Future Fundraising Now

Show donors the world without their giving

You might be able to persuade more people to give by talking about what isn't than by telling them what is.

A recent study, reported at the Neuromarketing Blog, looked at the impact of "counterfactual reflection" -- visualizing what would have been: Build Loyalty like George Bailey.

Subjects were asked to reflect on how the US came into being. Half of the subjects were asked to reflect on what their world would be like if the country hadn't come into being. (This is called "counterfactual reflection.") The other half were told to think about what their world is like because the country did come into existence (factual reflection). The subjects who were told to imagine the "what if the country hadn't come into existence" scenario demonstrated higher levels of patriotism in subsequent testing than those that reflected on their actual situation.

Counterfactual reflection comes naturally into charity conversations. Especially when we thank donors, we should be very clear about what things would have been like without their gift.

But probably more important is how you ask in the first place. Most nonprofits put a lot of energy into proving their value by describing the good they are doing. It would be more effective to help the potential donor see a world without their work. Unsolved problems. Unmet opportunities.

This is also why bad news raises more funds than good news.

Find the original study here.

Podcast: The two big trends in fundraising today

For the second installment of our new State of Fundraising series of podcasts, we interview Bill Jacobs of Grizzard, whom you can frequently read at Grizzard's Blog. Bill talks about two massive changes that are hitting the fundraising industry: The arrival of Boomers in their prime giving years and the way donors now respond to our fundraising as they please -- not necessarily in the ways we want them to. (Up to a third of response to direct mail comes in through channels other than mail!) If we don't respond to these huge and growing trends, we are in deep trouble in the coming years.

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:

Celebrate the gap between marketing and the real world

This is a fun and funny blog that everyone in every kind of marketing should follow: Things Real People Don't Say About Advertising.

It's easy for us to get wrapped up in our professional worlds. We can forget that our job is to be meaningfully present and relevant in our donors' worlds -- not to pull them into ours.

When it's okay not to be nice

Many years ago, I had a client, many of whose staff were members of a Roman Catholic religious order. They were impressive people. But one thing about them really caught my attention: among the vows they'd taken (which included vows of chastity and of poverty), they had taken vows of charity. One stricture of this vow was that they didn't criticize others.

I've thought a lot about that. What a challenging, life-transforming thing, to make a holy vow not to criticize others. Imagine the kind of person you could become.

Well, there's more than one side to everything. Turns out among those they couldn't criticize were their leaders. This allowed bad behavior to go unaddressed, and a scandal festered in the organization for years, leading to predictably bad ends for everyone. The Pope has since rescinded their vow of charity, as it clearly did more harm than good.

Charity is a good thing. But so is criticism.

All this to say, I won't be taking a vow of charity any time soon. And neither, thank goodness, will The Agitator, as announced at No More Mr Nice Guy:

Increasingly the world is counting on NGOs to do their thing in a timely and competent fashion. And increasingly this simply isn't happening. Too many nonprofits have grown bureaucratic, defensive, risk adverse and lazy. We plan to get specific and put the spotlight on the idiocy of incompetence, timidity, and sloth.

It's easier to aim a withering critique and something than it is to fix it. And in the nicey-nice world of nonprofits, sharp criticism is outside the norm. I know that, because I get the complaints when I go after something like a stupid nonprofit ad. And most complaints are from people not targeted by the criticism.

I'm with Tom and Roger. Fundraising is too important to sweep badness under the rug. There are common destructive practices that need to be scorned and/or laughed out of existence, and criticism is the first step in doing that. I don't plan on being either more or less of a nice guy than I was before.

What innovation looks like

What does innovation look like?

Well, it has a thousand faces. It'll be a lot easier to tell you what innovation doesn't look like:

Innovation doesn't look like things you've seen before. That's because innovation is by definition new.

That means with innovation there's:

• No precedent.
• No guarantees.
• No best practices.

If you insist on having those things, don't look for innovation.

Donors in the mood

Great list of things that encourage donors to give, at Katya's Nonprofit Marketing Blog: Things that put people in the mood for ... doing good. People do good:

1. When other people around them are doing good.
2. When they have a personal tie to a cause.
3. When someone they know asks them.
4. When the person asking for support has a personal tie to his or her cause.
5. When they feel hope.
6. When they believe they can make something better for one person (or animal).
7. When they want to feel good about themselves.
8. When they feel sympathy.
9. When they've done good before.

Some of these conditions you can't create; they must pre-exist in the donor. But some you can create or encourage by what you say and show.

Numbers 1, 4, 5, 6, and sort of 9 are up to you. Are you making those things happen?

Alphonse, the New Media Guy

Maybe you've seen this guy give a presentation on how nonprofits should be harnessing new media.

He has an amazing ability never to finish a thought. Which probably explains his strange hypnotic power over some organizations; if he ever actually completed an idea, the emptiness of what he was saying would be obvious to everyone.

(Or see it here.)

What focus groups can and can't tell you

Focus groups can be fun. They can even be useful. But you have to be careful, or they can lead you terribly astray. Check out The Assorted Pleasures of Focus Groups and M&Ms at AH&A's Industry Voices.

The important point:

If you strictly relied on focus groups to determine your strategy, you would probably suspend all of your direct-mail efforts based on the responses you receive. Even the most generous direct-mail donors will say they hate to receive direct mail. They always will say the letters are too long, even though many actually are more likely to respond to long letters.

That's exactly my experience with focus groups. If you take their opinions as marching orders, you'll set yourself up for a train wreck.

The trick is to listen carefully to how they say what they say. That's how you learn the ways non-experts think about and talk about your cause and issues.

At nearly every nonprofit focus group I've observed, somebody says more bang for my buck. The phrase tends to spread through the group and get repeated many times. That tells me two things:

1. The idea of impact is very important to many donors.
2. The phrase more bang for my buck is a very common way for them to think about impact.

Which leads to two important and useful fundraising tactics:

1. Talk about and create offers that focus on donor impact. This is why matching grant offers are so dependably powerful.
2. Specifically say things like, "This will give you more bang for your buck."

That's the kind of thing you can get from a focus group.

Read a parody of a nonprofit focus group here.

How older donors (that is, donors) think

If you're realistic, you know that fundraising is a form of "elder marketing." So realistic fundraisers will appreciate this post from Engage:Boomers: 10 Behavioral Distinctions Of Older Customers.

1. Increased individualism
2. Increased demand for facts
3. Increased response to emotional stimuli
4. Less self-oriented, more altruistic
5. Increased time spent in making purchase decisions
6. See fewer differences between competing products
7. See more differences between competing companies
8. For discretionary purchases, decreased sensitivity to price, but increased sensitivity to affordability
9. Increased price-sensitivity in nondiscretionary spending
10. Often project what seems to be contradictory behavior

Number 4 is why the ranks of donors are dominated by older people. Many of these other distinctives give us clues for strong fundraising from this critical group.

Number 1 helps explain why charity fads (like colored armbands) can make a huge splash, but don't have staying power. Older people aren't as susceptible to fads.

Number 2 tells us why giving specifics makes fundraising work so much better. Sure, donors like the cause. But they need solid information to push them over the line and make the gift.

Number 3 points out the importance of using stories and images to make the case for donors.

Number 5 may help us understand the staying power of direct mail for fundraising. It's just a much "slower" medium than almost any other, allowing the donor to spend as much time considering the offer as she wants.

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.