What’s New in ePhilanthropy

Posted on December 18, 2010 by Norman Reiss

I’ve long advocated using web based applications, but are we ready for a cloud operating system? Here’s a first look at Google’s Chrome OS, planned for release next summer. (Why not just focus on Android, which is already in wide usage on the mobile platform?)

Need help in planning a social media and online engagement strategy? Here’s a great overview of what’s involved, thanks to Big Duck‘s Farra Trompeter. For example, pick the channels where you have the time and resources to participate (you can’t be everywhere).

Will you join me at the Nonprofit Technology Conference in March in DC? For a preview of some issues we’ll be discussing, Nten summarizes the best of nonprofit technology in 2010.

In social media, a key principle is to listen first. Janet Fouts recently offered a terrific webinar on Streamlining Your Social Media Workflow , and offers this useful list of listening tools.

Only two weeks left to get out your year-end appeals. Here’s why you need to act now, and some last minute advice, more tips on making the ask and best practices for year-end fundraising.

While this is a busy time for fundraisers, I hope you still find time to celebrate the upcoming holidays.

Many Great Reports Out This Week

Posted on December 11, 2010 by Norman Reiss

The Online Giving Study from Network for Good and True Sense Marketing offers a comprehensive look of ephilanthropy, covering a 7 year time span and a wide range of nonprofits. Many others have already discussed its results – see Frogloop, The Agitator and Wild Apricot. What I particularly liked:

online fundraising is about relationship building, just as has it was for traditional development. This is a great reminder for nonprofits that focus only on the technology, or who treat online as a very ‘different’ channel than offline.
most online givers still go through the nonprofit’s own website to donate, less frequently to giving portals and social giving sites. More importantly, those who give through the charity’s site tend to donate more over the long term than other givers.
recurring giving should always be offered as an option. Perhaps eventually it will be used as often in the US as it is elsewhere in the world.
those who give in December have a higher long term value than donors in other months. Do you need any more of a reason to make sure your year-end appeals go out this month?
‘disaster’ givers have lower long term value and lower retention. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t use stewardship strategies to build a relationship with these contributors.

Idealware’s updated Open Source Content Management Systems Report takes another look at Drupal, Joomla, WordPress and Plone. Drupal still offers the most flexibility and has the support of a large international community. But all of these tools are potent; Wordpress is especially noteworthy for its ease of use and has developed into much more than a blogging tool.

Pew Internet’s first survey to focus on Twitter concludes that 8% of Online Americans Use Twitter which may seem like a low number, but nevertheless offers some interesting insights into the groups that are most active. For example, while it may be no surprise that young people (18-29) are heavy users, the report also concludes that African Americans and Latinos are more than twice as likely to use Twitter as white users. And even if you know if your constituents are on Twitter, their usage may differ greatly; the report contrasts those who check multiple times / day for updates (25%) with those who never check for new content (20%). My take: while it may have started out as a social service, that’s not the case now and your nonprofit should be using Twitter to connect with your audience.

Finally, in response to Apple’s reluctance to facilitate nonprofit fundraising on the iPhone, Beth Kanter has pledged to switch to an Android phone. (I’m getting one too, but decided to do so before the recent controversy featured in the NY Times erupted.) I believe the Androids will eventually overtake the iPhones, even with Verizon getting the iPhone (finally) soon.

It’s December – Year End Fundraising Plan in Place?

Posted on December 1, 2010 by Norman Reiss

December is the best time of year to reach out to your constituents for financial support. If you haven’t yet finalized your year end fundraising campaign, there’s still time to get on track.

To start, prepare an integrated communications calendar which includes direct mail, email marketing, social networking and any other forms of outreach. Make sure your messaging is consistent across channels, and look for ways for one channel to support another (e.g. an email piece that references a recently received direct mail letter). Make sure you talk about your organization’s accomplishments in the past year, and how your supporters’ contributions have been used.

Schedule emails to go out both before Christmas and during the last few days of 2010. Many constituents will wait until the last minute to donate, so make sure your online giving forms are working OK.

Plan in advance what you will say in each communication. If you know that you want to send an email appeal on Dec. 15, Dec. 22 and Dec. 30, don’t wait until the day before to prepare your message. Each needs to be a bit different; don’t simply repeat the same content. Spend the most time crafting your subject line to encourage your audience to open your mailing.

Need more help? There are many free online trainings available over the next weeks from CARE2 – The Procrastinator’s Guide to Year-End Fundraising and Network for Good – The Final Word on Year-End Fundraising, as well as these resources - CARE2′s Overachiever’s Guide to Year-End Fundraising, Convio’s Kick Start Your Holiday Campaign and M&R’s tips on Holiday Giving Programs. Finally, Common Knowledge recently presented a great webinar, Ten Success Tips for Year-End Online Fundraising – get the recording and slides here.

