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.
I’m speaking this afternoon to a group of executive transition leadership folks who wanted help thinking about how to market their services.
I was asked to share some general thoughts on marketing. I’m going to share here what I’ll say, because like these folks, you probably struggle from time to time on how to take a complex idea and make it instantly compelling to your audience. These classics are probably useful to you as a nonprofit marketer.
Here’s what I’m going to say:
1. First, tackle positioning - ie the marketing sweet spot.
That’s the intersection between:
-What your organization focuses upon (which is hopefully what you’re good at)
-What you do better than anyone else (what is completely unique about you)
-What your audience cares about
If you know me, you know this Venn diagram, which has appeared here before. It is SO IMPORTANT, because we tend to spend too much time ensconced in the righthand circle. We trumpet our merits and call it marketing. It’s not. Our audience members may not care about those merits, or they may feel they are getting what they want from their status quo approaches (or inaction).
Marketing takes into account competition (the lower circle) and the audience’s interests (the lefthand circle). It defines a good position in the marketplace as the INTERSECTION of all three areas.
Why people should care
What specific action you’re asking people to take
What personally relevant reward they’ll get in exchange for taking that action
Why taking that action is better than what they are doing now (the competition)
Why they should take action now (as opposed to later or never - there needs to be a sense of urgency)
Who claims all this is true (you need a trusted messenger)
You want your audience to engage with you and think:
I want to do this right now! If I (take the action you’re asking), I will get (this great benefit you’re offering) which will be far preferable to (whatever I’m doing now) because (a trusted person told me so).
If you’re not getting that outcome, you’ve got a positioning problem and a messaging problem.
A great reminder of how to inspire your staff was highlighted in the recent Influence Report (a highly recommended read). An organizational behavior researcher decided to test his theory that workers often fail to live up to their potential because they’ve lost track of the significance and meaningfulness of their own jobs.
As the report describes:
He figured that if he could remind employees of why their jobs are important, they might become more highly motivated, and therefore, more productive individuals. To test this idea, he worked with a fundraising organization that allowed him to go to its call center and randomly assign employees into certain groups. Some of these employees read stories from other employees describing what they perceived were the personal benefits of the job, including financial benefits and the development of skills and knowledge (Personal Benefit condition). However, another set of employees read stories from the beneficiaries of the fundraising organization, who described how the scholarships they obtained from the organization had a positive impact on their lives (Task Significance condition). Finally, there was third group of employees that did not read any stories (Control condition). In addition, the employees were told not to talk about or share what they had read with any other callers. The researcher was able to obtain the number of pledges earned as well as the amount of donation money obtained by the callers both one week prior to the study and one month afterward.
The findings are an important reminder to us all:
Employees in the Personal Benefit and Control conditions looked almost exactly the same after the intervention as before it in terms of amount of donation money raised and the number of pledges earned. Yet, those in the Task Significance condition earned more than twice the number of weekly pledges (from an average of 9 to an average of 23) and more than twice the amount of weekly donation money (from an average of $1,288 to an average of $3,130). Additional analyses suggest that the huge increase was driven by previously unmotivated employees increasing the number of calls they made per hour.
If you want your staff passionate about your work, show them the good they do in the world.
Homer Simpson for Nonprofits: The Truth about How People Really Think and What It Means to Your Cause is the title of a new eBook I just finished with Alia McKee and Mark Rovner of Sea Change Strategies. It’s a guide to behavioral economics for nonprofit leaders, and we’re having a free call on it next week!
One of the key points we make in the eBook is that in nonprofit marketing and fundraising, we need to do a better job sticking to social norms, not market norms.
Humans have two distinct decision making rulebooks: social norms, which are governed by values of community selflessness and altruism, and market norms, which are governed by calculated self-interest.
Social norms are stronger motivators than market norms. In experiments, under many circumstances people will work harder for free than they will for money. Not long ago, AARP asked lawyers to offer services to the elderly at a reduced rate (market norms). The response was dismal. Then they asked for lawyers to provide FREE services (social norms). Lawyers tripped over one another to volunteer.
