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Big hug or lame handshake–which are you dishing up for donors?

June 12, 2013 by Erica Barnhart

Bear Hug Last week, I teamed up with Peter Drury to present a session at the NDOA Spring Conference. It was called “Hook, Hug, Repeat: how to attract new donors and keep current ones super happy”.

Our basic premise was this: if you make donors feel awesome (i.e. you make them feel hug-erific), not only will you up your retention rate, you’ll attract new donors.

Because let’s be honest: not many organizations give a good hug. They give the equivalent of a lame, limp handshake. Makes you shiver just thinking about it, doesn’t it? A few examples of lameness:

When you only send an auto-generated, standard tax receipt to a donor? Lame.
When the only communication a donor receives is an ask for more money? Lame.
When someone gives at an event and you don’t communicate with them again until the following year when you ask them to attend again? Lame.

And don’t give me the old, “But we don’t have enough money to shower donors with love.” This is about having what Peter calls a ‘culture of gratitude’, not about spending oodles of money. It’s a way of being that informs your way of doing. For instance:

There’s no law that says your tax receipt has to be boring. Kiss boring bye bye and instead make the donor feel like their gift was a great, big, huge deal. Because it was.
Have staff–or board–call donors to simply say, Thank You. No ask. Not even to ring you back, if you end up leaving a voicemail (which you likely will). Just thank you. You did something amazing by supporting this organization and I want to say thank you. You rock.
Make sure your table captains are armed with note cards so they can jot off a handwritten note of gratitude right after the event. A handwritten note goes a long, long, long way to making a donor feel loved.

Brene Brown says the trick to happiness is to “tell the story of who you are with your whole heart.” Tell your donors how much you appreciate them with your whole heart. Bet some pretty great things happen. Bet they stick with you longer, engage more deeply and can’t stop talking about how fabulous it is to be part of your organization. And guess what? When that happens, hooking new donors becomes way easier.

Focus on your hugs and the hooks will follow.

Pitching Poo

May 29, 2013 by Erica Barnhart

Maile Lono-Batura heads up the Northwest Biosolids Management Association. They do wonderful work…that’s, um, sensitive to talk about. She was kind enough to share her and her board’s adventures in pitching poo in this guest post. Enjoy!

Pitching our mission isn’t glamorous but it is one that I truly believe in. The work of my organization, the Northwest Biosolids Management Association (a.k.a. Northwest Biosolids), conjures up images of things people don’t talk about in polite conversation. And so pitching our work to unsuspecting people produces some hesitancy from even the most enthusiastic members of our team. We knew we needed help. That’s why we turned to Erica.

In 2012, we invited Erica to our retreat to guide us through identifying who we are, what we stand for, who we serve and the voice we use to convey what we believe in. What we discovered during these exercises enlightened our journey in creating our 2013 – 2016 Strategic Plan. By formally identifying our organization’s personality and stakeholders, we had this newfound lens or tool to truly focus the plan on what matters most.

During this year’s retreat, we asked Erica to coach us on preparing our organizational pitch which is, as Erica describes it, a “door opener”—it explains who you are and what you do to the people that you hope will support your mission. When I describe what it is that I do, it often comes up during meal functions so I’ve had to discern gentle ways in which to reveal this so that appetites are sustained and I think I’ve done okay, but it took some serious misses over the years that mostly were cases of TMI (too much information). Because the fact is: I deal in poo.

Our retreat group created a variety of pitches. No two pitches sounded anything alike and it took a little cage rattling and norm shifting to get to our final pitch. Our team got to try our pitch in mock discussions to get the hang of it and it was like a light went on for many of us.

I had a chance to share NW Biosolids new pitch during a seminar I participated in recently and the reaction to it was priceless. The seminar was Creating an Investment Policy for your Non-profit Organization (something our Budget Committee will be formulating for the Board). Each participating organization went around the room, introducing themselves and the work they do, most representatives were either Finance Managers or Executive Directors. Everyone had their pocket pitch and when it got to me, I delivered our spiffy new one –

“I work for NW Biosolids, an organization that finds the best ways to recycle what you send down the pipe.”

The room erupted in laughter and everyone immediately knew what I was talking about. Afterwards, people approached me wanting to know more about how we recycle it and how they never knew about it until now. I couldn’t wait to share the story with our team to encourage them to give it a shot and see what reactions and questions you get.

I hope you’re reading this and thinking, “If she can pitch poo, we can definitely figure out our pitch!” Because let me tell you: having a pitch you love is priceless.

