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.
Katya’s websites of the week: toilets and trips
Posted by katya on Mon, January 05, 2009
I’m starting a new feature in 2009 - website(s) of the week. This week’s have nothing to do with marketing - they have to do with urination and travel! Because I want to make your life easier not just as a marketer but also as a fellow human being. In the future, I promise to sometimes feature content relevant to marketing.
This week’s winners:
Check out MizPee to find the nearest clean toilet to where you are now. Ratings available - measured by little toilet paper roll icons. (I read about this in today’s Wall Street Journal.) I’ve always been too intimidated to rate anything at Zagat’s but this I could do.
Check out TripIt for your next journey. When you get all your confirmations from airlines, hotels, etc., just hit forward to their email address and they assemble a nifty little itinerary for you! They’ll even tell you the weather! I learned about it from TechCrunch, natch.
Here are some of the things I did today in addition to working all day, doing carpool and writing sixth grade school applications:
I removed gum from my older daughter’s hair (mayonnaise works). She has “no idea” how this happened.
I listened to my five year old read her first book start to finish. Wow.
I found out a $100 gift card I sent my dad never arrived so I tried to call customer service at the company but they’re not open.
I worried about my bank account post-holiday.
All of this unfolded to the musical accompaniment of an iDog playing Rihanna.
So what’s my point here?
This is daily life. Doing an Internet search for gum removal, smearing Hellman’s on a child’s hair, handling the daily inconveniences, watching a child cross a massive developmental milestone, listening to your preteen’s music selections, thinking about what’s important and (unfortunately) about what’s not important.
Your audience is living daily life.
They are NOT sitting in an empty white room with no stimulation whatsoever awaiting your message.
I know this sounds obvious but maybe it isn’t.
Look at whatever you were about to say to your audience. Would it have gotten through to me while I was doing any of the above? Does it break through all the exciting and distracting and incredible things unfolding around the average person?
Or would it only work if I was seated alone in a blank space awaiting your message with bated breath?
If the answer to the second question is yes, start over.
Remember: people have lives. Make them want you as part of that life. Work hard to do that. You have to. Because dried up gum, sadly, is more pressing than the direct mail sitting on my table.
Happy New Year and thanks for reading the blog this year. Life is short, and if you’re taking precious time from your schedule to check the blog from time to time, I hope it’s been helpful to you. Let me know if there’s anything you’d like to see or know that’s not getting coverage here. I am always happy to hear from REAL readers. (Many of the comments I get are NOT from real readers—it’s amazing how many Viagra-peddlers and real estate agents like to comment about nonprofit marketing with helpful links to their products and services!).
This has been an incredibly eventful year in politics and our economy - both of which will affect our work fundamentally in the year ahead. On a personal note, it’s also been an eventful year - I got engaged to be married, my older daughter hit the double digits in age, and I took on a new role at Network for Good (COO) that has been an exciting change. I have a feeling 2009 is going to be pretty interesting as a result of all of this.
Whatever happens, we’ll be in it together. I look forward to finding my way through the excitement ahead right there with you. I’ve definitely learned more from all of you than I could ever reciprocate. Thanks for sharing your stories, your wisdom and your experiences. They hold lessons that I’ll be applying ever day in the New Year.
As I’ve said in this space before, there are two secrets to campaigning like Obama—a one-two punch of audience connection and infrastructure to serve the audience.
1. Audience appeal: directly appealing to the personal concerns of your audience
2. Infrastructure: putting the human and technological engines behind your audience via community-based organizations and via online engagement.
There are quite a few examples of organizations working to build off this approach - and keep the country engaged going forward.
Change.org is pursuing this approach on its revamped site here.
The Case Foundation is also taking this approach with a new campaign called “Change Begins With Me,” which calls for citizens across the nation to visit the Case Foundation’s website and make a personal pledge to “be the change” in 2009. By finishing the sentence, “Change begins with me…” individuals can share their commitments to change their neighborhood, community or the world in 2009. According to Case, one lucky citizen (and guest) will be randomly selected to attend the Inauguration of President-elect Barack Obama and related Inaugural festivities here in DC. And, in the spirit of giving and active civic engagement, this person will also participate in the Washington, DC Martin Luther King Day of Service.
