Using All Of Our Media for Social Good

Katya sent me this fantastic video produced by Network for Good yesterday:

What a fun video! It clearly demonstrates the need for a changed relationship between donors and orgs, it also demonstrates how easy and inexpensive it is for nonprofits to use videos to make their point very inexpensively and convincingly.

I then saw this interesting post from Niels Teunis who rightly reminds us that email continues to be the killer app (well, technically, it continues to be the killer app only for people over 30, but his point is important.) Niels closes his post with this great advice for communicating with donors via email:

1. Ask the recipient to do one thing that day
2. Show what that will accomplish
3. Tell them what will happen next.

Online donors are not simply donors. They are part of a movement. They want to have a stake in the outcome and that is where the real challenge lies.

Let’s extend Niels model a bit further. The goal of using media for social change efforts isn’t to use latest gadgetry whenever possible, but to select the best tools available to us that fits the need. Niels’ point is that we can’t forget to use the tools that most people are comfortable with to connect with them in meaningful ways for social change. So, I’d throw the telephone into the mix, also.

When’s the last time your organization picked up the phone to thank your donors, not with an ask in mind, just a thanks for being a part of our community?  A few years ago, an organization I was on the board of did just that. Every board member took the names of ten donors and called them. The response was astounding. People were so happy to hear from us, to hear about the work that was going on, and most of all, they were delighted to know that we cared about them as people and not just ATM machines. And many of them, without being asked, wrote checks. Particularly for smaller agencies, now’s the time to pick up the phone and call your donors, tell them about the wonderful things you’re doing, make sure they’re OK, and remind each other that times are tough but the purpose of our work is to build strong relationships with people over time to support our communities.

The Power and Limits of Storytelling

I love this video about telling the story of Red Riding Hood with social media:

Each one of us, and certainly the orgs that we work with and for, have the power to tell our stories in more visual and powerful ways using social media. YouTube is filled with compelling videos by causes, Witness does a majestic job of using video to document and share human rights abuses from around the world, and NPR is using a variety of tools, voices and mechanisms to enhance it’s storytelling ability. Andy Goodman has long been an advocate for and teacher of good storytelling for causes as well.

Everyone loves a good story, especially one told in vibrant, expressive and visual ways.  Everyone that is except for evaluators. Although I am not a full-time evaluator any more, I still walk the talk at times, particularly as it relates to the need for causes to participate in creating ongoing learning systems for their efforts.

The limits of storytelling for learning are that they so easily skew an overall effort to learn about what’s working and what isn’t.  When you pluck out your best, most compelling or heart string plucking, story to tell the world about your cause, you often forget about the other experiences that folks are having. This may be intentional or unintentional, but the bottom line is that powerful stories often drwon out the real story of what’s happening within a cause effort. It’s easy to listen to the loud voices because they’re, well, loud, but much harder to listen to the quieter ones who probably represent the norm of the experience with your effort.  It’s similar to the effect in politics of the extreme ideologues on both sides of the political spectrum drowning out the middle as Morris Fiorina wrote in his slime volume, “Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America.”

Causes need to practice balancing the power of storytelling with the need for careful listening and learning.  The key to doing this, in my opinion, is to lead with learning and follow with storytelling; it may not be as immediately rewarding, it may mean that the development and communications folks at your org are a bit frustrated at having to wait a little while to get to that amazing YouTube video posted, but the results will be truer to your cause and will enable you to focus on your true goal; improving your social change efforts over time, not just selling your effort.

Why Tweet Ghosts Are Bad

My tweeps were all atwitter this morning about the front page story in the Times about ghost tweeters.  Most folks had a similar reaction to Shaq’s, “It’s 140 characters. It’s so few characters. If you need a ghostwriter for that, I feel sorry for you.”

Then my friend Jed Miller broke the monotony by asking, “surprised by outrage re ghost-tweeters. @afine @EllnMllr, isnt this the tradeoff when a channel makes it? are some voices “2 legit 2 twit?”

