
• Help the reader avoid Eye Fatigue. (Use large enough type, break up long copy into smaller chunks, indent paragraphs, use black type on white paper.)

These principles are widely ignored by designers in all fields. Your work will stand out if you pay attention.

Lots more details at the post. Don't miss.

Three things about donors' minds

Reminders of how donors (i.e. people) think in Katya Andresen's column this month in Fundraising Success magazine: You Talk, Donors Listen. Main points:

• Small, not big. The bigger the scale of what you're communicating, the smaller the impact on your audience.
• Hopeful, not hopeless. If your problem seems intractable, enormous and endless, people won't be motivated to help.
• True, not false. The more you talk about the myth, the more airtime it gets and the more people remember it.

Remembering these things will help you every time you set out to raise funds in any medium. Check it out.