Tag: philanthropy

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June 29, 2011 DonorDreams Uncategorized

The 7 Ps and case statements

Yesterday, I wrote about the importance of crafting your organization’s case for support document, and I want to continue down this path a little further today. Back when I worked with the Boy Scouts of America, it wasn’t uncommon for me to hear a co-worker or volunteer lament “The Seven P’s” — “Prior Proper Preparation Prevents Piss Poor Performance”. If this revelation surprises you, then remember that “BE PREPARED” is the motto of the Boy Scouts .

After yesterday’s blog post, I realized that I might have made the case for revisiting and revising your case statement documents. However, I didn’t talk about how you can best prepare your volunteers to bring that case for support to life.

Here is an example of what some of our volunteers look like when they try to vocalize our case for support when sitting down with a prospect or donor … click here to see a less than perfect example of someone trying to make the case for their charity. Unfortunately, many of these volunteers commit the following mistakes:

They come across nervous or unsure of themselves
They don’t inspire confidence and passion
Their body language sends the wrong message
Some might even perceive that they don’t know what they’re talking about

This is not how we want our fundraising volunteers to come across; however, the reality is that we set them up for failure by not training and preparing them properly. Yes, many of us provide our volunteers with a copy of the case statement. Some of us might even go so far as to tell them what it is and why it is important. However, very few of us model the case statement’s appropriate usage or work with volunteers on practicing how to put it into their own words. Here are a few preparation tips you may want to consider:

Host a campaign kickoff meeting and use some time to review the organization’s case for support.
Ask volunteers to take a few minutes to read the case statement; then go around the room and ask everyone to share one impactful piece of messaging they took from the document.
Pair volunteers up with each other and ask them to take turns using the information in the case statement to “make the case for financial support” to their partner. Ask the person who is listening to also provide constructive feedback at the end of the exercise.
Use video technology to record each volunteer and meet with them separately with positive and constructive feedback.
Make sure that volunteers are personally solicited for their contribution prior to going out on their first solicitation, and make sure the person soliciting them is perfectly modeling usage of the case statement.
Make time to go on solicitation visits with volunteers. Take time after the visit to de-brief and discuss how the case for support might have been made more impactfully.

Volunteers will resist these efforts all in the name of “time”. However, you need to ask yourself if you can afford to send them out to talk to your prospects and donors less than at their best. If you invest a little time in “prior proper preparation,” they will become world-class fundraising volunteers who walk away from your campaign feeling good about the entire experience … click here to see a better example of someone trying to make the case for their charity.

How does your organization prepare fundraising volunteers to make the case for financial support from donors? Please share your best practices in the comment box below.

Here is to your health!

Erik Anderson

Owner, The Healthy Non-Profit LLC

http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/profile.php?id=1021153653

June 28, 2011 DonorDreams Donor-centered fundraising, resource development

What are you saying?

Last night I was watching Comedy Central before bedtime and caught an interview between Stephen Colbert of The Colbert Report and Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform. It was obvious that Norquist made an appearance on The Colbert Report because he wants to “cultivate” new Millennial generation voters and educate them about his anti-tax message.

Unfortunately for poor Grover, his time was not well spent because when all was said and done the only thing he essentially accomplished was to 1) explain his anti-tax pledge and 2) demonstrate how much he hates taxes. He never got around to telling the young Millennial audience WHY an anti-tax position is important to their generation. I was left wondering what is the case for support?

This got me thinking about many recent conversations I’ve had with non-profit friends. We’ve focused too much on the “how to” communicate with prospects & donors as well as the “how often” to do it. Unfortunately, I think we’re missing the boat (like Grover did last night) by not talking about WHAT should we say to our prospects and donors.

In today’s day and age of non-profit competitiveness, it is not good enough to:

send out a gift acknowledgement letter that just says “thank you”
mail a quarterly newsletter to donors
e-blast informational emails
call donors with appreciation
host a recognition event
get the newspaper to print your press releases
set-up and use Facebook pages and Twitter accounts

This laundry list is important, but even more important is what your messaging will be once your secure and use these communication vehicles. Here are a few suggestions to help you fine tune your messaging:

Go back and re-read everything you’ve used in the last 3-months.
Assess the messaging with a critical eye. Ask yourself if there is a fine tuned message focused on what you do, why you do it, and where are you doing it, and why is it urgent and critical for the community. (If all you hear is “blah-blah-blah,” then you have some work to do.)
Pull together a focus group of donors and ask them what messages they hear and what do they want to hear.
Dust off your organization’s “case for support” document. Re-read, assess, test, and re-write based on what you hear from others.

