Welcome to my personal blog on Robin Hood Marketing—the concept of stealing corporate savvy to sell just causes—and my life as a marketer, from Washington DC to Madagascar to points in between.
Who gives money online?
Posted by katya on Thu, November 16, 2006
Network for Good did a study (get it for free here with 10-second registration) that found:
Online givers are young (38-39 years old) and generous, giving several times more than offline donors on average.
Men and women give online in equal numbers.
Virtually all of online givers (96%) have given to charity before, but a sizable proportion (38%) is new to online philanthropy.
Online giving is tracking to the trends of online shopping and banking, and it is the avenue of choice for donors during disasters.
Most people give online during the week, during business hours – most commonly, between 10am and noon.
New York is the most generous state for online giving; Mississippi and North Dakota are the least generous.
Giving online follows the same “long tail” phenomenon seen in online sales of books and music.
Most online giving goes to disaster agencies, followed by animal-related causes.
Top searches are disaster related, plus “children,” “cancer,” and “homeless.”
Small organizations benefit from listings on aggregation sites; at network for good, half of dollars go to small-medium sized charities.
People say they give online because it’s easier than writing a check and a fast way to respond to disasters.
The highly recommended Blue Sky Collaborative blog posted the following interesting, provocative and funny comment on our research, and it’s worth sharing:
The growth of online giving is in fact not a surprise at all. Neither is the fact that online giving follows the same trends as online banking. Here we see the 10 year rule in effect. Results from a 1996 Booz Allen Hamilton Internet Banking survey showed the average cost of different types of bank transactions:
10 years later, which is about the lag-time for the nonprofit sector to adopt technology and innovation, NFG gives us data on average costs per type of donation.
Online Donation: $.05
Telephone Donation: $.63
Direct mail solicitation: $1.25
The 10 year gestation period for technology to enter the nonprofits sector may in fact be an opportunity for entrepreneurs. Think about it. If you’re at a startup in mobile technology or internet TV, or some other hot market right now and things don’t work out, YOU DON’T HAVE THROW EVERYTHING AWAY! Just zip it up and launch it again in 2016 targetting nonprofits. Coming in 2017 - Nano for Nonprofits, Mobile Donations, Nonprofit Robots that can fill out 990’s while shaking down major donors.
People aren’t signing up or giving money? Maybe your call to action isn’t prominent enough. Or maybe it’s not crystal clear. Or maybe you’re not asking for the right thing. Put your materials, web site or appeals in front of you and ask yourself:
1.) Specific: Ask for one concrete action. Telling people to click on a button to donate now is better than asking them to participate in a fundraising campaign. Asking parents to read to their children for 15 minutes every night is better than asking them to support reading readiness. Specific actions are easier to do – and harder to decline.
2.) Feasible: For most people, if the action doesn’t seem doable, they won’t do it. “Save the earth” does not sound like something any one person can do easily. Make the step you’re requesting small and easy, such as “put your plastic in your curbside recycling bin on Tuesdays”. You can build up to bigger requests once you have initial momentum of compliance.
3.) Filmable: A good test of whether your call to action is simple and specific enough is to ask if it would be possible to film the audience taking the action you desire. If you don’t have a simple visual, your audience won’t. I can’t picture myself as being against a legislative bill, but I can see myself writing to a member of Congress via an email form.
4.) First Priority: Make sure what you’re asking for is an action that, if people did it, would significantly and immediately advance your marketing goals and your mission. If your call to action will only “raise awareness,” take it one step further. We want people to DO something that will truly make a difference for your organization. Are you asking for the right thing? The Truth Campaign got teens to quit smoking by asking them to rebel and act out more than asking them not to smoke. Here’s an interesting guerrilla marketing campaign launched by YouthAIDS today that asks people to put “kick me” signs on each other. Check it out - it’s an unusual call to action and an intriguing application of these principles. Tell me what you think. Will it work?
