MKCREATIVE

#INTERVIEW: Jeff Brooks, Nonprofit Blogger, Author, and Creative Director

Jeff Brooks has been working on behalf of nonprofits for more than 20 years and passionately blogging about fundraising since 2005. He writes the Future Fundraising Now blog and is creative director at TrueSense Marketing. The interview was conducted by Don Akchin, a principal of Nonprofit Marketing 360 and a frequent contributor to the MKCREATIVE blog.

MKC: What do you consider to be the greatest challenge of being a good copywriter?

JEFF: What most people who are not professional copywriters get wrong is they don’t differentiate themselves from their audience. That’s why most fundraising is just bad. It doesn’t succeed the way it ought to because they say, I’m going to make this please me, and then it’ll please the others and then it’ll work. Well, that’s just wrong. That’s not how you create quality fundraising. You have to know your audience, and reach out to them, and 99 percent of the time, you’re going to hate it. You may say, I wouldn’t respond to this! And you’re absolutely correct, and it absolutely doesn’t matter.

Now If you want to talk about professional copywriters, I think what is difficult is taking dry, distilled- down-to-numbers program information and making it sing. Because that’s what you tend to get delivered: We fed this many people, and that’s up x percent from last year. That’s the kind of information you get and you have to say, how do I make somebody care? That’s the minute-by-minute challenge a copywriter faces.

MKC: I’ve been reading your blog for awhile and you’ve been preaching donor-centricity adamantly. Do you get the sense that anybody’s listening?

JEFF: Some people are. The thing is, the people who are reading my blog, or reading blogs at all, are the ones who are curious, who want to grow, and who are willing to change. The ones who need the help, who aren’t donor-centric, aren’t reading anybody’s blog. They’re not curious. So there’s sort of a preaching-to-the-choir quality to blogging.

In the fundraising industry, we are not donor-centric. We are navel gazers, and we expect our donors to gaze at our navels with us. I think that’s why direct mail response rates have been dropping for seven years in a row now. It’s because what we’re doing just doesn’t work like it used to. It’s wearing out. We’ve got a new audience of direct mail donors coming on board and they are more demanding. They want to be communicated with. In their commercial relationships with the companies they buy stuff from, they’re used to service and they’re used to being talked to as who they are. Most fundraising isn’t there. It’s saying, here’s your cancer bill. Pay it. That used to work, for a few reasons. One was, the older generation was more duty-driven: You give because you’re supposed to, you give because your church tells you to, you give because your family has always given. You didn’t have to be skillful at asking a person like that, they would just say, yeah, it’s my time to give. Not only that, but the competition in the mailbox has skyrocketed. There are probably 10 times as many appeals being sent out now as there were 20 years ago. So there’s that overwhelming noise, and the fact that younger donors, and I say younger meaning under 70, are a little more discerning. We actually see a behavior of larger gifts to fewer organizations. In the older donors, 70 and up, there’s just this behavior of sending 15 or 20 bucks to everything that comes across your door. Younger donors are saying, I need to be involved here, I need to know what’s going on, I need to care. So if we don’t get on board with talking to donors, instead of talking to ourselves, we’re in big trouble.

MKC: You also seem to have some strong feelings about nonprofit advertising. Would you like to talk about it?

JEFF: You’re talking about the “Stupid Nonprofit Ads” series. That is really about what I think is a huge scam perpetrated by ad agencies and other brand experts on the nonprofit sector. They bring commercial branding and advertising practices into the nonprofit realm and then misapply them. The reason it keeps happening again and again and again is it’s the glamour of the ad world: these are the big boys, this is where the real money is, they must know what they’re talking about, right? So they come in – and very often its pro bono so the nonprofit thinks, what the hell, I might as well do it, and they get these terrible ads that have no chance of making a dent in the problems of this world and motivating donors to do anything or care, much less give. So I kind of go after it, and I’m pretty mean about it, but it’s because I feel like it’s a big con, and we need it to stop. Plus I just like making fun of stupid stuff.

MKC: Is there anybody who does good advertising for nonprofits?

JEFF: Oh yeah, a lot of people do, and it will never win an award. No one’s ever going to show it anywhere, because it’s “bland,” it’s “ugly,” it’s “old-fashioned,” but it raises money.