Tom Ahern put it best in his most recent e-newsletter when he said: “Our job as donor communicators, I am now convinced by experience and research, is to bring JOY to the donor’s door.”

Has your donor communications brought joy to your donors? Have you asked them? Or are you just grabbing the megaphone and yelling as loudly as you can “we need more money”? Please go to the comment section of this blog and weigh-in on your organization’s communications best practices and how you know they are effective. Let’s learn from each other!

Here is to your health!

Erik Anderson

Owner, The Healthy Non-Profit LLC

http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/profile.php?id=1021153653

June 27, 2011 DonorDreams Uncategorized

Viruses, hackers, spyware and donors oh my

Last Thursday, I turned my computer on and started preparing to write my daily blog, when suddenly my virus software sprang into action. A pop-up window told me that my computer was infected with a trojan virus and asked if I wanted it removed. Of course, I said ‘YES’. In a blink of an eye, I was staring at the dreaded “blue screen of death,”and I was obviously out of commission. It was for this reason you did not see any blog posts from me on Thursday or Friday.

During my unplanned time down, I started thinking about how non-profit organizations probably deal with this on a daily basis and how in some instances it could even impact donors who routinely feed us their personal information (e.g. name, address, phone, email, credit card and banking info, etc).

Upon further investigation, did you know that the Obama team, who has collected tons of donor information at donate.barackobama.com, had to dealt with hackers as recently as a year ago? And “Twitter hacking” has been in the news recently for reasons I refuse to go into.

Non-profit organizations are constantly collecting information on their donors and storing it in their donor database. In fact, with the social media revolution in full swing, non-profits are pushing further by “friending” donors on Facebook, following donors on Twitter, and linking with donors on LinkedIn. All of these activities are intended to help deepen our relationships with donors and get to know them even better.

It is a brave new world and non-profit organizations need to make sure they are ready to deal with these issue. If you don’t think spyware, computer viruses, phishing and hackers are an issue, then go talk to our resource development friends at the University of Notre Dame or Maine Public Broadcasting.

Put yourself in a donor’s shoes after being informed that your systems were compromised? Where is your confidence level? What is running through your mind the next time you’re asked to make a contribution?

Of course, the answer is not to unplug your donor database or shutdown the organization’s Facebook or Twitter accounts. However, you might consider the following:

Develop a privacy policy for donors like the one Hope House has posted on their website.
Use the Association of Fundraising Professional’s (AFP) Code of Ethical Principles & Standards and The Donor Bill of Rights as a foundation to develop your resource development policies.
Develop a crisis management plan like the one United Way of Marion County in Florida has posted to the internet and consider involving donors in the policy development process so you can capture their point of view on how they’d like to be informed on certain matters.
Develop a documentation retention policies so you know what you need to keep and how to securely keep it. Blue Avocado has done a nice job getting you started down this road, but you definitely need to involve your board volunteers, Finance Committee, auditors, and possibly even your donors in developing your own policies.
Use virus software and spyware software routinely. Check out Tech Soup’s “virus protection toolkit”.
Don’t ever email donor data or information.

If you really want to scare yourself, spend a few moments with this PowerPoint presentation from our friends at NTEN. Scared yet?

So, how do you protect your donor data? If your systems got hacked or compromised, how would you go about informing your donors and dealing with the crisis? Please weigh-in and share so we can all learn together!

Here is to your health!

Erik Anderson

Owner, The Healthy Non-Profit LLC

http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/profile.php?id=1021153653

June 22, 2011 DonorDreams Donor-centered fundraising

Donors and organizational politics

A good friend of mine (and a reader of this blog) sent me an email yesterday suggesting that I start reading another blog called “The Third Sector Report“. Being a firm believer that good writers are good readers, I clicked the link and tried that blog on for size. This week’s post by Jeffrey Wilcox CFRE talks about politics inside of non-profit organizations.

Wilcox’s words hit me sideways and personally. They took me back in time to board meetings where two or three groups of board members were discussing different building options prior to beginning work on a capital campaign. Some volunteers wanted us to acquire land and build in one place. Others wanted to expand on our current site. Still others (including one of our biggest and most influential donors) wanted us to acquire an existing building and renovate.

When you get a bunch of people together who are mission-focused and passionate, politics can’t help but enter the equation. Sometimes it is paid staff at odds with board volunteers, and it really gets interesting when donors get involved.

