BIG’s Blog: Madonna’s Secret

I have to admit I actually kind of liked Madonna’s Super Bowl half-time show. Very surreal lighting effects, a few costume changes, and of course a cast of thousands can make pretty much anybody look good. And it worked.

But was this the Madonna from the 1980’s?

Besides my daughter noticing that her face looked “really tight,” her real secret to her longevity is reinvention.

The sexy girl reinvented herself as the glamour girl who then reinvented herself as the hip-hop girl. I’m probably missing a few reinventions but you get the picture.

It happens all the time in the world of entertainment as well as politics.

How about fundraising?

People like what your organization stands for. They trust you. But that doesn’t mean that your graphics and look can’t be more modern. And it isn’t just the look. It is also the channels you use to communicate with your donors and prospective donors.

Madonna has been successful. But rather than start putting out the “best of” albums of her old hits, now she is doing hip-hop.

You don’t have to play hip-hop on your website or get BOTOX, just update your look and expand your communication channels.


-Mike

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BIG’s Blog: Timidity

Monday’s blog was tough sledding for many of my readers . . . No One Can Serve Two Masters.

Change is upon us and you have to be open to things you might not have thought of.

At Browne Innovation Group, we try not to sugar-coat the fact that the world of fundraising is changing but we want you to be a winner!

The winners will adopt new fundraising business models and will continue to grow their revenue stream for their organizations. It isn’t easy, but it certainly is rewarding. Just ask our clients.

The losers won’t move and that will be that.

There are many people who understand the perilous crossroads that many organizations are facing with digital disruption. One of those is the blogger and author Seth Godin. His recent blog was dead on.

In search of a timid trapeze artist

Good luck with that, there aren't any.
If you hesitate when leaping from rope to another, you're not going to last very long.
And this is at the heart of what makes innovation work in organizations, why industries die, and how painful it is to try to maintain the status quo while also participating in a revolution.
Gather up as much speed as you can, find a path and let go. You can't get to the next rope if you're still holding on to this one.

-Mike

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BIG’s Blog: No One Can Serve Two Masters

Jesus’ lesson goes way beyond money as the book of Matthew relates in Chapter 6, Verse 24. “No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.”

The shift in fundraising methodology is so profoundly different that you need to separate your existing marketing fundraising functions along the analogue and digital divide. Separate direct mail from all digital and Internet-based marketing. Donor services need to be placed in the digital group as well, but I’ll talk about that another day.

The only exception to this hard and fast rule is if your fundraising group is very small; five or fewer. But if you have a significant, long tenured direct mail fundraising group with dedicated staff and your program is still viable, leave them alone.

Trying to force direct mail managers and staff with deep experience in the science and art of direct mail fundraising to take on elements of the new digital marketing just doesn’t work. Been there – tried that. It doesn’t work.

No one can serve two masters.

Digital and web-based fundraising applications are new and rising and are just now beginning to deliver a financial impact while analogue (direct mail) is still the dominant fundraising financial driver. . . even though long term it is declining.

Take your digital and web-based marketing functions and separate them. Manage them separately. Staff them separately. Prepare separate budgets.

No one can serve two masters.

-Mike

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BIG’s Blog: Finding a 21st Century Roadmap

Let’s be honest, this change is massive. It’s bigger than just one thing, which is why we blog each time about just one element. We do this so that rather than “gulping” the elephant, you can eat it bite by bite.

Today I want to elevate one sub-group of my blog audience which is . . . interestingly enough . . . the oldest group of fundraisers in the nonprofit sector; they are the Catholic religious communities.

But secular nonprofit groups should still pay attention; there is much you can learn.

I am highlighting Catholic religious communities because virtually all of them were raising donations before direct mail fundraising became common fundraising practice. In fact, some of these religious communities pre-date the Postal Service.

Before mass marketing fundraising, individual members from these communities would travel out to churches, groups, and events, connecting with individuals by way of sharing stories about who they were and what their communities were about. They developed supporters one at a time. They kept in touch with these supporters. Over time they formed deep relationships with these supporters.

You could say that direct mail supplanted this personal contact methodology and you would be correct. And as direct mail fundraising evolved, the personal communication gave way to the “mass” communication. The process of acquiring supporters, thanking supporters, and just communicating with supporters evolved into a “mass” process. And insofar as all other fundraisers followed the same process, it worked for all. But that didn’t mean it was the most comfortable for the religious communities.

