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? 

Be critical – because your donors will be.

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.

Welcome!  I’m delighted to be the host for this month’s Nonprofit Blog Carnival.  I asked some of my favorite bloggers to hold forth on the topic, “Highs and Lows” - great successes or flaming failures of their nonprofit careers.  Jeff Brooks of Future Fundraising Now, Kivi Leroux Miller of NonprofitMarketingGuide and Jake Seliger of Grant Writing Confidential came through big time.  Plus, I’m adding one of my own failures in this post.

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?) 

Here is this month’s roundup of wisdom:

1. My Nonprofit High and Low: Both on the Same Day by Kivi Leroux Miller

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.

2. Fundraising failure shows you can’t take donors where they don’t want to go by Jeff Brooks

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.

3. True Believers and Grant Writing: Two Cautionary Tales by Jake Seliger

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. 

So I worked with our great team at Network for Good to create our Learning Center, marketing and fundraising Tips and Nonprofit 911 calls.  I feel like this is a huge high - and it would not have come without that low. 

In fact, lows almost always beget highs, if you learn from the low.

Thanks everyone for showing us how true this is in this month’s carnival.

PS: Last minute entry alert!  Beaconfire made this video on learning from failures.

This is definitely worth watching.

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. 

Visit here to enter today!

I am a judge for the contest, so I can’t wait to see what you enter!

In the meantime, here are tips for great nonprofit video from See3.

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.

Learn how to deal with all the Homers out there!  Get the eBook for free here.

Enjoy!

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.