The verb is the word

May 24, 2013 by Erica Barnhart

grammar, verbs, nouns, language, words, messaging, nonprofit Recently, I’ve been on a verb bender. I mentioned it in this edition of the Claxonette and also in this post. I’ve been asked by some readers to explain what the heck I mean and cough up some gosh darn examples.

You see, English speakers tend to obsess about nouns—people, places and things. We worry over our nouns like mothers worry over their newborn babes. We spend so much time making sure that our subjects and objects are the “right ones” that by the time we get to thinking about verbs—you know, like, the thing we want to have happen—we’re exhausted. Our intellectual energy has been zapped.

This obsession with nouns has led to a woeful state of affairs. We are awash in wimpy verbs. To wit, the widespread use of the world ‘provide’.

We provide counseling to at-risk youth.

We provide reading assistance to elementary school students.

We provide legal services to families in transition.

That’s nice. But it’s boring. It doesn’t differentiate you from the gajillion other organizations doing similar work. And that’s no bueno.

Verbs are where it’s at. Their whole job in life is to make something happen. There are thousands of verbs out there just waiting to make stuff happen. They are action-oriented little buggers, skillful in the art of persuasion. Why settle for a boring, over-used verb that will do nothing to help you stand out from the crowd and stick in people’s minds and hearts when a fabulous verb is anxiously waiting its turn to help you out?

Pick your verbs and the nouns will follow.

And now some examples. Because a core message that works in writing and when speaking is the toughest messaging nut to crack, that’s always where I start. This is the answer to the question: “What does your organization do?” You want it to be concise, compelling and repeatable. You want it to spark a question, not answer all the questions someone might conceivably have. (Repeat after me: essence, not everything.)

Group Health Research Institute

Before: Group Health Research Institute is a non-proprietary, public-domain research institution within Group Health, a health care system based in Seattle, Washington.

After: Group Health Research Institute does practical research that helps people like you and your family stay healthy.

Art with Heart

Before: We heal children’s emotional wounds through expressive, therapeutic books and programs.

After: We create books that use art to help kids heal.

[Note: There’s absolutely nothing wrong with the verb ‘heal’. But this wonderful organization heals kids in such a unique way, they needed to bring that front and center so people would know how they heal. That’s their secret sauce.]

NW Biosolids Association

Before: We are a regional non-profit whose aim is to find safe and beneficial ways to utilize bio-solids in forestry, land restoration, reclamation, agriculture and landscaping.

After: We find the best ways to recycle what you put down your drain.

What verb best describes what your organization does?

Community Foundations playing with their verbs

May 22, 2013 by Erica Barnhart

Playing with words is fun!

Yesterday, I invited staff and board from Washington state’s community foundations to think differently about language. To play with words.

The group spent much of its time trying to find their verb. That’s right: their verb. Verbs are where it’s at. They are “the part of speech that expresses existence, action or occurrence.” Anyone who wants to inspire people to action and engagement should be downright obsessed with their verbs.

In English, we’re very focused on nouns. People, places and things. Those are important too. But when you focus too much on your nouns, your verbs get short-shrift and you end up with a wimpy verb, like ‘provide’. You can do better.

What struck me yesterday was how much community foundations are like philanthropic cruise directors. Julie on The Love Boat knew everything that was going on and could therefore recommend the perfect activity for each guest. Ditto for community foundations (only minus the boat). They know everything going on in their communities and can therefore direct people to where their investment can have the biggest impact given their interests.

At the end of our session, I suggested that their verb was ‘direct’ and that they spend some time playing with the following core message:

We direct money to where it can make the biggest difference in our communities.

For the balance of the convening (they had another 24 hours to go after our session), their task was to edit that sentence. To see what stuck with them. What didn’t feel right. To play with it.

I confess that I gave them a bit of a toughie. I wanted to see if anyone would notice that, as stated, their verb (i.e. the action for which they want to be know and that they are uniquely positioned to act upon) focused on a feature (i.e. directing money) rather than the benefit. If you were to rearrange and introduce a different verb first, you would get something like:

We drive change in our communities by directing money to where it makes the most impact.

Is it a bit longer? Yes. But possibly worth it. It all depends. With this switcheroo, community foundations would in essence be saying they are uniquely qualified to drive change in their communities and the way in which they are uniquely qualified to do that is by directing donors’ money.

In reality, those who aren’t board and staff probably won’t say ‘drive change’ because it isn’t something most folks would naturally say. (“What are you up to day, Susan?” “Oh nothing much, just driving change.”) So they’d still be investing in ‘directing’ as their verb, but it offers an option with the ever-popular and rather effective benefit-feature structure, which is always awesome to have on hand. And can be used in writing.

