Nonprofit Communications

I’m reading “Message Matters: Succeeding at the Crossroads of Mission and Market” by Rebecca K. Leet. I’m about halfway through it, and here are some of the tips that I found most interesting.

When creating a message that works, you need to start with the action that you want others to take. Unfortunately, lots of nonprofits take the easy (lazy) way out and say that they want people to “be informed” or “be aware” of their issues. But that’s not really a good goal for your communications. What is it that you want people TO DO after they are aware and informed?

In the book, Rebecca says that Mothers Against Drunk Driving could have had educating people about the dangers of drunk driving as a goal, but that would not have been nearly as effective as asking people not to drink and drive and to pick a designated driver instead. Clear actions make all the difference and add an incredible amount of clarity to the process of creating your messaging.

After you create your core message, you should create a few subset messages that more directly address the specific desires of particular segments of your target audience. For example, if you have one core message about early child education, you might have one subset message for parents, one for pediatricians, and yet another for day care providers.

I know the idea of creating multiple messages has created some heartburn for nonprofits I’ve worked with before (and for me too) — Won’t it be confusing? What if one target audience sees the message intended for a different target audience? How can we figure out who gets what message?

Rebecca says not to worry, because the reality is that people only tune into messages that appeal to them personally and pretty much ignore everything else. So as long as your subset messages don’t contradict each other and support the core message, it’s OK if the day care providers also get the parents’ message. In reality, a day care provider may also be a parent, and may be interested in both perspectives, reinforcing your core message.

I’ll share more tips when I finish the book. But I can say that I definitely recommend it. In fact, I’ve asked Rebecca to speak during an upcoming Nonprofit Marketing Guide.com webinar called “How to Create Nonprofit Messages That Motivate” on June 19. She’s agreed to boil down the best of the book into a one-hour webinar with plenty of time for your specific questions (although you should still buy the book too!) Learn more now.

I’ve been reading several books on storytelling, most of which were written for a corporate audience, in search of great advice and tips for nonprofits. I’ll share some of the best stuff during this Wednesday’s webinar, “What Should We Write About? Storytelling Ideas for Nonprofits,” and in future posts here. But for now, here is my quick take on three of these books, in case you’ve been considering a purchase.

As a whole, I haven’t learned much. The majority of the pages in these books are dedicated to (1) convincing the reader of the value of stories in influencing others and (2) helping the corporate reader accept the idea that good stories include emotional elements, even if the corporate landscape is normally devoid of emotion. Since I already believe in the power of good stories, and since I think most of the nonprofit sector doesn’t suffer from the same “business-only straight-face” corporate persona problem, I got very little out of big sections of these books.

“The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling: Mastering the Art and Discipline of Business Narrative” by Stephen Denning is probably the best of the bunch. It explains eight different types of narratives with explicit information on what elements should be included in each of the different types of stories in order to achieve the stated goal. For example, when using the “Motivate Others to Action” story pattern, you don’t want to include lots of details about the person or place in the story, because what you are actually trying to do is to have your audience members see themselves in the story. If you include too many details, you prevent your audience for placing themselves within it.

I like the way that this book helps readers see the various components of a story and how those can be emphasized or eliminated depending on the goal of the storyteller. I’m going to spend more time with this book to really consider the ways that these various narrative patterns could work in the nonprofit sector. Most of the chapters are not perfect matches for nonprofit marketing, but I think the important kernels are all there. If Denning would write this same book, but for nonprofits, I think it would be a huge asset to the community.

“The Elements of Persuasion: Use Storytelling to Pitch Better, Sell Faster, and Win More Business” by Richard Maxwell and Robert Dickman advocates following a basic story formula that includes the Passion, Hero, Antagonist, Awareness, and Transformation. They tell lots of interesting and entertaining stories themselves, but the how-to advice is too vague and one-size-fits-all. It’s hard to make the leap from the corporate stories to the nonprofit sector. Still, it’s a pretty quick read and it does include some instruction, so I’d give it a tepid thumbs-up.