MKC: Tom Ahern raves about the Domain Group formula for newsletters and he keeps saluting your role in it.

JEFF: We were doing mostly direct mail at Domain, and sometimes a client would say, could you do a newsletter for us? We don’t have anyone on staff to do it. When we did them, we made money. And at that time, the normal thing was for a newsletter to lose money. We started sharpening the techniques, we did some testing. We found that to be relentlessly donor-focused was critical, that to not be afraid to ask for money was good. I have a lot of clients where you can almost count on a newsletter being a more effective fundraiser than a direct mail appeal is. That’s not true across the board, but I have not lost money on a newsletter in decades. They are an effective fundraiser. The difference is, the old newsletter said, Look at us, aren’t we cool, look at all our great programs. The articles were long and boring, the headlines were dull. We found, just like in direct mail appeals, you had to get your eyes off yourself and on the audience. The reason they’re giving is they want to change the world, so you need to tell them, yes, you are changing the world, instead of, look at us, we’re changing the world. You still tell a story about their cool program, but you turn it a little bit, so it’s, ‘Look, donor, here’s what you made possible.’ You do that in subtle ways and direct, flat-out ways.

MKC: Has anyone attempted to convert the Domain Group formula to email newsletters?

JEFF: I’m trying to. I mean, we try to bring the techniques and the mindset. Email is a little different. I don’t think we’ve quite got it figured out. For now, email newsletters are nothing like as effective as print newsletters as fundraisers, and they’re less effective as fundraisers than e-appeals are.

MKC: You have been blogging since 2005. Have your goals for blogging changed?

JEFF: No, not really. The difference is, when I started, there were maybe three other bloggers in the fundraising space, and way fewer readers. Now I think there are over 100 fundraising-focused bloggers that I know about. I feel like I discover another one every week or so. And there’s just a larger audience. Thousands of people read these blogs now. That’s kind of cool. That means there’s an ongoing professional conversation happening. Before, the national conferences were the only place professional conversation happened, and most people weren’t going to those. So it was way less widespread than it is now. This is good. It means more people are able to get smarter.
Fundraising is a weird medium. A lot of things are counter-intuitive. Things work that you wouldn’t think would work, like longer letters work better than shorter letters. And there’s just a thousand little details like that. Some fundraisers seem to say, ‘We need to throw out everything we know, because it just seems so wrong to me.’ Then they watch their revenue go down the drain. This is very sad, because this isn’t just some stupid shampoo sales campaign. This matters. When you screw up, it matters that you screwed up. It means you can’t serve the way you’re called to serve. There’s a moral dimension to it.

You can follow Jeff on his Future Fundraising Now blog.

Guest blogger Don Akchin writes frequently about marketing and philanthropy at donakchin.com.

This interview series is produced with the generous support of the Nonprofit Marketing and Fundraising Zone.

Popularity: 5% | Category Blogs, Campaigns, Communications, Copyrighting, Cross-Post, Development, Donor Acquisition, E-Mail, eNewsletter, Fundraising, Grants and Funding, Interview, Marketing, Marketing Skills, Measurement, Newsletter, Nonprofit, Nonprofit, Permission Marketing, Perspectives, Perspectives, Publications Design, Research, Storytelling, Strategic Marketing, Writing | | 0 Comments

Written by: Don Akchin

#SM4MP: Must Nonprofits Redefine ROI When Developing Social Networks?

March 6th, 2012

When most of us, individuals and nonprofit organizations, consider social networks, we first think of Facebook. The 800-pound gorilla is said to be worth billions, and its membership grows close to a billion world-wide. For nonprofits, establishing a Facebook page seems a no-brainer. Features like Timeline, which we have outlined, allow organizations of all kinds to present a story of their development, their milestones, and their goals. The pool of potential Friends is so vast that an hour or two a week could bring in thousands, or millions, of new fans.

But will those hours result in a larger pool of donors or volunteers? Will friends of friends come to your Facebook page ‘cold’ and want to get involved? The numbers are not good. But should we even pay attention to the numbers?