Here’s my two cents (not to be confused with 50 Cent and his ghost twitterer!) on this topic. Twitter is wildly successful because it is 1) stupid simple and easy to use, 2) free for the moment, 3) the best combination of Facebook and blogging around, meaning it creates person to person connections (and to their social networks beyond) and shares useful information within your particular sub-network. this is why Twitter is the fastest growing online social network.

When you add these factors up, fast, free and social, you get an enormous amount of social capital in one place that is spread around the web through all of the tentacles of the ever-growing Twitter apps. The social network is this infrastructure of connections between people, that the glue is the social capital which is the value of those connections. And the value is based on mutual trust and reciprocity. I trust that you are who you say you are and if I don’t know you on land, I take a leap of faith that you can be trusted with my friendship, skills and network. The reciprocity is that what I put into the network, I expect that at some point in time, you will do the same, it isn’t a one-sided relationships. And we practice this exchange every day through our 140 character messages that reveal something about me, connects you to information and people, and serves to power and broaden the network.

I am willing to forgo the reciprocity for famous folks, even though I’d like Shaq and Al Gore to follow me I know it’s unlikely. However, the trust is absolutely not negotiable. I expect people to be themselves on Twitter; otherwise, I might as well be watching broadcast TV as some suit pushes messages at me.  The whole point of Twitter is that it’s a person to person space outside of the controlled messages of other places. I know that companies and famous people are accustomed to hiding behind their brands (I’ve written about my difficulty of talking to brands on Twitter before) but they are missing a huge opportunity to have a more meaningful relationship wiht their fans and supporters.

The real power of Twitter and other social media tools is that they break down the artificial barriers between people, and between people and institutions, whether those institutions are Coke or Brittney Spears. But that power is latent unless and until these folks step out from behind their brands.

A Compass for Social Media for Social Good

Qui Diaz, Beth Kanter and Geoff Livingston posted a summary of their findings from a recent survey of nonprofit donors and their attitudes about causes and giving online. A common complaint of online giving to date (see previous post about Blackbaud survey here) is that the dollar amounts are too low per donor and donors are tending to be one-time givers. In other words, online donors aren’t the elixir to replace the dying direct mail donors. Here are a few sub-highlights (meaning a summary of their summary) of their survey results from 426 online respondents:

• The axiom that older donors give more because they have more to give doesn’t change because of the mechanism of giving;
• 84 percent of the social media savvy aged 30-49 and 55 percent of those older than 50 used conversational media to discuss philanthropy;
• Seventy-seven percent of those 50 and older and 71 percent aged 30-49 prefer email. Additionally, 45 percent of 30-49 year olds prefer social networks and 31 percent of those over 50 also use social networks;
• Blogs represent the second most viable source of information next to social networks (among both the digital rich and the traditional brackets);
• 81% want information from a highly credible or quality source
  • 77% from a trusted organization
  • 59% would like to interact with other donors
  • 58% want to interact with philanthropic experts
• In summary, nonprofits and charities have a strong opportunity to engage in meaningful conversations (that may lead to contributions) with the social media savvy (30-49 and >50) – especially those who are uncultivated.

Add to this mix the fact that the fastest growing segment of Facebook users are women over 55 and we can see that social networking sites will be rich areas for discussion, organizing and fundraising for causes from now on.

So, the difficult question for nonprofits right now is: how do we navigate from what has been to what will be while still making payroll? To take that question a bit further, it is really about how you can create the capacity within yourself and your organization for seeing the world as it is but moving towards what it will be. And, for right now in this time of transition, we have to do both.

It is curious to me how often a discussion of social media becomes a zero sum game in people’s minds. If we’re using direct mail we’re not raising money online, or everything that was on land has to go online. The world doesn’t work in such stark black and white contrasts, it is, for better and worse, a continuum of grays.

