Free eBook: How to Raise a Lot More $ Now

Network for Good posted a free eBook last week called How to Raise a Lot More Money Now – 50 Great Ideas from 11 top Experts.

You have to fill out a form before you can download the book. But what you’ll get are great advice and tips from leading experts in social media for social change (full disclosure, our chapter from The Networked Nonprofit called From Friending to Funding.)

The authors include Jeff Brooks, Sarah Durham, Jocelyn Harmon, Kivi Leroux Miller, Mark Rovner, Nancy Schwartz, Chris Forbes, Alia McKee Scott and, of course, Katya Andresen.

This is a really fun and fast read packed with helpful tips. Here are some of my favorites:

• Replace at least one sentence that’s about you with one that’s about your donor.
• If you want my money, touch my heart. Learn what I struggle with and what makes me move. Walk a mile in my shoes.
• Organize a crowd-sourced appeal. Invite donors to participate in drafting the “perfect fundraising appeal.”
• Simplify your message for social media calls to action. If you can’t say it in 140 characters on Twitter, you’re not saying it well. Look to charity: water’s Twitter feed for inspiration.
• When donors give online, ask them for an optional few words on why they gave (you can do this with Network for Good’s online DonateNow service). Fill your home page with their answers.

This is all great stuff in the perfect bite size pieces.

Why Donors are Predictably Irrational

There are a lot of webinars, conference calls, videos, blog posts competing for everyone’s eyeballs, even in July. But some events really are more worthy of our attention than others, and next week one of the more worthy ones is happening.

Network for Good is hosting a Nonprofit 911 webinar on July 20th at 1 pm Eastern with Dan Ariely, author of Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions and The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home.

Here is their write up of the event:

Join Dan Ariely, author of Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions (February 2008) and The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home (June 2010), as he walks us through the simple experiments he’s used to study how people actually act in the marketplace, as opposed to how they should or would perform if they were completely rational.
His experiments examine a wide range of daily behaviors such as buying (or not), saving (or not), ordering food in restaurants, pain management, procrastination, dishonesty, and decision making under different emotional states. These interesting, amusing, and informative experiments demonstrate profound ideas that fly in the face of common wisdom.

Katya Andresen of Network for Good sent me an email about the event saying, “This is THE genius behind how people really think!” I always thought that Katya was the genuis who explained who donors think and act!  If she says Dan’s the real deal, then that’s good enough for me.

Register for this great event here: http://web.networkforgood.org/nonprofit-911-072010

Unveiling the Networked Nonprofit

Last Friday, Beth and I unveiled the framework and a few themes from The Networked Nonprofit at NTC. It was our first presentation together about the book, actually it was our first presentation together, actually it was only the second time we met in person!

The session was very exciting. We had people crammed into every corner, on the floor. We even had Deborah Drysdale and June Holley up on the dais!  We also had a remote audience watching the presentation on ReadyTalk.

Beth of course beat me to the blogging punch with reflections of her own about the session. Katya and Sokunthea also posted their thoughts. So, I thought I’d add mine to the mix also.

First, I have to admit to being nervous presenting with Beth. This is Beth Kanter, after all, the queen of experiential learning and participatory process. Beth was naturally very generous in shaping the presentation so that we both presented parts we were comfortable with and had some fun back and forths, too.

Second, I appreciate learning more from Beth about what it means to leveling the playing field for these kinds of presentations. She has a great role model for moving away from the “sage on stage” syndrome that I have been known to practice, and to model a conversation throughout a presentation. It’s not just Q&A the last 30 seconds, it’s an ongoing, unfolding conversation and we’re the guides and facilitators. It is in keeping with the principles that power social media and are woven throughout our book.

Third, I really loved what advice that participants were giving to one another. Here’s what we’re doing, they said,or here’s what we tried that didn’t work. Or wouldn’t it be great if we had fewer meetings a whole lot of people said! It was really energizing and everyone in the room – and even the folks who were virtual – could feel it.

I’m looking forward to doing a lot more of these sessions with Beth!

My Lowest and Highest Nonprofit Moments

Katya Andresen facilitated this month’s Nonprofit Blog Carnival. Although I missed the deadline (deadline, schmeadline!) I’m going to play anyway because it’s my blog and I can do what I want!

Katya asked us to share our great successes and flaming failures of our nonprofit careers. So, here goes:

As for failures, well, it’s pretty darn hard to pinpoint just one since I’ve had so many. But rather than share  an event, I want to share an old habit. It’s a widespread nonprofit trap, the one of being a proprietary thinker that I fell into when I ran Innovation Network (InnoNet). I created an organizational culture that framed other evaluation groups as competitors and my job, as the chief fundraiser, was to elbow them out of the way  to get to the pot of gold that foundations were holding It was successful in the short-run, but desultory and deflating in the long-run and contributed to my own burnout with the organization.

I am a recovering proprietary thinker and actor now. Although, like all addictions, it’s a day-to-day struggle. And sometimes I relapse and don’t do as good a job of sharing information or giving credit as I should.

But, now, onto the good news. My highs come from my participation in social media over the last five years. It happens because of and within the conversations everyday here on this blog or on Twitter or Facebook. It is energizing when someone  comments on my blog, or retweets me on Twitter or introduces themselves on Facebook. It is exhilarating every day when people connect side-to-side, share something that they know, educate me, tell me what they’re thinking about or doing or learning about, when I connect people to one another, when I share what someone else is doing and celebrate it. It makes me awfully lucky to be living here and now and doing what I’m doing with folks like Beth, Katya, Geoff, Holly,  Lucy and Tom.

