Make sure the left hand knows what the right hand is doing

It’s a simple enough premise.  If your customers, supporters or volunteers ‘speak’ with you about their needs, wants or a complaint, pay attention!

It’s about having good internal communications and this means putting in place both the means for your people to communicate as well as nurturing the will for your colleagues to communicate with each other for everyone’s benefit.

You know what I’m talking about; you spend 10 minutes on hold to your bank to tell them about an issue only to be told it’s not that department and you need to speak to someone else.  Fair enough if the organisation is a global behemoth – at least these guys will then tend to transfer you directly in trying to help.  Not the perfect experience but at least someone offers a solution which moves you forward.

But what about smaller organisations like charities?  Among the charities I donate to are a few smaller or regional organisations that between them apparently can’t manage my contact preferences or set up my direct debits in spite of me frequently proffering the right information.  I may have long hair but I’m still not Mrs. Baughen!

Why should I care about your email?

There are hundreds if not thousands of people online offering technical and content advice on email marketing for business as well as for fundraising or campaigning.  I’m not a technical expert so can’t pretend to understand detailed coding or firewall issues but I do know a thing or two about content and about engaging readers.

Why do we want to engage readers?  Because engaged readers are much more likely to do what you’re asking them to do!  Note the implication in that last sentence… you have to have a clear and compelling ‘ASK’ in every email whether it’s for funds, to buy something, to sign-up to a campaign, to share with a friend or just to get further information – include an action.

I received a well-intentioned and polite email earlier this week from someone telling me about a schools reading project in Wales.  Here’s how it broke down:

Why Innovation is all about ‘as well as’ not ‘instead of’

I love the debate around ‘the next big thing’ versus ‘tried and tested’.  There are passionate advocates in each corner (you know who they are in your organisation I’m sure), but mostly I like the debate because one side can never completely win if an organisation wants to stay successful.

A little friction can actually be hugely motivating if channelled correctly.

Jeff Brooks writes an interesting blog this week positing that ‘the next big thing’ in fundraising really isn’t as big as all that.  And probably won’t ever be.  I don’t believe Jeff is decrying innovation but he does offer a warning not to lose focus on the things we already do that work.  In a broader marketing and communications sense, I wholeheartedly take on board the key point but it’s not quite so black and white when we’re talking about either changing behaviours or trying to leverage new technologies.

For example, just think about what we wouldn’t have today if we had stuck to the tried and tested;

• Crowdfunding
• Online giving
• Mobile giving
• Twitter campaigning from and for far flung places
• Serious government debates driven by e-petitions
• Personal music players… (the Sony Walkman started it all off boys and girls with no quantifiable market opportunity at all)

Curly Wurlies, Marketing and Fundraising resolutions 2012

Kevin Baughen

By this time each year I’m usually on the verge of blowing one minor resolution (this year’s was to do with avoiding Curly Wurlies, but that’s a different blog).  This minor failure on my part has made me determined to achieve the more important professional resolutions that I believe will help charities, civil sector organisations and social enterprises get more value from their activities in 2012.

Here’s my top six. Let me know what you think and what’s made it into your marketing and fundraising resolutions:

1. Engage more organisations with the approach that their brand should be an asset which needs to be leveraged wherever possible to meet objectives and UNDERPIN activities.  Does your brand support what you do day to day?  If not, it’s not working as an asset should and is likely occupying too much time and effort for little return.

Contradiction damages your credibilty

What a week of message contradictions we’ve noted at Bottom Line Ideas…

First there was research from Charities Aid Foundation (CAF) which showed Britain to be the fifth most charitable country in the world (up from eighth last year apparently).  The same research also reported that nearly 80% of us give regularly to charity, second only to the Thais.

Then we saw the British Government veto any further support to the IMF in support of specific Euro-zone bailouts – our European cousins perhaps not feeling our generosity quite so much.

New fundraising ideas can work – we just have to try…

Any regular readers will know how I often lament the lack of great marketing and fundraising ideas making it to fruition.  All too often, decisions are made to bin new ideas because there is no proven track record of success or because it’s simply ‘different to the way things are always done around here…’

This week, I’ve had my faith restored by two approaches to fundraising that in one case is working and in the other, I hope works.  But both are trying something different to stand out from the plethora of charity messages we all receive at this time of the year.

The case of the missing collection box

Thieves stole a Marie Curie collecting box from a village café in Stanstead Abbotts and concerned citizen Steve Berry used his Just Giving page and various networks to set about replacing the contents of the box.

