Get Ready For a (Good) Cry

July 28, 2006

August approaches, and many of us will take time to re-charge our batteries in the weeks ahead.

Here is the most inspiring story I've read in ages.

Read it and you will be energized and motivated to do better, try harder and take on bigger challenges. You'll feel more optimistic. You will not be able to resist forwarding this story to friends and colleagues. And they will thank you for it. I guarantee it.

Thank you Ellen Church for sending.

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Bus Leaving for Washington, NOW!

July 28, 2006

Attention planned giving fundraisers!

Washington's abuzz. But it's only fair that you non-Washingtonians should get a bite at the apple.

The biggest transfer of wealth in the history of the Washington region will occur over the next 50 years as current retirees and Boomers expected to die by 2055 make bequests totalling $2.4 trillion. So reports the Washington Post, scooping a study to be released this week by Boston College's Center on Wealth and Philanthropy. Charities will get close to $460 billion of this amount.

The bulk of the bequests will come from households with a net worth of more than $1 million — including equity in homes — which account for a remarkable 10% of households in the region.

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Jon Stewart vs. Arthur Sulzberger, Jr.

July 27, 2006

On the HuffingtonPost blog today, Washington insider Marty Kaplan laments the fact that the Network of Spiritual Progressives must buy its way into the NYTimes with an ad costing $154,000 or more. He writes:

“What's odd is the monopoly on elite attention that the prestige press seems still to maintain. You'd think that new technology would by now have created a way for Rabbi Lerner and those who agree with him to get their viewpoint into the media mix, without his having to raise and spend a couple hundred grand.”

I think it's possible that reaching elite eyeballs — the Influentials as Roper calls them — might indeed get even more expensive, not less, as time goes by. Sure, there are more and more media channels out there … you can blog, you can podcast, you can do online video ads, you can bare your soul (or whatever) on YouTube or MySpace. But still, today, if you need to reach the small number of Americans who shape so much of what the rest of us think, you'll need to penetrate a handful of media outlets that aggregate and deliver the Influentials.

The producers and reporters at CNN read what the editors and reporters of the NYT write, who watch what the producers and reporters at CNN broadcast … and around and around it goes.

This won't last forever.

Continue reading “Jon Stewart vs. Arthur Sulzberger, Jr.”

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Cabbies and Carbon Sequestration

July 27, 2006

When's the last time you had a great conversation with your cabbie about “carbon sequestration.” NOT!

And that's the problem with today's knowledgeable, authoritative, but politically weak environmental groups.

In a must read article in this week's Nation magazine, Mark Hertsgaard, the Nation's environmental correspondent, contrasts the staleness and homogeneity of the national groups with the dynamism and diversity of a new grassroots environmental movement.

From my own perspective, after 40 years of working with environmental movements, from Environmental Defense Fund to NRDC, to Greenpeace, to WWF, the Wilderness Society, etc, it's both exhilarating and sad to see how far they've come.

They've grown rich in science and policy, rich in their ability to attract caring, committed and talented folks.

But, while dealing effectively in communicating with the caring rich and the mindful middle class in their major gift and direct marketing programs, the mainstream groups have not effectively, in more than a decade, dealt with the larger politics of their movement.

Continue reading “Cabbies and Carbon Sequestration”

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If the Wall Street Journal Can Contemplate It …

July 26, 2006

Prompted by a report that the Wall Street Journal is reviewing its distribution options, Scott Donaton muses in Ad Age about the prospect of a major newspaper bowing to the inevitable, abandoning print altogether and going 100% online. Think it will happen? We do.

Moreover, it's a potential transition that every non-profit should consider as you evaluate:

  • rising costs of print production & distribution;
  • greater comfort with — even preference for — using online resources on the part of your supporters, particularly as younger segments take interest in your work;
  • greater impact of communications using images, audio and video to reinforce or deliver the written message;
  • rising penetration of broadband, making viewing of media-rich e-newsletters and PDFs faster and more convenient to most supporters;
  • greater potential impact with imbedded interactivity features, like “discuss this,” “forward to a friend,” “get more info here,” “act now” and so forth.

If you hold the “publishing portfolio” at your non-profit, and you're not at least pondering print vs. digital trade-offs, you oughta be fired!

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Wouldn’t We All Like to Score Like Ed?

July 25, 2006

According to Business Week, Ed Robinson spent $10,000 to create a humorous 12-second “viral video” and e-mailed it to five of his friends with his website address. Three months later his site had received 500,000 visits.

Wouldn't we all like to score with a creative hit like that?!

As the article describes, big dollars are beginning to flow into online video ads on sites like YouTube, Google Video and about one hundred other sites that share videos. But the field is already getting cluttered, with major brands spending $200,000 on a video competing with Valley girls and their videophones. YouTube alone, the 800-pound gorilla, serves up millions of videos daily; according to MediaPost its traffic has quadrupled in the first half of 2006.

For non-profits, there's still a relatively low “cost of entry” for experimenting with online video, both in the context of viral videos (where you're hoping simply to ignite a free ride from your audience) and paid placement (where the calculus is similar to traditional direct response TV). Again I'll say, when you find an opportunity that combines the impact of video, plus the ability to target precisely (at least with paid placements), plus the immediate “one-click” direct response capability of the online channel, it's worth checking out!

Posted by admin | Filed Under Pushing the Creative Envelope, drtv, new media, online fundraising, online video | Leave a Comment 

Play. Learn. Save the World.

