So I’m recommending you read Getting Attention’s Nancy Schwartz’s excellent analysis of the Komen vs. Planned Parenthood debacle from the perspective of what makes for effective (and ineffective communications) and smart fundraising (on Planned Parenthood’s part) in response to threat.

Tom

P.S. Stuff ‘em Planned Parenthood!

What Rainie says, much of it related to the explosion of social media and mobile communications, applies to all messaging and communications, which makes these observations pertinent to fundraisers, and especially those in advocacy groups.

Some key thoughts:

• With hugely expanded networking capacities, there are many more — and new — civic actors, many operating independently.
• Four messaging opportunities — to traditional ‘paid media’ and ‘earned media’ now add ‘owned media’ (e.g., websites, customer service) and ‘shared media’ (e.g., social sites, YouTube) … all requiring communications strategies.
• Six stages of engagement — observing (Lurkers matter, he says), following, endorsing, contributing, owning, leading.
• Migration of authority away from organizations (like your nonprofit) to — traditional experts with new platforms (e.g., blogs), amateur experts who are avid contributors (some with tribes), new algorithmic authorities (e.g., Google, Bing).
• Different ‘attention zones’ — continuous partial attention to media streams, immersion in ‘deep dives’, info-snacking in free moments.
• All organizations under more scrutiny, where trust depends upon transparency — surveillance (powerful watch the ordinary), sousveillance (ordinary watch the powerful), coveillance (peers stalk peers).
• Age of big data is upon us, giving new power to analytics.

This is a powerpoint presentation, so you will need to fill in the blanks yourself. But it’s well worth the mental effort … a very stimulating presentation.

Lee Rainie, you deserve a raise!

Tom

Her points are well made on an important subject — should more energy and resources in the nonprofit/charity sector be devoted to fighting and fixing systemic failures in our political, economic, and social systems … as opposed to providing urgent needed relief at the ‘bottom of the cliff’?

It’s a discussion I think needs more air time … so I didn’t want Tina’s thoughts lost in the archives. Here are Tina’s comments in full.

“Clearly, I’m woefully behind in my reading but I’ve been banking all the Agitators post and am now finally catching up. I hope you’ll indulge another comment on this one…

The part of this discussion that I find most compelling is the call to ‘zero in on the systemic, structural failures that are creating many of our social problems in the first place.’

I couldn’t agree more. And many of the nonprofits I work with are trying to do just that — remedy systematic failures.

Here’s the rub…the focus on root causes is more complex, harder to “sell” and therefore harder to raise money for. And I’m not talking about the big players like Habitat for Humanity. The work they do is critical — absolutely critical. But I’m talking about real root cause work…the kind of transformative social change that starts locally.

True systematic failures are being tackled by local grassroots organizations working to change the status quo and build political power from the ground up. They are training new leaders and organizing communities who have been cut off from participating in the systems that control their lives. They are working to shift the whole power dynamic in which we live, work and play; in our neighborhoods, in our states, nationally, and globally.

These organizations desperately need outside help to frame their complex and often intangible long-view work in a way that makes it compelling to potential supporters outside of the small core of insiders they know who think exactly like they do.

In my experience, the cases for support developed internally by these groups are train wrecks. Their appeal letters don’t inspire even me to make a gift. And don’t get me started on their websites.

These all-too-easily-forgotten groups, that we say we need more of, deserve more support. But they are caught in this catch-22 of not being able to afford the outside help that could get them and their development program to a higher level. They don’t have the expertise in-house to do it. And foundations, where they get the overwhelming majority of their income, don’t fund that type of expense.

I’m not implying that these organizations should all be given a free pass. Some of them do deserve to be put out of business. And there’s room for new groups to come in and do what these folks seem unable to do.

But rather than debating whether we need more nonprofits, I want a discussion about why we (myself included) haven’t even heard about some of the organizations that are incubating effective models for creating the change we want to see in the world, and what we can do to remedy that.”

Well said, Tina.

