Future Fundraising Now

Will they think you're incompetent if you say you need help?

Good question over at Jonathon Grapsas' blog: Need v incompetence? Will people think your organization is inept when your message to them is We really need your help?

Jonathan suggests a few ways to avoid the problem:

• Ask when you need the money, stop and feedback in between.
• Find the right times to show off your wares, announcing your successes.
• Do a terrific job explaining why you're unique and better than everyone else at least one thing.
• Ensure the execution of the ask is clear, concise and explains why you need help, right now.
• Get the balance right between asking (when there's a need) and non-asking.

That's all good advice. But let me suggest something else:

Don't assume anyone thinks less of you because you need help.

That's an utterly self-centered assumption, and generally the only people who even dream it up are executive directors and board members -- people who have personal pride wrapped up in the professional image of the organization.

The more common truth is this: Donors love it when they think they can make a difference, when they think their gift really, really matters. The question of your ineptitude hardly ever comes up. They know conditions are tough (even in the best of times), and they know your organization is doing a lot.

So go ahead and admit you need help!

What makes a Stupid Nonprofit Ad stupid?

A popular ongoing series on this blog, Stupid Nonprofit Ads, tends to generate a lot of controversy.

More then one commentator has correctly pointed out that I don't have response data on these ads, and quite properly asked how I can label them "stupid" when I don't know whether or not they actually worked. If they worked, then calling them stupid would just be, well, stupid.

Yes, I'm going out on a limb when I call these things stupid.

I could be wrong. It's happened many times.

But in the case of these Stupid Nonprofit Ads, I'm pretty confident I'm right. These ads are stupid, and their stupidity is of the type that will prevent them raising funds.

I've been in the fundraising business a long time. I've seen thousands of projects from the inside. And every time -- yes, every time -- a project has used cleverness and abstraction as its platform, it has failed. I'm not talking slight under-performance, but spectacular and utter failure.

The pattern is unambiguous. Talk to anyone with experience and they'll agree.

There's a lot of uncertainty in fundraising. Things that should work sometimes don't. Oddball projects that just don't look well-built sometimes work. Often, we can't find a reason for success or failure. If you've been in fundraising for a long time, you learn to be pretty agnostic about what's good and what's bad.

But ads like these stupid nonprofit ads are different. They look like they're going to fail, and they fail. Every time.

There are a lot of ways fundraising can be bad. It can be jargon-laden. It can be self-centered. It can be vague. It can be poorly written or designed. All of these things can cause it to do poorly and waste money. But these things won't get the "Stupid Nonprofit Ad" label from me.

I'm aiming at a certain class of badness in nonprofit marketing: The abstract, glib, usually agency-created sludge that just never seems to go away because ad agencies are good at selling what they do (even when they aren't good at what they do), and nonprofits are suckers for "glamour." They are part of the utterly corrupt ad agency award mill that robs billions of marketing dollars from nonprofits and for-profits alike.

I'm on the warpath against this stuff not because I hate it (I mostly don't), but because it's a scourge to fundraising, and it needs to be called out for the scam it is. Maybe we can save organizations from falling victim in the future.

If any of these ads motivated even a mediocre response, I will retract my label of "stupid." I'll just have to chalk it up to "fundraising can be strange." If you have inside knowledge of any campaign I've called out and can show me that it isn't actually stupid, I promise I will retract what I've said about it.

And if you have any nominations for the Stupid Nonprofit Ads category, send them my way!

Two kinds of fundraising

Here's good advice from Guerrilla Marketing for Nonprofits: Me Marketing vs. You Marketing.

Fundraising that focuses on the organization (and seldom works is "Me Marketing." The kind that works focuses on the donor: "You Marketing." You do it like this:

Put the people you want to reach into the picture and they will pay much closer attention to you. Every sentence needs to be about the reader and how their involvement will make a difference in your community. As you write your first draft of the copy on your website or brochure, start all your sentences with the word you. As you write and after you edit, you will have a very compelling message that resonates with your readers.

Amen. It takes a little more imagination to do You marketing. And it works best when you actually know who the You is. But it's how you do fundraising if you're serious about raising funds.

What happened in the first year

Yesterday, September 26, marked the one-year anniversary of this blog. I realize that's not important to you, so I hope you find something interesting in these first-year facts:

There have been 253 posts in the last year.

The very first post: When will the future start?.

The most-read post: 5 ways to know if a fundraising consultant is lying

The top five nations for readers of this blog:

1. United States
2. Australia
3. Canada
4. United Kingdom
5. India

The top referring site (other than search engines) is philanthropy.com (that's The Chronicle of Philanthropy and its blogs).

Fun facts about search terms people use to find this blog:

• By far, the most-often-searched term is "future fundraising now."
• This exact phrase -- "goal directed action people grasping objects people moving around" -- has sent 94 people to this blog. Go figure.

Other odd search terms used recently:

• "future fundraising now" = ugly
• an old cleshay
• do you have to know how to type in 6th grade
• how to catch a wild dog
• odd shaped buildings in seattle
• psychology people who underline everything they read
• stupidity makes people cute
• symbolic photo of absurdism
• what ever happened to jeff brooks
• what you do in 6th grade
• why don't i have empathy

Want more background? Read the about page.

Don't try to start lame conversations in social media

Do you see companies and nonprofits trying too hard to hang out with the cool kids on Facebook?

It's embarrassing. Mission Paradox Blog noticed it too, and reports at Fake Community about hearing the following on the radio:

Join the VISA Pre-Paid Debit Card Conversation on Facebook.

Really. Imagine someone with a perfectly straight face and completely non-ironic intentions thinking anybody wants to spend even one second of their life in a conversation about pre-paid debit cards, VISA or otherwise.

