Nonprofit Communications

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New donors, volunteers and other potential supporters have questions that they want answered before taking the next step with your organization. These five simple but universal questions that people will have about your organization are best answered not with statistics or wonky program statements, but with stories. Your website is the perfect place to answer these questions.

1) What Do Other People Think About This Group?

Answer with Testimonials. When someone is learning about you for the first time, they’ll be curious what other people think about your organization, your staff and your effectiveness. You can talk about how great you are, but that’s not nearly as convincing as testimonials from other people who aren’t on your payroll (or even on your board). Testimonials are short quotes — little mini-stories — that offer insight into why someone is happy to be associated with your organization in one or two sentences. Gilda’s Club Seattle includes testimonials and photos at the top of nearly every page on its site that instantly convey how important the group is to its supporters.

2) Are People Here Like Me?

Answer with Profiles. When someone donates time or money to your organization, they are joining a virtual community of people who believe in the same cause. If someone is not quite sure if your nonprofit is a good fit for them, showing them that they fit in with other supporters can help overcome that barrier. Profiles of clients, donors, volunteers, members, and other supporters are a good way to show the different kinds of people who are involved with your group, making a newcomer feel more comfortable that they are in the right place. Iraq Veterans Against the War lets members write their own profiles as part of the open, online membership directory.

3) Does This Work?

Answer with Success Stories. Do you get the job done? Are you going to make a difference with the money I give you? Success stories show donors (and potential new donors) exactly what it is you do and how you do it. They can be full-length articles or shorter vignettes like those on the National CASA website. The multimedia stories on the home page show the children they serve and their adult court-appointed advocates speaking about the benefits of the CASA program. These stories end with this simple statement: “Children with a CASA volunteer are less likely to reenter Child Protective Services.” Does it work? Yes, it does.

4) What Difference Can a Single Person Make?

Answer with Personalized Giving Options. Big problems are overwhelming. If you swamp people with the enormity of the need, they are likely to tune you out and move on to something that feels more manageable. One way to overcome this problem is to focus on the difference that a single person can make and clearly demonstrate through storytelling that a new donor, as a single individual, can bring about change by supporting your organization. Tying donor actions or gift levels to specific results is a great way to do that.

Kiva and Donors Choose are the shining stars in this category. CARE’s “I Am Powerful” campaign also makes a clear yet less direct connection between individual donors and the people they are helping.

5) Can I Come Along?

Answer with Personal Chronicles. For your supporters to fully engage with your nonprofit, you have to be willing to share what’s really going on. A small but important segment of your donor base won’t be happy with the level of detail they get in your newsletters. They’ll want more and you should give it to them. Blogs are a natural way to provide this kind of ongoing, detailed, behind-the-scenes narrative about your work.

The Humane Society of the United States’ dispatches from the Canadian seal hunt are riveting (although brutally graphic). It’s one thing to ask supporters to put a “Save the Baby Seals!” bumper sticker on their car — it’s another to invite them to tag along virtually with the HSUS’s Rebecca Aldworth as she chronicles the bloody devastation on the ice floes day in and day out. A more heart-warming example can be found on the Interplast blog, where doctors chronicle their efforts around the globe to repair birth defects like cleft lip.

In both cases, these nonprofits are taking their supporters to places they would likely never physically go themselves, showing them in detail both the need for their support and what can be done with their donations and advocacy. By bringing your supporters along day in and day out, you can make them feel like they really are part of your team.

While storytelling is a wonderful tool for nonprofit marketing, it only works with a specific goal in mind. What point are you trying to make? Or in these cases, what question are you trying to answer? Without a goal behind your story, the words may be interesting or amusing, but the point will be lost on your supporters. Know what question you are answering before you start telling your story for maximum impact.

Learn More Here: Nonprofit Storytelling: How to Write Your Nonprofit’s Best Stories

No more Santa, please!

If there is any chance that your supporters will receive mail from you in the coming weeks with references to holiday giving, PULL THE PROJECT NOW! (Yes, I’m yelling in ALL CAPS!) I don’t care what else is in the newsletter or the direct mail package, if you are referring to Christmas or end-of-year giving in any way, do not mail it.

I have received two pieces of mail like this in the last week. One was a newsletter from a social service agency asking people to include the organization in their end-of-year giving plans and to remember loved ones by purchasing ornaments on an “Angel Tree” at the hospital. That tree was turned into mulch weeks ago. The second one was from a humane society, complete with photos of homeless pets in Santa hats, with puppy dog eyes pleading for a home for the holidays. I’d rather not think about what happened to those animals.

I know print projects get stuck in the pipeline. It happens to all of us and it is really frustrating. You can blame your printer or the mail house, but the result is the same: your supporters will see the holiday references, chuck the whole thing, and wonder what the heck is wrong with you.

If someone with solid direct mail experience wants to explain to me how Christmas references received the fourth week of January still work on donors, I’m all ears. But until then, I say pull the job, regardless of how much time and money have already been invested. If it really is your printer or mail house’s fault, and not just your rushed scheduling, talk to them about credits to your account. Otherwise, eat the cost. Consider it the price of preserving your reputation with supporters and of learning the hard way to pad your publishing schedule. It’s always better to be a little too early than way too late.

Is it possible to do all of your nonprofit marketing online and avoid printing costs entirely? Many nonprofits are dumping their boring print newsletters in favor of email versions, and some are forgoing the printed annual report in favor of a pdf download or basic web pages instead.

The extent to which you can eliminate your print budget depends on your audience and what you are trying to communicate. If the people you are trying to reach all check their email regularly or login to the same websites or check their RSS readers frequently, you might be able to pull it off. But for many nonprofits with audiences who are not tethered to the Internet, print will always be a necessity.

The best approach is to evaluate your options each time you decide you need to communicate with your audience. Don’t assume ahead of time — actually think it through. Is that message best delivered to them in print or online, or in some other way, like over the phone or in person? You have to match the audience, the message, and the delivery.

Of course, the printing industry will argue that print will never die. Check out this very clever video called Printing’s Alive (warning to sensitive ears: it contains bleeped cussing).

Thanks to the ADCMW Creatives List for the video tip.

I came across this interesting article in the Washington Post (”Hey, Isn’t That. . .“) on how big corporations are poaching photos off of Flickr and private blogs and using them without attribution. When caught, the common reaction seems to be, “Ooops, an intern did it.” Not really an acceptable answer from the likes of the multinational corporations involved in the cases cited in the article, is it?

It reminded me of the similar excuses several nonprofit bloggers heard last fall when a bunch of us were hit with a spate of poached blog postings all around the same time. I wrote about fair use of blog posts and Nancy Schwartz also shared her story about a stolen article. In both of our cases, the perps attributed the problems to mistakes by “junior” staff.

When you hand off tasks like newsletter writing and finding photos for your publications to junior staff or interns, be sure to take five minutes to talk about copyright and proper attribution. Spend a few minutes at Creative Commons. This is definitely a case where a few minutes of prevention can save you hours of grief. Not only will you avoid the embarrassment associated with being publicly called out as a content thief, you’ll also save hours of time defending and/or apologizing for the behavior (and in the case of the corporations in the Post story, lots of legal fees.)

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.