“The Story Factor: Inspiration, Influence, and Persuasion through the Art of Storytelling” by Annette Simmons. This book was the least satisfying of the three for me because it really focuses on the broader concepts of why storytelling works without much how-to. It includes tons of meaningful stories, but it’s really short on how to identify your own stories and make them work in specific situations. If you aren’t convinced of the power of stories, this book will convince you. If you are already sold on the idea, it won’t do much else for you.

This post is part of my participation in Michele Martin’s Blogging4Learning Challenge. I’m blogging to learn more about how nonprofits can use storytelling in nonprofit marketing and communications.

After trial runs with both GoToWebinar and ReadyTalk this fall, I’m launching my 2008 webinar series on nonprofit marketing topics using ReadyTalk. And after hearing from a woman in one of my Duke classes that her nonprofit adoption agency paid a ridiculous sum of money (in the several hundreds of dollars) to host a webinar for less than a dozen prospective adoptive parents, I realized that nonprofits are looking for cost-effective, easy ways to deliver training and information too.

Here is my take on these two services.

GoToWebinar

What I Liked:

-The user-interface was very easy to follow and figure out.

-They offer fully integrated tools for promoting your events, tracking registration, sending automated reminders, etc., although not all of the system emails can be customized as much as I would like.

-The fixed monthly fee was very appealing, because it would allow me to budget for the expense regardless of how many webinars I did per month, or how many people attended. I see that as a big bonus for some nonprofits too.

-They have advanced tools to monitor participants during the webinar. For example, you can tell how long your webinar was the top window on someone’s computer and how often they were working on something else.

-I could start the trial immediately through their website.

-GoToWebinar lets you poll the audience live by presenting multiple choice questions on the screen that participants can click on, giving you instant, compiled feedback about what people think about various topics. Several participants in the webinar I did said they really loved the instant polling feature.

What I Didn’t Like:

-While all the data on participants is nice after the fact, for me, all of those monitors and icons were in the way during the live event. I couldn’t present the webinar and monitor all those panels at the same time, so they were distractions more than anything else.

-Other than sending in chat messages, there was no way for me to know which specific participants had questions or would like to participate in exercises with me.

-To record the webinar for later viewing, I had to record the audio on my own hard drive, and then allow GoToWebinar to integrate the files. It worked OK, but seems fraught with potential for problems. I understand that GoToWebinar is fixing this in its latest upgrade.

ReadyTalk

What I Liked:

-The “Raise Hand” feature allows me to see the name of the person who has a question, allowing me to ask that person to unmute their line and ask a question or participate in an exercise.

-The system uses Java, instead of its own program requiring a download (like GotoWebinar), which makes it very easy for everyone to use (although no one complained about the GotoWebinar download).

-The audio and video recordings are fully integrated.

-You can show your presentation slides from your desktop (as GoToWebinar requires), or you can upload your presentation and run the slides through ReadyTalk. Not only does the upload eliminate bandwidth issues, but it also allows me as the presenter to preview slides and skip around much more easily without the audience seeing everything I’m doing. And I can still show my desktop or specific applications when I want to.

What I Didn’t Like:

-I had to wait on a customer service rep to start my trial run. While my rep ended up being very helpful, he insisted on talking to me on the phone and then was out sick, so I had to wait several days before I could really get started. I do a lot of online tinkering after my kids are in bed, so I prefer fully automated trials.

-The ReadyTalk website doesn’t include pricing information and you have to wait for your sales rep to come back to you with pricing packages. That always feels a little bit like used car buying to me. I’m not unhappy with what I’m paying, but I do prefer upfront, fixed rate pricing options, which GoToWebinar offers.

-ReadyTalk offers virtually no support (except for some ugly email invitations) for promoting your webinar and registering participants. I understand that they will be introducing a new module that will take care of many of these tasks later this year. But for now, you have to use another system for everything.

-The user interface is rather sparse. It’s easy enough now that I have figured out where everything is, but it is not as intuitive or rich in features as GoToWebinar.

-Their security system for preventing unregistered people from participating is not as rigorous as GotoWebinar’s.