July 24, 2006

“The generation that grew up with Super Mario is entering the workplace, entering politics, so they see games as just another good tool to use to communicate” says Henry Jenkins, an MIT professor quoted in Sunday's New York Times.

The Times piece, “Saving the World, One Video Game at a Time”, explores and reports on a range of new socially and politically focused games designed to provide players new perspectives on the world — ranging from conflict in the Middle East, to genocide in Darfur to the problem of global hunger.

Reporter Clive Thompson outlines the key players, the size of audiences attracted and even what major foundations (MacArthur) are doing to support this new wave of public education and involvement.

These games are posting serious numbers in terms of audience. The UN World Food Programme's game “Food Force” has been downloaded by 4 million players!

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Giving Plus

July 24, 2006

According to Philanthropy Today, Bob Wilson, a truly dedicated environmentalist, has announced his intention to give $100 million each to Environmental Defense, The Nature Conservancy, the Wildlife Conservation Society and the World Monuments Fund, with the proviso that each group match his gift with other fundraising.

From my Environmental Defense days, I know Bob is an original. He demands performance from the charities he supports, on both the program and management sides of the house, but at the same time welcomes risk-taking. And anyone who's been in a Board meeting with him or shared a document for his review knows that when they invented the term “cut to the chase,” they were assuredly inspired by Bob!

Requiring a match for his gifts (usually stipulating new, incremental gifts) has been Bob's way of helping — indeed prodding — his chosen beneficiaries to raise the bar for themselves, their other major donors and prospects, and even their grassroots donors in ED's case. Obviously it's not a concept original to Bob, but applied on his scale and with his rigor, what huge impact it has. More major donors should follow suit.

I have no doubt that ED will meet Bob's challenge and reap the $200 million benefit.

Thanks Bob!

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Poetry or Persuasion?

July 21, 2006

Once again the Pew Internet Project has produced a research masterpiece with its just-released study, Bloggers: A portrait of the internet's new storytellers.

In addition to reporting all the valuable demographic data (12 million blog creators, 57 million blog readers), Pew drilled into the motivations and behaviors of bloggers, producing many rich insights. Looking at reasons for blogging, Pew's authors focus on the desire of bloggers to express themselves creatively (79%) and share their personal experiences (76%), leading marketing guru Seth Godin to title his comments on the study, Blogging is the new poetry.

But the study also delivers a portrait of bloggers as “among the most enthusiastic communicators of the modern age” and as motivated persuaders — 61% blog to “motivate others to take action” and 51% to “influence the way other people think.” For you fundraisers and organizers out there, older, wealthier bloggers are more likely to list “motivating others” as a major reason to blog. Among all bloggers, 11% indicate “politics and government” as the main topic of their blog (more likely for bloggers in their thirties and forties and those college-educated, second after “my life and personal experiences” at 37%). Bloggers are the most avid online news news readers, particularly political news.

I'll bet that if you passed bloggers through the traditional Roper “Influentials” screen, they'd over-index like crazy, even though they skew so young (only 16% are 50 years or older).

Plenty of meat to chew on in this report. Get it. Read it!

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Agitating Again: “Funding Father’s” New Book Released

July 21, 2006

I'll never forget the phone call I received from Richard Viguerie, often called the 'funding father' of the New Right, on election night 1980. A dozen liberal Senate candidates, and presidential candidate John Anderson– campaigns that Craver, Mathews, Smith & Company had worked on that year — had just gone down to in landslide defeat.

“Well, don't take it so hard,” Viguerie said. “Afterall, now you're gonna get rich because in our business we always do better when we're out of power.” Well, I didn't get rich, but business sure did boom as the progressive movements and causes rallied againt the Reagan Revolution and the rise of the Right.

The Reagan Revolution, in no small part, was made possible by the skill, determination and down right entrepreneurship of Richard Viguerie. In the late '60s and through the '70s the direct mail empire he built almost single handedly raised the American conservative movement –and some of its more extreme branches — from obscurity to power.

But unlike today's consultants who move easily from the campaign trail to the lobbyist's trough feeding off the spoils of victory, Richard Viguerie remained true to his beliefs and true to causes he cared about. And like so many ideologues he's felt the bitter sting of “betrayal” as the movement he helped build morphed into go-along-to-get along politics as usual.

So for anyone who has ever been in that position (and that's most of us who've helped build ideological movements or done issue politics) the release today of Viguerie's new book, Conservatives Betrayed: How George W. Bush and Other Big Government Republicans Hijacked the Conservative Cause is worthy of note.

No wonder, given the groundwork he laid and the conservative foundation he helped build, that as the election results of 2004 became clear, Viguerie proclaimed,
“Now comes the revolution! If we don’t implement a conservative agenda now, when do we?” Then he added: “Make no mistake. Conservative Christians and ‘values voters’ won this election for George W. Bush and Republicans in Congress. It’s crucial that the Republican leadership not forget this—as much as some will try.”

Viguerie’s new book serves notice to the Republican Party that it must hew to the conservative line if it hopes to remain in power. For before Karl Rove, another direct marketing guru, there was Richard Viguerie. And, it's important to remember that while Rove’s first loyalty is to the GOP, Viguerie’s is to the conservative movement.

Viguerie’s latest book gives Conservatives their marching orders for the coming political battles ahead, so no matter which side you're on it's worth a read.

Published by Bonus Books scheduled for release July 22, 2006.

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