If you are a fundraiser, you live every day on the razor’s edge between norms. Major donor fundraising operates primarily on social values. Direct marketing-based fundraising operates on a weird hybrid. What does a major donor get for his or her support?: a sense of camaraderie with like-minded philanthropists; influence and access to organizational leaders (which makes them feel even more a part of things); and the potent psychological rewards of knowing they have made a difference in making the world a better place. What does a low-dollar donor get? Tote bags. Water bottles. Calendars. Certificates of adoption. It’s a largely market exchange.
Scrutinize your appeals: Are you emphasizing social norms or market exchanges? Make sure you are focused on the emotional rewards of giving. Segment to avoid a hybrid. Some non-donors and low-dollar donors will solely be motivated to give because of market norms — they want the certificate or the calendar. But others are looking for that emotional connection. Identify who in your file responds to what — and give them that. If you must engage in marketplace rewards, ensure they are highly tied to your cause. If you are saving the whales, think plush toy whales, not coffee mugs.
Fundraising is not about what you need. Really. It is about what the donor – through you – can achieve. It’s about giving donors the gift of knowing they changed the world for the better. It’s not about our goals – it’s about our donor’s aims.
Everyone knows you need money. So do the other 1.8 million nonprofits in the United States – as well as the millions more around the world. If that’s all you’ve got to say, you are just another organization with yet another appeal.
What is special about you? The answer can’t simply be that your programs need support. It must be that with your donor, you can together achieve a difference that no one else can.
The biggest thing that needs to change this year is how we think about our donors. We are in the midst of an enormous generational shift that has major implications for our work. The Greatest Generation of older, civic-minded Americans who wrote checks out of a sense of duty and expected little more than a tax receipt in return is passing the torch to a far more demanding series of successors.
Boomers expect a sense of impact, and younger donors expect engagement and involvement. They are anything but passive. Think of it this way. Just as in marketing we have left the broadcast era where consumers passively take in promotional messages, we have left the low-expectation donor era.
That means it’s not enough to declare a need and send a thank-you. Today’s supporters increasingly expect engagement that makes them feel seen, heard and involved. They are not walking wallets or ATM machines. They are partners who expect a relationship with the organizations they support. They want to be talked to as individuals, thanked and updated.
This is especially true online. With most of what we do online – Facebook, Foursquare, gaming, etc. - being highly personal and extremely interactive, we have to provide a more intimate and involved experience for our supporters with our technological tools. Otherwise, you will alienate nearly everyone.
That means we have to completely reorganize not only our approach but also how our organizations are structured. We need to tear down the walls of our organizations’ technology, marketing, fundraising and communications departments and rebuild the organization of our people in a way that creates a completely supporter-centric experience. A supporter is a real person, not a volunteer vs. an online donor vs. an offline donor, and she expects to be treated as such.
If a complete reorganization is impossible, then at least consider how to reorganize your fundraising efforts with a focus on what a prospective supporter or donor experiences at each touch point with your organization. If you aren’t sure, role play. Have a Be Your Donor Day. Go to your website. As the donor, ask yourself: Is it apparent what your organization does? Do you see something that forges an emotional connection? Are there tools to share what you are seeing via social networks, right on the home page? Are the voices of donors and supporters clear in the content? Does the website feel like a community or a brochure?
Keep going. Donate online and offline. How and when are you thanked? What happens after that? Call your 800 number. Sign up for e-News. Tweet your support. What happens?
We in the nonprofit marketing world spend a lot of time planning and holding events. We should spend an equal amount of time assessing the mountain of data they generate - and using that information to inform our future strategies. More measuring to learn and plan, please!
That’s the point made in a new eBook sent to me by Jono Smith of Event360 (and formerly of Network for Good - we miss you, Jono!). It’s called Analyze This: A Nonprofit’s Guide to Event Fundraising Analytics. You can download your free copy here.
