Nonprofit Communications

If you missed my free webinar today on “Getting Ready to Write Your 2007 Annual Report,” you can now view the 37-minute recording online at no charge. Here is the registration page.

It covers what information you need to be gathering now, what decisions you should make before the end of your fiscal year, and what you can put off for a few months. Today’s participants also asked some great questions, so even if you don’t sit and watch the video (although I do have some fun slides), it’s worth listening to while you putter around in your office with other tasks.

Here are a few comments from today’s participants:

“Great webinar… Clear and relevant.”

“Good, clear, high-level content.”

“I found the seminar very helpful - it confirmed for me that we are on the right track with our approach . . . Thank you so much for your time and insight.”

“Thank you - this was very informative.”

“I found the information and the Q&A session extremely helpful.”

This week’s Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants is up at Giving in a Digital World. Bryan has compiled a great set of posts on how nonprofits can use Facebook, MySpace, OpenSocial, and other social networking tools. Check it out now.

On December 3, the Carnival returns stateside to Getting Attention with Nancy Schwartz. Here’s Nancy’s question for you: What are the top three to-do’s on your nonprofit marketing agenda? Get the details here on how to contribute to Nancy’s edition of the Carnival.

If you find a little time over the holiday weekend to catch up on your blog reading, start here:

Still mulling over your year-end appeal? FrogLoop’s got a procrastinator’s guide to year-end fundraising.

Here are some great tips on giving presentations from Chris Brogan that go well beyond the usual advice you already know. (Tipped by The Agitator)

The Copywriting Maven compared two direct appeals from Planned Parenthood and asked her readers which one was stronger. What do you think?

Nancy at Getting Attention has posted a nice case study on how a museum drastically increased both visitors and donations through a savvy marketing campaign.

Soha at Wild Apricot has interviewed Jason King about web design for nonprofits.

Rosetta Thurman has some thoughts on keeping your Gen Y employees happy (much can also apply to Gen Y volunteers).

Michele at Bamboo Project shares ideas on keeping online communities going. Big social networking sites aside, many nonprofits use listservs and other basic tools to create communities and struggle with the same issues.

Duct Tape Marketing explains the proper way to stalk a journalist (in other words, how to get reporters to think of you as a resource) via a 3-minute video.

Have a safe, hassle-free Thanksgiving!

If the boomers have all the money and time for nonprofits, it seems like getting on social networking sites like TeeBeeDee, Multiply, and Eons would be a much better investment of time for nonprofits seeking new donors through social networks than creating MySpace and Facebook pages.

This New York Times article describes several recent rounds of venture capital investments into social networking sites like these aimed at the over-40 and -50 crowd.

“There are 78 million boomers — roughly three times the number of teenagers — and most of them are Internet users who learned computer skills in the workplace. Indeed, the number of Internet users who are older than 55 is roughly the same as those who are aged 18 to 34, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, a market research firm.”

Newsweek ran an essay by Robin Wolaner, the founder of TeeBeeDee last week that provides some additional enlightenment:

“We boomers behave online just as younger people do—shopping, banking, learning—but we have not yet committed to social networks. Sites like MySpace have felt unsafe or a waste of time . . . The goal was authenticity; that sounds simple, but many ventures aimed at our generation have failed because they think of us as one big market.”

While these sites target older generations, social networking for boomers is a young field. It’s hard to say which of these sites will rise to the top, but if you see social networking as a growing element of your online marketing strategy (and who doesn’t?), it’s worth experimenting with at least one of them. Compared to Facebook and MySpace, the competition from other nonprofit causes will likely be slim — but not for long.

Michelle Murrain at Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology has posted the Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants, featuring some Thanksgiving-week treats. You’ll find posts on sustaining online communities, using Facebook, social marketing principles and much more.

Next week, the Carnival skips over the pond to London, where a new host, Bryan Miller of Giving in a Digital World, will open the big top on November 26. Bryan is especially interested in posts about engaging with supporters through online social networks. He’s accepting posts through the weekend through BlogCarnival, giving those of us in the U.S. some extra time to recover from the feasting. It’s the perfect excuse to break away from your in-laws — you must get your Carnival submission in!

Happy Thanksgiving!

