Repositioning the Revenue Department for the Content Creator Wave, Part 2

In the first installment of this two-part blog series, I explored the rise of livestream gaming and its impact on nonprofit fundraising, with a special focus on the often-overlooked value of content creators. In part two, we’ll take a closer look at how nonprofits can strategically harness this growing trend to enhance their peer-to-peer efforts.

If you missed part one, read that first before diving in!

Legacy Walks Fail at Iterating

Legacy walk programs are trying to figure out the new world order. Their team captains, the foundation for previous success, no longer act the same way. They don’t want to show up in person, and they have trouble building teams. When they have a team, we can’t tell if team captains communicate with them. They don’t respond to email. How, we wonder, can we get them back?

Your team captain used to exert their influence at church and on soccer field sidelines. More and more now, though, that team captain exerts influence online and offline. Asynchronous online communications let them push their communities (their teams) along. Yes, you’ll still have that person who does it the old way, but they are literally dying off. Your new team captain is now a content creator with a following of between 1,000 and 10,000 people, some of whom they will motivate to take action with their digital content.

What does an influencer program look like when it targets low-level, hobbyist influencers instead of traditional big-name influencers? It looks a lot like a legacy peer-to-peer program. It’s still about recruiting influential team captains aiming to leverage their social capital.

In legacy peer-to-peer, we accept modest fundraising returns below $1,000 per team. However, existing influencer programs expect much more, which is consistent with the history of livestream/gaming. Traditional peer-to-peer ignores most online influence-wielding, beyond “send this email” and “post this message.”

Playbooks haven’t changed much since the early 2000s when posting to Facebook was an exciting new method.

How Could Content Creation Support Legacy Walks?

So, how do we make this change? Michael Wasserman, Founder of Tiltify, believes the change happens at the entry point into the peer-to-peer program.

• The first “yes” is to support the nonprofit.
• The second “yes” is to select how you will fundraise. Will it be in person, digital, or through social channels to fundraise for your online community? You’re sent to page two, presenting a selection of tools under the same program.

Currently, content creators are funneled automatically into the “livestream/gaming” track. But often, they just want to support the legacy walk and don’t livestream or game. Our treatment of the tools used in livestream fundraising as standalone programs has driven potential fundraisers away. When content creators land in the gaming space, they know they are in the wrong room.

Here is the typical constituent experience now.

• I raise my hand to fundraise.  
• I am routed down a path that immediately wants me to self-identify and segment myself as one of these: Facebook fundraiser; gamer, livestreamer or influencer; or third-party platform fundraiser.
• I may want to be all three of these. I may be one or two of these. As I am not singularly one of the above, l may leave.

Wasserman’s client base is heavily populated with volunteer fundraisers who eschewed the traditional third-party platform that the nonprofit offered because it didn’t let the content creators use the skills they bring to the party. That traditional platform did not have content-creator tools.

What are content creator tools? For Tiltify, content creation tools include Milestones, Rewards, Polls, Targets, Schedules, Media and Fitness. These tools are ways that a fundraising influencer can interact with their community beyond, “How ‘bout you donate?” These tools give the potential donor a way to engage beyond donation. They become part of the story, which makes potential donors much more interested in the story.

The movement of unfulfilled content-creating fundraisers is demonstrated  in two ways.

• By the decrease in legacy walk programs supported by a singular, traditional third-party platform.
• By the increase in the diversity of forms that peer-to-peer fundraising is experiencing. Case in point, Wasserman reports, “As of end of July Tiltify numbers are up 53.5% YTD from last year with campaign averages at an all-time normalized high (nothing over $50,000 included) of $1,265. That’s up 10% from last year.”

It’s Not as Generational as You Think

Let’s face it: Most of us in leadership are baby boomers. Old boomers. Maybe we think these new ways to gather and deploy a community don’t make sense to our generation—that content creation won’t feel comfortable to our typical fundraiser. But we’d be wrong.

Wasserman uses an example from politics: “Case in point: #WhiteDudesForHarris. These folks are mostly older, mostly whiter, mostly men. None of these people would consider themselves ‘creators.’ They are all the age that charities are concerned won’t understand the technology. Yet tons of boomer celebrities recently raised millions livestreaming non-gaming content to support Kamala Harris. They didn’t seem to have any issues.”

Wasserman underscores that the political arena has accepted content as a key fundraising weapon. Encouraging that we emulate political fundraising methods gives us pause, I’ll admit. But in this case, we must. Here’s an example of actor Jeff Bridges producing non-gaming content to raise money for his cause. His content is talking. Yep, that is his content. Is he a high-capacity influencer? Not by his definition. He’s a white dude talking about something he cares about.

Kevin McMahon, senior director of community fundraising and cause marketing at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said, “Don’t overcomplicate it. Ask your content creator to tell a great story, ever how they do it. It could be through a content creator or patient family with a large following in a local community. They don’t consider themselves influencers, but I do.”

Why We Don’t Change

Remember when the younger folks in your organization staffed the legacy walk program? Now, I bet that group looks lots older. Today the fresh faces probably belong to the livestream or digital team, who have skills like coding, social media and video editing.

Most organizations keep these teams apart. We avoid joining content creation with legacy walk programs because the nonprofit teams live in different departments or speak different languages. Sometimes, the barrier isn’t even departmental; it’s the mistaken idea that the status quo already exploits all the opportunities.

The people who enforce the status quo are often the people in the boats rowing, the mouse on the wheel, running hard with eyes fixed on meeting their annual goal. The best person to fix the status quo is someone with their eyes on the horizon: leadership. If you are in the trenches, your development leadership needs to read this blog more than you do. Leveraging content creation influencers will require some reorganization of internal resources. This means there will be dotted lines where there were none before, a normalization of new language will be made for both sides of the fence and performance metrics will be reconfigured.

I’m using content creation as an example of why our departments need a reorg from the constituent behavior point of view. There are other examples, such as social media fundraising, which is chief among them. The constituent journey is typically controlled by whatever department historically owns the technology tools, not what the constituent needs. Tear it down!

The Constituent Journey Changes at the Point of Entry

A logical attempt to grow at scale is to change the point of entry, the offer. What if your influencer wants to do a marathon and bring their own existing online community along for the ride? What if they need content creation tools to do that? The most important question should be, “How do I get them the tools they want?” Instead we ask, “Who owns this fundraiser? Who in-house gets credit?” That answer dictates the constituent journey and the tools they get to use.

What to Do

We want scale and ease of handling for our programs. However, accommodating fundraisers’ desires means organizational, maybe transformational, change. That change must address these areas.

Honor their expertise. Open the door to any fundraiser using creator tools for fundraising in their online community. Your constituent journey will change.

Improve data handling and platform management. Fundraisers are processing donations on multiple platforms. This is happening now. Staff hate it. The fundraisers want it. These are the three platforms most organizations have fundraisers using, but typically, we only support “c” for our own ease of use and data handling. Our audience is telling us the answer. They want to support your program with the tool of their choice.

• Facebook fundraising.
• Tiltify.
• Traditional third-party platform.

Re-organize and re-matrix from the constituent’s point of view.

Get good at change. Taking advantage of the content creator wave is one area that requires us to change. The rate of change is escalating.

I got a text from a friend recently…

Hello!  A few questions:

• Did you send me a new Facebook friend request?

• Can we do a Zoom? I have a book idea and would like your guidance on the process.

• Does peer-to-peer even exist anymore?

Change or die.

The preceding blog was provided by an individual unaffiliated with NonProfit PRO. The views expressed within do not directly reflect the thoughts or opinions of NonProfit PRO.