Wilcox suggests that politics is unavoidable and urges non-profit leaders to develop a political management toolkit. There are lots of awesome tools one of which is a written succession plan. <Yikes!> However, I don’t want to steal his thunder. I urge you read his blog post for suggestions of the other tools to include in your toolkit.

In the end, I am convinced this “political management toolkit” is a great opportunity for non-profit leaders to get donors involved. CEOs and development professionals are wasting an engagement opportunity if they sit down and pound out a communication policy by themselves. I don’t see any problem with involving key donors and board volunteers in development of the executive director’s annual performance management plan.

Some donors just don’t have time to join the board of directors, a standing committee or a special event committee. So, why not ask them if they want to help out with a small project that has a distinct start and end? If you can make the case for why these tools in your political management toolkit are important, you will likely find a few donors who are willing to help. In the end, that donor is likely to be more engaged and as we all know … “money follows involvement”.

The bonus, of course, is that you’ve simultaneously built more organizational capacity in addition to deepening key donors’ engagement. Additionally, if the project involves something that a donor is passionate about, then you are modeling what a good “donor-centered” resource development professional looks like.

Have you ever included key donors who are not board volunteers in short-term projects? What was your experience and the results? Please weigh-in and let us know.

Here is to your health!

Erik Anderson

Owner, The Healthy Non-Profit LLC

http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/profile.php?id=1021153653

June 21, 2011 DonorDreams Uncategorized

Tin cup philanthropy

So, I was coming out of my local grocery store on Saturday and standing outside of the exit was a volunteer. She was holding a small plastic bank in the shape of a dog. Once I was in ear shot distance, she asked if I could spare some change for the local “low kill” animal shelter.

First, let me say that I know this charity. Second, let me say that I respect the work that this charity does. However, I did not part with my pocket change and found myself wondering instead:

How many hours was that volunteer standing there?
How much money could she possibly have collected during that time?
How much more money could she have raised in the same amount of time if she just asked a few of her friends who cared as much as she does about this cause to make a direct contribution?

Now there are some people who believe ALL charitable activities that ask people to make a contribution for nothing in return is “tin cup philanthropy”. If you don’t believe me, just read this Financial Times article for yourself. If you get really interested, you can cross check it with our friends at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania who appear to have fallen in love with what they call “Experimental Entrepreneurship“.

As a donor and a resource development professional, I understand why so many people see traditional philanthropy as begging with a tin cup, and it goes beyond just the volunteer standing outside of my local grocery store begging for her charity of choice. It extends to many non-profit organizations who recruit volunteers who are “reluctant solicitors” in the first place and then provide little to no training to those volunteers. The end result is typically well-intentioned people going to their friends and neighbors begging them to make a pledge, purchase a raffle ticket or attend an event.

When this happens, very little time is spent talking about the community needs that the charity might be addressing with its programming. To be frank, it typically sounds like begging and sometimes degenerates into quid pro quo or favor granting.

While I am intrigued with “experimental entrepreneurship” and see nothing wrong with charities exploring it as revenue stream, I don’t think it is “the answer” to tin cup philanthropy.

Non-profit leaders need to recruit the right volunteers for their fundraising activities, and they need to do a better job of training and supporting those volunteers. Let’s stop begging and start talking about our mission; community needs & gaps; our programs, services & solutions; and most importantly the “return on investment” for the community that comes with making a charitable contribution.

Only once we start doing this will we be able to retire the old tin cup.

What has been your experience as a donor? A volunteer solicitor? If you are a non-profit staff person, am I off-base with my conclusions? And is anyone excited about experimental entrepreneurship and why?

Here is to your health!

Erik Anderson

Owner, The Healthy Non-Profit LLC

http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/profile.php?id=1021153653

June 20, 2011 DonorDreams Uncategorized

Gross or net?

Last week, a very dear friend of mine emailed me with a question. She was wondering how is the right way to report to her donors and the public how much money one of her special event fundraisers had generated. Is it more transparent and appropriate to report the event’s “gross income”? Or is it more honest to report “net income”?

As I typically do, I went to the great “internet oracle” called Google and conducted a search on the question. I didn’t find anything exactly “on point,” but I did find some very interesting stuff that I think is worthy of sharing:

Non-Profit Accounting Basic$: “Non-Profit Specific Bookkeeping & Accounting“
American Institute on Philanthropy: “(Mis)understanding special events“
National Resource Center: “Building Trust Through Transparency“
IRS: “Charitable Contributions“

Getting back to the original question: “how to report special event revenue to donors” … perhaps we should try to first create a litmus test to measure “transparency related questions”. I think a transparent non-profit organization might exhibit the following traits:

always telling the truth
sharing all relevant fact with stakeholders
being accurate and authentic
being upfront and avoiding surprises

Here is what guidestar.org says about “non-profit transparency“.