Below is the first in an occasional series of guest-star blogs from smart people with something interesting to say. Beth is very clued in to all things technology and oft-cited on this blog. And we share a Cambodia connection - I worked for Reuters there from 1996-98. Here’s your chance to hear from her and give your opinion.
Photo: thanks to Flickr’s NCDD, a glimpse of the always-wired Beth Kanter.
I’m Beth Kanter of Beth’s Blog and I’m honored and delighted for the opportunity to be a guest blogger on Katya’s awesome nonprofit marketing blog. I’ve worked as a nonprofit technology since 1993, mostly as a trainer, evaluator, and researcher and most recently as a blogger. My bio is here.
I’d like to share my widget fundraising experiment with you and get your advice on how to do this better. So, think of me as one of your organization’s supporters who has grabbed your organization’s widget and set it up on my blog. What advice would you give to your supporters so they are successful in a group fundraising campaign. What do I need to think about? What is the checklist? What should I try doing? What internal issues does this bring up for you? We had an interesting discussion at our board meeting about all this and I’ll share that shortly ...
What a deal! I’ll make all the mistakes, potentially look stupid, and we’ll reap the benefits of learning together!
Some Context
One comment that Katya made about fundraising widgets that struck in mind is that it is about the messenger, not the organization. So, let tell you why our family is passionate about supporting Leng Soparath, a young Cambodian woman, for her college education.
I’m the parent two wonderful children, Harry and Sara, who were adopted as orphans from Cambodia. My children have food everyday, clothing, go to school, have toys (probably too many), and many other necessities of life that we often take for granted. When we were in Cambodia, many Cambodian people came up to us and said “Your child is lucky!” We would reply, now we’re lucky parents. But in some respects, they were right. The infant mortality rate in Cambodia is very high, so my children are lucky to be alive.
When we adopted our beautiful children, we also adopted their birth country. We have embraced Khmer culture and we also feel a responsibility to give something back to the country, particularly to seriously disadvantaged children in Cambodia. Soon after coming home with our first child nearly seven years ago, I volunteered for the Sharing Foundation, an ngo that works directly with local officials, orphanages, and NGOs in Cambodia to identify and carry out projects which improve the lives of children. I now serve on the board.
There’s lots of could tell you about TSF and I encourage you to visit the web site so you can get an sense of the scope of the good work this organization does. One of its focus areas is education. Over 1,300 children in Cambodia receive educational support every day as a result of The Sharing Foundation initiatives. The Foundation has increasingly focused its efforts on ways to create and improve educational opportunities for Cambodian children of all ages, including public school projects, pre-school, Khmer literacy, English language instruction, high school and college sponsorships, and vocational training. These projects present what might be the only means for the most disadvantaged children to life themselves, as well as their families, out of poverty conditions, become self-reliant and lead more productive, hopeful lives.
The Foundation is now its second year of college sponsorships. Last year, our family stepped forward to sponsor Leng Soparath, an orphan from Kampong Speu orphanage. For a gift of $750 annually, TSF is able to cover her college fees and living expenses. (It is a stretch for us ... we’re not rich but this could make such a difference in the life of one young person) In addition to money, we provide emotional support and encouragement through regular letters and photographs that we exchange. Our letters are hand-carried to Cambodia by Sharing Foundation’s 76-year old founder, Dr. Nancy Hendrie. Watch the video for more information.
I’ve also documented our correspondence with Leng Sopharath in flickr (here, here, here, and here).
While TSF has paid staff, Cambodians, in Cambodia to manage all its programs, the work done in the US (primarily fundraising) is all volunteer-driven. Almost of the money raised comes from grassroots efforts and primarily done offline as well as some web fundraising. (See these wonderful examples.) So, when I saw the fundraising widget, it looked like a natural extension of the type of grassroots fundraising that we’ve been doing offline. And I might add that our family has made a commitment to sponsor Leng Soparath through graduation and we ask our friends, family, and colleagues to help us. Even my kids contribute money from their piggy banks and direct birthday money to the effort.