So now you can campaign like Obama - and enter a lottery to see him sworn in.
I’ll now share how to NOT campaign like Obama and completely bungle all things social media.
Read the horrific superlist of social media blunders of the year here.
I have a really good piece of advice for you. Send a fundraising e-mail the week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve. Dec. 30 and 31 are the biggest online days of the year, in my experience. All those generous procrastinators are just getting their acts together, so your timing is perfect if you send a last-minute reminder at year’s end.
But make it a GOOD e-mail. How do you know the difference? We have a great new e-mail partner at Network for Good called Emma, and that company’s experts have agreed to share 10 big e-mail no-nos, based on their time in the trenches with electronic communications.
So before you hit SEND on that all-important, last-minute e-mail in December, remember to AVOID these sins:
1. Using generic subject lines.
You know your latest e-mail campaign is the December newsletter. And you know it’s great. But it’s up to you to tell your constituents just why December is so darn special. Consider using your subject line to tease your favorite article or whatever you decide is the most enticing part of your newsletter. Also, try including your brand in the subject line. It’ll let people instantly recognize your e-mail at a glance and can help with inbox sorting down the road.
2. Getting freaky with Comic Sans.
Fonts and colors and formatting, oh my. Keep your campaigns easy on the eyes with simple, intentional style choices. Avoid switching fonts every few lines, and choose your colors with an eye for readability. After all, a well-formatted campaign will catch your readers’ attention and make it easy to keep reading. And isn’t that the whole idea?
3. Sending e-mail to people who didn’t ask for it.
While it’s important to make sure your e-mail looks great, a successful campaign really starts with a solid, permission-based list. Only e-mail people who have asked to receive your updates or are directly affiliated with your organization. If it’s a rented list, purchased list or list of people who’ve never heard of you, avoid it.
4. Using an invalid ‘reply to’ address.
Since permission-based e-mail marketing is all about staying in touch with your members and customers, giving your recipients a way to continue the conversation is a must. Otherwise, you’ll miss the follow-up questions from your subscribers, not to mention those rare (but important!) unsubscribe requests from people who choose to reply to you instead of using a built-in opt-out link.
If the “from” address you currently use doesn’t exist, consider asking your e-mail administrator to create it, or change it to an address that does exist and is monitored by someone who can manage the replies.
5. Ignoring those results.
After all the work of the big send-off, don’t forget the fun of watching the results roll in. They’ll tell you a lot about what your audience is interested in. Did you have an overwhelming clickthrough response last month when you linked to your blog? Consider adding more links like that in this issue. Did 62 people click to learn more about your newest program? Sounds like follow-up phone calls might be in order. Make sure you learn from the way people respond, and apply those lessons toward even greater success next time.
6. Sending one big image.
I know it’s tempting to take that gorgeous flier your designer created for print, save it as a JPG and plug it into your e-mail campaign. But sending one big image is risky. Servers are more likely to filter e-mails with large images, and recipients may move on to other things before your image fully loads. And some e-mail programs, like Gmail and Outlook, block images by default, meaning a percentage of your recipients might see the original e-mail you designed as a big, broken image. Yikes.
7. Forgetting to test.
By taking a few minutes to send a test to yourself and a few colleagues, you can have peace of mind that your links work, your copy is typo-free and everything looks just the way you thought it would — all before you send it to the big list.
8. Writing — and sending — a novel.
Don’t send a really flippin’ long e-mail. When you send a campaign that goes on and on (and on), a typical subscriber — with a typically short attention span — probably won’t sift through lots of text to find the content that interests him. Instead, he might delete your e-mail at a glance.
9. Sending too often or not enough).
Finding your ideal frequency depends on a few factors, like what your organization does and who you send to. Just keep in mind that sending too frequently may annoy your readers and increase your opt-out rate, but long lapses of silence may cause some readers to just plain forget about you. Aim for regular contact that keeps your brand in front of your readers, and make sure each send-off has a purpose.
