This is Amost Brilliant!

I got very excited when I saw an email from the American Cancer Society titled "Who is the official sponsor of your birthday?" Brilliant! I had to open it. The Cancer Society has started a new campaign to be the "official sponsor" of birthdays - reminding people that every birthday is a victory over cancer. In the email there was also a link to this web page:

http://www.morebirthdays.com

Guess what it has ... ecards! Yes! Just what I was asking for! There's also a YouTube and Facebook tie in. Brilliant! Unlike the cards and address labels I get in the mail from various causes that have little or no tie to the cause, these cards are a little too much about the Cancer Society for my taste. They probably won't replace my use of Hallmark.com anytime soon. I would prefer a happy medium. So maybe this is just short of brilliant.

I'm not sure where it goes from here. There was is no obvious way to donate if I chose to use an ecard. I might actually be more inclined to send the ecard if it included a message saying I made a donation in the recipient's name. Perhaps the lack of focus on donations was intentional. It could just be a list-building activity. When I gave them my birthday to add me to the list of 13,103 birthday's they are sponsoring, they invited me to give them my friends emails so they could get sponsored too. Then I got an email thanking me for joining and saying "By joining the movement for more birthdays, you are helping save lives by creating a world where cancer can’t steal another year from anyone’s life." I'm not sure how telling them when my birthday is helps fight cancer. I'm thrilled if it does. I'll keep you posted on my experience with my new birthday sponsor.

Just 'Cause

I know it’s been a while, but I’m still intrigued by this year’s Academy Awards. It wasn’t the awards themselves that caught my attention, it was the ads. Oscar night ads don’t attract as much attention as Superbowl ads (the awards ceremony had a mere 36.3 million viewers compared to 98.7 for football). But with that much audience it has become another opportunity for advertisers to show off some of their best work. And, I noticed these ads were very different from those at the Superbowl. To me, that says the advertisers believed that different people watch each event (I happened to watch both). Or at least they expect the viewers to have different motivations.

For example, the most popular ad from this year’s Superbowl was a Doritos ad featuring two guys in an office hitting someone in the groin with a snow globe. At the Oscars, the most advertised snack was True North nut snacks (owned by the Frito Lay division of Pepsi Co). They aired mini-documentary spots about people doing good. They were great stories but I wasn’t sure what they had to do with nuts.

True North wasn’t the only one trying to increase the value of their brand by borrowing from the good work of others. Diet Coke spent a bundle on ads with Heidi Klum to promote women's heart health and the American Heart Association. I didn’t learn anything about women’s heart health and didn’t understand what it had to do with Diet Coke.

Don’t get me wrong, I am all for creating win-win promotions between corporate America and the non-profit sector, often called “cause marketing.” And, I was impressed that in this climate when so many companies are cutting back sponsorship and advertising, there was so much money being spent showcasing causes. But, I wonder what benefit these companies realized and how they justified the expense.

Cause marketing doesn’t have to involve expensive campaigns with Fortune 500 companies. Not long ago a brilliant, small-scale example appeared in my mail box. It was a mailing from The Gary Rosenthal Collection announcing the Art Tzedakah Box Contest. To decode that for you, Gary Rosenthal is an artist that produces a line of Judaic art and a tzedakah box is a coin bank for collecting money for charity. The artist is giving away $5,000 in prizes to causes based on the creativity of people who design tzedakah boxes in the shape of their cause. It’s targeted, it gets people involved with the brand, and it’s “viral.” I sent a link to this website to two people and I’m not even Jewish! It’s not just plucky artists that use this kind of approach, Virgin Atlantic gave away money to promote their launch in the Boston Market. It was not quite as creative or targeted as Rosenthal, but it was interactive and viral. I might not have even noticed Virgin otherwise. So, I think even in a tough economy cause marketing isn’t going away. Like all good marketing, it needs to be targeted and meaningful.

Going 2.0

I actually don’t like the term “Web 2.0” but it’s convenient short hand. I’ve decided it’s about time I integrate my nonprofit marketing-related efforts with the online networking tools I use. So, I’ve created a Linked-In group for Marketers Making A Difference, Boston. All those marketers who come together to help Boston-area nonprofits once a month can now network online whenever they like. I also converted the old-fashioned, 8-page Word document that contains all the nonprofit marketing-related resources I’ve collected into a series of links on Delicious (which I just discovered is no longer Del.icio.us – when did that happen?)

Whew! I feel more modern already.

Address Labels Are So Last Century

Since October 2008 I have collected 51 pieces of direct mail fundraising solicitations. Seven of them (14%) have included address labels. One of them was from my alma mater, Indiana University, but the rest were from organizations I don’t have a relationship with and the labels generally don’t have an obvious relationship with the mission. What’s worse, they don’t bother to say why I should send money. Usually they just send the labels and a reply form. (See the example from the American Heart Association below.)

There is a commonly held belief that if you send someone something they will feel obligated to reciprocate and your response rate will go up. However, I think that in today’s economy you need more. If you send me something I didn’t ask for and don’t want and you don’t even try to make an emotional connection with me, I don’t feel compelled to send you money. Even if I do send a small amount on impulse, I’m not likely to be a loyal donor. As a group, nonprofits have a dismal track record in retaining donors. More than once I’ve seen my meager donation used up with a series of expensive mailers sending me more and more stuff I don’t want.

Specifically address labels and cards. I used to use the labels for bills but then I switched to online bill paying. I don’t send cards or letters to friends except at Christmas time. I do send ecards. I’m a big fan of Hallmark’s ecards and I send them for friend’s birthdays or just pick-me-ups. If a nonprofit with a mission I care about offered me an ecard, I might pay for that. I would be highly likely to use it for free and perhaps one of my friends would donate. I’ve never been offered an ecard. Perhaps it’s because these organizations seeking money from me don’t have my email address. Well, if they sent me a direct mail piece telling me about their ecards, I just might give it to them.