Now what? What are the ten things I need to do have in place to make this a success? Post your response as a comment or send me a track back. I’ll summarize the advice and share it back both here and at my blog.
As they say in Cambodia, ARKOON, which in Khmer means thanks.
PS If you want to read how important education is Leng Sopharath, read this letter from her.
Our esteemed colleague Nancy at Getting Attention has a terrific nonprofit marketing carnival today with everything you ever wanted to know about social networking. (A carnival just means a bunch of bloggers writing on a theme.) She says:
This traveling Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants brings you the best blog postings on nonprofit issues. For this week’s event, I asked bloggers to advise on how already over-taxed nonprofit communicators can handle the ever-expanding menu of communications channels, especially social networking tools, and what social media have the greatest potential for nonprofits.
My post of last week is featured, along with work by bloggers smarter than I am on the topic! Highly recommended reading.
I got some heated reaction to my last YouTube post, so I am ready for some more! Reader of this blog, Kelley has shared her new spot for 18-34-year-old YouTube viewers to encourage recycling. I really like it, because it’s entertaining (and you gotta be on YouTube). And it provides a reward for taking action. That’s my mantra - you have to give people an immediate, relevant, personal reward for taking the action you ask. This spot tells us we get the benefit of not looking like a lazy fool. I think it works—do you?
UPDATE 11/14
Wise Scott of Catalyst has such a good comment I’m elevating it to a PS to my post:
If a Great Environmental Ad Plays in the Forest and No One is There to Hear It.... Does it Really Matter?
This is a great ad - but like many non-profits if there is no marketing strategy you have wasted valuable time and resources.
While YouTube may seem like a phenomenon - it is not! People that have networking skills and list building skills thrive. And those that do not… do not!
I cannot emphasize this enough. Simply putting out an ad on YouTube does not drive traffic to the ad. Organizations need to drive traffic to the ad themselves… and people need to start forwarding the link to their friends in order to generate buzz.
I know this seems like obvious stuff… but shockingly few organizations spend money in marketing these campaigns or generating buzz about their new ad.
Organizations need to do more to get young voters engaged in their cause than simply put up an ad on YouTube.
I recently confessed on this blog that I had to throw out the first half of my book because it wasn’t very good and start over mid-way through my writing process. Here’s an analogy from the cutting room floor that I did like: a map of Sherwood Forest as the map for reaching our audiences. In the middle of it is the marketing territory we sometimes want to avoid but all must pass through.
If we are working for a good cause, Sherwood Forest is located on our mental map between somewhere between our mission statements or strategic plans and our outreach efforts. Most organizations or activists have mission statements and even strategic plans. These are the ideas and documents that tell us why we are in business and what we want to accomplish. Picture this as the west side of a map that shows how to reach our audiences.
At the other end of our mental map, to the east, is an outreach or communications plan. Most organizations have at least an informal version of this plan. It tells us how to get our message out – for example, press conferences, canvassing, printed matter and public service announcements.
Now visualize the empty space on our line between our strategic plan and our communications plan. This is the uncharted, dense, dark wood we’re calling Sherwood Forest. It is tempting to circumnavigate it, because it seems so much easier to bypass the wood and take our mission directly to the people.
We all like to figure out what we’re trying to accomplish and then go straight to promoting it. This is skipping the crucial path through the forest. It’s assuming that being right is the same thing as being convincing, and therefore giving people information will get them to take action. We start by saying “we need a brochure” rather than asking, “who are we trying to reach and what do they want?” Many marketing efforts stumble because information alone does not change hearts or minds.
We need to backtrack and determine how to translate, position and compellingly package our agenda for our audience before we start promoting. Taking time to do this ensures that when people hear our public service announcement or read our brochure, they will take action. Sherwood Forest is where we go from mission orientation to market orientation. It’s where our advocacy efforts either come together and gain power or fall apart, lost somewhere in the undergrowth.
OK, so it’s a little overblown. That’s why it did not end up in the book. But I revive it here to say, before we go east and decide how to communicate, we should make the journey into our audience’s world and figure out what they think, what they do and where they are. Then and only then can we figure out how to express our Western orientation - our mission - in terms that will travel well.
