A lovely snail mail newsletter

A Goodman sends out a monthly newsletter called Free-Range Thinking.  Besides Current, it’s the only professional publications my postal carrier delivers anymore.  I’m so attached to my newsgator feed reader I have pretty much moved everything to it. Consider adding our fine blog to your rss feed, and you won’t miss a post.  But I digress…

If you haven’t checked out A Goodman I reccomend you do, and sign up for this newsletter.  And if you are attending the PRDMC next month in Reno, you will be able to hear Terrence McNally from A Goodman speak in a session called Storytelling as Best Practice.

How fitting with the PRDMC quickly approaching this month’s edition of Free-Range Thinking gives the 10 immutable laws of storytelling.  As I was reading the 10 laws, it struck me how well Andy Goodman’s 10 laws fit in line with our efforts to integrate the elements of programming core values into our fundraising practices.  Here’s a couple highlights of what I mean, but really go check them out for yourself.

Stories are about people- Regardless of the cause an organizaition supports, it’s people that drive the action.  Pub Radio example:   A great on-air testimonial about a listener or reporters first hand account of a driveway moment or a breaking news event. 

Audiences bore easily- Who of us hasn’t written an appeal or made a pledge drive pitch that has way Too Much Information (aka.. TMI).  Sometimes we get stuck stretching out a pitch break or a fundraising letter just to fill the space.  When storytelling works well, Goodman suggests the message of your case needs to leave the audience asking “what happens next?” and “How is this going to turn out” make certain your story makes the audience, “sit up and take notice”.

Stories have clear meaning - to quote Goodman directly, “When the final line is spoken, your audience should know exactly why they took this journey with you.  “If your audience cannot answer the question, ‘what was that story about all about?’ it won’t matter how dilligently you followed rules one through nine.”

Cool online ideas for pledge from KEXP

When I’m not working for DEI I still have the fortune to play/work at KEXP here in Seattle.  I wanted to share a couple cool things they are doing during their current pledge drive.  Both were generated with the help of volunteers, and dedicated station staff who are always looking for ways to keep pledge time interesting.

 

For about a year the station has been putting up a splash page during pledge drive, so the first thing you see when you go to KEXP.org was a call to action to make a pledge with some listener testimonials.

 

They’ve expanded the idea this time to make an automatic updating splash page that reports the results of their hood to hood fundraising challenge. 

 

http://kexp.org/summer07.asp?noflash=false

 

Second one of the Dj’s (the talented Quilty 3000) made a little pledge themed animation for all the DJ’s and station myspace pages to feature during the drive.  The KEXP team has tens of thousands of friends on my space so this is a great visual reminder of the importance of listener support.

 

 

 

http://www.myspace.com/quilty3000  

 

 

While the fundraising results are hard to measure, the staff feels these efforts to make an impact and help build the case for belonging to the community. 

 

Melanie Coulson - Coordinator for Online Individual Giving

Hi there, I know I haven’t emailed in a while…reconnecting with your list

We know many DEI members  are collecting email addresses from donors/listeners, but haven’t been communicating regularly or ever with those individuals.  Many of you are in a conundrum what is the best way to reconnect .  Here’s some easy advice from the monkeybrains, the mailchimp blog:

A quick reminder: best practice tells us that donors who receive e-newsletters are more likely to give again versus those who don’t. 

 Q: “I have a list of 9,000 customer email addresses. I haven’t emailed them in a while, and now I’m ready to start sending them email newsletters. How can I do this without getting blacklisted, or angering my customers?”

A: Very carefully. If these recipients haven’t heard from you in a long time, chances are they already forgot opting in. Or, your emails just aren’t relevant to them anymore. And just because they bought something from you 5 years ago, it doesn’t mean they want to get email newsletters from you today. The chances are very high that they’ll click that nasty “this is spam” button in their email program. If only a handful of recipients click that button, some ISPs will start blocking all future emails from your company.

So you’ve got to be extremely careful. Here’s some advice we gave someone yesterday, who asked us this very question:

1. Send a “Re-introduction” campaign. The tone of the email is the most important factor here. Think more “Letter from the president” than “Boy, have we got an offer for you!!!!”
2. In that email, try to remind them how you got their contact information. If they’ve purchased something from your site, or if they’ve opted in, put that in your message. Got an order ID? Name of the product they bought? Mail-merge it in.
3. Give an incentive to stay opted-in. If I did business with you years ago, why would i want to do business with you again?
4. Send the re-introduction campaign to very small chunks of your list. Don’t just blast one message to 9,000 people. Break it into smaller lists of 1,000 or 2,000. And why not spread it out over several days? That way, you can watch for abuse complaints, and tweak content for maximum effectiveness.

