Fundraising Detective

Successful fundraising needs excellent leadership

2012-02-10T11:34:04+00:00

There's been a lot of buzz on Twitter this week about the Fundraising magazine story on Christian Aid deciding to dump the Head of Fundraising role.

It's an interesting and brave decision, with the consensus being that it is a bold plan, but one fraught with danger and a high risk of failure.

From my point of view, the best (and most successful) fundraising teams I have worked with and observed have all had a strong leader, who imparts their vision and fundraising philosophy on the team.

They drive through the necessary changes, make tough decisions and enable people to do their job. They inspire, cajole and lead the team to success.

For me the big danger in Christian Aid's decision is that no fundraising leadership will lead to no fundraising culture in the organisation.

At the crudest level (and with only limited information), it sounds like they have a fundraising and management team who don't actually like fundraising and asking for money!

I wish them well and would love to be proved wrong, but I can't help thinking that this tweet from Adrian Salmon sums up the situation perfectly:

"Ship dispenses with rudder - says crew can steer 'perfectly well with hands'"

I'd love to know your thoughts on Christian Aid's plan...

Fundraising Reading Round-Up

2012-02-03T12:21:49+00:00

Time for another reading round up. I've included a couple of excellent round-ups about the Komen controversy in the US this week. Whilst it's not strictly fundraising related, I think it makes for a fascinating story (regardless of your views) and a case study in how not to react to a negative story about your charity.

Kivi has a great summary, which Nancy then follows up and again here. This one is going to rumble on for a while I think!

In the fundraising world, there are some good follow up articles to the relationship Fundraising debate on the SOFII Linked In Group.

Ken Burnett responds with his thoughts.

Kimberley shares her thoughts on thanking and shares a lovely story.

Pamela's 10 essentials of an ideal thank you letter.

Why quality is more important than quantity in major donor fundraising.

Mark shares a case study that raised $65,000 in a day.

101 Fundrasing lose and regain a donor.

Alyson on the myth of fundraising panaceas.

The Agitator on beating your control pack.

Paul shares a great Amnesty campaign from Sweden involving interactive billboards and i-pads.

I was delighted to take part in Q&A about fundraising ROI on the Guardian website this week. You can read the highlights here.

Di Flatt with some thoughts on communication.

Nancy hosts the January non-profit carnival on dreams.

Advice for Good on who gives to charity.

Finally, a couple of articles on customer service.

Seth on caring.

Kev asks if your left hand knows what your right hand is doing and Copyblogger has a case study from customer service favs Zappo's.

Data Insight + Relationship Building = Fundraising Gold

2012-02-02T10:47:05+00:00

There's been an intense and fiery debate raging over on the SOFII group on Linked In over whether you should send an ask with your thank you letters.

The initial debate widened to a discussion on the merits of relationship fundraising and the need for data analysis - to me the two aren't mutually exclusive, though some people seemed to think so...

Fortunately the rhetoric and mudslinging has died down a bit and some insightful and thoughtful analysis has come out of the discussion.

The consensus seems to be that the best fundraising is a combination of relationship building and data insight.

Anyway, the discussion has got me thinking how you can represent this graphically and I've come up with the following:

I've put intuition and data insight on one axis and taking a relational or transactional approach to donor care on the other. By charting how you go about fundraising, you will fit into one of four categories.

I'll give you a quick overview of each one, starting with the worst:

Bad Fundraising: Unsurprisingly the worst type of fundraising. I'd hope there weren't many charities operating here. This organisation is likely to have an underutilised database, appalling attrition rates and a high turnover of fundraising staff. Amazingly, some donors will still give to these organisations!

Amateur Fundraising: I've seen a lot of charities in this space. They are filled with good intentions and do create meaningful relationships with some donors and are generally well liked. However, they let mailing dates move, don't have proper processes in place for capturing information and many opportunities slip through the net. The worst extreme of this is when you get fundraisers who are scared to ask for money.

Churn and Burn Fundraising: Treating donors as ATM's, constantly asking, using data insight to maximise short term income and the optimum number of 'asks' can be surprisingly effective (especially in the short term). You 'churn' through your donors as quickly as possible and are constantly looking for new donors. However, as response rates to cold mailings have decreased and the costs of recruiting donors has increased, this is increasingly hard to pull off.

Relationship Fundraising: The best of both worlds. You treat people with respect, listen to them and try to engage them for the long term. However, you also use data insight to target donors appropriately, have a rigorous approach to testing to maximise your returns and monitor things like lifetime value. This is the space I want to be and it is the combination that I believe will raise the most money.