If you’re struggling wtih how to manage the transition to the connected age of the future for fundraising, here are a few steps to help you get unstuck:

1. Keep doing what works but know and plan like it isn’t going to work forever. In fact, you should plan that this is the last year you’ll be able to do what you’ve done before successfully. You don’t want to get caught totally off guard like newspapers that thought they had much longer to transition from old to new than they really did.
2. Get your conversations going online NOW! Pick one or two places, say Twitter and Facebook, and start talking about your issues and listening to the conversations that folks are having about your cause. Don’t worry if the conversation is small, don’t worry that it isn’t leading to donations right now. You need to practice talking to people online about your cause; these aren’t skills that more traditional orgs have in their DNA.
3. Find one fundraising event or idea to take online this year. Use Facebook to ask your folks for ideas for fundraisers, should we pick a day and everyone does their own thing like Red Nose Day, or should we have one event in person, maybe a lower key breakfast this year instead of a fancy dinner, or maybe a virtual event or contest? Don’t prescribe, listen and learn.

OK, those are you marching orders – get going!

Thinking the Unthinkable About Online Social Networks

A few weeks ago, Clay Shirky wrote a thoughtful reflection on how the newspaper industry is failing largely because they avoided thinking the unthinkable about their old business model and what the future held for it.

A few days ago, Katya brought this startling article to my attention on the rapidly falling revenues from Internet advertising by Eric Clemens on Tech Crunch. Eric writes, “Traditional advertising simply cannot be carried over to the internet, replacing full-page ads on the back of The New York Times or 30-second spots on the Super Bowl broadcast with pop-ups, banners, click-throughs on side bars.”  His discussion focuses largely on sites that generate news and services.

I was noodling this around when I saw this tweet from Steve Case:

RT @NateVanLoon: Twitter is becoming new Facebook, which was new MySpace, which was new AOL (sorry @SteveCase). Except AOL makes $$$.
To translate for non-Tweet speakers, Steve is passing along a message he saw by Nate Van Loon, wiht a smile, about the fact that the new social networking sites are built on the premise of AOL but that only AOL has made money.

And that made me think of a recent post I had seen on Tech Crunch about paying for “suggested user” slots as a way for Twitter to monetize it’s efforts. These kinds of payments are completely antithetical to the DNA  of Twitter and what has made it so popular; meaning the easy, unfettered access to  lots of people famous and not and the leveling affect of the site.  Essentially it’s “freeness” in every aspect of that word that I just made up.

Let’s put the pieces together.

1. Thinking the unthinkable. This is really a way of saying that we need to challenge the assumptions that we make in any business or program model. This is what the “smartest guys in the room” failed to do with the housing market models; they made the incorrect assumption that housing prices would always continue to go up, and, well, we know that wasn’t true. It is the essence of program evaluation which is the art of testing your assumptions that the array of services you provide will lead to the outcomes you are hoping for.

2. The assumption that lots of advertising will automatically follow lots of eyeballs to particular sites.

3. The fastest growing social networking sites have yet to make any money in spite of their repeated, flailing around trying to do so (how many apologies are we up to on Facebook for trying to monetize the site?)

The unthinkable assumption about social networking sites is that they attract so many people because of their “freeness” meaning their easy access, no cost, public commons aspects which are antithetical to existing revenue models. (for an amazing array of thoughtful papers on this, see danah boyd’s site.)  These online commons are often compared to ways that we used to meet in open, public spaces where we live. However, what most people don’t think about on is that those free, open spaces that we value in our on land communities are actually paid for by our tax dollars – they aren’t actually free.  What happens when the News Corp and Google give up on these sites after years of investing millions, maybe even billions, down the drain and repeated attempts to monetize them fail?  Most importantly from a social change perspective, will these online commons continue to generate awareness, organize and raise funds for large numbers of great causes if they need to be monetized, or can they be protected as open, common online spaces like parks and playgrounds? One thing to throw into the mix is that the online social networking sites aren’t valuable for their software innovations (Twitter and innovative software definitely don’t mix!) but for their vast crowds. Maybe one answer is that like free flowing liquid, the crowds will follow the least restricted pathway and continue to move to the freest online commons and avoid the monetized places.