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Popularity: 3% | Category Cause Marketing, Communications, Community, Development, Donor Acquisition, Facebook, Facebook, Fundraising, Marketing, Measurement, Nonprofit, Nonprofit, Social Media, Storytelling, Technology for Nonprofits, Twitter | | 0 Comments

Written by: Christopher Gardner, PhD

#PHILANTHROPY: Google Can Give Time, Resources, & AdWords To Nonprofits

February 20th, 2012

Google is the great behemoth of web searching and video hosting. Google.com is default homepage in millions of browsers and YouTube has inspired citizen journalists in war-torn Syria and video mashups of cute kittens in suburbia. Google.org is perhaps not as well known, but its philanthropic outreach is huge, and it offers that money and support numerous ways – some of which your organization can surely take advantage of!

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Popularity: 4% | Category Advertising, Advice, Blogs, Campaigns, Cause Marketing, Civics, Communications, Community, Crowdfunding, Desktop Apps, Development, Donor Acquisition, eNewsletter, Fundraising, Grants, Grants and Funding, How-to, Major Gifts, Marketing, Marketing Skills, Measurement, Nonprofit, Nonprofit, Public Relations, Site Administration, Social Media, Technology, Technology for Nonprofits, Video | | 0 Comments

Written by: Christopher Gardner, PhD

#INTERVIEW: Sybil Stershic, Consultant, Blogger, & Author of Taking Care of the People Who Matter Most

February 15th, 2012

Sybil Stershic, founder of Quality Service Marketing, is a long-time consultant and blogger on internal marketing and the author of Taking Care of the People Who Matter Most: A Guide to Employee-Customer Care. A former chairperson of the American Marketing Association Board of Directors, she continues to lead workshops fort AMA including its “Nonprofit Marketing Boot Camps.” The interview was conducted by Don Akchin, a principal of Nonprofit Marketing 360 and a frequent contributor to the MKCREATIVE blog.

MKC: You’ve chosen to specialize in internal marketing. How do you see that different from marketing to the outside world?

Sybil: It’s not that different in the sense that it recognizes that you have a critical audience – only this time they’re your employees and volunteers. Basically you can use marketing to educate them, motivate them and persuade them, just as you use marketing to educate, motivate and persuade consumers from the external side. What’s different, however, is that most organizations don’t recognize employees and volunteers as an internal audience that needs to be addressed. (more…)

Popularity: 4% | Category Advice, Blogs, Book, Communications, Community, Cross-Post, Development, Donor Acquisition, eBook, Fundraising, Grants, Grants and Funding, Internal Marketing, Interview, Marketing, Marketing Skills, Measurement, Nonprofit, Nonprofit, Perspectives, Perspectives, Resource, Strategic Marketing | | 6 Comments

Written by: Don Akchin

#PHILANTHROPY: What Might Inspire People To Give To Your Charity?

February 6th, 2012

The year’s fundraising drives are laid out before you and your colleagues. The sting of the Great Recession still hurst most Americans, even if the stinger is gone. The prospects can look intimidating. Even though your charity or nonprofit does good work and has the track record to prove it, this moment might be a good moment to look at a hard fact of fundraising: what will entice more donations, micro or macro, NOW?

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Popularity: 5% | Category Audio Interview, Blogs, Campaigns, Cause Marketing, Community, Crowdfunding, Development, Fundraising, Grants and Funding, How-to, Marketing, Marketing Skills, Nonprofit, Nonprofit, Public Relations, Sponsorship | | 1 Comments

Written by: Christopher Gardner, PhD

#interview: Simone Joyaux, Nonprofit Consultant, Author, and Columnist

January 25th, 2012

Simone Joyaux is an internationally recognized consultant to the nonprofit sector on fund development, board development, and strategic planning and management. She writes a column, “Unraveling Development,” for the Nonprofit Quarterly. She is the author of Strategic Fund Development: Building Profitable Relationships That Last, now in its third edition, and is co-author, with Tom Ahern, of Keep Your Donors: The Guide to Better Communications and Stronger Relationships. The interview was conducted by Don Akchin, a principal of Nonprofit Marketing 360 and a frequent contributor to the MKCREATIVE blog.