But we see nonprofits doing pretty much the same thing: Thinking their internal conversation about who they are and what they do will naturally become part of the conversations happening on Facebook.

It doesn't work. As Mission Paradox notes:

If what you have is self serving, or boring, or lazy, dumping it into social media will not magically turn it into something else. It's still self serving. It's still boring. This is why so many social media efforts fail...

Facebook is a compelling place. That's why more than 500 million people have signed up for it. But you don't become compelling just by showing up and opening your mouth.

Remember your mom's advice about making friends: "Talk to people about the things they're interested, not just the thing's you are interested in."

The 100-day countdown starts today

January 1, 2011, is 100 days away. If you haven't been counting, now is a good time to start. There are now 100 days until the first Baby Boomers turn 65. And starting that day, the Boomers just keep pouring into 65-hood every single day for the next 18 years.

This is a big deal for us.

While giving behavior typically starts to manifest meaningfully in the 50s, it really takes off around age 65. By all ways of measuring giving, the 65+ crowd are the champions. They give more, give more often, and are significantly more loyal to the organizations they support. When you have 65+ donors, you have the mother lode.

That's why January 1, 2011 is an important day for fundraisers. The good news: There are going to be more 65-and-up people than ever in the history of the world. The not-so-good news: These Boomers show some different behaviors and preferences than older generations. We'd better figure them out!

And say happy birthday to those leading-edge 65-year-old Boomers on January first!

You have to fail if you want to succeed

How much energy does your organization put into avoiding (and punishing) failure?

Probably too much. Successful organizations -- the ones that figure out new things and grow when others are shrinking -- Celebrate Failure as described at the Leadership Freak blog:

Celebrating failure creates environments where people dare to try. If all you do is punish failure your organization will always choose the safe path. You'll stagnate and die.... Celebrating failure includes rejecting finger pointing. When a project that you authorized fizzles, accept responsibility and honor those who worked hard but failed.

Most new ventures don't work out. Even those that do usually don't do so perfectly. If you're trying to engineer failure out of your experience, you're inevitably preventing success.

Let the failure happen. Learn from it.

Giving is about feeling good

Lori Jacobwith's blog reports on a comment Seth Godin made about fundraising: Feeling good is what nonprofits sell.

His comment was helpful. Here's part of it:

Transactions pull people apart. Gifts pull people together. What may hold a staff back is the inability to relate authentically to the person who gets asked for money every day. The act of giving adds meaning to our work. And many social profit CEOs don't often GIVE the investor or potential investor a way to feel good.

In fact, a lot of people in nonprofits assume giving feels bad! So they make one of two errors:

1. They create fundraising messages that artificially (and pointlessly) try to make people feel good by never mentioning there's a problem or need or urgency of any kind. This, of course, doesn't work. Donors just don't respond to being told they aren't needed.
2. They just go for the bad feeling. They help create the impression that everything sucks all the time. All is dark, and you'd better give right now. You can raise money with this approach. But you tend to pay for it in lower retention as donors get the impression that giving doesn't really make a difference.

If you remember what Seth says -- giving brings us together, makes us feel good -- you're free to do fundraising right:

• You respect donors enough to let them know when things are tough, when their giving could make the difference between failure and success.
• You also remember to give the donors hope. You tell them their investments in you pay off in a better world.
• When the news is bad, you share the bad news. But you also share the good news.
• And you never forget that fundraising is not about you: It's about them.

Print ad unplugs a flood of nonprofit stupidity

Leave it to an ad agency to make sure nobody knows what you're talking about, even when you're talking about something everybody knows about.

You only need look at the agency's homepage to see that abstract, incompetent messaging was inevitable for this project.

The winner they came up with is a nearly full-page newspaper print ad done for the Canadian Red Cross.

It's true that many fundraisers have struggled to communicate the crushing scope of the flooding in Pakistan. (There are some unfortunately predictable reasons for this; read about them here.)

But the main reason donors aren't pouring our charity into Pakistan like they did with Haiti, is the disaster there seems less real.

You might think a solution to that problem would be to find a way to make it more real, wouldn't you? Well, the ad agency that fleeced Canadian Red Cross this time took a rather different approach: Make it less real.

Yep, the Geniuses of Abstraction felt the best way to use nearly a full newspaper page of space wasn't a heart-wrenching photo, wasn't a headline that captured the pain and urgency of the crisis, wasn't copy that pulled the reader viscerally into the situation. Their solution was a cute visual pun.

Actually, I'm not sure it even rises to the level of a pun. In what way does letters falling down the page recall a catastrophic flood that devastated the lives of something like a third of one of Earth's most populous nations? The little red cross acting as an umbrella? Isn't that kind of like illustrating the Haiti earthquake by showing a picture of maracas?

And if all that weren't bad enough, the tiny bit of copy makes several basic rookie copywriting mistakes:

Don't let hope get washed away. We are on the ground, providing aid to flood victims in Pakistan. And we need your support.

An abstract slogan, followed by two look-at-us sentences. Not how you motivate giving. It's never worked before, and it's not going to work this time.

I understand the frustration. This was a big disaster. Not nearly enough funds were raised. Sadly, given the circumstances, even a well-constructed ad wouldn't have performed the way it should.

But no matter how frustrated you get, don't call in the abstract fairy dust that the ad agencies sell. It's just going to waste time, money, and good will.

Update: This ad has won an award! So it has accomplished its purpose. Too bad that's about all it will ever do.

Thanks to Osocio for the tip.

More stupid nonprofit ads.

The Slow and Boring Path

Here's my column in this month's FundRaising Success magazine, The Slow and Boring Path.

Teaser: "When you faithfully walk the slow and boring path, you increase your chances for exciting breakthroughs. The slow and boring path puts you in fertile situations where you can take advantage of rare opportunities."