Wow I’m stuck on the travel analogy this week too. Maybe I need a vacation?
I’ve lived in several foreign countries, and each time the first weeks were an unnervingly rush of the unfamiliar. The parade of shuffling, singing men and women celebrating a newly circumcised boy in Madagascar or the electric shades of hair sported by pointy-booted Ukrainian beauties or the geckos swarming on my office walls in Cambodia were thoroughly strange, and they made me feel thoroughly a stranger. With each country, I worked harder and faster to become less of an outsider, to understand, and to fit in. I was weary of children, men, and old women pointing—endlessly pointing—and shrieking, “foreigner!” in their language. Wherever I was, it was inevitably the second word I learned, soon after “hello.”
One minute into my five-minute guide, I’d better make my point: to most of us (including me), social networking—using the web’s latest and greatest ways of connecting to people—feels akin to being a stranger in a strange land. People have their own customs online, they act differently, and it can be hard to find your way around. It seems so foreign and intimidating. At least it did to me, until I figured out I should simply apply the same skills of assimilation I’d apply anywhere else outside my experience.
So here is my survival guide to social networking, for those of us who feel out of place in this new world. All of these points lead to one conclusion, by the way: you will succeed if you seek to be a part of the culture. It’s less about the tools and more about how you use them to make strong connections with the people out there.
1.) Pack light
Don’t load yourself up with everything you own—ie, your mission statement, PSAs, brochures, etc. and think they’re going to travel well. Social networking is about reaching out to people on their terms, not “re-purposing” your marketing materials. That means unless your material for other outlets is really cool and loaded with celebs, it’s not going to look good on a place like YouTube. You have to think about audience and culture before you pack your bag.
2.) Observe before you act
Before my first day of work at Network for Good, my older daughter, who’s been to five schools in seven years, said, “Mom, don’t be nervous. Just watch what everyone else does and act like they do! You won’t be nervous anymore!” Exactly. Go spend a lot of time watching. It’s easy - watch YouTube. Read MySpace. It’s about the audience, not us, and it’s not the channel that matters so much as who is on it. Focus on the people, and where you feel a fit.
3.) Find the local hang-outs
I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: go to where people predisposed to be your friends hang out. Get out of the house and hotel room! This blog is full of tips like going to Technorati to search which of the 57 million bloggers are talking about your issue. Find the Meetup groups talking about your issue. Don’t build a blog, create yet ANOTHER “MySpace for (fill in the blank with your issue),” or do anything until you’ve gone out and met the people already doing that. Why create something when you could co-opt someone who already has a constituency online? Get out there and befriend these folks, because…
4.) Don’t sit back and wait for visitors
...they aren’t going to come to your site like the welcome wagon. You have to help them find you. And you have to let them help you where they are, on their blog or wherever they live online.
5.) Don’t pick only one friend
I had a rule in foreign countries - for the first three months, I didn’t turn down any invitations, ever, even from people I wasn’t sure I liked. I met a surprising range a friends by being open-minded and not relying on one person to be my best buddy. The online corollary is that you SHOULD NOT rely on one “thing” to be the gateway to your social networking. Don’t put all your eggs in the Facebook basket. Who knows what will be hot in six months? No one! That’s why it’s so key to focus on people who care about your issue and follow them online, rather than worrying about the merits of the site they happen to be on today. Hedge your bets. Why not give people ways to support you on ANY blog or social networking site with a badge like you can get via Word of Blog? Or the incredibly compelling build-it-yourself badge Network for Good is launching at the end of this month? (Stay tuned!)
This is so funny, I can’t stop watching it. The Huffington Post loved it too.
Check out more at PhilTube. After immediately asking me on the phone today if I was blogging, Phil later let on that ”Hart + Larsson are the agency creative minds behind this PhilTube campaign and its brilliant execution.” That would be Phil himself.
