Future Fundraising Now

Yet again: is direct mail dead?

One of my favorite pointless questions is "Is direct mail dead?" I'm glad to find someone else who also thinks it's a dumb question. Ken Burnett says the question is "fatuous and redundant" at Is direct mail finally dead?

Ken's take:

At its heart direct mail fundraising is not about direct mail. It's about one individual writing to another to describe an issue or cause they both care passionately about. If it is to work well, that written communication has to be engaging, compelling, urgent and important. Which means it has to be very well crafted. We may use technology and the postal service to convey our message simultaneously to hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people all at the same time. So what? That's just a technical organisational challenge.

There's some common sense. The truth is, direct mail might be dead, or maybe comatose, for some fundraisers whose pool of donors are younger or otherwise not responsive to mail. But for most, it's not dead -- it's not even particularly sick.

Fundraising is about connecting with people. You find the medium that connects you to the right people. If it works, it's not dead. Asking if direct mail is dead without first knowing a lot of other information is getting it backwards.

What to do if you aren't fundraising for Haiti

There's a lot out there on what you could and should do if you're raising funds to respond to the Haiti Quake.

What about the large majority of fundraisers who have no connection to the disaster? You're reading the articles about the outpouring of millions of donor dollars for the disaster -- and you're thinking This has to be coming out of our pockets!

Good news: It's not. Disaster giving is largely above-and-beyond giving. Any damage to your fundraising is likely small and short-lived. So for now:

• Don't panic. Stay the course. Changing your fundraising plan because you're afraid of Haiti fundraising is the worst thing you can do. Any negative impact you've suffered has already happened. Things will quickly return to "normal" for you.
• Don't get defensive. You might be tempted to unfavorably compare the importance of Haiti relief with that of your cause. Please don't. There's no absolute scale of Importance of Need in fundraising. There's just what donors feel in their hearts. Right now, Haiti is at the top of the list. Your argument against that will just look belligerent and ill-mannered. And nobody's asking you. If they do, just tell them to give as their heart leads and leave it at that.

Turn donors into real brand loyalists

In commercial marketing, one of the things everyone wants it lots and lots of "brand loyalists." That's people who just love whatever it is you sell, talk about it all the time, try to get their friends on board, and generally do your marketing work for you.

Some nonprofits have brand loyalists. Having more would be better.

The Social Business blog takes a look at getting regular customers to cross the line to brand loyalists at How to build an army of brand loyalists.

Here are their steps, along with my thoughts for how it might play out for nonprofits:

1. Add value first. Do something really cool and unusual for donors. Tell them out of the blue that their gift was multiplied by matching funds -- after the fact. Send them congratulations for making the world better. Just surprise them.
2. Listen. Find ways to talk to them and get them to tell you what they want out of their relationship with you.
3. Create a culture of responsibility. Make sure everyone in your organization who has anything to do with donors (and everyone else, while you're at it) owns the job of treating donors well.
4. Make a human connection. Do something other than mass marketing to them. Call. Email. Send a card. Just be human.
5. Promote your customers. Put your donors in your newsletter and on your website. Treat them like the heroes they are.

Give these things a try. It's a great way to really get donors on your team.

Thanks to @simonmainwaring for the tip.

25 Tips for Better Fundraising Copy

Here's my column in this month's FundRaising Success magazine, 25 Tips for Better Fundraising Copy.

Teaser: Be too dramatic. Too emotional. Too strong. Eight times out of 10, you'll realize later that you didn't overdo it at all.

Passionate about weak marketing

Here's a funny look at the fatuous claims of "passion" that so many marketers make these days:

Or you can watch it here.

How much nonprofit marketing is based on empty, self-centered phrases like "We're passionate about _____"?

Too much.

When you need to make public claims, make them meaningful, true, and unique. Just blurting out something like "We're passionate about online fundraising" is none of those things.

Thanks to Brand Camp for the tip.

How to make yourself into a loathsome spammer

It seems PETA screwed up in a very instructive way. On Twitter, the organization direct-messaged more than 150 mommy bloggers with the following message:

Never-b4-seen photos that will convince parents never 2 take their kids 2 the circus: http://bit.ly/7ha9NL

The link takes you to a site that reports to show people being mean to baby elephants. The goal, it seems was to ignite some buzz about how the circus is not a good place to take kids. Because the circus is mean to baby elephants while training them.

Poor move on PETA's part. Blogger Allie Sullivan reported the incident and comments at PETA Spam Wednesday? What Not To Do:

... when it comes to social media and audience development, you can't think of a "target audience" ... you must think about the people who you will be engaging with.... My advice to any company or organization would be "don't spam, don't spam, don't spam." It's pretty easy not to do and focusing your energy on the relationships you're building everyday with your supporters will be so much more rewarding in the end, trust me!

Most of us grew up on mass media, where our entire way of thinking is built around broadcasting information of our choice to audiences of our choice in hopes that enough of them will be motivated to make the effort worth our effort.

That's not how social media work. There, the foundation is relationship and offering value. It takes more time and effort to get the word out. In fact, you can only get the word out if people want the word; you are no longer in control in the new media.

Thanks to Adrants for the tip.

