An overused narrative.

Perhaps it is the fact that the 2012 presidential campaign is underway in earnest, along with its ongoing torrent of analysts parsing every word. Or perhaps it is because I find myself reading more and more business blogs that are really pseudo-marketing blogs. Or maybe it is simply that my subconscious vocabulary overflow meter has finally been triggered.

Whatever the reason, I find myself mechanically tearing clumps of hair out of my head whenever I hear what has to be the most abused, overused word of the year: “Narrative.”

We are told that the Romney campaign has to find a “narrative that resonates with Middle America,” while the Obama campaign needs to find a “narrative to respond to the Romney campaign.” Marketing leaders are looking for a “narrative that resonates with consumers.” The Olympics provided us with a “rich narrative of personal achievement.”

I finally reached my personal limit when I started seeing the word pop up in the nonprofit space. “We have to find a mission narrative that donors will respond to.” Honestly, when I hear nonprofit executives talking about a “mission narrative,” I want to scream. 

“Narrative” is a word for our times. It sounds grown-up. Sophisticated. But it is also, basically, meaningless. Is a narrative a story? A theme? A conversation? A pitch? A lie? It is a word that offers little but self-importance. It is a word designed to be deliberately vague. 

Call me old-fashioned, but I’m not sure where “narratives” fit in politics, business, or particularly, the nonprofit world. Campaigns need platforms — a worldview that is supported by policies, not stories. Businesses need strategies — unique, defensible positions supported by operational activities that fit together. And nonprofits need a mission — a specific way of changing the world. 

It is important to be able to talk about how you can help change the world. But it is much more important to actually have a way to change the world, and then to go about doing it. It could be that your problems in fundraising (or marketing or selling or operating or campaigning) have less to do with the way you’re telling the story and more to do with the actual subject matter. Are you making a difference? Does your organization actually help people, directly and impactfully? If the answer is yes, we can find a way to powerfully tell the story. If the answer is no, then no amount of marketing, writing, editing, or creative manipulation will help you grow. 

Leave the narratives to the authors. The world needs help — what are you doing about it?

Pareto's Principle in Fundraising: An Interactive Example

Over the last few months, I’ve presented and written quite a bit about Pareto’s Principle in fundraising. Better known as the “80-20 Rule,” the idea is simple: Most of the money we raise comes from a small number of donors. This dynamic shows up in nearly every campaign I’ve worked on. Even so-called “grassroots” campaigns are heavily dependent on a small number of donors; just because we ask for small gifts doesn’t mean all of our donors contribute equally.

What is just as amazing to me as the math, however, is the fact that many people have trouble getting their heads around the idea. Even though most of us use donor pyramids and gift tables every day, it is often hard to understand how even massive programs are really driven by small percentages of donors.

This interactive graphic, built from actual campaign data, is designed to help illustrate Pareto’s Principle. Click on any gift level to see how many donors contributed at that level — and how much of the total revenue those gifts represented.

All of this begs at least two questions: Are you trying to grow large numbers of donors or are you spending time finding and cultivating donors who are connected to you? And do you treat donors equally or do you talk to them differently based on how important they are to you?  

Click to interact.

May 9th Webinar: Deeper Segmentation Techniques for Fundraising!

If you looked at the exclamation point in the subject heading and said, “Huh? That doesn’t look exciting at all,” you can just stop reading now.

But for those of you who get excited by the idea of fundraising segmentation (I know you’re out there!), I wanted to let you know I’m hosting a free webinar next week to explore practical fundraising segmentation techniques. I’m going to try some new visualization techniques that may or may not work, so that in and of itself will provide some excitement above and beyond the subject matter!

This webinar is a follow-up to my presentation at the Nonprofit Technology Conference last month, but will be a complement to it — attendance at that presentation is not a prerequisite. So for those of you who did not attend, I promise you’ll still get something out of the presentation.

It takes on May 9 at 1:00 Central, and you can register here. Hope to see you there!

Notes from 2012 NTC - Day Two

The astute observer may note that I’m actually posting notes about day two of NTC on day three of NTC — take it as a sign of how packed day two was. 

Another long but fulfilling day of conversation. I spent an alarmingly large part of the day, and drank an alarmingly large amount of coffee, at the hotel restaurant, which essentially became the office for dozens of NTC attendees all day. There were times the waiters looked a bit annoyed with tables of six people spending $8 on coffee, but I know they made out on the breakfast and lunch tabs so hopefully it evened out for them in the end. 

Highlights:

• Great meeting with Donna Wilkins of Charity Dynamics. Besides being an expert on social and mobile fundraising, Donna is an astute industry observer. I always enjoy thinking big thoughts with her.
• Spent some more time with the leadership team at StayClassy, specifically planning for a fantastic new social impact conference later this year. Stay tuned!
• Our team had a chance to sit down with Nyla and Amy from Mama Hope and hear about their take on development and how to turn it on its head. Exhiliarating and Inspiring.
• Interesting meeting with Jonah from Altruicity — he’s trying to bring richer outreach and phone experiences to the space. Some potential applications for our clients.