This is the fifth in a five-post series on a direct mail make-over currently being tested by the University of California at Berkeley (Cal). Read Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

This week I have chronicled the story of how Cal’s fundraisers took a new approach to turning alumni into annual donors by creating a graphic-driven, audience-directed, full-color brochure. While the results of the direct mail campaign aren’t in yet, I believe you can still pull several lessons from their experience.

1) Connect with your audience’s memories and emotions. A large group of alumni has never responded positively to Cal’s annual appeals. Instead of continuing to send them more of the same kind of mail that didn’t work, hoping that the alumni would change their minds, Cal conducted focus groups. They honed in on some themes they heard directly from those alumni, and worked with those concepts, even though they weren’t all necessarily positive (e.g., Cal is big, impersonal place.)

2) Try something new and test it. This is the first time Cal has produced a brochure as bold as this one. But rather than sending it out in the world all alone to see how it performs, they also wrote a traditional business letter using the same theme. This split-testing will tell them much more about the success of the brochure than if they had sent it out alone.

3) Let your ideas evolve. Cal started with a cookie cutter theme based on focus groups. But it simply didn’t work. Rather than abandoning the concept completely or sticking with it simply because the focus groups had used that terminology, the fundraising team let the idea evolve into one that worked. I compare it to kneading bread dough until it is smooth and shiny. I have a folder on my computer labeled still cooking for article ideas that aren’t quite ready for publication. I’ve found that it takes at least three iterations from the original concept before the images and text of an idea really gel. (Enough cooking metaphors; you get the idea.)

4) Let the graphics talk. The Cal piece works graphically because it appeals to our natural curiosity, but still provides enough clues that we don’t stray too far away. Take the Trendsetters tagline, with the Rolling Stone cover of Bono. Now, I know Bono didn’t go to Cal, so I’m thinking, “What’s the connection? Let me read this small type down here.” Turns out Jann Wenner, ‘67, is the cofounder and publisher of Rolling Stone Magazine and upon closer inspection of the image, I see that he wrote the cover story on Bono. (I personally think that using the Bono cover is also a subliminal message since he is now one of the faces of modern philanthropy, but Cal says that’s not the primary reason why they chose it.)

5) Use “You” Without Being So Obvious. The first drafts were full of “you” statements –“you this, you that” and they were too presumptuous. While I am completely on the “You” bandwagon for nonprofit marketing, especially donor communications, some people are taking it too far. I believe smart donors can see through it, and once everyone employs this technique, the effectiveness of that single word alone will dim. What will not fade, however, is the power of more creative, sophisticated messages that are built off the concept of “You, the donor” without overdoing it.

I hope you enjoyed the series this week. Let me know what you think by leaving a comment on any of the installments.

Special thanks to Amy Cranch and Virginia Gray of Cal for their detailed, honest accounts of the process!

This is the fourth in a five-post series on a direct mail make-over currently being tested by the University of California at Berkeley (Cal). Read Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | This is Part 4 | Part 5

The direct mail makeover by Cal fundraisers highlights the cultural contributions of alumni and asks other alumni to support the next generation of innovators, while also thanking the graduates “for being who you are.”

The brilliance of this approach is not in its originality – it rarely is. Using famous alumni is not new. Asking alumni to support future generations is not new. And yet it works beautifully. What is new is the twist on these concepts. What’s new is the juxtaposition of meaningful cultural icons that came out of Cal alumni and inviting other alumni to think of themselves as peers to those innovators.

I’m one of those slightly disaffected Cal alums who Virginia Gray, Cal’s associate director of annual giving and regional programs, is trying to squeeze some bucks out of. I enjoyed my time there and appreciate the education I received, but I feel no special connection to any particular people or places on the campus. But this piece grabbed me.

Rather than talking about all the Nobel Laureates and other Big Brains who went to Cal, the piece talks about their impacts in images and words that are relevant to me, right now. A computer mouse. Saving the planet through energy efficiency. MySpace. Apple, Inc. Dilbert. Bono on the cover of Rolling Stone. This piece of mail takes an education at Cal that happened decades ago and makes it meaningful to my life today. It makes it incredibly easy for me to see how my contribution will lead to the next great thing I’ll have on my desk tomorrow.

Remember: They started with a cookie cutter. “We tried it one way, and it didn’t work out, but we kept going. The new idea was really good, and the copywriting and graphics told a great story,” says Virginia.