This 18-page guide is designed to help event fundraisers move beyond only reporting the past and start using analytics to predict the future. A case study featuring the Komen Global Race for the Cure highlights how analytics helped formulate the steps the organization took to transform their highly attended event into a strong fundraising event.
For example, the guide explains that if you are struggling to build a reliable analytics program, start by looking at these key questions:
• What metrics are most important to your nonprofit?
• How does event fundraising impact those metrics?
• What are you currently measuring?
• How can you change those to take advantage of more information for more insight?
• What decisions will you make as a result of those metrics?
• What behavioral change is required?
I urge you to read it, because as I explained in my last post, knowing what worked and learning from what worked should be an approach we take much more often. Seriously.
I had such a nice comment in my last post from Jim Lord. He spoke of the importance of focusing on peaks not valleys.
I’d like to push that concept a step further and talk about positive deviance.
In my book I wrote about Jerry Sternin from Save the Children, whom I had the honor to meet years ago when I lived in Cambodia. Sternin approached problems in a truly innovative way: Rather than focusing on what was wrong in neighboring Vietnam, he decided to look for solutions to change that already existed in communities. He called it “positive deviance,” and it had a huge role in improving childhood health in Vietnam. Instead of spending all his time focusing on the problem of undernourished children, he visited children that were not undernourished and watched closely what their mothers did differently. Then he had these women teach their solutions to other mothers. They were things like adding sweet potato greens to a lunch of rice. In their new book Switch, Dan and Chip Heath tell this story in great detail (and better than I did!), calling this approach “bright spots.”
They write:
You may not fight malnutrition. But if you’re trying to change things, there are going to be bright spots in your field of view, and if you learn to recognize them and understand them, you will solve one of the fundamental mysteries of change: What, exactly, needs to be done differently?
...We need to switch from archaeological problem solving to bright-spot evangelizing. There’s no question that it’s possible to do. Take Jerry Sternin. He came into an environment riddled with failure. The opportunities for analysis were endless. He could have stayed in Vietnam for twenty years, writing position papers on the malnutrition problem. But what he knew was this: Even in failure there is success… These flashes of success - these bright spots - can illuminate the road map for action and spark the hope that change is possible.
Amen.
Try it. Instead of asking yourself why giving is down, look at which donors gave more this year and find out why. Instead of looking at why an email flopped, look at your last email that performed really well and discover what made it a winner. Instead of asking people in your program why they are failing at times, ask them about when they are succeeding and why.
Spend more time on duplicating what works rather than dwelling on what is broken.
Before I get to the great entrants, a quick thanks to about.com and Joanne Fritz for sponsoring the carnival. And in case you’re waiting for me to start selling you cotton candy and funnel cakes, I should explain the carnival is simply a monthly roundup of themed blog posts hosted by various bloggers in the nonprofit world. (What’s a carnival?)
Kivi Leroux Miller of NonprofitMarketingGuide has this wonderful post on a low point in a nonprofit job that led to her current incredible career as a thought leader and consultant. I am a fan and friend of Kivi, and I’ve got to tell you, that low was a real gift to all of us who now benefit from her wisdom. ( I should also add Network for Good - where I am COO - regularly turns to her as a consultant, too.)
She has such good advice:
Don’t stay in a job you hate, especially in the nonprofit world, where you have so many opportunities to do work you truly love. When you see people keeping secrets from or gossiping about other staff and board members, either shine a bright light on the situation or get out fast. Change is always hard, but in my experience, it’s nearly always good.
Like Kivi, Jeff Brooks is one of my favorite bloggers and thinkers. You should read his Future Fundraising Now blog regularly. (I should add Network for Good also uses Jeff as a consultant. I know there’s a pattern here but what can I say, I like to have smart people on our team!)