I think that like most great things that go viral, it cleverly captures a latent but widespread phenomenon just waiting to be creatively expressed. In this case, it satirizes what’s popular, what’s contrived on YouTube and the general foaming-at-the-mouth for all things web 2.0—in a really original way. At least that’s what it means to me. And it’s funny.
By contrast, last night, I spent a good 60 minutes on YouTube looking at nonprofit videos, and it was like watching public access TV. Most were at least six minutes long and about as fresh as a canned PSA from the 1960s. They looked so tragically unhip amid Borat and shrimp on a treadmill. Most had been viewed by about 12 people—about the number of staff at the nonprofits in question.
I found only two I liked - one that wasn’t in English and this one:
I like it because it follows some basic rules of the YouTube world:
1.) Be authentic
2.) Be homemade
3.) Be original
4.) Let someone else have the camera—a supporter, a beneficiary, whatever
5.) Give up control—let that someone else say what they want
6.) Give people a reason to watch and something easy to do
In honor of election day, I’m going to run a poll here. Tomorrow, I’ll report on what percentage of visitors took the poll. (ANSWER: only about 8%) If you want to put a poll on your web site or blog, it’s fun and easy via Vizu. Thanks to blogger Beth Kanter for the tip. What did she find in her poll on widgets? People like these things!
I happen to like them because they do three things:
1.) They give your audience a way to talk to you
2.) They give you a way to listen to your audience
3.) When they talk and you listen, you get market research. That means when you talk, you’ll be speaking in the audience’s terms, and that’s good marketing.
At Network for Good, the charitable giving portal where I work, we recently undertook a study of $100 million in online giving to 23,000 charities. We found all kinds of cool things available here, but one of the most intriguing was that we were a long tail. As we said in our research:
The “long tail” phenomenon – a term devised by Wired Editor Chris Anderson to describe how the Internet creates and serves long-tailed distribution markets – is evident at Network for Good when numbers of donations are charted by organization. At Network for Good, 50% the donations go to 1% of charities (excluding crisis giving). The rest is spread out along the long tail. Just as Amazon and Google have enabled consumers to access products and information that meets their particular needs and interests by providing one-stop access to many, diverse choices, Network for Good has enabled donors to contribute to many, diverse nonprofits by putting a fragmented nonprofit “market” in one place.
In other words, there are supporters for every cause, no matter how small.
That’s great for Network for Good, but if you’re on the long tail, how else can you reach people than just waiting for them to find you on Network for Good? Here’s some good advice. In addition, try going to Meetup and type in your zip and focus. You’ll find people meeting in your area to talk about your issue. They are already hanging out on the long tail of Meetup, waiting to meet your organization, which also sits on the long tail.
Too bad we’re SO SLOW to do this in our sector (hence the “long snail,” the title of Network for Good CEO Bill Strathmann’s recent talk on the topic). Hurry and work your tail right now. It’s never been easier to find the people out there in the fragmented but limitless online “marketplace.”
We all know it when we hear it—the sound of the genuine. We hear it less and less these days, because marketing, politics and interpersonal communication often lacks honesty and authenticity. Stephen Colbert captured the erosion of genuine with the word “truthiness.” Here’s what he says in a new Rolling Stone interview by Maureen Dowd:
“I’m not a fan of facts,’’ he boasts. “Facts can change all the time, but my opinion will never change.” Truthiness, a word he made up just before going on air, has been hailed by New York magazine as “the summarizing concept of our age.”
Yep, it’s house of mirrors out there. I only feel worse after spending an afternoon at SeaWorld with my children. A lovely day and a great park, really, until we saw the Shamu show, which was themed “believe” with 20 minutes of video and speeches by the trainers filled with vapid platitudes about believing in anything/everything and an Anheuser-Busch salute to troops which had way too much beer logo to be authentic. My seven-year-old saw right through it in five minutes. She actually was laughing by the end. I could hardly glimpse Shamu amid all the truthiness.