I don’t work for a community foundation, so I can’t say if these are the right words for them. That’s the thing with words–you have to find your own. I can only say that, if I did work at a community and was looking for my words, these are some of the ones I’d play with. And then I’d see where they took me from there.

Your future: it’s young, involved and LOLing on the Interwebs

May 21, 2013 by Erica Barnhart

The path to giving is different for each person. Some are inspired by a personal experience, some have grown up in families where giving was expected. Still, giving is far from “default” behavior for most folks. But things are a-changin’. According to some research studies, generation Y (or “Millennials”) are giving at a higher rate than previous generations, and the way they think about giving is notably different. As this generation ages (and acquires more wealth), will we move closer to a world where giving is just something people do? That’s a trend I could get behind.

Of course, to attract your Millennial donors of the future, you’ll need to engage them in a way that’s meaningful for them now. The Millennial Impact Report (and this nifty Infographic) offers some insights on this audience that could help you ensure that your messaging meets those potential supporters where they are and inspires them to act.

(click here to view full Infographic)

So what’s it going to take for a vision-focused organization (no, that’s not a typo…I meant to write vision-focused and not mission-focused and here’s why) to maximize Millennial engagement?

Give your supporters opportunities to be involved, even when your focus is fundraising. Consider volunteer opportunities an opportunity for potential future donors to build a relationship with your organization.
When it comes to technology, be where your audience is. This means more than just having a swanky website. Think about social media and mobile engagement.
Let your target audience help to spread the word. Create messaging that’s easy to share, both in format (tweets, reports) and content (succinct data points about the challenge you are working to solve).
Make a clear connection between what you are asking supporters to do and the impact it will make (“your gift of $5 provides school books for one child for a year”).

Care to read more about the generation that’s already rocking the nonprofit world?

The Millennials Are Here: 5 Facts Nonprofits and Businesses Needs to Know

Five Things Nonprofits Must Do to Captivate Millennials

Why the Nonprofit World Needs Millennials

Is your mission getting in the way of your vision?

May 14, 2013 by Erica Barnhart

Clear Vision You can’t read a non-profit blog or newsletter without tripping over commentary on trends…online giving is up, but gift growth rate is down overall, social enterprise is on the rise, etcetera. Maybe I’m waxing optimistic, but I’ve been thinking about the trends we’d like to see. You know aspirational stuff. And for a word nerd like me, that means things like communicators choosing their words with greater intention.

Accountability is a frequent trend topic these days, with donors applying additional scrutiny to the organizations they support and an increase in the availability (or not) of impact data online. But there’s another type of accountability that I’d like to see get its fair share of attention, and that’s a commitment to a vision instead of a mission.

Yes, you read that right: more vision, less mission.

Indeed, I am boldly suggesting that you start thinking of yourselfas vision-focused organization rather than a mission-focused organization? You betcha. And here’s why…

Your vision is why you do what you do. Your mission is what you do and how you do it. Vision is your aspiration, mission is your action plan. For example, if your vision is a world where every child has access to a great education, your mission might be to build schools in rural villages. Or it could be to connect classrooms with technology. Or it could be to mentor teachers so they can all teach math with confidence. Many organizations can share the same vision. Each organization should have its own mission, its unique way of blazing a path toward that vision.

So what difference does it make, really, whether you focus on and talk about mission or vision?

A focus on vision allows you to better communicate impact, because your vision identifies the problem you are trying to solve
A focus on vision allows you to adapt your approach based on emerging needs and innovations (for example, providing computers for children who aren’t in walking distance of a school)
A focus on vision allows you to grow without requiring a re-evaluation of whether your growth opportunities support a more narrowly-defined mission
A focus on vision helps you keep your WHY front and center

This might be a bit of a shift in how you think about communicating. I don’t recommend you ditch the mission-talk. I’m simply asking you to consider giving a little more air-time to your vision, and using your mission-message as an explanation of how you’ll get there.

You talkin’ to me?

May 9, 2013 by Erica Barnhart

We all know that every mission, in order to succeed, needs its supporters. And to get supporters you have to talk about what you do – you need to make people care so they fund your work, donate their time, tell their friends. You also need to explain how what you do impacts them (their community, their faith, their sense of justice, etc.). So there’s them, and there’s you…sometimes there’s us. There always seem to be plenty of pronouns.

The key to pronoun awesomeness: when you talk about your mission, pick your pronouns with intention.

“You” versus “we”

I’ve been known to get a little opinionated about the tendency for well-meaning organizations and people to talk about themselves too much (also known as PITCHFALL #2). Whether on your website, in emails or in face-to-face conversations, sometimes the enthusiasm for your mission can lead to a lot of “I” and “we”, when a little more “you” is called for. You…it’s the cowbell of pronouns.