If anyone has any feedback on this or some better names for the segments then I would love to hear from you!

If you don't have a dream, how you gonna have a dream come true?

2012-01-26T10:16:49+00:00

This post is my submission to the January edition of the Non-Profit Blog carnival. This month’s carnival is being hosted by Nancy Schwartz of the Getting Attention blog.

Most non-profits were built on a dream. An aspiration. A vision for the future.

Just take a second to think of the non-profits you support. What is the dream that you are buying into that makes you give?

Winning the fight against cancer.

Eradicating poverty.

Ending child abuse.

Whatever it is, it is likely to be aspirational and motivated by a desire to do good and help change the world for the better.

It’s all too easy to forget your dreams and get tied up in small details, endless meetings and trivia that distract from your effectiveness.

Have a think about the last time you visited a project, spoke to a beneficiary or went and chatted to your programme staff.

If it has been too long, why not make it a commitment in 2012 to take time to re-connect yourself to the dream that made you want to be a fundraiser in the first place…

Fundraising Round-Up

2012-01-20T10:13:37+00:00

Here's my first round-up of 2012. I hope your year has got off to a good start. These posts are only from the start of the year, so if I missed anything over Christmas then do let me know.

I'm delighted to say that since the start of the month, I've been working with Pamela Grow to provide a monthly round-up for the SOFII monthly bulletin. Why not sign up today?

Katya on the importance of metaphors.

Karen Zapp looks at the impact of colour in your direct mail.

Kevin on why innovation comes on top of your exisiting offers (not instead of).

Stuart Glen on a lovely thank you from Child's i - I also received a card and it was my favourite Christmas Card this year!

Your ears as moneymakers on the 101 Fundraising blog.

Aline on making your own luck.

Fired up Fundraising with some killer tips for thank you letters.

Kivi does some mystery shopping and gets some pleasing results (which makes a nice change!)

Donor Voice take an in-depth look at donor segmentation.

Jeff asks what donors want. Spoiler what they say and what they do are different things.

A direct marketer asks what businesses can learn from charity direct marketing. HT Jeff Brooks.

Six great links on making presentations.

Forget charities, I'm going to give directly...

2012-01-10T15:00:43+00:00

I loved this story from the US about strangers randomly paying off the Christmas lay-away bills of struggling families. The whole story just oozes feel good quotes and restores your faith in humanity.

Closer to home, my mother-in-law did something similar (with work colleagues) for families in her community. She decided to go direct to families (via social services) after having a couple of bad experiences of donating directly to charities. Overall, she found the whole experience much more rewarding than giving via a charity and it was something her whole company got involved in.

Elsewhere, the Oxfam blog reported on Give Directly, who are enabling donors to directly transfer cash via mobile phones to families in need in Africa. It's a fascinating concept and completely cuts out charities by getting people to give straight to the individual family in need.

I still think they need to think how they are going to report back to donors (it lacks some of the feelgood factor of the above examples), but it will be interesting to see if it proves popular.

It's a bit early to declare this a fundamental shift, but I do think there are some lessons we can learn from this as professional fundraisers. Here are some of my takeaways...

One of your main jobs as a fundraiser is to connect the donor to the beneficiary through your communications.
You can do this by always trying to humanise what you do. Put stories and emotion at the heart of what you do as a fundraiser.
Make your donors feel part of something important and that their giving is making a tangible difference. Being made to feel that your donation is disappearing into a large, anonymous pot can be deeply unsatisfying.
Don't forget to report back to your donors on the difference their gift has made.

Final Fundraising Reading Round-Up of 2011

2011-12-23T12:12:34+00:00

What better way to finish off the working year than with a final round-up of fundraising related links from the last couple of weeks... :)

Whatever you are doing this Christmas, have a wonderful time.

Thanks for reading and best wishes for a memorable 2012.

Kimberley with some wise words for thanking donors in small charities.

The Wild Woman interviews Jules Brown from the excellent Dear Joan blog.

Jeff on how your silos are killing your fundraising. The Agitator also makes a plea to avoid them in this well argued post.

Margaux from Bluefrog reports from the London IoF Conference - sorry for not making you cry!

Kev on trying new ideas (complete with examples).

Katya with five strategic mistakes to avoid in 2012.

I loved this thank you Paul received from Send a Cow.