Bottom line: it used to make me feel bad to hoard information and grab credit, and now it feels good to share and link and connect with people.

Who’s Missing from this Picture?

This is Ashton Kutcher conferring with Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey in Moscow on Tuesday. They are part of a delegation of techtopians sent by the State Department to Russia. According to the New York Times straight-faced report of the visit (always missing an opportunity for a delicious satire over there at the regal Times), “Among the delegation’s goals was to persuade Russia’s thriving online social networks to take up social causes like fighting corruption or human trafficking..”

Of course, nothing wrong with anyone making the case anywhere in the world of the power of people-to-people activism fueled by social media to make enormous differences in their lives and their governments. Although using my tax dollars to send Ashton Kutcher across the globe does give me pause.

The problem is that there is someone ( a lot of someones, actually) missing from this photo – missing from the whole delegation. The heads of E-Bay and Mozilla were there, as was the brilliant Esther Dyson who has spent a good part of her career focused on ways to use technology for the common good.

But why didn’t it occur to anyone in the State Department to include someone in the delegation who actually does this work – who works to build civic society using social media every day – to the event?

If the purpose of the delegation was to promote the use of social media for building small businesses it would be expected that the contingent would include mainly for profit business folks. So, why doesn’t that same axiom hold true when talking about civic society?

Because, once again and for the umpteenth time, the assumption by outside observers is that what we do is pretty easy. See, all you have to do is log onto Twitter, it’s free and so easy to use that Ashton and Demi do it all the time, and poof! civil society building just magically happens. The strategy and network weaving that are beneath all of the recent successful efforts to use social media for social change are either dismissed, or more likely, not understood and therefore not included as part of the discussion.

So, Jared Cohen or anyone over at the State Department, if you’re listening, why don’t you think about inviting folks like Robert Egger or Beth Kanter or Katya Andresen, or Katrin Verclas to speak knowledgeably about what it takes to use social media for social change.

I Have a FREE HP Laptop and Printer to Give Away!

Morning, peeps, I’ve got a special surprise today!  Beth and I have helped to plan and assess online contests such as America’s Giving Challenge sponsored by the Case Foundation over the past several years. Now, we’re part of a group of bloggers who get to help sponsor a contest and give away free HP stuff!

The giveaway is part of the HP Create Change effort. For every purchase from the Create Change site that is part of the HP direct purchase website, HP will donate 4% to one of the following seven nonprofits that you can designate. The nonprofits are: American Red Cross, CARE, DonorsChoose.org, Junior Achievement, Make-A-Wish Foundation, Susan G. Koman Race for the Cure, World Wildlife Fund.

You can download a widget for the HP Create Change effort form their site and follow their conversation on Facebook.

Back to our contest. HP has asked me and a few fantastic bloggy friends: Beth (of course!), Tom Watson, Katya Andresen’s Nonprofit Marketing Blog, Jolly Mom, and Amy Sample Ward to ask our readers a question about social change. And then each of us bloggers will pick a winner from the comments on our blog.

So, here’s my question to you: What conversations on which social media channels do you  most want to have with your community this year?

Extra points will be given to anyone who works Foursquare or Tumblr into their answer!

AF Note: The contest closes on February 26th!

Reflections on Fundraising By Text

I’ve spent a lot of time this week thinking about the explosion in donations by text messaging since the devastating earthquake in Haiti.

Here are my latest thoughts:

1. Gavin Clabaugh, one of the smartest folks I know about this stuff, made a very insightful comment on my post the other day about Haiti signifying the tipping point for fundraising via social media. His comment was that text messaging is not a social media tool since it doesn’t creates opportunities for many-to-many conversations unless using a special app, like Twitter. So, what he says what we have been seeing is pretty traditional fundraising with text really as “a billing system, not social media.”  Point well, taken. It’s funny, I had just reflexively lumped text messaging into my social media toolkit because it’s digital, cheap and ubiquitous. But, I think Gavin is right, without the facility of many-to-many conversations it doesn’t reach the threshold, unlike email.

2. Katya has a brilliant post up about the quick drop off of donations to Haiti. It speaks to another problem with text giving,  which is the way that the donation comes to the organization. It is a circuitous route with a cell phone carrier in the middle — and that can’t possibly be good. As I mentioned in my earlier post this week, giving by text is a pledge not a direct donation. On top of that, as reported by the Chronicle here unless the donor opts in to provide their cell phone number, an organization has a lag in the giving and perhaps just a check from the carrier, leaving them with no way to connect with donors beyond that initial engagement.

3. Jenna Sauber of the UN Foundation shared with me this Make-A-Wish web page with an opt-in option for folks to sign up for alerts by text as a way for organizations to begin to build relationships with folks who want to communicate mainly by text.

So, where does this all leave me on text giving? Trepidatious. It’s certainly not a panacea, and may be best used as part of an immediate crisis or disaster responses – exactly as the Red Cross has done. However, it may not be as useful when the initial crisis begins to wane. In part, because most of the donors will opt-out so organizations will have no way to contact them and also because, sadly, I think it will be too tempting for organizations to misuse cell phones numbers and become spammers. It seems to me that relationship building with a first engagement being a cell phone number is going to be inherently difficult. I hope I’m wrong, would love others to disagree!

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.