10. Not personalizing.
Sometimes being one in a million isn’t such a good thing, and you certainly don’t want your readers to feel like they’re just one e-mail address in a giant list. Use your e-mail campaign to connect personally with your readers, but don’t just stop with a personal, first-name greeting (although that’s a great place to start). Look for other ways to extend a personal touch, whether it’s through sending targeted messages based on your readers’ ZIP codes or interests, or keeping a friendly, personal tone as you write your content.
Thanks to my friends at Spitfire, if you need help planning your next big campaign, you’re in luck. Spitfire Strategies and the Communications Leadership Institute (the people who brought you the Smart Chart™ and Discovering the Activation Point™) have just unveiled their newest tool: The Just Enough Planning Guide™. It’s a free online resource that for the first time gives nonprofits and foundations a process for planning successful campaigns. Whether your organization is planning to pass a law, win popular support for an issue or organize a boycott, the guide gives groups a clear sense of where they are going, the best way to get there and what to expect along the way. Visit justenoughplanning.org to download a free copy.
Thanks Spitfire!
Here are steps it covers:
1. Confirm That a Campaign Is Possible. This is the time to step back and assess the viability of a campaign. Are the stars aligned for this effort to be successful?
2. Set a Clear, Measurable Goal That Is Achievable. Your plan needs to be focused on achieving a very specific goal. Your goal is your raison d’être. Are you trying to make something happen or stop something from happening? There is a difference.
3. Chart Your Course. Much like a road trip, there are likely many ways to get to your goal. You will use your knowledge of the field and the external environment to determine the best steps to your goal.
4. Anticipate Conditions. Visualize all possible scenarios – the good, the bad and the ugly – so your plan includes strategies for leveraging opportunities and mitigating challenges, including identifying your opposition.
5. Know How to Make Headway. What will propel you down your path? What major campaign activities can help you get from point A to point B?
6. Prioritize Your Target Audiences. Now that you have a strategy, stay focused by prioritizing who you need to engage to win, and when.
7. Put a Public Face on Your Campaign. Give the effort a name and a personality that is memorable and easily understood. You want people to recognize what you are about and not have to guess.
8. Operationalize Your Campaign. Based on the activities you think will help you make headway, determine which campaign tactics you will need: from intellectual knowledge to government relations to public mobilization to communications to coalition building to fundraising.
9. Stay on Track. Build evaluation mechanisms into your plan that will tell you when you are making progress and when you need to stop and make a mid-course correction. Meet regularly with your team to discuss your progress.
1. INSPIRATION: to touch people, help them envision the amazing possibilities they can be part of. It’s about what they can achieve, not what you need.
2. IMPACT: to compel people to action, show them the tangible difference they can make in the real world.
3. INTIMACY: to close the deal, make it personal. Or get a messager they know and love.
We recently were lucky enough to have Kim Klein share with Network for Good her wisdom on fundraising. The woman is an entertaining encyclopedia of fundraising smarts. She is really, really good at what she does.
If you missed her talk, you can listen to it or read the transcript HERE.
Here are four immediate steps she says you can take this December:
1. Encourage your donors to give the gift of charity. It’s the holidays. People are buying gifts. Have them make that the gift of charity.
2. Call all your major donors. She says, “The tendency right now is to think, “Oh, these poor people. They lost so much money.” So you don’t call them. What you actually wind up saying to them, even though you don’t mean to, you wind up saying to them, “All we cared about was your money. Now that you don’t have so much money, I can’t be bothered to call you.” And that is really,
really, really not a message you want to give. You want to welcome them. You want to write to them and use a follow-up phone call to say something like, “We thank you for all you’ve done for us over the years. We are determined to hang in there and continue to do our work as best we can. We hope you will support us at whatever level feels acceptable to you.” Focus on the donor, not the donation!
3. Tell 70+ donors how to save on taxes! She says, “You can transfer up to $100,000 in any given year directly from their IRA to a charitable organization and they pay no income tax on that. Normally if you withdraw money from your IRA you pay a tax, whatever tax bracket you’re in that year. And of course if you donate it, you claim that tax donation. This is a very nice provision that allows you to avoid taxation and still claim the donation, so it’s kind of a double tax advantage.”
4. For smaller organizations especially, share a wish list! She says, “Tell people, this is the stuff we need. We need four ergonomic chairs. We need 10 printer toner cartridges. We need 75 reams of paper. We need new filing cabinets.” And you just kind of list all the stuff, everything in your budget.”