“We” versus “we”

Sometimes, “we” means you and your organization, sometimes it means you, your organization and your reader. It’s the difference between “we’re working to eradicate polio” and “we can eradicate polio in the next decade”. Which one you choose– and choose you must– depends on to whom and when you are communicating. Talking to fans and current supporters? Include them in your “we”. But before that, it’s a little like talking about the wedding before you’ve had a second date.

I’m not suggesting there’s a set of rules for selecting the appropriate pronoun in any given communication situation. I am suggesting that a little less willy-nilly pronoun usage and a little more intention picking the ones that work best would go a long way.

For a little pronoun fun, and possibly a childhood flashback, allow me to introduce Albert Andreas Armadillo:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koZFca8AkT0[/youtube]

Enhancing your audience understanding through personas – a how-to guest blog

April 29, 2013 by Erica Barnhart

When someone is super duper smart about something, I always hope they’ll share their smarts. Lucky for us, Heather Hamilton, who knows a gob smacking amount about personas and audience segmentation, has agreed to. She knows about the art and science of connecting with people on-line. Enjoy! Erica

“My name is Heather, and I research people online for a living”. Well, that’s partially true…I mean, it’s part of what I do. I run a small consulting firm called Whiz Bang Solutions that helps organizations connect with people online. We help our clients understand who their most important audiences are and then we develop content and engagement strategies that help these organizations connect with those people in relevant and meaningful ways. So target audience insights are a foundational piece of that work. In fact, I believe that understanding the folks on the receiving end of your messaging is the most important thing you can do to ensure the success of your outreach. All the help that Erica provides to organizations telling the story of their missions? It all starts with knowing their audiences.

So Erica asked me to share a little about my process. Let me start out by saying that if you are an organization with a humongo budget for an audience insight project, I am NOT your gal. My experience comes from looking up boyfriends online almost twenty years in the staffing industry, where you really can’t attract the right people if you don’t know who they are, and from creating these target profiles with a budget of exactly zero dollars. Fortunately, the age of over-sharing is upon us, so gathering data online about peoples’ opinions and habits? Piece of cake.

Step One: Define your mission and stakeholders. It sounds a little basic, but revisiting your objective and asking yourself who the people are that can impact your success will help ensure you’re looking at the right potential audience subjects. For example, if your mission is to provide safe playgrounds for kids and you are only reaching out to moms of toddlers, well, Houston, we have a problem. You’re not thinking big enough. Explore your objective, toss it around and poke at it so you are able to define your stakeholders in the broadest possible way. For example: parents, members of communities that include children, child-related service providers, people who talk about issues related to children online, leaders of organizations serving families, toy manufacturers. You get the idea. Brainstorm and go broad.

Step two: Determine where you can find data about these people. Much of the data you can find online, but don’t forget the data you collect about your current supporters. I really enjoy this part. I feel like a PI (sans mustache)…that data is out there and it’s my job to uncover it. Don’t try to focus your research only on uncovering your targets in the context of their interest in the nonprofit space. Donors don’t think of themselves only, or even mainly, as donors. They think of themselves as parents, professionals, neighbors, friends, etc. Get creative and think about where folks might share their relevant thoughts. For example, you might find people sharing comments about the merits of specific playgrounds in parents forums. You’ll find information on peoples’ careers and interests on LinkedIn. You’ll find folks’ buying habits in Amazon product reviews. And here and there you will strike upon chunks of data that really start to paint the picture of your target audiences.

Step three: This step I refer to as “collect without judgment” because you’ll start to collect data for analysis before you ever know if that data is important. For example, you may end up finding that families with multiple children are more likely to use a playground. You won’t know this at the outset of course. So capture your data (like number of children) when it’s available and don’t judge its usefulness just yet. I use Excel for this because it allows me to create huge data sets and manipulate them easily through hiding, filtering and sorting. Make sure that all of the stakeholder groups you identified in step one around accounted for. You now have loads of audience insights. So now comes the targeting part…

Step four: Next determine some messaging or engagement goals that relate to your objectives and the role that your stakeholders play. Let’s return to our safe playground example. Perhaps enhancing name recognition for the organization and retaining donors are shorter term priorities and growing your average gift size is a longer term priority. When they align their stakeholders to these goals, they see the importance of people who talk about issues related to children online, because this stakeholder group impacts their short and long term priorities: they can help generate name recognition and can be a source of donor advertising opportunities; they may even become donor-advocates. These stakeholder groups are now priorities for your analysis. They aren’t your target audiences, but they will be highly represented.