Jeff writes about a fabulous fundraising piece that fell flat. And he has some terrific counsel for all of us:
Turns out you can’t just raise funds for anything you want. If you go to your donors with an offer they don’t associate you with, they just might ignore you in droves. No matter how great your work is.
Charitable giving is complex. It works when a lot of factors all come together. When you change one or more of those factors—like talk to donors about something they don’t feel signed on to support—you can actually lose money in direct mail.
This is a wonderful post from Jake’s Grant Writing Confidential blog, which was new to me but now on my must-read list. If you’re not familiar, you must check it out.
Jake has great stories from toiling in the grant salt mines for over 16 years, a few of which he shares with us. I love this post, which describes how zeal can derail your chances of getting a grant.
My favorite part of the post is:
It’s pretty tough to keep a nonprofit going on bratwurst, car washes, and hope. You’re not going to reach as many people if you don’t have the organizational capacity to do so. Put aside your passion long enough to write proposals that are aimed at the funder’s guidelines, not your parochial view of the universe.
And that’s the truth.
Thanks Kivi, Jeff and Jake.
Last, I’d like to add one of my lows that also turned into a high.
A couple of years ago, I led a session on fundraising at a major conference. Midway through the presentation, I described Network for Good to the more than 100 nonprofit professionals in the audience. A man in the middle of the room raised his hand.
“I have a DonateNow button from you,” he said. “But it doesn’t work.”
It was a dark moment for a staff member from Network for Good. A real low.
So I said to the man – and everyone else in the room - that I was anxious to fix the problem and would get to the bottom of why people could not make donations from his website as soon as I finished my speech.
“No, that’s not the problem,” the man responded. “You can make a donation. The problem is, no one is clicking on the button.”
Ah.
The story of the “broken” button was an incredible epiphany for me. I realized that in my work to help nonprofits with online giving, I was assuming that giving them Network for Good’s functionality was enough. It wasn’t, which made me a failure at our mission of getting more resources to nonprofits online. There are limits to technology. You can have a huge donate button on your home page – or a snazzy Facebook page – but that does not mean anyone is coming or clicking. A DonateNow button is not magic and social networks aren’t money machines. You need great messaging and marketing to make effective use of these tools.
If your organization made a video in 2009, now is the time to enter the 4th Annual DoGooder Nonprofit Video Awards, presented by See3 Communications and YouTube! The contest will award a total of $10,000 in grants, funded by the Case Foundation, to the best videos of the year found in the YouTube Nonprofit Program—a special program that YouTube designed to help nonprofits achieve their missions.
Submit any video your organization made last year by March 19, when a set of nonprofit and media professionals will select 16 finalists to compete in a public vote among the YouTube community. Awards will go to organizations of all sizes, including a special award for Best Innovation in Video.
Now is your chance to get your nonprofit video featured on the YouTube homepage, receive great prizes from Flip Video and Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN), and have your work showcased at a screening in Washington DC, hosted by Nomadsland.
Winners will be announced on April 10 at the Nonprofit Technology Conference in Atlanta.
This is the title of a new eBook I just finished with Alia McKee and Mark Rovner of Sea Change Strategies. It’s a guide to behavioral economics for nonprofit leaders and in here is why you should be reading it: You will be seeing behavioral economics everywhere this year. It’s the topic of a slew of business books - and it should be the topic on the minds of everyone in nonprofit marketing and fundraising, too.
As we explain in the eBook, behavioral economics challenges the notion that people will choose the best action or the most logically presented choice and explores the bounds of rationality — identifying social, cognitive and emotional factors that can influence the decisions people make. The big takeaway? People don’t arrive at most decisions through a process of weighing costs against benefits. We are irrational. In their book Nudge, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein put it simply: Real people make decisions like Homer Simpson, not Spock.
So why is behavioral economics important to nonprofit organizations? For us, these irrational decisions have high stakes. We’re not asking people to buy a Coke. We’re asking them to protect our environment, to safeguard our children, to fight for human rights. We’re asking them to change the world. Their individual decisions — which often don’t take into account one’s own best interest let alone the interest of the greater good — matter a lot. We need to be sure we’re asking people in the right way, or their Homer brains might undo our Spock arguments.