Meantime, Jeff Brooks at Future Fundraising Now just blogged this related — and dismal — observation: “…the offers that work best are super-simple, emotional, and often a bit short-sighted. Providing a meal for a hungry child will always beat creating systems that keep the child from going hungry. You can spend your whole fundraising career trying to change this fundamental quirk of the human mind — and you’ll have a miserably unsuccessful career.”

Experienced direct response fundraisers will always make comments like this. “Don’t try to educate donors, just grab their money!” And they have response data to back them up. So it makes sense from the hired gun’s perspective … he/she is rewarded for producing hard cash.

But that shouldn’t deter nonprofits from facing up to tackling the systemic failures. And there’s plenty of evidence that donors can be educated. For example, I’ll submit that the folks who sign up for monthly giving programs are not knee-jerk givers; they’re deeply committed and understand the long haul dynamics of the causes they care about.

In fact, I’d suggest that if you want to evaluate a potential hired gun (individual consultant or fundraising firm), find out what they’ve accomplished with monthly giving programs. Anybody can produce a portfolio of ‘instant winners’!

Tom

While this guide specifically looks at online political advertising, any nonprofit looking to target and engage a constituency online will find it very useful.

As the guide says: “What makes video advertising unique is its ability to incorporate calls to action and enable supporters to easily respond. So, not only can campaigns target a persuasive message to voters, they can fulfill secondary goals like generating email signups, helping voters find polling places—and, yes—raising cash.”

In other words, the techniques and tools presented in this guide are applicable to just about any online call to action.

While the guide provides case studies and strategic/tactical advice from various consultants, perhaps most useful to nonprofits will be the basic ‘nuts and bolts’ information — costs, online advertising types, format standards, video ad networks and what they offer, and various ad technologies that can add interactive functionality to online video ads.

Kate Kaye, you deserve a raise.

Tom

As reported by CBS News’ Political Hotsheet:

“While there are different agendas within the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement, nearly all of the protesters say that wealth has become too concentrated among a relatively small group of Americans. The poll found that most Americans agree with that assessment: Two in three say that wealth is not distributed as equitably as it should be, while just one in four says wealth is distributed fairly.”

We’re stoked.

This is the kind of citizen uprising that put the two of us together forty-some years ago at the launch of Common Cause.

We’re glad to see that kind of energy hit the streets today … empowered by a lot more technology than we had available in 1970. You might enjoy this brief ‘case study’ — presented by Roger on SOFII with the original creative work — on how Common Cause’s then-unprecedented grassroots fundraising was launched.

Roger & Tom

Here’s the official descriptive blurb:

The Social Change Impact Report “provides a detailed picture of the state of social change engagement in America: Americans’ beliefs about social change, the issues they care about, the motivations behind their engagement, the actions they are taking to further social change and the tools they use.”

Heaps of interesting stuff here if you’re in the social change or advocacy side of the nonprofit sector.

But here’s what grabbed me: “Americans say they are most likely to get involved in social change in the future as individuals acting on their own or in informal groups (52%)”

And: “Nine out of 10 Americans (88%) agree that digital technology can turn interest in a cause into a movement more quickly than anything else.”

Couple these two proclivities together and you see the potential large-scale abandonment of major social change and advocacy organizations.

Who needs them (i.e., your nonprofit), when you can do it all yourself, or with a few social net friends, digitally?

Faced with this ‘do-it-yourself’ mentality, what is your organization doing to maintain its relevance? If your core business as a nonprofit is supplying timely, specialized information on what to do to save some small bit of the world (isn’t that what most advocacy groups do, in essence?), are you relevant anymore to — or needed by — net-savvy would-be activists?

A possible ‘macro’ reason for the fall-off in donor retention?

Tom

Seth Godin has been promoting End Malaria the past couple of days, and here explains the case for that fundraising initiative using a book premium.

He says the book is better than a tote bag.