Applying a “transparency test” to this question, I lean towards the conclusion that it is appropriate to share ALL relevant information about the special event. Why not tell donors that the event grossed $X and costed $Y, which resulted in net revenue of $Z?

That is just my two cents … what do you think? How does your non-profit organization report its special event revenue to donors, board volunteers and the community?

Here is to your health!

Erik Anderson

Owner, The Healthy Non-Profit LLC

http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/profile.php?id=1021153653

June 17, 2011 DonorDreams Uncategorized

Boards should meet NOT email

I opened my e-newsletter from Jean Block yesterday, scrolled through it, and nearly jumped out of my chair when I read her link to an article in The Non-Profit Quarterly about boards that are voting on issues in between meetings using email . In a nutshell, the article spells out all the reasons why taking email votes is neither legal nor a very practice. I strongly encourage you to click the previous link and read the article for yourself (after you are done reading this blog, of course … LOL).

My former supervisor at Boys & Girls Clubs of America used to periodically rant to me about email. If I heard it once I heard it one hundred times … “email is an information technology and not a communication tool”. Regardless of whether or not you agree with him, I think we can all agree that email has its limitations. I thought the MAXIMUMadvantage website did a good job of naming the times that email is not appropriate.

Board members that use email voting are not exercising their fiduciary responsibilities. How in the world can we “discuss” important issues unless we’re engaged in a “real-time” discussion?

I know that there are people reading this blog who are saying to themselves that board members are “too busy”. To those folks, I suggest that anyone who doesn’t have time to attend board meetings probably shouldn’t be a board volunteer.

Please don’t misunderstand … there are appropriate roles for everyone in your organization. You just need to take the time to be donor-centered and relationship-oriented by getting to know the person and finding the right opportunity for them to support your mission.

Not every big donor or important person needs to be on the board of directors. It is possible to “engage” donors and community decision-makers without asking them to join the board.

Ask them to be a program volunteer or fundraising volunteer.
Ask them to help with strategic planning or participate in a focus group or a special project.
Just listen and then ask them to do something they are passionate about.

My bottom line is that square pegs shouldn’t be asked to fit into round holes.

Others of you might be saying that non-profit organizations have a tendency to “over meet” their volunteers. If that is the case, then I simply suggest that we need to figure out how not to do that. Instead, we should focus our efforts on having powerful and effective meetings. It “must be” possible because there is a website with the name effectivemeetings.com. LOL. At the very least, in all seriousness look into instituting a consent agenda. Additionally, here is a YouTube video with a few meeting tips.

Other than a consent agenda, what other strategies are you using to streamline board meetings while maximizing impactful and strategic discussions that serve to engage and empower board volunteers? Please share your thoughts and practices in the comment section before another email proxy vote is sent out for consideration.

Here is to your health!

Erik Anderson

Owner, The Healthy Non-Profit LLC

http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/profile.php?id=1021153653

June 16, 2011 DonorDreams Uncategorized

Fundraiser-in-Chief?

My partner and I have been bombarded in the last few weeks by the Obama fundraising team with countless solicitations. There have been phone calls, emails and even snail-mail appeals. There is even one interesting email enticing us to donate in order to get entered into a raffle for a chance to have dinner with the President. Ohhh, let the fundraising fun begin!

After closing the “Dinner with Barack” email, I randomly decided to look at the Wikipedia page for “fundraising“. Interestingly enough, the only picture on that page was of U.S. President Barack Obama.

These two unrelated things in my life got me thinking. “Is Barack Obama not just the Commander-in-Chief but also the nation’s Fundraiser-in-Chief?” Here are some of the thoughts floating around in my head as I contemplate this question:

Team Obama raised approximately three-quarters of a billion dollars in 2007-08 and experts are predicting they will top the $1 billion mark in 2011-12. I don’t know of anyone who has done that in any sector.
Team Obama raised their money from approximately 4 million donors, many of which were individuals.
Many fundraising experts who looked closely at the numbers said the Obama people did very well with getting small donors to contribute to their first political campaign and then did an even better with getting small multiple gifts from those same donor.