Today through technology we have evolved personal and interactive ways to communicate using the Internet. Many Catholic religious communities are seeing the connection to the “old ways” of connecting as becoming the “new way” of personally connecting to their supporters; returning to a more comfortable approach to developing relationships with supporters. One joked with me the other day that the past 80 years was a small aberration for her group and they wanted to return to their roots and connect personally with their many supporters. She viewed the Internet as allowing them to develop the depth of relationship they used to enjoy between themselves and their supporters.

Catholic religious communities are drawn to this more personal person-to-person contact methodology, but are struggling for a 21st century roadmap.

Many of these groups are engaging with us and it is exciting! Collectively, we are integrating the new technologies with the “old ways” of personally connecting and communicating. Very exciting indeed!

-Mike

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BIG’s Blog: What are you?

An onion is an onion.  But the onion provides a great metaphor because of its construction to help us all think about something that’s really confusing.

You are the leader, or are a part of the leadership team, of your organization’s fundraising group. But if you peel back your fundraising group all the way to its core (as you would peel back an onion) you hopefully will get to the “reason for your existence.”

Fundraising . . . right?

We can study the philosophy of philanthropy and spend a lifetime working through the nuances of “why people give,” but if your group is charged with raising funds to power the missions of your organization and the funds are not hitting the goals that you set, that’s a problem.

We are always comfortable with what we know, and a part of that is forgetting what we “are” and instead seeing ourselves as “what we do.” This is always a big challenge in times of great change like we are experiencing today.

Huh?

It isn’t just fundraisers that fall into this. It is so endemic that it is easy to find all kinds of similar examples. Take the railroads for example.

The railroads forgot that they were in the transportation business, carrying passengers and freight. They saw themselves as railroads and evolved a culture . . . some would say a romantic narrative . . . around all the history, events and characters (think Casey Jones) of what the railroad culture means.

And insofar as the people that actually built and worked on the track beds, ran the trains or otherwise focused on the operation of the railroad, the culture of being a railroad man or woman made sense.

But for the leaders or members of the senior leadership team that ran the company that actually owned the railroads, forgetting they were in the transportation business was inexcusable.

As new transportation technologies developed, and began to siphon off passenger traffic, why didn’t they follow their customers and incorporate these new transportation technologies into their transportation companies? Why don’t we have Union Pacific airlines, or Burlington Northern airlines? Exactly!

For fundraisers it’s no different today. If you view your fundraising group as direct mail and planned giving, because that is what you “do” today, rather than following communication technology and your current and potential donors as they fundamentally shift how they communicate, engage, and donate, you will actually be worse off than the railroads. At least the railroads had a freight business to fall back on.

-Mike

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BIG’s Blog: The 99% and the 1%

I overheard only two words from the conversation of two young ladies behind the hotel desk: “Haiti” and “earthquake.” I immediately opened my smartphone and clicked on my Wall Street Journal app. Under the tab,“What’s News,” there it was under a banner of “Breaking News:” the first report of a report of an earthquake in Haiti.

We digest news and information differently now. Electronic media and word of mouth give us the broad brush strokes of what is happening. But, it is digital media that offers us the deep dive into the details.

We hear things all the time and 99% of it won’t be in our memory banks five minutes later because it doesn’t connect to our lives. But when we do hear something or see a headline about something we personally care about – like “Haiti” and “earthquake” to me; we are immediately going to the internet to seek out all the information we can find.

As direct-mail fundraisers you send out a lot of direct-mail appeals. That is information. If there is a story in your appeal or a particular issue you are addressing to your donors and friends, it had also better be on your website.

For the 1% of the information that matters to us, your website provides something we never had before. It connects seekers of more information to a deeper understanding of the story or issue that is relevant to them.

-Mike

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BIG’s Blog: U.S. Banks and Fundraisers Need a New Business Model

Nonprofit fundraising isn’t the only sector of the economy that is seeking out a new business model. How about American banks?