Now, I’m not a fan of premiums, period. Yes, I know they can lift response (not always), but they’re prone to generating low value, low loyalty tippers. So analysis of lifetime value usually indicates a rather poor return compared to non-premium responders.

But today I’m simply taking issue with the ‘book is better’ claim. I’m not at all sure a book (full of business and work habit tips) is better than a tote bag or a refrigerator magnet or any other premium that at least directly reinforces the cause/nonprofit’s brand and helps in some small (and ideally, frequent) way to keep it top of mind.

Plus, there’s more chance of the biz book overshadowing the cause, making the ‘donation’ even more incidental, than there is the tote bag doing so.

The first step toward improving lousy donor retention rates is to recruit more committed donors. Premiums — of any kind — blur the picture. But, if forced, I’d opt for the premium that might reinforce — and signal clearly to others — my donor’s commitment to my cause.

What do you think … tote bag (or a some other badge of the tribe) or biz book? Or no premium … simply offering the donor the peace of mind of doing good?

Tom

But then I saw this video, reporting on what they have accomplished to date and hope to achieve next.

The 2011 September Campaign. Our 5-year-anniversary video from charity: water on Vimeo.

The video itself is great. It tells an inspiring story about what average donors — raising money in every way from lemonade stands to birthday gifts to dance marathons — can help accomplish, and shows the concrete results in dramatic fashion. Lives improved in so many ways from the simple step of providing clean local water.

Excellent program and superb fundraising.

But then I reflected a bit on the message.

Part of it featured a Ethiopian — described as a national hero — who has been painstakingly bringing freshwater to his fellow Ethiopians, one well at a time, constrained only by the fact that his team has only three drilling rigs … and most of the country to go.

Charity: Water wants to get him one more rig … so they’re asking donors for the $1.2 million required to purchase and fully support one mobile drilling rig.

All of a sudden, it occurred to me that this request of lemonade stand donors bordered on the obscene.

The very request for $1.2 million of charity money simply underscores the total failure of the international development community — from the World Bank on down, and including national governments, both rich and recipient. These entities have squandered literally billions on failed development projects for decades.

Then a tiny, by comparison, charity comes along and shows everyone how important — and relatively simple — it is to improve millions of lives by meeting a fundamental human need … clean, easily accessible drinking water.

Here they are, begging for your lemonade stand proceeds to buy one rig, when some incompetent, probably corrupt, bureaucracy could write a check for a hundred of these rigs in a nanosecond.

Don’t you find that upsetting, even obscene?

I don’t ask that to denigrate the program of Charity: Water. I’m glad they’re showing the world how to get the job done. And maybe by doing that, they’ll embarrass some dripping-in-money development institution to make a first-ever meaningful contribution to alleviating the water problem.

I guess someone needs to fill the vacuum and get done the practical work of drilling water wells.

But the other need is for well-financed policy advocacy designed to force development institutions to either get the job done, or shut down and stop pretending. Unfortunately, as cause fundraisers know, it’s a lot tougher to raise the funds for advocacy than it is to raise money for ‘on-the-ground’ projects.

Is there some group out there as smart about raising advocacy money as Charity: Water is about raising funds for drilling rigs? Nominations, please!

Tom

Also some cause examples — from Hunger Action Month to volunteerism to gay marriage foes.

ClickZ’ Politics & Advocacy is a good news feed if you want to follow political use — often at the cutting edge — of the digital realm.

Tom

To tell you the truth, I didn’t get it. His conclusion … The scalable unique selling proposition is that being part of the community is worth more than it costs.

Huh?!

I just re-read it, hoping I might be smarter today, but still think it’s rather obtuse for perhaps our most gifted communicator about marketing.

But he did say this: A donation earns you peace of mind.

And that’s the real gem in his post.

Whether your donor is responding out of anger, frustration, hope, guilt, sympathy, fear or whatever feeling about an issue, what they are seeking emotionally is peace of mind.

They want to feel better about the situation.

Is that what your fundraising appeals are offering?

Tom