Step five: Now the data fun begins. I’m not even joking. This is where your target audience personas really come to life. Review your data set and specifically focus on your priority stakeholders from step four (without completely excluding your other stakeholders). Start to sort the data and you will see trends emerge. For example, you might see that there is a group of stakeholders that live in large cities, are active on social media with many followers and like to post pictures online, and others are donors to child-related organizations, go to church, have a dog and drive a sensible car. The magic of this stage is that you don’t end up finding your target audiences, your target audiences end up finding you. Don’t keep your data subjects sequestered in their stakeholder buckets. The folks that live in large cities and post pictures to their massive Twitter followers can help you generate more name recognition and the sensible donors who drive a Volvo may be great fundraising targets.

Step six: Create audience personas. This part is creative and can feel a little silly, but it really helps rally the troops behind your target audience segments. I write short biographies about a prototypical member of each high-priority segment. So “Susie” may be your social media maven, who lives in a walk-up in Brooklyn with her two kids and cat. She works as a writer and on weekends she takes her kids to the playground and then out to lunch and checks her Facebook account frequently throughout the day and writes her mommy blog at night. By creating a persona for fictional but totally data-based Susie, your influencer audience comes to life. And the people responsible for messaging can make sure they are talking to Susie each time they produce a campaign or program aimed at generating more name-recognition for your organization.

Essentially, you’ve taken a big amorphous group of people who maybe-could help your organization fulfill its mission, and turned them into tangible audience members with the highest likelihood of helping you kick a little do-good butt.

If you’ve got questions on my approach, or ideas on great sources of audience data, feel free to get in touch or drop a comment here!

The first step on the path toward audience understanding can involve cocktails

April 22, 2013 by Erica Barnhart

Thinking woman in front of blackboard with question marks After reading some of my recent posts on identifying your target audience, you may be wondering: “Hey Erica, that’s great. I get that my target audience isn’t just like me and they aren’t simply defined by their demographics, but what do I do to figure out who they are?” So today, I’ll start you off with some questions that will lead you down the path of defining your audience and then later this month, I’ll be posting a bit of a deeper dive from a guest blogger who has a scrappy approach to helping organizations do this type of audience analysis.

So without further delay, here are some of those questions to ask yourself about your current and future supporters:

For what goal am I gathering this data, e.g. donor retention, donor acquisition, volunteer recruitment, board recruitment?
What data am I already collecting on donors and other supporters?
When I ask our best supporters why they’re involved, what do they say? What got them excited about our organization the very first time they engaged? Why do they stay engaged?
Where do our supporters, and supporters of organizations with similar or complementary missions, hang out both online and offline?
Who is talking about my mission online? Who is influential?
Why do supporters believe in our work? That early childhood education leads to lifelong success? That clean drinking water is a human right?

A little group brainstorming over cocktails can really super-charge your organization’s focus on your highest priority audiences, aka your believers.

“Single, white female” is not a target audience, it’s a creepy movie

April 21, 2013 by Erica Barnhart

Image courtesy of Wikimedia

Ask an organization to describe its target audience and you’ll most likely hear some demographics – women between 35 and 44, etc. Knowing the gender and age range of prospects is great when it’s relevant. But sometimes it’s just trivia. People just focus on it because it’s simple information to gather. The key to understanding your audiences lies in psychographic and behavioral segmentation. The demographics can inform your approach like, say, reaching your future supporters through a website devoted to the issues faced by young women in the workplace. But without an assessment of the attitudes, lifestyles and behaviors of your desired/likely supporters, your work is only half-done (if that).

For example, consider you work at an animal shelter and you are conducting an annual fundraising drive and focusing on the aforementioned young females (and, yes, 35 to 44 is young!). On the surface, this makes sense to you because past donors have predominantly been females in that age range. If you fail to dig deeper, however, you may not realize that most of your donors (regardless of age and gender) are people who have adopted a pet from a rescue shelter in the past. And that many of your past donors have been women because most of the people who work and volunteer at your organization are women and you have relied mainly on word of mouth marketing, which means you’ve been asking your friends, which it turns out are mainly young women just like you. Your demographics, in this instance, would have to do with historical outreach, rather than future opportunity. . Because the opportunity for your shelter is to engage potential new donors not based on age and gender, but based on values and behavior— to focus on people who already believe in your mission and think of it every time they look into the furry face of their adopted pet.

I’m not going to say that demographics aren’t important. I am going to say that past behavior and future behavior are connected, and this connection often goes unexplored. So neglecting to evaluate the behavioral trends in current and prospective donor groups is a mistake akin to leaving money on the table – money from people who care about what you do and who want to support your mission if you’d only ask them to.