Sarah Clifton takes a fresh look at the donor pyramid and proposes a donor lifecycle map.

Barbara with 10 predictions for fundraising in 2012.

Freakonomics report on experiments in charitable giving.

Pell and Bales share 10 life lessons from one of their telephone callers.

Jeff opens a can of worms about innovation. Lucy and the Agitator respond.

Sex, lies and the art of commanding attention - some great advice from Copyblogger on headline writing.

Eaon looks at the myth of influencers.

Does a personalised approach make a difference? Results from two tests

2011-12-21T13:33:53+00:00

I wanted to share the results of two small experiments I've conducted in the last couple of months regarding personalised thank yous and appeals.

I hope you'll find them of interest, though I need to say upfront that the sample sizes were (very) small and so the results aren't statistically significant.

Does a handwritten thank you card increase response to the next appeal?

For the first experiment we randomly split the responders to a previous appeal in two. One half received our normal personalised thank you letter, the other half also received a hand written thank you card, which referenced their previous giving.

As well as being a nice thing to do for donors, I was also interested to see if those who received the extra thank you would also be more likely to give to the next appeal.

The results were as follows:

Normal Thank You: 28.1% gave to the next appeal.

Extra Thank You: 29.2% gave to the next appeal.

Interestingly, the normal thank yous gave more collectively than the previous appeal, whereas the extra thank yous gave slightly less!

So it appears not to have made any difference in the short term. If I had the resources then I would love to monitor the long term effect on doing this to the lifetime value of a donor.

Does a personalised Christmas appeal increase response?

In the next test, we decided to send a personalised version of our Christmas appeal to our top 400 donors (they'd all given over £50 gifts in the past).

We included a handwritten Christmas card featuring a poem from a beneficiary - you can read this lovely poem online.

Last year the response rate across all segments of the appeal was about the same.

So far the response rate is over 25% higher for the high value donors than all other donors.

With responses still coming in (I'd expect we have around 66-75% of responses now) then the top segment has responded at 13.2% compared with 11.7% last year, so by the end of the appeal I'd expect to see a 30-40% increase in response to sending the handwritten Christmas card to the top donors.

A pleasing result and one that we can look to utilise for future appeals as well...

Should we name and shame millionaires who don't give?

2011-12-15T12:02:39+00:00

UK Fundraising have a great summary of the 2011 Coutts million pound donor report (you can download the full report here) and it shows that the number of million pound gifts in the UK fell from 201 to 174 last year.

At the same time, one of the Freakonomics podcasts reports on Australian Dick Smith who has publicly vowed to name and shame rich people who don't give.

Would such an approach work in the UK and has Dick's direct approach had an effect?

Sadly, I think the answer is no to both questions.

While I admire Dick's enthusiasm and directness, I think issuing threats and trying to embarrass people to give is not a viable long term solution to get people to give more.

In Australia his approach has attracted critics and he has been accused of being a bully.

If I was advising Dick, then I'd tell him that he might have more success by trying to show people the benefits of donating and the satisfaction that philanthropy can bring.

I'd get him to encourage people to go on shows like Secret Millionaire and for him to offer a matching challenge to millionaires who've never given before.

Finally, a public pledge (like the one from Warren Buffet and Bill Gates) that he will give most of his wealth away, might inspire others to join him.

In the UK I'd like to see more people celebrating their giving and publicising their philanthropy, but sadly our natural reserve means that even great initiatives like the Beacon Fellowship don't seem to attract the publicity and attention they deserve.

Rather than endless white papers and talks of tweaking the tax system to incentivise giving, I would rather see people celebrate the emotional joy of giving and encouraging others to join them.

Fundraising Reading Round Up

2011-12-10T15:40:11+00:00

Time for another round-up. The year has flown by and this is likely to be the penultimate one of the year. Enjoy!

The Grant Garden on asking nicely.

Alison with a fundraising analogy about brazil nuts.

Mark with some more analysis and results from his mystery shopping exercise.

Jeff and Nancy both critique a stupid non-profit ad.

Karen with some thoughts on direct marketing trends in 2012.

Pamela Grow hosts this November's non-profit blog carnival on giving thanks.

Aline with some emergency fundraising appeals (past and present).

Derek on fundraising films.

Tom Ahern with a sure fire recipe for failure.

The Agitator with an in-depth look at donor commitment .

The Wild Woman looks at the anatomy of a successful annual appeal.

Katya gives a thumbs up to donors.

Dan Pallotta on jargon.