Category — emotional giving

For the first time in my life, my crisis planning was personal instead of professional.

Nashville, Tennessee received more than 15 inches of rain on May 1st and flooded. The whole city was hit, some harder than others. We received damage worse than many but not as bad as those truly overwhelmed by the event. We are thankful to be safe and on our way to recovery.

This week, I have witnessed first-hand some of the best that a good community has to offer. People helping neighbors, businesses providing fair services, employers assisting employees and even restaurants conserving water. All of these relationships are the true kinds – for better or for worse. The nonprofits and businesses making a difference now will remain in the hearts and minds of our city for a long time.

I hope you will never face such a challenge personally but I would still encourage you to consider how you and your organization -whether NPO or company – prepares for crisis. Are you ready to step forward and meet the challenge? Does your organizational culture and mission support the relationships that make this work? The true tests of our beliefs and values are the tough times. Make them count.

To paraphrase Shakespeare, would a rose by any other name smell as sweet? I’d say NOT.

I have been talking a lot this past week about the value in a strong brand and what branding means to nonprofits. Typically, we have thought of a brand as our logo. There it is. Stick it on all of your materials and call it a day.

This is another area in which we NPOs tend to undervalue ourselves. Just think of some of the best known nonprofit brands out there. According to this New York Times article from last year, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/24/us/24charity.html?_r=2&ref=us the YMCA has the strongest brand – followed by the Salvation Army and the United Way of America.

What does this mean? Well, it means that their organizations have clear personalities. When people hear or see the name, they know what to expect and it rings all of the appropriate emotional bells in their minds. If someone asks you to support the YMCA, you rarely need to stop and ask “Now what do they do?” That gives them power in the marketplace with stakeholders of all kind, including potential corporate partners.

You may not have a nationally known brand. Face it, few of us do. This doesn’t let you off the proverbial hook. Whatever the size of your universe, make it count. Give your brand the power it needs to speak for you and to represent you well.

Here is a good place to start: set in front of you on a table both your mission statement and a few examples of your brand in action (your newsletter, letterhead, a funding proposal, etc.). Ask yourself this question: do these things all speak the same language and do they say what I want my audience to hear? If the answer is not a resounding yes, get to work!

My daughter is almost ten years old. Recently she had been ruthlessly pursuing the question of Santa Claus. “Mom, admit it! You’re Santa,” she said over and over again. So, I admitted it. She was shocked and dismayed despite the fact that she already knew the answer.

She came back to me a few days later and wanted to know if it was okay with me if she pretended that she didn’t know. She wants to still have a Santa in her Christmas.

I think that many of us feel the same way. We want Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny. We want the mythology that makes our lives rich and magical. We especially want the bigger-than-life characters and the textures of our youth. Companies that perpetuate these myths can be among the most powerful icons in society.

Think about the myths in your corporate culture, whether nonprofit or for profit. The Salvation Army kettle, the Red Cross, the conductor of your orchestra… these are powerful symbols that have great value. If weilded with integrity and purpose, they can rally even the most reluctant partners to BELIEVE.

It has been a while since my last post. Partly, the holidays chewed up my time but I must be honest… it has been tough just keeping up with the economic news.

In case you haven’t noticed (ha ha), the economy stinks. It stinks for consumers, businesses, NPOs, foundations, individual donors and the government. That covers just about everyone who might hope to give or receive a gift of charitable support. I’ve decided that THIS is the proverbial “elephant in the room.”

Over the past few months, I have spoken with quite a few consultants, donors and NPO leaders. I am amazed at h disconnect I see here. The donors are strategizing, making cuts, sweating the options and too many of the NPO leaders are smiling and saying they are just fine. You know, that smile that looks physically painful and has a little twitch in the corner.

Look guys, no one expects nonprofits to be immune to the climate. If NPOs had the magic potion they should be sharing it with everyone else! What our partners and supporters do and should expect is that we face the situation and make the tough choices. Ask yourselves these questions when requesting a gift or considering forging a partnership with an NPO:

1. How is this agency making a difference right now and to whom?

2. How is this agency adapting to changes and preparing for future potential changes. Will they outlast the bumps? Will my gift have long term value?

If you can’t answer these questions, get out the BIG pooper-scooper. That “elephant” has taken up residence in the corner of your office and isn’t leaving any time soon.

Reading a magazine this afternoon, I started to notice a trend in both the editorial content and the advertising.  Something that I guess I have known for a while, but have never given voice to before…. our lives are becoming more seamless.

By this, I mean that the distinct pieces of our lives, our decisions and our daily routines are overlapping more than ever before.  Perhaps it is a simplified view of the past but I imagine, for example, a parent in the 70s shopping in a grocery store for dinner. Find the ingredients on your list, pick the best prices, drive home and make dinner.  Or this scenario from the 80s:  go to work in the morning, get your work done for the day (or stay longer if you were a yuppy), go home and watch TV.

Fast forward to today: in the grocery, you are barraged with a myriad of decisions to make that have nothing to do with your shopping list. Is it organic? How is it packaged? Does any cause benefit from my purchase? Can I clip that Boxtop for my child’s school? Did I remember my shopping tote? If not, paper or plastic? 

Now to the worker… Will I carpool to save gas and get a chance at the HOV lane this morning? How many times have I checked email today? Don’t forget to log on to Amazon and buy that birthday present. Then the return home but still the Blackberry and iphone ring, IM and email all evening. Then TiVo that show you never watched.

It seems that every move we make today says something about us and our choices in life. I don’t just shop, I make a statement about organics, local farming, sweat shop labor and cause marketing.  I don’t just go to work, work follows me everywhere that my digital universe allows.  Perhaps we should not be surprised. It is, afterall, what many of us thought we wanted. 