The holidays can be a stressful time for fundraisers, but the funds you raise over the next month will make a huge difference to helping your organization – and give you a jump start for 2011.

What’s New in ePhilanthropy

Posted on November 12, 2010 by Norman Reiss

Attended an interesting session on email marketing and social media at the All About Email Virtual Conference and Expo yesterday, reviewing how these channels can be used to complement each other. An important point – since you don’t ‘own’ information on Facebook and Twitter, it’s still important to build your own email list. (Sessions were recorded and will be available for listening starting Mon, Nov. 15.)

While we’ve seen reports on social media and email marketing, there’s been little to guide nonprofits on website statistics until the new 2010 Website Benchmarks Report available from Groundwire. Although the report focuses on small environmental organizations, its findings are useful for all nonprofits.

When deciding how to do fundraising, do you rely on data or on your own instinct. Jeff Brooks in Future Fundraising Now suggests that you use facts and past experience as your guide. And if you think that a multichannel approach to fundraising / marketing is something new, take a look at Hank Rosso’s classic Achieving Excellence in Fundraising, last revised in 2003 (see chapter on using the Internet as a fundraising vehicle).

If you still need help with your year end fundraising drive yet, get some help from Network from Good’s upcoming webinar as well as this tool from Blue State Digital which analyzes your Google Analytics data. (Tip – don’t wait until the last week of 2010 to frantically prepare an appeal.)

Like to be on the cutting edge? Try RockMelt, a soon to be released browser which integrates social media.

If you’re in NYC next week, attend the Foundation Center’s Open House on Tue, Nov. 16 and Nten‘s 501 Tech NYC meeting Wed evening, Nov. 17, which will feature Allyson Kapin, from Rad Campaign, Women Who Tech and lead blogger at Frogloop offering tips on nonprofit technology and social media.

Enabling Donors to Choose How Money Is Used

Posted on November 6, 2010 by Norman Reiss

This week I was invited to take a look at GiveLoop, a new software platform for processing online donations. Inspired by sites such as Kiva and DonorsChoose, GiveLoop allows nonprofits to empower constituents to decide exactly how their donations will be used by ‘voting with their money.’ Benefits for the nonprofit are to increase donation size, increase donor loyalty and increase donor volume, as well as providing more transparency. If you’ve looked at direct mail appeals you’ve received lately, you will probably notice how donation levels are often associated with what each amount will allow the nonprofit to do, but doesn’t obligate the organization to use the funds for that purpose.

While GiveLoop offers an interesting new way to do online fundraising, most organizations I’ve worked with have been wary of collecting restricted funds, partially due to the accounting requirements and partially because they really don’t want to give constituents this level of control. But this reminds me of the difficulty some nonprofits have had in embracing social media because they want to control the messaging. But as Clay Shirky pointed out at last year’s Nonprofit Technology Conference, ‘you’ve already lost control.’

However, I like the idea of GiveLoop as continuing the recent trend of giving donors more information about what their money will be used for, and then reporting back on how the donations were actually used. GiveLoop also tries into social networking, although co-founder Todd Spitz told me that it was too early to tell whether constituents who have given through GiveLoop have been successful in becoming fundraisers for the causes they support.

For a nonprofit that is considering using a product like GiveLoop, a question to ask is whether the organization is really interested in listening to their supporters, or if they are doing it simply to raise more money. If it’s the latter, then the effort is less likely to be successful as constituents will eventually realize that their input is not welcome. There also needs to be full transparency about what will happen if the requested funds for a specific project are not raised; will the balance be made up by another donation source or will the donor be asked to consider supporting another initiative?

Interestingly, GiveLoop’s FAQ clearly states that the nonprofit is not obligated to use the money in the way donors select. But to make the most of this type of program, an organization clearly has to be willing to give constituents a much greater role in how funds are spent, similar to why it’s so important to listen first in social media and not simply treat it as another way to send out nonprofit updates.