That’s the question Lucy Bernholz answers with her Blueprint 2010. This is the first in what will be a independent annual industry analysis for philanthropy and social investing. Lucy describes how 2010 will be another tough year for nonprofits - but likely a growth year for alternatively structured organizations that pursue the common good - like L3cs and B Corporations. Nonprofits no longer have the corner on social good. For-profits, social enterprises and other hybrid organizations will be active in the work of social impact as well - and on a bigger scale than ever before.
Earlier this week, I got to hear Lucy present on what all this will mean beyond 2010.
Some fascinating trends she highlighted were:
1. Data is the new platform for change. There is an expectation that nonprofits should provide more data about their activities and impact to the public - and that government and others also open up their data to the public. Transparency and impact are the new black, folks. (NB: That said, individual donors have limited interest in the data.)
2. Self-organizing groups using free technology will increasingly challenge institutional monopolies on social change. When anyone can put together a cause-related effort with relative ease, they are freed from working via nonprofits. We have to learn how to engage with these groups.
3. Anyone can act anytime, anywhere. In an era when we can volunteer from our iPhone or give with a click as part of any transaction, giving opportunities are becoming more and more pervasive and fragmented. Individual people can make a difference more than ever in more ways than ever. We need to figure out what this means to conventional fundraising and outreach.
4. Mobility matters: The ability of nonprofits to react to the digital world and manage channels like FourSquare and geotagging will separate the old school nonprofits from a new digital generation of organizations.
5. Forms matter: The conventional nonprofit is no longer the end all, be all of doing good. (See above comments on L3Cs and B corporations).
6. Global reach is a new standard: Technology is enabling organizations to scale globally in short order - just look at Kiva.org or Wikipedia. Are you an organization that should scale to the world?
The hard copy of Blueprint 2010 is $20 but you can get it on Kindle for half that cost. I should disclose Lucy has done consulting work for my organization and I’m a fan of her work.
As you know, HP emailed me to say they are giving away laptop and printer bundles as part of their Create Change program, which highlights how individuals and technology are creating change in the world. More on the campaign here.
I asked readers to write in comments one great, brief story about how technology helps you transform lives. I encouraged great storytelling skills. I said I’d pick the most moving story and HP would send that person a laptop and printer for the work of their nonprofit. Everyone else who posted gets copy of Switch (the one book to read if you’re trying to change the world) !
There was one story, though, that grabbed us all from the start and illustrated every principle of good storytelling. That was Vikki’s:
A local mom had her heart broken when her ex-husband did not return their two boys to her after a visitation last year.
Her life and soul was seemingly ripped from her when the two boys and their father were discovered in a remote wooded, snow-covered area - victims of a murder/suicide.
Shortly after that incident, our Domestic Violence shelter was in danger of being closed due to funding cuts, and we had implemented a fundraiser using Facebook Causes. Amy, the bereaved mom, was a “friend of a friend of friend”, and one of those friends had supported us through that cause. Amy, a Survivor, and her friends quickly utilized their Facebook accounts to spread the word that, without their help, Neville House was in danger of closing down, and this would eliminate all victim services for the whole of our county.
Amy’s request for people to donate reached the local newspaper, who ran a domestic violence theme for three days - including Amy’s appeal and the plight of the shelter.
I believe that it is as a direct result of this story running “through the wire” - from our website to Facebook to the local media - that our shelter is still operating. We have had to eliminate a staff position, and now need to replace funding that has been cut by a different source. but the victims of domestic violence in our county still can find shelter in their time of need, and can still access support services to enable them to become Survivors.
And everyone else gets a book! Just email me at katya dot andresen at sign networkforgood dot org with your address. I will be thrilled to send you an advance copy of this great book.
Posted by katya on Wed, March 17, 2010
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