MKC: I have difficulty maintaining one blog. Why do you have three?

SIMONE: I made a decision that I wanted to do not just a professional blog, but I also wanted my website to talk about the world and social justice issues. Because I have always felt that there isn’t enough speaking out. I decided I would take the risk to speak out about my political and social beliefs on my web page, but that if I was going to do that, I had to distinguish between them, hence what I call “Personal Rants.” And then I thought, I have a lot of peeves about professional stuff, so I thought, okay fine, I’ll do professional, pet peeves and personal rants. Now I can do three posts in 30 minutes. I only post once a week, and you will notice, nobody is allowed to respond. You can send me emails, but you can’t comment. I have a job! I can’t possibly maintain comments from people.

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Popularity: 6% | Category Communications, Community, Cross-Post, Development, Donor Acquisition, Fundraising, Grants and Funding, Interview, Marketing, Nonprofit, Perspectives, Resource | | 0 Comments

Written by: Don Akchin

#Interview: Allison Fine, Author & Analyst — Examines Intersection of Social Media & Social Change

January 18th, 2012

Allison Fine researches and writes about the intersection of social media and social change. She is the co-author (with Beth Kanter) of the bestselling book, The Networked Nonprofit: Connecting with Social Media to Drive Change, as well as the award-winning Momentum: Igniting Social Change in the Connected Age. She hosts a monthly podcast for The Chronicle of Philanthropy called “Social Good.” The interview was conducted by Don Akchin, a principal of Nonprofit Marketing 360 and a frequent contributor to the MKCREATIVE blog.

MKC: You’ve researched and written about social media and how it could impact democracy in the 21st century. Is the Occupy Wall Street movement along the lines of what you were envisioning?

ALLISON: Occupy Wall Street is absolutely part of the same DNA of social protests that we’ve seen for about the last ten years or so. They are widely distributed – meaning there’s no centralized organizing person or organization. They are fueled, but not caused, by social media – the ability to share messages, share photos, share videos, which are very powerful, is part of what’s stirring the pot and helping to organize the events. Occupy Wall Street has some of the drawbacks of this kind of mobilizing as well: the lack of a centralized message and the lack of goals. Whether or not those ultimately stop the momentum for these self-organized efforts locally will be interesting to watch.

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Popularity: 4% | Category Blogs, Book Review, Campaigns, Case Study, Cause Marketing, Communications, Community, Cross-Post, Crowdfunding, Development, Direct Mail, Donor Acquisition, Fundraising, Grants, Grants and Funding, Interview, Major Gifts, Marketing, Marketing Skills, Nonprofit, Nonprofit, Permission Marketing, Perspectives, Perspectives, Resource, Reviews, Social Media, Sponsorship, Strategic Marketing, Technology, Technology for Nonprofits, Tools, Twitter | | 1 Comments

Written by: Don Akchin

#Inteview: Amy Eisenstein, Fundraising Consultant and Author of 50 Asks in 50 Weeks

January 11th, 2012

Amy Eisenstein is a “no nonsense” fundraising consultant for local and national nonprofits. She is the author of 50 Asks in 50 Weeks: A Guide to Better Fundraising for Your Small Development Shop. The interview was conducted by Don Akchin, a principal of Nonprofit Marketing 360 and a frequent contributor to the MKCREATIVE blog.

MKC: Your book is targeted specifically to small shops. Is that because you have a particular affinity for them, or they need more help?

AMY: The big shops invest in training, in all sorts of specialists and consultants, so even though they’re often struggling as well, they have more resources to put into development. But I have to say that most nonprofits in this country are operating with small shops, with very few exceptions. The universities, hospitals and a few national nonprofits have more than three development staff members, but a large majority of the nonprofits in our country and around the world have sometimes no paid development professionals, and usually one, or maybe two if they’re lucky. So yes, that’s why I targeted small shops. They need a lot of help.