How not to sound like an idiot

There's a pretty good chance you sound like a complete idiot. Not you personally (I hope), but your organization's public communications.

Most advertising, direct marketing -- and fundraising -- uses a tone you'd never use with your friends. If you did, they'd laugh in your face. Or run away.

Really. Think of the junk that's freely scattered through copy. Like:

1. Phony superlatives, like "leading," "best," "most important."
2. Meaningless, high-flown claims, like "cutting-edge" and "pioneering."
3. Self-aggrandizement. Look-at-me copy that talks at donors, not about them.
4. Unnaturally long and complex sentences that abandon all pretense of human speech.
5. Bastardizations like © and ™.
6. Legal disclaimers and other CYA weasel talk.

It all adds up to a tone of voice that nobody would ever use in person. We used to get away with it. As long has our meaning was clear, the inhuman tone was tolerated or ignored. But that's changing. More people all the time are choosing to ignore fake, non-human marketing-language. They know it signifies irrelevance and semi-truthful claims. They prefer authentic, human conversations.

Your nonprofit organization is doing real things. There's no reason to sound phony when you talk about it. It's not like you're selling one of 12 kinds of virtually identical detergents. Be real!

Read your copy out loud. If it doesn't sound at least somewhat like speech, send it back for revision. And bypass the committee writing process. That will always make your copy sound inhuman.

You can't hide your bad attitude any more

Customers and donors seem to be developing psychic powers. It's as if they know what we're thinking. You can't put anything past them.

That's what we see in a recent post at Tom Peters' blog, Your Brand Can Only Be As Good As...

It's impossible to fake out your customers. Our world has become very transparent, and your customers can see, clearly, right into the soul of your company. If you want your customers to have clear, compelling, motivating beliefs about who you are and what you do for customers, you must ensure that your company's employees have those beliefs. Otherwise, your marketing and sales promises will not resonate with the reality of being your customer.

This matters for nonprofits too.

If your organization is full of people who think your donors are clueless dolts who are barely worthy of supporting you, it's going to show. Even if those people aren't involved in fundraising or marketing.

I bring up that example because I've seen that specific issue many times at nonprofits: While the fundraisers earnestly struggle to motivate donors to join the cause, a culture of anti-donor, we're-too-cool-for-those-ignorant-fogies disdain constantly undermines them.

It's the kind of stuff we used to get away with, because personality didn't really matter. But in a deeply connected world where people are suspicious of the messages they receive, you're going to get caught: It won't be dramatic or embarrassing; just a slow death by low response rates and tumbling retention.

If your organization has this cultural problem, your pain has probably already begun.

Study: Donors worry less than you do

If you want to be good at fundraising, get into the minds of older people.

Here's a study that'll help -- and it just might blow you away. It's from Gallup: Don't Worry, Be 80: Worry and Stress Decline With Age. Here's what they found:

... "worry" is a much more common emotion among young and middle-aged Americans than among seniors. Well over a third (37%) of those in their 40s report having experienced worry "a lot of the day yesterday." This figure drops to about 23% among those in their late 60s and drops further to 15% among those aged 91 and older.

Most of us would guess that age brings more worry: After all, there's more to worry about as you grow older: Health issues, limited income, seeing your friends die.... But apparently these things don't add up to increased worry.

Deeper analysis of the data pretty much rules out lifestyle factors (no children at home, no job, being more religious, being more likely to be female) as explanations for the lack of worrying.

Nope. Older people just worry less. Not because they have less to worry about, but because they think differently. Some combination of wisdom, perspective, and changing brain chemistry gives them a different way of handling the future.

Readers of this blog are overwhelmingly in their 20s to 50s. You're still a worry-wart.

So wrap your mind around this: Imagine your life being exactly the way it is, but you worry about things materially less. That would be a fundamentally different experience of reality. In some ways, it's a deeper and harder to bridge gap than the cultural differences we encounter when we travel.

I don't know what -- if anything -- lack of worry has to do with charitable giving. But I do know that this one issue signals that older people are different from me. (I'm in my peak worrying years.) It's an important reminder that you can't judge fundraising from the way it affects you.

Keep that knowledge in mind, and you'll automatically be one of the best fundraisers around.

Thanks to The Boomer Blog for the tip.

Free webinars about online fundraising

Got an hour to learn a few things about online fundraising? I'm going to be teaching an online webinar, offered by the fine people at Network for Good, on Tuesday, January 26 at 1 p.m. (Eastern). It's free.

It's called Three Big Screw-ups in Online Fundraising, and How to Avoid them in 2010. Here's what we'll cover:

1. Make sure you actual do your online fundraising.
2. Make sure you learn from your online fundraising.
3. Make sure you grow your online fundraising.

Details and registration here.

And this is just the middle session in a three-part series about online fundraising. The other two are:

Thanks a Million: How to Thank Your Donors So They'll Come Back and Give More with Katya Andresen. Tuesday, January 12 at 1 p.m. (Eastern). Details and registration here.

Ensuring Your E-Newsletters are Read - Not Dead - On Arrival This Year with Kivi Leroux Miller. Tuesday, February 9 at 1 p.m. (Eastern). Details and registration here.

Did I mention these are all free?