Little Silver Linings in the Arts World

I’ve been thinking and reading and tweeting and posting a lot about the effect of the recesssion on arts organizations in the last week or so.

A link to my post led me to a terrific blog by smArts and Culture by Maryann Devine in Philadelphia that focuses almost entirely on the arts and social media. Maryann wrote last week about the Cultural Engagement Index created for the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance.

Maryann writes about a few key findings from the report including:

• A high correlation between civic engagement and cultural engagement;
• Arts engagement in any form (e.g. music lessons) leads to other forms of arts participation; and, the most interesting data point;
• Hispanic and African Americans in the survey sample scored very high on the civic engagement scale.

A very interesting index ripe for replication in other cities.

A few other nuggets:

• One of my favorite Tweeters is the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra whom I first came across when they gave one of the first tweet-outs about the GiveList back in December;
• The Brooklyn Museum is reaching out to families and younger patrons using social media in creative ways. In particular, check out Target First Saturdays and 1stfans. As Will Carey, the membership manager of the museum wrote to me last fall, “It’s the relation to our community-centered Mission here at the Brooklyn Museum that inspired us to create our new “socially-networked” 1stfans Membership program. It’s a paperless, $20 Membership that offers monthly events and exclusive online access to artists and the Museum’s staff through facebook, flickr, and twitter.”
• And here is a terrific post from Beth on the ingenious ways that the Arts Museum of Indianapolis is using its web site to transparently share its social media success on a variety of different platforms.

So, just as one good day for the Dow Jones won’t end the recession, these glimmers of creative uses of social media by arts organizations won’t end the loss of arts organizations in communities. But, as I say to older folks who come and hear me talk, “You’re not dead yet!”

A Confession: Am I A Charitable Person?

I saw a little paragraph in the sports section today that said, in essence, , ” The players union has discovered that at least 22 teams require players to make donations. . “

The Dodgers signed Manny Ramirez to a $45 million contract and he then donated $1 million to the Dodgers Dream Foundation. At the signinf, the owner of the Dodgers said, “every future Dodger” would make a donation.”

The players union took umbrage at their overpaid players being required to give to causes. I began this post to mock the players union for this stance.  In a time of such great need, with baseball players continuing to make enormous salaries, it doesn’t seem too much to ask that they give back in proportionate amounts.

A publicist friend of mine who worked with a lot of famous actors and athletes would lament that they were often the cheapest givers she knew. They often didn’t follow up on their pledges, skipped out on events and didn’t give nearly as much as they could have if they were generous people.

It was in concert with what I’ve been thinking for weeks now that there don’t seem to be any grown ups left on Wall Street. Isn’t anyone at Goldman Sachs or AIG or whoever else is left concerned about putting the country as a whole back on track — or are they only interested in their own bonuses? None of the smartest guys in the room will take “only” six figures, not the seven they think they deserve, to fix the system that they broke?So, that’s where I started. And then I read a terrific op-ed by Jean Strouse this morning about J.P. Morgan’s contribution to the country in the recession of 1907.

But then I stopped my ranting for a second and remembered to get back to basics. The rants against ball players, starlets and AIG is so very easy to do, it’s coffee shop harangues that really don’t add up to anything but the fact that “those guys” have done us wrong. But isn’t that the same conversation that we had for years about “those guys” meaning the government and politicians that kept getting elected and not listening to us and taking us down the wrong pathways drunk on big, fat campaign contributions?

Finally, last year, with the add of social media, we figured out how to do it differently. We figured out that each one of us could contribute a little time and money, we could each connect to our own social network to create one huge one and elect a president who is trying to do the right thing for the good of the country over the long haul.