By way of thanks, I wanted to give you a link to the eBook I just helped put together with my colleagues here at Network for Good. It’s a downturn survival guide for online fundraising.
Here’s what it’s about:
During these uncertain economic times, having an online fundraising strategy is the perfect medicine for a bad economy. Download Network for Good’s free downturn survival guide to learn how to market and fundraise more effectively during a downturn. The guide features 12 real-life strategies nonprofits are using right now to succeed during the downturn, in addition to tons of great tactical advice, creative samples and other resources. And we’ll also include a coupon to save 50% on Network for Good’s online fundraising services.
5 Ways to Get People to Sign Up for Your Email List
Posted by katya on Thu, December 04, 2008
Courtesy of Emma, our wonderful new email partner here at Network for Good, these tips:
As with most things, the art of enticing new subscribers depends a lot on the kinds of emails you send and the kind of people you’re trying to attract. Realize that by offering tons of enticements to recruit subscribers, you’re likely to get more addresses but wind up with members who may be a bit fickle. Conversely, by understating the value of your emails, or not promoting the signup link enough, your list will likely be made up of very loyal readers, you just won’t have lots of them.
We call this the Inverse Loyalty Curve. Actually we just made the whole ‘Inverse Loyalty Curve’ thing up, but if we were to give it a name, Inverse Loyalty Curve would be it, and before you know it people would be blogging about ‘Inverse Loyalty Curve this’ and ‘Inverse Loyalty Curve that.’ Pretty soon there would be entire books and seminars devoted to it. But back to the matter at hand.
So you want to entice people to join your list? Here are five quick tips:
Why should someone sign up? Tell them. Ask yourself why someone should sign up to get your emails. Is it because they’ll get tips that can help them eat healthier or access to articles before they’re published? And then make your case clearly to prospective subscribers. Don’t just ask them to sign up for your emails; instead, ask them to sign up for your emails to get exclusive, email-only insider information (or whatever the reward might be).
Ask when they’re most likely to say yes. In life, timing is everything.* So make sure you ask people to join your list when they’re most likely to say yes: after they’ve just made a donation, just filled out a survey for you or when they’ve just read the most fascinating article on your website. So be sure to incorporate your ‘join now’ link and teaser into the parts of your website where people are most likely to jump at the chance. We call these open-minded moments.
Make it super easy. The people who love you will be perfectly content to fill out three screens of information and take a short survey to join your list. The people who like you may not. So keep your signup process short and sweet. Minimize the clicks, and ask only for the information you truly need (if you’re not planning on using people’s birthdate information later, don’t trouble people for it). And by all means don’t mislead people into thinking the process is short and sweet only to hit them with a 20-minute routine. (You’ve seen signups that ask only for your email address followed by a ‘join’ button - but instead of joining you’re greeted by 20 more fields and a citizenship test.) Make signing up a pleasant, fast experience, and you’ll lose fewer people along the way.
Offer something in return. It’s possible the content of your emails is reward enough. But you might also consider offering people a bit of instant gratification for joining. Remember that you can customize the thank-you screen that greets new subscribers. Get creative and make the thank-you screen itself a printable VIP ticket to your next event, or include a link to premium content (say, a download for 10 Ways to Manage Your Diabetes, if your organization is concerned with diabetes).
Above all, keep it simple. MarketingSherpa (a great resource, if you don’t already know them) published the results of a lengthy experiment conducted by the Motley Fool in which a financial content service tested all sorts of signup elements - short teaser text versus a longer list of subscriber benefits, calling it ‘membership’ rather than simply joining a list, offering lots of content choices rather than just one, and so on - to see how it affected their new-subscriber numbers. In the end, Motley Fool found that keeping things simple worked best.
Shameless plug by me as COO of Network for Good: If you don’t have an email campaign tool, we offer EmailNow powered by Emma at a great rate at Network for Good.
Right about now, most of us are panicking. We’re watching our 401Ks disintegrate before our eyes. Major financial comapnies are crumbling. And fundraising has never looked so tough.
Stop. Take a deep breath and consider this.
