More Strength Training Tips for Fundraisers
[Editor's Note: The cover story in the May issue of FundRaising Success, "Strength Training for Fundraisers," featured 12 tips from global fundraising consultant Ken Burnett to help nonprofits flex their fundraising muscles and build (or rebuild) an effective development department from the ground up. As promised in the issue, here is the next tip on Ken's list. Look for the remaining two on Thursday.]
13. I'd create an environment where innovation and creativity can flourish, so I could readily develop appropriate products and propositions designed to suit our donors
It pays to offer donors appropriate products they want to buy. These days if a nonprofit doesn't have monthly giving, high-value donor and legacy products, then it is already behind. Product design and development is a sophisticated field for fundraisers. Most new products fail, and that's as true in the nonprofit world as commercially. But that should never deter us from investing appropriately in new product development or from learning and borrowing from the experience of others.
A vast body of knowledge and experience has now been built of what works and what doesn't in fundraising, so this is a good area for creative plagiarism, for borrowing the best of what works for others.
Yet in the world our donors inhabit, lazy, look-alike fundraising abounds. Somewhere in the mists of time (or more likely, at a succession of quite recent fundraising seminars), fundraisers were taught and came to accept that there are fixed formulae to guide them; that to get the best responses we must slavishly follow the "right" procedures; that to obtain maximum savings and optimum returns our communications have to fit a limited range of standard shapes, styles and sizes; and that what works for one organization will surely also work for another.
They were right, those teachers who propounded these wisdoms. (Though I suspect that many of the fundraising gurus who teach at seminars and workshops also own direct-marketing and communications businesses that thrive when fundraisers all blindly follow the conventions of their trades.) Nevertheless, fundraisers all want to minimize costs and maximize returns, so by processes of testing and plagiarizing we have all wound up copying pretty much what everyone else does. The result for our poor donors (and even our rich donors) is that they wind up getting piles and piles of requests that all look pretty much the same. Yet we know that the beginning of success is to be different; the beginning of failure is to be the same.
Averagely our donors are quite intelligent people. Ere long they begin to see through our techniques, which are generally pretty transparent, not to say often ham-fisted. Who was it that first imagined donors would be fooled for long by letters that start with that moronic salutation "Dear Friend"? (OK, Dr. Thomas Barnardo, I have to suppose, whom I mention in "The Zen of Fundraising." But I guess even he'd be astounded to find that nearly 120 years after he coined this bland generalization we still trot it out daily, as if there were no permitted alternative. Are we sheep, or what?)
So maybe it isn't sensible any longer to have mailings that look so obviously mass-produced, with envelopes with addresses that show through windows or carry prepaid bulk postage imprints and letters with lots of short paragraphs, underlining, indenting and inevitably all ending with at least one postscript (better known as the P.S.). We should acknowledge now that the majority of our donors and potential donors are perceptive enough to see through such artifice.
From any viewpoint, nonprofit organizations constantly need to be reviewing the products and propositions they offer donors, even if it's just the continuing efficacy or otherwise of the basic proposition "give us your money."
There's ample evidence around to show that those organizations that have embraced research and development, as it might be called in corporate businesses, and offered their donors appropriate new products and propositions have prospered disproportionately. Think of child and animal sponsorship, monthly donor strategies, bequest giving clubs and so on.
Think too of the prizes that might come to those who do things differently, who innovate, who stand out from the herd — not just in format (it's often quite hard to break from the conventions that have been imposed upon us). We can also be imaginative in offer and in audience and always in how we present our message, in creative treatment and in how we tell our stories.
No doubt, in fundraising it pays to be first, as I'm sure fundraisers down the ages have known well. But it also pays to move on. Those organizations that first experimented in off-the-page advertising did spectacularly well in Britain in the 1950s and '60s. The pioneers of direct-mail fundraising in the U.S. and U.K. during the 1970s and '80s built massive donor lists that are now the greatest of assets for these far-sighted fundraisers. Those first in telephone fundraising cleaned up, whereas the entrepreneurs who gave us direct dialogue, better known in most of the world as face-to-face fundraising, very quickly and cost-effectively recruited hundreds of thousands of regular monthly donors and raised millions of dollars, pounds or euros for the causes they represent. Those in the vanguard of the new communications revolution will most probably reap similar benefit.
Undeniably, there are glittering prizes for successful innovators in fundraising. But fundraisers also are a cautious lot, and adequate budgets for research and development are not often to be found in the nonprofit world. This won't do. Fundraisers have to innovate fearlessly and constantly. More alarming is the culture of "heads down" that pervades, the fear of being different and the almost irresistible compulsion to be the same.
Given the urgency of our causes, such conservatism is unforgivable. We should reject totally a culture of caution and instead build for ourselves environments that are in constant turmoil, where change and invention are nurtured and encouraged, where innovation is honored, even revered, and where "wrong" is not necessarily a bad place to be. This may require a new approach to budgeting. The innovation culture has a totally different sense of failure to the operations culture. In the innovation culture each failure takes us a step closer to ultimate success. Donors need to understand this and be a part of it. (They often are — and enthusiastically so. In America these generous, rich and far-sighted people are referred to as entrepreneurial donors, or "philanthrepreneurs." Maybe that is going a bit too far …)
I'm not suggesting we sink all of our resources into the search for innovation. Ten percent or even 5 percent of net income would do. Actually, for most organizations even 1 percent would be nice. Provided that along with the cash would come a commitment to change our thinking and elevate innovation and all that goes with it to its proper place. If it's really committed to be the best in this area, the serious nonprofit will regularly review those in charge of the innovation process, how it encourages staff to collaborate on product and service improvements, how it generates and captures new ideas, how it bounces back after a wrong decision, and how it is doing in regard to competitors and their innovations. This is not an area for the faint-hearted.
Look for the two remaining tips in Thursday's edition of Today in Fundraising.
Ken Burnett is a globally renowned author, lecturer and consultant on fundraising, marketing and communications for nonprofits. This "Top Tips"' list is an extract from his book, "The Zen of Fundraising." Reach Ken at ken@kenburnett.com