Now, we know full well that the corner office doesn’t really exist any more, and we can’t wait for the smartest guys to bail out my local community.  With so many people suffering in the economic downturn, with so many organizations, like symphonies and food banks, facing such hard times, we should be focused on doing what we do best; a lot of people contributing in small ways that adds up to a big difference.

And then I looked in the mirror, not a good idea on a Monday morning, but I looked anyway. Am I doing the best I can for the causes and communities that I care about?  I am on several boards; my synagogue, One Web Day, Hope for Henry.  We give a significant amount of money to our synagogue both in dues and in contributions throughout the year, we have given to Hope for Henry, but not enough, and I have never written a check to One Web Day.

Through many board experiences over the years, I have come to really dislike being on boards. It seemed like the pinnacle of success when I was younger. Sitting around the big boy table and making decisions about where and how to spend money, to generate ideas for the cause, generally being the decider. Then I sat on a few and llearned that nothing much happens on boards except for the repeated request for board members to write a check or ask others to write a check. Most of the major decisions have already been made by paid staff and the chair, the structures don’t allow for real participation by nonboard members in governing issues, and the same problems just keep getting passed from meeting to meeting, year after year. [Note: I don't feel this way about my current boards otherwise I wouldn't still be on them.]

As David Renz has smartly observed, “boards are a structure, governance is a function.” The function has changed, the structure hasn’t.

I use my professional time to encourage others to give and have really enjoyed creating efforts like the GiveList with my friend, Marnie Webb. GiveList was a great opportunity to showcase ways that people can contribute to causes without writing a check. It was fun, it was a great opportunity to try out networked activism mainly through Twitter and it didn’t require any fundraising.

Here’s my confession.  I didn’t actually do anything on the GiveList. I’m beginning to wonder if I’ve been relying too heavily on my work to substitute for making meaningful personal contributions that could positively affect people’s lives in my community.  Perhaps I feel too great a need to separate out what I do professionally; research, write and pontificate on social change using social media, from my personal life before it all feels too much like work. Or maybe I’ve spent too much time evaluating efforts and have developed an vaneer of cynicism that comes from finding out that far fewer programs have as great an affect as we hope they do. Or, maybe, sadly, that’s all just an excuse for not being as charitable as I should be.

The 80:20 rule definitely applies to philanthropic giving and volunteering. It may even be 90:10, meaning that only 10% of us are really doing heavy lifting and 90% are watching. Does my work count as part of the 10%?  Perhaps. But I have the means and know-how to be doing much more than I am right now. I live in a very wealthy county that still has tens of thousands of people hungery and thousnads homeless every day.

I’m going to try to start today to stop spending so much time worrying about what the smartest guys in the room aren’t doing to help the rest of us, and start doing more locally to help one person at a time. I’m going to start by talking to my kids about it over dinner tonight about how we can contribute locally to help people who are less fortunate than we are.  Unless I’m too busy yelling at them for poking one another, or not doing their homework, or using a vulgar work, and in that case I’ll do it tomorrow — but I’m going to do it!

The Arts and Social Capital (cont’d)

I am so grateful to all of the interesting feedback and comments and tweets and emails I received yesterday regarding the post on the loss social capital in communities across the country when arts and news organizations fold.

Wrestling with the loss of news organizations has become well worn ground for bloggers, tweeters and others, but I was very interested in some of the feedback I heard regarding arts organizations that I wanted to share.

First, the good news.  I received an email from Barbara Schaeffer Bacon of Americans for the Arts, the same org that is predicting a loss of 10% of the total number of arts organizations across the country this year.  Barbara wrote in her email (and subsequently posted as a comment):

But there are promising new models.  I look to many exemplary small and medium sized cultural organizations that foster excellence in artistic production and presentation but do so closer to the ground in small towns and urban neighborhoods around the country.  Diaspora Vibe in Miami, Wing Luke Asian Museum in Seattle and Cornerstone Theater in LA are three examples. They promote art, artists and cultural expression as a catalyst for engagement around civic, social and community issues.  They demonstrate resourceful leadership and many have successfully encoded true diversity into their core values, mission and practice.  Unfortunately, these organizations are creating social and creative capital but come to this downturn undercapitalized themselves.