I admit, my interest in this piece was piqued first by professional curiosity. When I saw the big, yellow “You” on the cover panel after getting years of canned letters from Cal, my first thought was, “OK, somebody just took some donor marketing training and has gulped down a big cup of the ‘You-Not-Us’ Kool-Aid.” But when I opened it up and read the piece, I immediately felt like I was part of this amazing group of innovators simply by virtue of being an alumna. Check one slacker alumna off your list, Virginia. I gave online for the first time since I graduated in ’91.

Virginia is new to nonprofit marketing, but she has a strong direct marketing and branding background and knows the importance of finding emotional hooks. Her focus groups told her what she already knew. Cal is huge and there are not a lot of common experiences there that create unifying emotions in alumni. But those same alumni also told her what their hot buttons were — that they weren’t cookie-cutter Ivy League graduates and yet were proud to have graduated from one of the top universities in the nation.

Did it work on other alumni as well as it did with me? We’ll see. The mailing list includes 100,000 graduates of Cal’s College of Letters & Science who are not currently donors. The list was not broken out by age or other demographics. Half got the full-color brochure and the other half got a standard business letter with similar messaging in much longer text and no graphics. See the Brochure. See the Letter.

Virginia says it takes a good two-three months before they can judge the performance of a direct mail campaign, but she will pull the first numbers at the end of November and has agreed to share them with us. By split testing similar messages in drastically different formats and comparing them to other campaigns, she hopes to determine what was more important to success: the message, the package, or both.

We’ll find out in a few weeks. Stay tuned by subscribing to this blog right now (see upper left of blog home page), so you don’t miss the results!

Coming Tomorrow: Lessons you can learn from what Cal did

This is the third in a five-post series on a direct mail make-over currently being tested by the University of California at Berkeley (Cal). Read Part 1 | Part 2 | This is Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

The creative team has gone back to the drawing board. Gone are the cookie cutter imagery and the direct language about “you, a Cal alumni” being innovative, creative, etc. Instead, the team creates a piece that finally works: On the cover, it asks, “Who are you? Cal alumni are . . .” The “you” is in big, bright yellow letters, standing out against a black background. As you open the piece and unfold it, you see a series of panels:

Movement Leaders & Story Weavers
Creators & Innovators
Educators & Crusaders
Trendsetters & Friend Seekers
Activists & Satirists

Each tag includes a clear simple image with a small blurb about an alum who exemplifies that description. With Movement Leaders, you see a bunch of asparagus, and “Alice Waters, ’67. Acclaimed chef and pioneer behind the worldwide movement to eat local, organic foods.”

With Friend Seekers, you see a screenshot of Tom’s MySpace page with 201,904,463 friends. It says “Tom Anderson, ’98. Cofounder and president of MySpace.com and first friend to every user.”

The ten images represent a great diversity in alumni in age, gender, ethnicity, and subject area. They are chefs, writers, teachers, scientists, programmers, inventers, cartoonists, and athletes who have all had a profound impact on today’s culture. Look at a PDF of the full piece It’s flat here, but you can imagine how it would unfold in your hands.

On the donation form and envelope, it closes with these simple phrases that say it all to the alumni-would-be-donors: “Cal alumni are changing the world. Won’t YOU champion the next generation of innovators?” followed by “Thanks for being who you are. We appreciate your generosity.”

In creating the design, Amy Cranch, the piece’s principal editor, knew they had to choose between pictures of the alums or pictures of things that represented their contributions to society. “The thing is way stronger,” says Amy. “It makes a crisp design, and it’s much easier to relate to.” Most people wouldn’t recognize or know who Douglas Engelbart is, but everyone uses what he invented: the computer mouse. “We tried to be careful not to pick just famous people, but to emphasize the impact that these people have on our daily lives,” says Amy.

“Instead of ‘You are this or that,’ it became an invitation to explore the categories of people, and to feel some excitement or pride that the thing you use everyday came from someone who went to the same school as you,” says Amy. The new approach still allowed Cal to play off the original concept of not being a cookie cutter and to still use “You” directly, but without jamming in onto people. “I firmly believe that using the personal stories opens the doors for further connections with people,” says Amy. People first, organizations second. Alumni first, Cal second.

Coming tomorrow: Find out why I think this piece works so well and about the test that Cal is running.