Recap: Day 2 of the NTC, Messiness is cool

 

flickr: corey pud

 

In my last post, I forgot to mention another org at the science fair.  I first became aquainted with Care2 at the IMA conference. Care2 is a unique social network website that connects socially responsible people with the causes they care about.  Check them out and sign up, they have nearly 7 million members!  I mention them also because Hatef Yamini from Care2 assured me that Thursday’s keynote speaker would be excellent and he was right! 

 

That was David Weinberger, an entertaining, visionary thinker and observer of technology and how it is changing our culture and vise versa. He’s also a fellow at the Berkman Center at Harvard, but you may be more familiar with him as an NPR commentator on All Things Considered. 

 

David’s (poor guy had the flu) talk was enlightening for me.  He discussed what he calls the “P2P” (person to person) nature of the web; how each of us can individually influence the thinking and actions of others using the web in a way that businesses cannot.  He posted a great example of this on his blog on April 8th.

 

One theme in his presentation that really resonated with me was “Messiness as a Virtue” in relation to how dramatically the Internet and web 2.0 are changing the way information is organized, or actually rather disorganized.  Think old-school encyclopedias; physical hard-bound books, limited to one or 2 contributors on a subject that is just a couple paragraphs long.  Time, space and physicality limited what information was included.  Now think wikipedia–limitless, up-to-the-minute content from many sources and the ability to refute or add to the subject.

David reminded us that we (people) are completely revolutionizing the way that we organize our world. 

 

This idea really opened up my thinking for the remainder of the conference.  As some of you know who have been on the receiving end of my attempts to define what I’m grappling with in my role at DEI.  Which is how generational and cultural shifts in donor expectations are going to change how we raise money for public radio.  All the while anticipating what immerging technologies will deliver the public radio content we are asking listeners to support.

 

This new paradigm challenges us to reconsider the structure of a membership as we know it.  As I will share in coming posts, there are many ways people want to contribute to our cause that don’t fit into the neat components of being a member as we traditionally thought of–with a renewal cycle and a willingness to give through mail and pledge. Donors are now supporting causes through new conduits including micro payments, personal support badges on blogs and web pages. The American Cancer Society recently held it’s second Relay for Life event in Second Life, raising approx $41,000!

 

 

Check out the links in this post and share your thoughts with me.  Are you starting to think beyond what we know as best practice in pub world?  When do you think public radio will start pursuing these new models?  Which stations will be the first to dive into the “fundraising 2.0″ world?

 

-Melanie Coulson, Coordinator for Online Individual Giving, DEI

Notes from Nonprofit Technology Confrence - Day 1 Science Fair

 

I had a really fun and educational time at the NTEN - Nonprofit Technology Conference in Washington DC last week.

 

Don’t let the name fool you, this conference was rich with content for fundraisers as well as techies.  And there are even a large number of sessions where we all come together to learn from each other.

 

Wednesday afternoon was the Science Fair,  where attendees had one shot to check out the vendors at the conference, after that, the vendor area closed!  There were about 100 vendors, here were a few highlights that I thought might be of particular interest to you as well.

 

I had the opportunity to meet Laura Quinn, Founder and Director of Idealware. www.idealware.org is one the best resources for nonprofits trying to find the right software solution, and has tons of useful articles for all “accidental techies”.  If you don’t already receive their monthly enews, sign up.

 

Techsoup - www.techsoup.org is also an invaluable resource to nonprofits.  Not only can they provide advice, they connect can connect you with product donations from companies like Microsoft, Adobe, and Cisco.

 

ePhilanthropy foundation was present, www.ephilanthropy.org. DEI’s own Betsy Harman is a ePhilnathropy master trainer.  This org provides online and in-person training during their “etours”.  One standout bit of information I was reminded about was their work in the area of online fundraising ethics. Check their ethics center and resources–it’s time well spent! 

 

http://www.ephilanthropy.org/site/PageServer?pagename=ethics

 

There were many other vendors and resources that I didn’t get to mention here, but if you are curious you can see an entire list of Science Fair Vendors (look in the column on the right side of the page) at the Nten website.

http://nten.org/ntc-science-fair

 

-Melanie Coulson, Coordinator for Online Individual Giving, DEI 

 

-flickr credit:yuduke