Over and over, research tells us the same thing about why people stop giving. And it’s got nothing to do with the Dow Jones.
PEOPLE STOP GIVING BECAUSE THEY ARE FED UP BY HOW THEY WERE TREATED BY THE CHARITIES THEY SUPPORT. Running out of money is far down the list of reasons people stop giving.
Look, it’s reasonable to expect this won’t be a banner year for giving. People are hurting financially. But worrying about their wallets is not going to do you much good. You can’t control the economy.
You CAN control how you treat your donors.
And the best kept secret to fundraising success is: be nice to your donors. Lavish them with love, thanks and special treatment. Because most charities do not. You can stand out and save your donors if you get better at this. And trust me, it’s a lot easier to keep a donor than find a new one. So get better at building relationships with the people who support you.
The latest research proving this is from Bank of America and the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University (subscription required to view the Chronicle article.) The NUMBER ONE reason wealthy donors stopped giving, according to this study, was they no longer feel connected to the organization or believe they are being asked for money too often. Another top reason: they decided to give to a different charity. Probably related to those other issues, right?
Non-wealthy donors are the same, by the way. They want to know what their donations accomplished, they want to know whose lives they changed, and they want to feel great about themselves and the cause they support. Give them that, as often as you can. Because it matters more than ever.
Note this from the Chronicle article:
Bank of America’s philanthropy experts said that as the economy worsens, donors they work with are increasingly saying they want their dollars to make a difference.
You may not be able to change the economy, but you can convince a donor their dollars make a great difference. Treat your donors well. Give them credit for your success. They are people, not ATM machines.
I wanted to share information on several free training teleconferences coming up at Network for Good - anyone is welcome!
Nonprofit 911 Free Training Call:
Generate Impact! Through Stories
December 4, 1 p.m. EST
“Even if you have reams of evidence on your side, remember: numbers numb, jargon jars, and nobody ever marched on Washington because of a pie chart. If you want to connect with your audience, tell them a story.” – Andy Goodman, communications guru
During difficult economic times, raising funds and sharing your message become even trickier tasks. So how do you break through the clutter? How can you connect with supporters and still make an impact? What’s the best way to frame your communications so that your message is powerful and compelling?
Tell a story.
During this call, participants can expect practical tips in the following areas:
What constitutes a real newsworthy story
Why storytelling is effective
How to turn your organization’s topical issue into a story
How to find good stories
About Our Speaker
Susan Barnett is a former network news journalist turned nonprofit communications consultant.
Nonprofit 911 Free Training Call:
A Procrastinator’s Guide to Year-End Fundraising
December 9, 1 p.m. EST
The last weeks of the year are far and away the biggest and most important for online charitable giving. In fact, Network for Good processes 40% of online donations for nonprofits like yours in December. In addition, almost 70% of adults plan to donate the same amount online as they did in the 2007 holiday season. So the rest of 2008 is very important. With some quick tweaks to your website, as well as your marketing and communications efforts, you can ensure that you are ready and able to take advantage of the season. To help you get started right away, Mark Rovner from Sea Change Strategies will discuss 10 critical action steps for raising more money this holiday season.
If you’re a procrastinator and are only just revving up your holiday fundraising, this is a seminar you do not want to miss!
Do you know the biggest online fundraising day of the year? December 31. Followed by December 30. Over 45% of annual giving via Network for Good is during the month of December.
In addition, the gifts are bigger in December – on average, about $189!
That means there are a lot of generous procrastinators waiting until the last minute to make their donations this year.
What does this mean to you? Here are tips for ensuring those generous procrastinators give to you:
Send out an extra email between December 26 and 31st. That way you’ll be top of mind when these folks are doing their last-minute giving before the close of the tax year.
Keep the appeal short and simple. This is a hectic time of year, so don’t force people to work hard to make their gift. Frame a pithy, compelling ask and make sure that online donation form is a breeze.
Consider asking for a recurring gift as part of the appeal. This year, people may have less money. So set up the idea of spreading their giving over many months if they can’t afford the gift size they want to make.
Don’t forget to thank people when they give – or to acknowledge past support. Give your donors credit for making your work possible. A little gratitude goes a long way.
Posted by katya on Mon, January 05, 2009
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