The consulting company McKinsey recently released a paper by Toos Daruvata that details the problems U.S. banks face and their need to fundamentally redo how they do business. “By business model, we mean how banks actually operate – how work is done, the degree of automation, the pricing and design of their products, and the underlying compensation systems.”

Aren’t banks still making money? Yes, but not enough. Banks are owned by investors and if an investor’s bank stock investment is worse than other classes of investments, the investor will sell their bank stock. If too many people want to sell their bank stocks, the stock price goes way down.

Today banks are being buffeted in three areas; expanded capital requirements, increased regulations, and consumers and businesses deleveraging. “These forces of change will compel banks to reinvent their core banking business. In five years, branch banking will probably look fundamentally different as branch layouts, formats, and employee capabilities change. The use of Internet and mobile devices will grow exponentially. Overall, the cost of serving each customer in a branch is likely to fall by one-third.”  

But what about fundraisers? If fundraisers stay with current failing fundraising business models then donations will begin to decline and the work or ministry of the organization becomes stunted. Soon donors that continue to hang on begin to see the organization declining and they, too, pull back.

There will be many nonprofit organizations that fail because their fundraising failed to adopt new fundraising business models.

When a bank fails, it is a bad thing. Some people lose their jobs and investors lose their investments. When a nonprofit organization fails – that is a tragedy. Critical services or ministries are lost to those who really needed them.

-Mike

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BIG’s Blog: Death by a Thousand Cuts

At the end of World War II, the Soviet Union’s armies controlled Eastern Europe. Many of these Eastern European countries had been western-style democracies before the war. To his shame, FDR agreed to the Soviet demand to allow “spheres of influence” in the territories (former independent countries) occupied by the Allied armies.

There was never any question that the U. S., France and Britain would allow the countries they occupied to freely elect post-war governments, including Germany. The Soviets had other plans.

But even the Soviets knew they could not quickly impose their domination on eastern countries like Poland and Yugoslavia while the American and British armies were still in place.

The Soviet tactic was to slowly, very slowly, put like-minded communists in leadership positions, change former constitutions, and rewrite laws in these formerly democratic countries. Their thinking was that the populations wouldn’t rebel because the changes were slow and incremental. But they had the effect of slowly ceding democratic rights to the state; the state that was now dominated by Soviet puppet leaders. It was called “Death by a thousand cuts.”

Last Sunday the U. S. Postal Service raised rates yet again. Slow and insidious price increases by Postal management that do nothing to make the Postal Service a better service or that underpin changes that would turn the Postal Service into a viable 21st century organization and business. Death by a thousand cuts.

-Mike

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BIG’s Blog: The “Words” Struck a Nerve

“So while the old players are lamenting you can’t do it the old way, nimble players are utilizing the new tools to gain advantage.”

We live in our own worlds. So we can be forgiven when we “misinterpret” people we think are talking about our world, when in fact, they are talking about something else entirely.

But even when we figure out they are not talking about our world, and take a step back, we can’t help but notice how similar the “issues” are.

It turned out that the above quote came from the head of an Internet company who was opining that the SOPA and PIPA bills currently in front of Congress dealing with protecting intellectual property and stopping online piracy actually could have the effect of infringing on freedom of speech and could hurt future Web development. The bills enjoy particularly strong support in Hollywood and the music industry.

I could have sworn it came from a nonprofit fundraising blogger describing the all too prevalent attitude among way too may senior direct mail fundraising executives.

-Mike

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BIG’s Blog: Can You Change the World with Donor Service?

“Life is service,” said hotel magnate E. M. Statler, “and the one who progresses is the one who gives his fellow human beings a little more, a little better service.”

Service is about the entire experience. For businesses, it’s about making it easier for customers to spend money with you. Customers will be happier, you will be happier.

Service is about the entire experience. For not-for-profits, it’s about making it easier for donors to donate money to your organization. Donors will be happier, you will be happier.

Every single not-for-profit organization serves somebody. Service is ultimately the core cause of virtually every not-for-profit. Therefore, every not-for-profit should understand the word service.

Why, then, are there still not-for-profit organizations that make it either difficult or impossible to give online?

Spend waaaay more time making your online donation process easier than you do nitpicking your campaign copy!

Your organization’s concern about your donor service says waaaay more to current and potential donors than your copy.

Can you change the world with donor service? Only with happy donors.

-Mike

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