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Popularity: 4% | Category Campaigns, Communications, Community, Cross-Post, Development, Donor Acquisition, Facebook, Fundraising, Interview, Major Gifts, Marketing, Marketing Skills, Nonprofit, Nonprofit, Permission Marketing, Perspectives, Perspectives, Social Media, Strategic Marketing, Twitter | | 0 Comments

Written by: Don Akchin

#SocialNetworks: Primary Politics Offer Models For SM Strategy

January 10th, 2012

Click to enlarge

As voters in New Hampshire head to polls to divvy up delegates for the Republican Convention (and the uncontested Democratic one), all the candidates are doing what Barack Obama did so singularly in 2008: developing social-media strategies meant to expand their bases, to parry jibes from their opponents, and to launch a few of their own attacks. In sheer numbers, the Republicans have turned the tables on their Democratic counterparts: According to Jennifer Steinhauser of The New York Times: “Republican House members have more than twice as many followers as their Democratic counterparts — about 1.3 million versus roughly 600,000 — and are far more active on Twitter with more than 157,000 individual Twitter messages, versus roughly 62,000 for Democrats.”

Nonprofits are not competing for votes in a similar antagonistic dynamic, of course. But donations and volunteer hours are finite entities, and the fact is nonprofits of all stripes now must challenge themselves to raise their social-networking strategy to challenge for every engaged constituent. The return on investment (ROI) might not be votes,

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Popularity: 2% | Category Advice, Campaigns, Case Study, Cause Marketing, Civics, Communications, Community, Development, Facebook, Facebook, Fundraising, Marketing, National/International, News and Current Affairs, Newspaper Article, Nonprofit, Politics, Public Relations, Social Media, Twitter | | 0 Comments

Written by: Christopher Gardner, PhD

#Tech: Don’t Confuse Innovation For Implementation This Year

January 9th, 2012

Sure, often new technology IS better...

Who doesn’t like to toss out some predictions about the upcoming game/meeting/primary/year? The thing is: predictions about nonprofits and technology tend to push the envelope of the latter while ignoring the needs and practices of the former. Sure, the iPhone 5 might include Near Field Communication (NFC) technology allowing its owners to round up purchases to the nearest dollar as micro-donations to their favorite charities. Perhaps indeed cloud-computing services will bring nonprofits’ databases to their staff’s tablets in the field.

But some of the most important work for a nonprofit takes place off the grid and away from the latest thinnest laptop. Which is worth remembering, even as your nonprofit absolutely should be keeping an eye out for the tech innovations that can indeed help your colleagues and community.

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Popularity: 2% | Category Blogs, Community, Development, Fundraising, iPad Apps, iPad/Tablet, iPhone Apps, Marketing, Marketing Skills, Nonprofit, Opinion, Public Relations, Technology, Technology for Nonprofits, Tools | | 0 Comments

Written by: Christopher Gardner, PhD

#Interview: Gail Perry, Fundraising Consultant, Trainer & Author of Fired-Up Fundraising

January 5th, 2012

Gail Perry is a fundraising consultant and trainer and the author of Fired-Up Fundraising: Turn Your Board’s Passion into Action. She is a highly sought speaker and writes a popular blog. Her most recent venture is an online coaching group. The interview was conducted by Don Akchin, a principal of Nonprofit Marketing 360 and a frequent contributor to the MKCREATIVE blog.

MKC: What are the issues that are keeping your clients awake at night?

GAIL: I think the economy is just a huge issue. People are worried about whether they can raise the money they need or not. But I’m also seeing a really interesting problem. My consulting clients are struggling to learn how to take donors who are identified as potential major prospects and bring them into the major prospect arena by closing a gift. It’s a very delicate, step-by-step, intuitive process to bring a major donor along. That’s a lot of what I’m teaching my clients, all these little subtleties of developing that type of relationship.

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Popularity: 31% | Category Blogs, Campaigns, Cause Marketing, Communications, Community, Cross-Post, Crowdfunding, Design, Development, Direct Mail, Donor Acquisition, E-Mail, eNewsletter, Facebook, Facebook, Fundraising, Grants, Grants and Funding, Interview, Major Gifts, Marketing, Marketing Skills, Measurement, Nonprofit, Nonprofit, Permission Marketing, Perspectives, Perspectives, Research, SEO, Social Media, Sponsorship, Storytelling, Strategic Marketing, Twitter, Web Design, Writing | | 1 Comments

Written by: Don Akchin

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