While I’ve come to learn the hard way that political fundraising is very different from doing so for a non-profit organization, I still believe the upcoming Presidential campaign fundraising efforts (all of them and not just Team Obama) are worth watching because there will likely be some interesting take-away lessons for social service non-profit organizations.

Team Obama did much to move the needle with regards to making political fundraising more “donor-centered” and less “transactional” compared to previous campaigns, and they seemed to do so using a blended approach of traditional fundraising (e.g. events, mail, phone, face-to-face) and e-philanthropy (e.g. email, website, social media, text, etc). I personally came to these conclusion because of the countless “update emails with videos” I received in 2008. It was obviously an attempt at stewardship and a way of demonstrating ROI to individual donors. It must have also been successfully because of the number of small donors who made multiple contributions.

In addition to non-profit resource development professionals getting an opportunity to observe up-close-and-personal donor-centered techniques being applied, I think it will also be interesting to watch how 2008 Obama donors behave in 2012. There were lots of promises made in 2008. As non-profit organizations have learned (mostly the hard way), when we over-promise and under-deliver, donors tend to be a little more reluctant to renew their contribution.

Finally, I’m also interested in watching how “transparency” in political fundraising continues to evolve in 2012. Have you ever checked out The Huffington Post’s “Fundrace” resource? Unfortunately, I have done so and found myself sucked into countless hours of looking up friends, family and donors to see who was donating what and to whom. Interestingly, I found my personal contributions to be under-reported. I wonder if that was a problem that resulted from having to reconcile contributions made via so many different avenues (e.g. website vs. snail-mail vs phone).

So, I think the jury is out on whether Barack Obama is our country’s Fundraising-in-Chief and the proof will be in the 2012 numbers. What do you think?

Were there any best practices or lessons learned that your non-profit used after the 2008 campaign? Are you watching anything in particular from a fundraising standpoint as we head into 2012?

Here is to your health!

Erik Anderson

Owner, The Healthy Non-Profit LLC

http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/profile.php?id=1021153653

June 15, 2011 DonorDreams Uncategorized

Symbols and philanthropy

Yesterday was June 14th and that can only mean one thing — Flag Day — which got me thinking about the importance of “symbols” in philanthropy.

Quite simply, symbols are things that help us quickly and clearly understand for what something stands. For example, the American flag represents the historic formation of our country (e.g. 13 independent colonies) and stands for the values put forth by our Founding Fathers (e.g. freedom, justice, democratic principles, self-determination, etc).

Symbols are powerful communication tools for organizations according to Anat Rafaeli and Momica Worline in their paper titled “Symbols in Organizational Culture“. The following are a few examples of symbols that I’ve seen non-profits use effectively:

Boys & Girls Clubs use a logo of two hands gasping each other. It is commonly known as “The Knuckles”. It symbolizes hope and opportunity as well as a partnership between kids and those willing to extend a helping hand in partnership. Donors see the logo and immediately understand in what they are investing.
The Boy Scouts integrated the fleur-de-lis into its logo. This symbol has had many meanings throughout human history; however, within a scouting context it is supposed to make donors think of a compass, which symbolizes scouting’s power in a person’s life to always keep them pointed in the right direction.
Getting back to Boys & Girls Clubs … this organization effectively uses its alumni assets as “symbols” and a way to effortlessly communicate to donors that the Club is 1) an effective after-school program that yields success stories, 2) all about lifting people up, 3) about forging positive kid-adult mentoring relationships, and 4) lots and lots of fun. Check out this Denzel Washington commercial and see if you can see those messages embodied in their spokesperson.

Many non-profit organizations also develop “signature fundraisers” or publicize “signature programs” that become symbols of their organization. I can specifically think of the United Way’s fundraising thermometer, poppies to support veterans causes, and cookie sales to help the Girl Scouts. Think of how powerful it must be for a donor to instantly understand in what they are investing.

In my opinion, the biggest challenge for your organization is integrating a sense of “mission-focus” into the symbols you construct. This is especially true for those non-profit organization’s pursuing cause-related marketing efforts. Who can ever forget when Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure affiliated their “symbol” (aka brand) with KFC’s brand (greasy, unhealthy food)?

Jump in and comment on other non-profit symbols that you’ve seen used very well or poorly by a non-profit organization in their resource development program. And enjoy this final link to the Chinese symbol for “philanthropy”

Here is to your health!

Erik Anderson

Owner, The Healthy Non-Profit LLC

http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/profile.php?id=1021153653