Fortunately, I spent the morning here in Orlando leading a session at the Multiple Sclerosis Society national meeting and the honest, transparent and effective marketers there made me so inspired that even the saccharine-coated insincerity at the Shamu show couldn’t undo my faith in authenticity.
This is one place where we can and should claim our superiority as marketers: being genuine about our genuinely good causes.
I will leave my last thoughts on the topic to Diva Marketer Toby Bloomberg, who hit the nail on the head with her blog post this week:
Authenticity is difficult to mask… Meeting-up offline is one more reason for bloggers to stay true to the Blog Mantra of Honesty, Transparency, Authenticity and of course Passion. Honesty, Transparency, Authenticity are the building blocks of establishing trust. Sure is difficult to do business without it - online or off.
1. Marketing is a tool. Tools aren’t good or evil. They are morally neutral methods that can be used for noble reasons or not. Marketing a good cause is a noble endeavor.
2. As people with a cause, we’re in the business of persuasion. Marketing is a way to be more convincing so that we’re better at persuading people to buckle up, donate, sign a petition, eat healthily, etc. Marketing isn’t “manipulation,” it’s a way of doing what we already do, better.
3. Marketing is respectful. Refusing to take into account the audience’s perspective and talking to people as if you’re hollering into a mission megaphone is not respectful. Asking people what they care about and then relating our cause to their values is respectful. Good marketing is a conversation, and that’s much less slimy than a soliloquy.
4. Marketing is efficient. What is immoral is slimy is not doing good marketing and wasting precious taxpayer or donor dollars on dealing with social issues ineffectively.
But, as I say in the book, there is a line.
We have to be true to ourselves. Marketing allows us to meet our audiences where they are, physically and mentally, but it does not require us to lose our own way. We should stay true to our mission, represent ourselves honestly, and promise only what we can deliver. In that way, we gain a competitive advantage over all the other folks using marketing for more nefarious ends.
Picking up the topic from my last post, the second most common question I receive is:
Q: Is marketing really possible with practically no marketing budget?
A: Yes, if you do it right.
A lack of funds should force us to be creative, not to complain. Most of us are never going to have fat marketing budgets. But we don’t need a glossy brochure to succeed. Don’t believe me? Then I will tell you my favorite story—the chicken story. I tell this at all my workshops, and I’ve mentioned it on my Amazon blog.
A few months back, a creative leader at a small nonprofit told me he wanted to get heavy coverage in the press and on TV, start an online donation program and just generally make a big marketing splash with almost no money. His name was David Levinger, and his organization was Feet First in Seattle, a local group advocating for a more livable, walkable community. A classic nonprofit mission: worthwhile, ambitious and very hard to talk about in catchy, relevant terms. Until David started talking about chickens. “It’s like we’re in this town where the chicken can’t cross the road,” he said. In fact, that simile was so apt that he’d bought a chicken suit. For about $125, if I recall correctly. That chicken then went around Seattle trying to cross the road.
I loved the story and told David a chicken suit was the best non-brochure I could imagine. But it got better with a few brainstorms - plastic eggs with a chick and message inside asking for donations. A Network for Good recurring giving program where you “click the chicken.”
The moral(s) of the story? If you are dangling by a marketing shoestring - or even if you have a healthy budget, remember:
1. When everyone is doing wristbands, brochures or whatever, don’t try to compete. You don’t have enough money to stand out in a herd. Do something entirely different, far away from the herd. Chicken eggs are different.
2. Make yourself a story that gets covered instead of buying ads. Chicken + rush hour = visual story for media.
3. Invest your marketing energy in “open-minded moments” when your audience is most likely to be thinking of your issue—like when they are about to cross the road and can’t.
4. Get a recurring online giving program going and give people a compelling reason to participate. Regular, automatic gifts mean you don’t have to spend money asking those donors for money over and over. All you have to do is thank them.
No, not my boss. Thankfully he agrees with me that marketing is one of the most powerful tools for nonprofits, as well as the center of the universe. Right, Bill?