I also learned about a very interesting initiative spearheaded by the Nonprofit Finance Fund called Leading for the Future: Innovative Support for Artistic Excellence to support and strengthen arts organizations over a five year period. The lessons that they learn about how to structure, stabilize and grow arts organizations, presumably (hopefully!) using social media, will be important to watch.

And finally, on a philosophical note, the brilliant Lucy Bernholz was thoughtful and thought provoking as she is in every conversation with this comment:

Don’t get me wrong – I love art and art orgs – but I worry less about them, and maybe not from a rational stance. The arts are, I think, proof that some things come back stronger the harder they get whacked. The arts always get whacked when economies tank. This doesn’t make it OK and don’t take me for a art-hating hard-heart, (I think I’m just the opposite). I just feel like we’ve seen this moment before, new structural types will emerge, and the arts will thrive again in some way we could never have planned. I think of artists like water – water always finds the lowest point and artists always find the highest ground.

I sure hope Lucy is right! Perhaps Barbara is seeing a glimmer of these new signs of hope. The key question is how sustain arts organizations that have relied for so long, centuries really, on a few large patrons. Maybe another way to put the question is: What is the “iTunes” model for living performing arts?

Lots of interesting questions, and, hopefully, lots of interesting answers soon.

Greatest Loss of 2009: Social Capital

The biggest problem with having smart friends is that they ask smart questions, and then one is obligated to try and answer; hopefully smartly, but failing that, at least pithily.

Yesterday, my friend Katya Andresen, the magnificent brains behind Katya’as Nonprofit Marketing Blog and the book Robin Hood Marketing, posed this question to me on Twitter:  @Afine one in ten arts orgs are on the brink of collapse but movie attendance up – is this a marketing problem?

Katya ws responding to a report yesterday from the AP that Bob Lynch, the President of Americans for the Arts estimated that 10,000 arts organizations will close this year, 10% of the total number.

Certainly some portion of that number are organizations that are poorly managed, or have no real base of local support so that any shaking of the apple cart sends them spiraling downward. But, still, a large percentage represents opera companies, symphonies, museums and theater companies that will be huge cultural losses to those communities, and of a course a huge and heartbreaking loss of jobs.

As Katya suggests there is definitely a business model element to the struggle of local arts organizations. Local performing arts organizations are too labor and capital intensive that makes the cost of participation for casual supporters very high in comparison to movies. It is financially impossible to make a ticket to the opera the same cost as a ticket to Slumdog Millionaire (although once you throw in the cost of popcorn and soda you are getting closer) without a significant subsidy from the government or private donors that doesn’t exist in today’s economy.

Even though the meltdown of the newspaper industry has gotten far more press (from the press, naturally!) than the collapse of local arts organizations, there are pathways that make future local news gathering and dissemination possible. The newspaper problem is a classic business model problem; the process of gathering and reading news has fundamentally changed and organizations are scrambling to catch up with newer, more efficient mechanisms for delivering news to readers. But, there is a marketplace for news as online readership continues to rise, and we are in the messy process of transitioning to a new model.

The problem of trying to figure out a new business model for arts organizations is much more difficult. This is due in part because the cost of delivering the product is largely fixed; there is no way around the fact that orchestras need violinists and cellists. Consumers of news exist in large numbers, some say even growing numbers, but many arts organizations that face the prospect that there may not be enough patrons to support their efforts — ever.  It may be that performing arts organizations cover larger regions. For instance, perhaps Hartford, CT cannot sustain a symphony orchestra, but lower New England may be able to. Or that the orchestras get smaller, or that the players aren’t full-time professionals.

Tinkering with the size and catchment area for performing arts organizations (and museums, too) misses a much a bigger problem for communities.  The loss of newspapers and arts organizations creates an enormous, perhaps irreplacable, loss of social capital for local communities.