What I Learned This Week

Posted on September 25, 2010 by Norman Reiss

What’s especially nice about the nonprofit community is how generous everyone is in sharing their knowledge. This week I attended the Westchester Chapter meeting of the Association of Fundraising Professionals, listened to webinars on Using Online Tools for Year End Fundraising, Rethinking Your eNewsletter Strategy, a session based on the recently released Nonprofit Social Media Decision Guide and Engaging Donors through Social Media . Here’s a sampling of what I learned:

why it’s critical to have a strong case for support to present to constituents, and to make sure all staff understand it (not just development)
the importance of integrating fundraising with an organization’s overall planning process
use social media for stewardship; use email, direct mail and telemarketing to deliver a strong ask
figure out your main objectives before starting a Facebook presence – is your main goal to:
- encourage feedback / discussion
- drive traffic to website
- build email list
- attract event attendees
plan to spend at least two hours / week per channel on social media, but you will need to devote more time in the getting started phase
Facebook will soon be making available more functionality within tabs, so visitors may have less reason to go to main organization web site
when communicating with constituents:
- send fewer words more often
- talk about the future, not mainly about past events
- write more about them, less about your nonprofit

I also raised this issue during the AFP event: how can an organization find a balance between aggressively pursuing its mission with the hope of ‘putting itself out of business’ within a specified time, e.g. Michael J. Fox Foundation, versus long term nonprofits which has been seeking a cure for a disease for a very long time, but still have much ground to cover? My suggestion: keep reminding donors what their help has allowed your organization to accomplish, relating specific examples of how you’ve been able to help your target audience. And keep saying ‘thank you’ – not just when you are seeking another contribution.

Please vote on which sessions you’d like to see at Nten’s 2011 Nonprofit Technology Conference and pick your favorite slogan in the Getting Attention Nonprofit Tagline Awards.

For an example of how powerful video can be in communications, watch this incredibly touching one minute video by ALS Society of Canada.

Report from NYC 501 Tech Club Meeting on Brandraising

Posted on September 17, 2010 by Norman Reiss

At this week’s monthly NYC 501 Tech Club meeting, Sarah Durham of Big Duck offered highlights from her recently published Brandraising: How Nonprofits Raise Visibility and Money Through Smart Communications. Here’s a few tidbits to encourage you to buy the book and to attend the upcoming Nten webinar series which begins next week:

Nonprofits communicate for fundraising, programs and advocacy
Positioning is the differentiating idea you strive to get across to target audiences
Personality is the feeling you want people to associate with your organization
Big Duck’s Brandraising strategy suggests a consistent approach to developing materials, strategies and campaigns for your organization (best done after you have completed a strategic planning initiative)

What’s the best way to get management buy-in (for this and other types of projects)? Take small steps, don’t push your agenda, and show how your organization’s competitors are already implementing the strategies you are advocating.

Does a Brandraising campaign would stifle staff who are accustomed to doing things in their own way? According to Sarah, making available templates and consistent communications materials actually makes it easier for staff to do their job since they don’t have to keep recreating the basics and can apply their creativity in other ways.

How can an organization devise an approach to appeal to many diverse audiences? Sarah recommended that a nonprofit must be willing to differentiate itself; an approach that tries to appeal to all will ultimately fail (similar to why it’s so important to use segmentation when developing email marketing campaigns).

How can you tell when a Brandraising strategy has been successful? When an organization’s messaging is more cohesive and staff can more easily communicate key ideas to new and existing constituents.

My favorite remark from the evening: how consultants often repeat what staff have told management all along, but the organization only pays attention when the recommendations come from a consultant. I’ve been on both sides of the fence, and have had this experience. The lesson for nonprofit management – ask your own people for advice before you spend money on an outside resource. Not only will you save money, but you’ll show your staff that you value their opinions.

What’s New in ePhilanthropy

Posted on September 2, 2010 by Norman Reiss

Social media expert Beth Kanter updated her list of listening, monitoring, engaging and management tools. It’s not easy to measure the results of social networking, but it’s important to pick at least some of these programs, most which are free, to evaluate your efforts. Here’s some questions to help evaluate your social media initiatives. (Thanks also to Harish Rao for highlighting this topic for GrassrootsCamp at a live event this week in NYC.)

Network for Good‘s Katya Andresen explains why you can’t just focus on older donors, even though they have traditionally been the most reliable givers. Older constituents are also getting more active in social media , per reviews in The Agitator.net and the Chronicle of Philanthropy of a recent Pew Internet report.

It’s challenging to change the name of a major event, but the March of Dimes used a variety of strategies to rebrand its major fundraising event (not all which worked well).

Courtesy of Big Duck’s blog, use these tips to revitalize your email subject lines. (Sorry, email is still a valuable way to reach constituents, despite the rising role of social media.)

Finally, TechSoup asks what does your organization look like from the outside, reminding us of the importance of clear, consistent messaging across our online (and offline) communications.

Have a safe and restful Labor Day weekend.

Nonprofit Bridge

Bridging Technology, Communications & Development to Implement ePhilanthropy for Nonprofit Organizations

Category Archives: fundraising

Many Great Reports Out This Week

It’s December – Year End Fundraising Plan in Place?

Report from NYC 501 Tech Club Meeting on Brandraising