Why I Ultimately Chose ReadyTalk

I decided that ReadyTalk’s technology works better for my needs than GoToWebinar’s. ReadyTalk has also made significant inroads into the nonprofit community, which means that many of you who will be registering for my webinars will already be familiar with their system. For me, these two reasons outweighed GoToWebinar’s far superior tools for webinar promotion and management. But not by a whole lot, especially given that GoToWebinar is cheaper given how much I plan to use the service.

While ReadyTalk did offer me the NTEN membership enterprise deal for unlimited web connections, no flat rate is available for the audio connections. For me to be a full-blown ReadyTalk evangelist, they need to unveil their new event management system and they need to develop better flat-rate pricing packages that are more competitive with GoToWebinar’s rates.

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.

This is the second 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 | This is Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

The fundraisers at Cal have decided to break away from their standard business letter appeal and try a bold, full-color brochure to convince alumni to become new donors to the university. From their focus groups, they know that Cal alums consider themselves unique and diverse – not like the cookie cutter graduates from rival private schools. They’ve also decided to speak directly to the audience by using the word “You” prominently in the piece. So the creative team went to work.

In early drafts, the simple imagery of the cookie cutter was meshed with too many complex messages about alumni, says Amy Cranch, a principal editor with Cal’s development communications department. It said, “You challenge convention. You have an independent spirit. You think freely.” The whole idea was that your life has been transformed by graduating from Cal, but in a way that left you your own person, explains Amy.

“It just wasn’t working,” she recalls. “There were too many disconnects, and the concept of the cookie cutter itself was a cliché and not very strong. The copy made very strong assumptions about people. It was not an invitation to agree with the ideas. It felt too forced.”

Virginia Gray, Cal’s associate director of annual giving and regional programs, agrees. “The whole thing wasn’t holding together. It wasn’t telling the kind of personal story we wanted.”

This is where many people would have given up and gone back to the standard form letter. When you are creating messages, whether they take the form of a tagline or design theme or epiphany at the end of an essay, you have to keep kneading the bread dough. At this stage, Cal had a nice lump of dough, but it was still a sticky mess. But they kept kneading it, waiting for that smooth, satiny finish to appear that tells you that you are done.

Amy’s boss had a middle-of-the-night brainstorm. Instead of telling Cal alumni what they were and sounding presumptuous – just what Cal grads hate – they would use famous alumni who are often described as innovators, free thinkers, and creators.

Everyone has the ingredients for good bread, but it takes knowing how long to knead it to produce something delicious.

Coming Tomorrow: How Cal designs a piece all about famous alumni without abandoning the “You, the Donor” ideal.

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

The fundraisers at Cal had a problem: they needed to raise more money from alumni to support the diverse education and research programs where Cal excels, but their current direct mail program wasn’t increasing the size of the alumni donor pool. While the standard annual appeal in a letter format did a good job at renewing existing donors, says Virginia Gray, Cal’s associate director of annual giving and regional programs, the letters weren’t bringing in many new donors.

To learn more about these alumni who weren’t currently donating, Cal sponsored some focus groups. “We found that a lot of people felt like going to Cal was a big, impersonal experience and they didn’t have the same emotional connections and bonding experiences that you’d find at a smaller university,” says Virginia.

Cal must also contend with the misperception that as a state-funded school, it doesn’t really need individual donors. “At private schools,” explains Virginia, “you are educated about how the people before you are funding your education now, and that you need to give back so the school can go on. You don’t get that message at Cal.”

The alumni in the focus group also shared how they viewed themselves as a very diverse group and that the Cal experience enhanced that diversity, unlike other private institutions of similar caliber that churn out cookie-cutter graduates (the staid professionals that graduate from rival Stanford, for example, come to this Golden Bear’s mind).

The cookie-cutter imagery stuck with Virginia and her colleagues as they pulled together a creative brief for a new direct mail campaign centered on a full-color, multi-panel, graphic-laden brochure. While Cal had tried colorful brochures before, it would be the first time they had tried something as bold as they had in mind this time.

Coming Tomorrow: The cookie cutter concept falls apart, but an even better concept comes together.