Tom Watson really nailed this issue in a terrific post on the Huffington Post yesterday when he wrote:

As Shirky writes (correctly in my view) the casualty isn’t so much the newspaper (and the companies who operate them), as it is the journalist – and professional journalism itself. And that is a huge loss for society that no one should be welcome with glee (though some digital triumphalists cannot seem to restrain themselves)

And Tom is no luddite, he is the author of CauseWired and works every day to help organizations transition to the Connected Age.

And in a follow up email to me yesterday he made a point that has been overlooked in much of the debate:

Most ‘observers’ don’t know the scale of this disaster – we’re talking
tens of thousands of reporters at thousands of newspaper in thousands
of cities and towns and counties. A whole system of informing the
public commons is dying – blogs simply won’t replace it, citizen
journalists will be a tiny fraction of what went before. It’s truly an
American loss.

We are losing the institutional memories of institutions that are in the business of connecting individuals to one another, to their communities, to beautiful and inspiring stories and works of arts.

I’m not quite as pessimisitc as Tom about the future of local news efforts. The models that we’re discussing and testing right now may not work, but that doesn’t mean that a model for news won’t or can’t exist in the future, a model that is financially sustainable and does a credible job of informing the citizenry and keeping local institutions accountable to the public. But what I don’t know is if or how social media can make up this loss, it may simply be that this is one casualty of the Connected Age. One thing we can do is to insist that the growth of social capital be a part of the discussion and implementation of new models for news and arts organizations.

Making money isn’t the only measure of success for news and arts organizations in the future; reconnecting citizens locally to one another; regenerating the social fabric is just as important and necessary to the success of these efforts.

Future of Fundraising is Hiding in Blackbaud Results

Interesting article by Stephanie Strom in the Times today about a recent survey by Blackbaud of online donors. Blackbaud, a fundraising and software company, surveyed twenty-four nonprofits to learn more about who their online donors are and their giving patterns.  They found that these donors are high-income, high education people who are very attractive to causes, but who are exhibiting a pattern of giving once online and don’t become habitual online givers to particular causes.

No surprises there, that is in keeping with every other survey and all of the other data that I’ve seen about online giving. However, I disagree with the conclusion of the article, here’s the gist:

The findings suggest that while the Internet can be a valuable fund-raising tool for charities, particularly in soliciting gifts after disasters like Hurricane Katrina, it is not a replacement for direct mail or other forms of fund-raising.

Nope, wrong. We are in a period of transition where the old ways of doing things, like direct mail fundraising, may continue for a short time because going back to the old well is easier than figuring out where the new well is and how it works. But when your donor bases average (average!) age is in the seventies that’s not a sustainable way of thinking or working.

Here’s what I would have concluded instead. Online giving works differently than direct mail giving because the people who are most likely to give online, younger, more tech savvy people, think differently than other generations. As donors they are not going to behave like their grandparents and become lifelong members and givers to specific nonprofits. That’s what I found in Social Citizens and what other smarter folks, like Carol Cone, have been reporting for years. So, if young donors aren’t going to change than nonprofit orgs had better – and fast before those donors bases average eighty years old!

Online donors, or you could say young donors it’s the same thing, really, are going to come and go based on how strongly they feel about an event (e.g. a natural disaster) or a cause (e.g. hunger) at that particular moment in time. The job of causes is to continue to build relationships with lots of people over time, and keep lots of access points open for them to participate in conversations, learn about the cause, tell their friends about it — and give when they’re moved to give. Not everyone is going to give to every campaign but they’re not lost to you, they’re busy and moved by other issues at that time. The job of the cause is to continue the conversation over time.

But this won’t happen for more traditional organizations accustomed to living off of their donor bases until they really understand the DNA of younger donors — and change their DNA to match.  Easier said than done, of course, but it’s time to get to it, because one thing is for sure:  75 million Millennials aren’t going to change their stripes for you!