Actually, “Help! My boss hates marketing!” is one of the most common comments I get from people who speak to me after my presentations, and today will be no exception. I’m in Kansas City presenting at the Midwest Philanthropy Conference. Since you’re not here with me, I thought I’d share my response. In fact, this week, I’m going to devote my blog to the most common questions I receive, and I’ll share my answers.
Let’s launch into today’s topic.
Q: How do I get my boss to value marketing? (or why won’t she let me do marketing, hates marketing, won’t fund marketing, won’t listen to me, doesn’t appreciate me, etc.)
A: You don’t. Instead, you do the following six things.
1. Don’t call it marketing. Call it something else.
I typically ask people what they are saying to their recalcitrant boss, and the answer is instructive: “I tell my boss why marketing is important and why he should care about it. I tell him we absolutely must do X, Y and Z because marketing is so valuable.” What’s interesting about this approach is that it’s basically a sermon on why our boss should value marketing. That is not walking our talk as marketers! We should be asking our bosses what THEY care about rather than informing them that they should care about marketing.
2. Show how your “initiative” (which is really marketing) meets their agenda.
Don’t position your agenda as a marketing campaign; frame it as your initiative to support your boss’s goals, in your boss’s language. Show how you are going to help make that fundraising goal, audience behavior change or front-page newspaper story happen.
3. Make it about the audience.
A good way to depersonalize different visions for “marketing” is to make it about your audience’s preferences rather than a philosophical tug of war between you and said boss. A little audience research is great fodder for advancing your agenda. For example, “Mr. Board Member, I loved your suggestion to put a quote in Greek on the cover of our brochure! I even created a draft of it and showed it to a group of our donors. Can you believe, they didn’t get it? For this piece, we’re going to take their suggestion about what they understood and prompted them to give.”
4. Report every wee step of progress.
Every single time anything good happens, be sure the boss knows it. Identify some early, likely wins toward your boss’s goals and report victories.
5. Give your boss credit and put him or her in the spotlight.
When good things happen, give credit to your boss. Create a dashboard that shows progress against your boss’s goals and let your boss show that progress to the board. Your boss will like you for it. If you pitched your organization’s story in a completely new, marketing-savvy way to reporters and that yielded your boss’s photo in the paper, all the better.
6. Seek forgiveness, not permission.
If all else fails, just do what you want to do anyway, quietly, and tell your boss about it when something good happens. People don’t get fired often in this sector anyway.
I was so inspired by Mark Rovner‘s encouraging response to my last post that I thought I’d admit more failure. I hate to fail, but through the cozy, comfortable viewpoint of hindsight, I can say that my failures are among the great moments in my life because they make me stretch.
My first public speaking experience was horrific—a stammering recitation of written notes. And I was supposed to be a moderator on a panel! Now I think I’m a good speaker, but only because I was driven to improve by a serious fear of repeating that humiliation.
When I wrote my book, I had to admit failure halfway through. I realized on page 140 that the book was only starting to work and threw out everything I’d written up to then. I finished the book, then went back and rewrote the first half. Though I nearly went mad over the process, the book and I were better for it.
My favorite jobs are those when I feel scared at the sheer immensity of the tasks before me about 49% of the time. I hate that discomfort, but it makes me creative, productive and excited by my work.
On NPR’s This I Believe, columnist Jon Carroll recently said:
Failure is how we learn. I have been told of an African phrase describing a good cook as “she who has broken many pots.” If you’ve spent enough time in the kitchen to have broken a lot of pots, probably you know a fair amount about cooking. I once had a late dinner with a group of chefs, and they spent time comparing knife wounds and burn scars. They knew how much credibility their failures gave them.
I have more scars than I can count.
Failure is a big part of marketing. Most campaigns fail. Most messages start a bit off target. Most appeals for dollars don’t rake in cash. That’s okay, as long as we look at them as broken pots and tweak our recipes. Admit the dish tasted bad and go find your missing ingredients. I’m certainly still on a quest for them myself.
Posted by katya on Thu, November 16, 2006
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