A New Relationship with Donors

I was struck a few weeks ago when I read this article in the Chronicle about the rise of anonymous giving this year.  I suspect that this is due to these donors not wanted to be stalked by causes. the giving cacophony for causes is bad enough in a good economy, but the incessant pressure to give to many causes and give larger gifts in a bad economy is overwhelming.

Then I saw this report from Pam Fessler on NPR about the rise of giving circles. Giving circles certainly aren’t new, informally friends have been talking to friends about giving to causes for years, and the more formal versions really started to coalesce about fifteen years ago. But, nonetheless, it’s interesting that they’re on the rise in a bad economy. We all want to feel better now, and talking to friends about causes that we’re passionate about, what we want to share with them makes everyone feel better. Also, giving circles are a good way for everyone to give a little that adds up to more for a cause.

Then I began to think about what Katya might say about all this.  And here’s my guess:

We know that donors want to a real, meaningful connection to causes. We also know that too many causes continue to treat them like an ATM machines.  You gave $50 last month/quarter/year, how about $100 or $1,000 this year?  Causes also treat donors like data points in a big database of givers who are never connected to one another. It simply doesn’t occur to many causes to create a network of donors rather than continue their hub and spoke model of individual to institution giving.

Let’s imagine a different way of doing this. Giving circles are generally oganized by friends to give to a variety of causes, leaving the cause in the passive position of hoping to be supported.  What if causes organized giving circles to support their cause — and other causes. I know, really scary to think about organizing your own donors to possible give to other organizations, but, hey, that’s what people do. What if you took all of your donors in one zip code, regardless of how much they gave and helped them to organize a get together at someone’s house to talk about the cause. Maybe they don’t even talk about giving the first time they meet. Maybe they just to talk about the cause, what it means, what it does, how it could do better, etc. They could come back onto your Facebook page or on Twitter and share what they learned, what they thought and dreamed for the cause. And then the second meeting they begin to talk about giving to the cause.

Maybe you would get less from a big donor this way, but you’d also get more from the little donors – that’s what giving circles do. They would learn from one another, they would feel like a community rather than isolated donors. Maybe it’s worth a try!  So, Katya, how’d I do?

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.

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.