How to get people to read your blog the cynical way

The helpful folks over at Marketing Donut published a list by Sonja Jefferson of 20 article ideas to capture readers’ attention and imagination.  It’s all useful stuff and many of the ideas are proven to work (my referencing it here is in fact no. 11) but I think I’m getting sceptical in my old age.  The blogs that generate the most traffic – and I mean globally – seem to fall into one or more of the following categories:

• They are about or focus on famous people (which may or may not include Hollywood, Bollywood, reality TV and soap ‘stars’)
• They are excerpts from a book written by someone already famous or well-known for their expertise
• They are about niche or irreverent ideas and issues not always well-covered elsewhere
• They have more and more imagery and videos than words
• Their popularity is driven by users and readers, not by the organisations or individuals creating the content
• They are trying to sell a “you can’t get rich quick, but you can get rich” online marketing scheme
• They include instructions on how to use the latest tools (Google+ is everywhere at the minute)

It also seems that unless the blog features in the top three points, readership is likely to rise and fall on the tide of fashion, fads and gizmos.  I think it’s fair to say that predicting what will be attractive for readers of blogs (and other online forums) in advance will become a highly sought after skill in the immediate future.

So, if you can create content that your audience can’t really find elsewhere, has a picture of Katie Price holding a puppy with a broken paw and signing an autobiography of management guru Tom Peters whilst appearing in a YouTube video featuring an hilarious diving board accident, you’re bound to attract readers!

On the other hand, we could all just make sure that our target audiences find the content valuable enough to read, share and contribute to and not get obsessed with the volume game.

Fenton! Fenton! (you can actually have that as a T-shirt, you know)

And yes, I know I’ve used celebrities and viral videos here but it was to make the point… honest.

Why effective fundraising and marketing is about more than just targeting a postcode

No effective charity or business wants to waste time and money or deliberately upset customers or supporters.  That’s why targeting has long been a mainstay of the marketer’s and the fundraiser’s toolkit.  In my simple world, it helps us to achieve two things:

1. Communicate only with the people most likely to act upon our messages in the way we want them to (assuming we match the target group’s wants and needs to our messages)
2. Save time and money by not communicating with audiences who are least likely to act in the way we want them to.

I appreciate that there are further subtleties here, like recognising that our organisations will have different messages which will appeal to different or the same audiences at different times, so one general rule of targeting simply won’t fit all situations.

But in the last week alone I’ve observed three examples of the consequences of all this targeting being done independently by multiple, well-meaning organisations:

Targeting postcodes for charity bag collection

Several contributors to the LinkedIn Group, Charity UK, have been sharing their experiences of receiving multiple collection bags – from several every week to 3 every day!

Fair trade volunteering or voluntourism?

I came across this interesting view on tying up volunteering with overseas projects and campaigns – voluntourism.  It was written by Valere Tjolle, the editor of the global online tourism resource TravelMole.com and I’ve included it verbatim below simply because readers need to be signed up to the Travel Mole service to access the often useful content.

I don’t take any credit for the contents but it did make me think that there is an opportunity for more charities to create voluntourism packages to support their fundraising efforts… what do you think?

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Fairtrade voluntourism launched

Over the past few years, the number of volunteering opportunities and the organisations which provide them has grown substantially and there now a whole range of type and quality of placement for the prospective volunteer.  Some are commercial organisations; others are charities, churches or schools.

There are also host communities or projects overseas which directly recruit volunteers online. With the majority of these, volunteers are expected to make a payment for their placement, which may go towards covering their living costs, support while on placement, ongoing support for the project or as a fee to the organisation which has placed them.

With the increase in the concept of volunteering as a “saleable product”, has come a whole host of different types of operators with different priorities for the volunteers, the projects and the money it brings in.

This growth and diversity has also brought a great deal of negative coverage of volunteering, with the sector being criticised for exploiting volunteers and overseas projects for commercial gain.

Charity fundraising and marketing truths (or not)

I was reading the tweets from the very useful @marketingdonut team and was pleased to see them share  renowned marketing expert Drayton Bird’s “35 things I have found to be almost always true”.  I was pleased to see it again as I didn’t get the chance to add to the list from a not-for-profit perspective… something I aim to put right below for the most impactful of Mr Bird’s points:

1. Relevance matters more than originality – 100% agree but originality tends to get more cut-through than cliché
2. The most important element in any creative endeavour is the brief – ie; the robust thinking that went into it and how the organisation can articulate that to an outsider
3. The urgent takes precedence over the important – but a mixture of both is likely to be the right thing to do (if your plans are robust, that is)
4. The customer you want is like the customer you’ve got – so true… but as well as the new types of donor, volunteer or supporter, not instead of!
5. The internet is just accelerated direct marketing – I think it’s more than DM these days.  Perhaps it’s just a hugely powerful means to achieving a whole raft of objectives (including traditional direct marketing)?