A quick Google search turned up three sources for ecards ranging from $500 to $5,000 and up. I cannot endorse any of them, but include them here to illustrate that they’re not hard to find:

IncentiveXT

Thoworlds

Convio

I’m not saying ecards are a panacea. The point is that many organizations are relying on outdated tactics that show a lack of understanding of the needs of their audience. It’s time to start thinking creatively about what people want now.

Improve Your Status

I’ve attended a few presentations on “Web 2.0” or “social networking” and the like and are usually disappointed. I’ve even blogged about how awful these things are. Tonight I attended a meeting titled “Social Networking – Using Technology and the Web as a Highly Effective and Low-Cost Ways to Recruit Volunteers” presented by Laura Briere, CEO and Founder of Vision Advertising.

Laura stressed the importance of updating your status on sites like Linked-In, Facebook, and Twitter on a daily basis. This is a good way to stay top-of-mind with your network and reinforce your reputation as someone who is active, fun, and up to something important. You can even use it to invite people to events or to check out your website. But, who has time to update all those different sites? The solution is my favorite new tip from Laura – Ping.fm. This site allows you to update all those other sites in one place. Of course, it doesn’t tell you what to say. You still have to figure that out on your own.

Sometimes, It's Better to Take Your Best Guess

In my last blog post (which was an embarrassingly long time ago) I talked about the importance of market research to nonprofits. So, you can imagine my excitement when the University of Michigan Alumni Association sent me an email saying they want to know what I think. I was actually looking forward to taking the online survey and felt a little pride at what a sophisticated alumni association I belonged to. Well, pride does go before a fall. What a disaster it turned out to be! Yuck!

It started by showing me various pieces of mail and asking me to rate my likeliness to open each one. It then asked me to rate how appealing I found one particular envelope. (There was no option for I couldn’t care less about your stupid envelope.) Then the fancy software program asked me to highlight in green the parts of the envelope I liked and highlight in red the parts I didn’t like and then explain each one. It didn’t get any better from there. It was only my researcher’s curiosity that kept me going to the end of the survey.

They didn’t really care what I thought about my alumni association, they just wanted to know the best way to sell to me. From having implemented direct mail programs myself, I know that expert direct mailers experiment and test every possible detail from the color of the envelope to the stamp to the greeting and more. By sending a slightly different package to different segments of the mail list they learn what works and what doesn’t. It’s an expensive, laborious process that is hard to get right. So I can sympathize with anyone wanting to short cut the process. But this project was ill conceived from the beginning for two key reasons:

1. While it’s true, for example, that a blue envelope may get you more donations than a yellow one, it’s not because people have well thought out opinions about the color of envelopes. It seems to me that these decisions operate on an irrational, sub-conscious level. There’s plenty of research that shows people are not good at accurately predicting their own behavior.

2. More importantly, every communication you have with your constituents, including surveys, influences their opinion of you. If you tell me that you care about my opinion and ask me to spend my precious time answering your questions, you'd better be asking me about something that I care about or I’m going to wonder why you’re wasting my time.

Yesterday, I attended a workshop on “Fund Development” with a consultant named Simone Joyaux that I really enjoyed. She talked about a lot of things but the theme that came up time and again was that most development efforts do things backwards. They are focused on themselves and not on the donors. It seems that “donor-centered” organizations are as rare in the nonprofit world as “customer-centered” companies are in the corporate world. This acutely myopic project shows that my alma mater is no exception. (Simone would not be surprised; she’s a rabid Michigan State fan.)

The next time I get a survey from U of M, I’m still likely to take it because I am a freak who collects surveys as a hobby. But I wonder how many other alums will be less likely to open their U of M emails after this experience.

Why Not Just Ask?

There is a lot of talk of borrowing for-profit marketing tactics to promote nonprofit causes. Not everything the corporate world does is transferable, but many organizations have benefited from applying marketing expertise in nonprofit settings. One of the most valuable and, sadly, least borrowed marketing tactic is market research. For example, Marketers Making a Difference met with Cambridge Cares About AIDS to discuss their new name. I’m not announcing any spoiler, I don’t actually know the new name. We helped them think through how to launch their new identity.

One of their chief concerns was how to choose a name that matches their current and future identity without alienating their most important historical supporters. I asked if they had asked their key supporters for input on the new name and they said they had not. What a great idea? Why not ask your most influential supporters for their opinion? You will probably end up with better ideas and you make your key supporters feel important.

I think that nonprofits overlook this kind of opportunity for input all the time. Market research can be a long, complicated, and expensive project or it can simply be making a few phone calls. Don’t be afraid to pick up the phone. Nonprofits have an advantage over corporations in that your constituents are much more likely to want to talk to you. You already have a head start. If you want to get some “quick and dirty” input, here are some pitfalls to avoid:

* Sample bias – don’t assume that all constituents are alike. Some input can be worse than none at all if you talk to only a few people and assume that they represent everyone. Think about who you are talking to and what segment of your constituents they do and do not represent. Use your one-on-one conversations to develop theories that you can test on a wider audience.

* Interviewer bias – the answers you get can be influenced by who’s asking the questions. It’s human nature to want to avoid hurting someone’s feelings or to look important in front of other important people. So, if you want input on your volunteer programs, you might not want your director of volunteer administration asking all the questions.

* Ignoring input – if you’re going to start asking for input, be prepared to use it. This doesn’t mean you have to do everything someone tells you to, but it does mean you have to be prepared to hear and respond to news you may not like. Also, take credit for it when you do make a change in response to constituent feedback. Make sure your supporters know you are being responsive.