Book review: Badass: Making Users Awesome by Kathy Sierra
Your donors are awesome. They are badass world-changers.
Does donating to your organization feel badass?
It should!
This book can help you change the way donors feel about donating. Giving to your organization could be exciting, life-affirming, beyond-the-normal, something donors are tempted to brag about. Badass.
As this excellent book maintains, it involves a change in the way we talk about what we offer donors:
It's not about our organization, our cause.It's not about how the donor feels about us.
It's about how the donors feels about herself, in he context of what our cause and our work helps her to do and be.
(I edited this to make it about nonprofits and donors.)
It's become fairly commonplace to say Fundraising is about donors, not about us. Badass challenges us to take it a step further: How do we make our donors feel what a big deal they are? How do we position giving to our organizations deeply and viscerally internal to each donor -- so we aren't just telling them they're heroes, but they know it?
This book starts your thinking. And it may take you to very new places.
Badass is not aimed at fundraisers. If you're looking for a bunch of easy how-to-raise-more-money tips, you'll be disappointed. It's aimed at people selling products that requires some level of mastery to use (the examples are things like high-end cameras and snowboards). But if you put your imagination to work, you may be able to leap across the gap and apply badass thinking to fundraising.
This is a quick, easy read. The only thing that will slow you down is how often you have to step and just think about what you've read. Highly recommended for smart fundraisers who are ready to take the next step.
Available here at Amazon.