I wonder what it would say about me right now if I turned off the computer, the phone and the lights and took a nice long nap. Sounds good.

The Who may have started singing about “My Generation” years ago but the issue is more relevant now than ever before. Both for-profit and NPOs are trying to tease apart the differences between our country’s generations but also appeal to the interests and checkbooks of the masses.

Perhaps there is really no such thing as mass media anymore?

I attended a roundtable discussion today with a group of NPO leaders about the issue of generational marketing – particularly marketing to potential donors, volunteers, and employees.  As a group, we are frankly overwhelmed. Small nonprofits are just now approaching the realms of online giving and social media. This adds another layer to our work and may shift the balance of charitable giving in only a few short years.

As NPOs continue the quest to build corporate partnerships, this “generating” generational-specific traffic through our partnerships will put successful cause marketing campaigns head and shoulders above the rest.  Just as products such as Avon and Yoplait have carefully aligned their cause partners with their key market demographic, other less obvious mergers of interest will be necessary. I am particularly interested to see the Millenials’ favorite products adapt and change to the giving climate.

Our lessons from today’s conversation seemed clear and perhaps obvious in retrospect – but not so easy to implement. First, be flexible. Realize that your clients, donors and consumers may not all see things from your perspective. Two, realize that you cannot dramatically change the population. It will be they who change us.

I was teaching a workshop yesterday and one of our exercises was creating a demographic and psychographic profile of our donor base segments.  All of the agencies who participated in the program were great NPOs with open minds and open hearts yet none of them had a core group of non-white donors.

Each of the organizations confirmed that there is a minority population of some type in their communities (some much smaller than others) but there seems to be a disconnect between these groups and people of varying ethnicity.  Pondering this question, I realized that it is not part of the organic growth of an organization – whether an NPO or a consumer based business.  We tend to recruit staff who look like us, board members who look like us and, therefore, attract donors who look like us.  It’s a vicious cycle.

Perhaps NPOs and for-profit organizations could be more effective working together to solve this issue?  If we use our advertising and brochures as a “mirror” we will only see the same thing and never grow.  If we turn this around and use them as “telescopes” to see the world beyond us, we could make great new discoveries.

I have been doing a lot of research lately about Generation Y (the Millennials) and their characteristics.  They are, as reported by numerous studies, thoughtful, relatively conservative, independent and prone to entrepreneurial tendencies.  They are plugged in all the time and get much of their news from the Web.  They are also the first generation to have all of this at their fingertips since they were toddlers – cell phones, computers, the internet…

Many of these characteristics bode well for fundraisers and community-conscious corporation.  They hear our messages and absorb new concepts like sponges.  However, I wonder if this sensory barrage will have a potential negative impact in the long-run?  Just as researchers told us that kids exposed to too much violence on TV and in computer games became desensitized to real violence, will these new potential donors become immune to our messages?  How many images, how many stories and how many calls to action will it take to register on their “screen?”

With so much information out there, it is incumbent upon marketers to make our messages relevant and urgent.  Generation Y , as a group, looks at things from a global perspective and believes it can have a global impact.  This means our competition for their attention has also gone worldwide. Ouch.

Last Sunday’s New York Times magazine featured an article about affluent travelers and the new preference for authentic travel.  By this, they mean travel experiences where you connect with people on a local level.  The article says that these travelers want “more than just superficial encounters with the natives; they want their culture unfiltered.”

The guys at Global Exchange, a not-for-profit that creates customized “reality tours” point out that there is an increased interest in issue based travel – including education, public health and environmental issues.  Many of these enlightened travelers even spend part of their vacations doing volunteer work as a way to connect with the people and cultures of these distant places.

I think these globe-setters are on to something.  Fundraisers and marketers are seeing the same trends.  People don’t want to make a gift or buy a product and then go away.  They want a lasting connection and a sense of ownership – a type of philanthropic backstory.  This requires cause marketers to drop the curtain and allow access to new areas of operations.

There is also a potential downside to all of this authenticity.  Hoe many tourist trips can we take to a remote village in Tanzania without changing the very fabric of their culture?  How many customers can we treat like family before our “family” becomes too big to be meaningful?

Undoubtedly, time and these savvy shoppers will provide us with the answers.

Last week I went shopping for a birthday present at Cost Plus World Market.  I would describe the store as a cross between an import food store and Pier I – and I was thrilled that they opened a location here in Nashville.  During my visit, I decided to pick up a little yummy for myself as well as the gift.  When I got my snack in the car, I found that HALF of the volume of the container was actually a concave bubble that came up from the bottom and was clearly meant to give the perception that there was twice the amount of product in the container than actually existed.

Well, I’m just the kind of girl who tracks down the customer support email and sends a message.  I really liked this store and felt cheated that they did not live up to my expectation.  Unfortunately, the canned email response to my comment did even less to revive my confidence.  Apparently, my comments have been forwarded to the proper department, hmmm.

I have seriously reevaluated my perceptions CP World Market based on these two experiences.  I have also told other people about my dissatisfaction… and this was all over a $6 package of snacks.  Imagine how your supporters, customers and clients feel when they are disappointed by the cause they love or the nonprofit partnership that they champion.

I find that many of my clients spend all of their time creating great programs and little to no time with follow-up and service after the exchange.  No one is perfect and no campaign is perfect.  The difference between long term success and long term failure is the willing to admit mistakes and use them to find wonderful, and sometimes unanticipated, new ideas.  And a small dose of genuine concern can go a long way.