I’m not sure if the above sounds like much, but that takes us to 6:00 last night and a very tired NTC attendee! A highlight of the evening was going with the kick-butt Event 360 team over to House of Nanking for dinner. WOW. Yum. 

Okay, no more procrastinating — I’ve got to put some final touches on my presentation for later this morning. Just keep swimming…

The presentation is being streamed live, so I hope you’ll come along!

Notes from 2012 NTC - Day One

A great day at the 2012 Nonprofit Technology Conference so far. Wanted to send some quick notes.

The Hilton in San Francisco is absolutely buzzing with activity. (Now that I write that, I realize what a lame analogy it is. But picture a really, really busy hotel lobby with people connecting, re-connecting, networking, re-networking. Not sure if that is “buzzing,” but that’s it.)

My day so far has been full of a bunch of different connections:

• Started with a meeting with GoodThreads CEO Brandon Hance. Great guy. I love what they are doing. Lots of applications for our clients. 
• That led to a short (and then later, a slightly longer) conversation with Debra Askanase, also known as @AskDebra. If you are in social impact in the Twittersphere (odd that the previous phrase probably makes sense to a lot of people), you know who she is and what she does. She was very complimentary about Event 360’s content strategy, which meant a lot coming from her. 
• Interesting meeting with the guys at Avectra, the leading association management software. I’m somewhat familiar with the space from a past life. Interesting to hear about the social integration in their platform. Interestingly, they are one of many groups who found out about me through this post. 
• Great, great inspiring meeting as usual with the fantastic Jane Kim of Ink-Dwell. So thrilled to be working with her. 
• The usual fantastic exchange with the incomparable Pat Walsh and Scot Chisolm of StayClassy. Nothing more to say about that. Need to go find them down on the floor somewhere. 

Countless other interactions. I’m getting lots of comments about my session coming up on Thursday, so no pressure! Gotta practice some crunching on that dataset. My session is taking place Thursday at 10:30 Pacific, and if you’re not here you can register to watch it, and lots of other great sessions, online at 2012 Online NTC. Check it out!

More to come…

Nonprofit Technology Conference 2012

Hello everyone from San Francisco, where I arrived late last night for one of my favorite weeks of the year: the Nonprofit Technology Conference. It’s a week to learn from some of the most innovative people in the industry about how they are using technology to drive social impact.

It’s also a week when I traditionally experiment with the time-space continuum to see how many meetings I can cram into 72 hours, and when I conduct a bit of a workplace Lord of the Flies test with my director of marketing: At what point will she skewer me if I still don’t have my presentation materials ready?

All of these things and more I will try to share in bite-size increments throughout the week. Stay tuned!

MuckRuckus MS and the Reluctant Neck

A quick video inspired by my post below about MuckRuckus MS. Wow, was that so fun!

MuckRuckus MS: Absurdly, ridiculously fun.

It is late and I need to go to bed after a long day, but I had to write a quick post about how flipping great it was to participate in our team’s MuckRuckus MS event today in Jacksonville. I had an incredibly fun time on this unique take on mud runs — I can without a doubt promise you this is the most well-engineered, hilarious set of obstacles you are going to encounter, for the best cause you are going to encounter, in the growing mud space. An odd sentence, but true.

In the next few days I’ll post some video — I ran the 10K event with a headtop camera, because, why not? — but in the meantime I wanted to thank the National MS Society for the opportunity, and thank the kick-butt Event 360 team for their great work. I can’t wait to do another!

Victory!

I take a practice run on the Helicopter. Hold on!

My time is now your time! Let me help you change the world.

I wanted to share a piece of news that is an exciting step for me and I hope a great opportunity for you. Yesterday at the Run-Walk-Ride conference I announced that henceforth and forever more, I’m setting aside at least 5% of my time each week to offer free fundraising advice to nonprofits, social entrepreneurs, and world-changers big and small. 

Why? As we work with more and more nonprofits like yours, I’m struck by a few things. 

• First, many of you only need a few quick pieces of advice or a dose of outside perspective. But you are reluctant to call either because you don’t want to impose if you don’t have a budget to hire us, or because you fear getting a sales pitch, or both. I want to eliminate the barriers to you reaching out for input.
• Two, there are lots of you who work in small, passionate shops, and even a short consulting engagement might represent a huge portion of your budget. And so you don’t have the opportunity to work with us. But your work is some of the most important to me, and I want to help. Others of you work in large organizations but getting budget authority to bring on an outside agency can take months. I want to speed that up for you.
• Three, I love talking about fundraising and helping people understand it! And I’m always so gratified when I get the chance to talk and meet with new people. You’re a neat person! I want to talk with you.
• Finally, I’m a world-changer. I want to help you make a difference!

How does it work? Simple: Just email me at jeff@event360.com and ask for a time in the office hours schedule. I’ll commit that we’ll spend an hour on the phone with you talking about whatever issue or issues you want — without a sales pitch in sight. If you send over a dataset, I’ll even go through it on the phone with you. The only small print is that depending on what you need and our mutual calendars, you may speak with one of my consultants instead of me, and it may take us a couple of weeks to coordinate a time that works.

But that’s it. All you have to do is ask.

So, will you email me for a time to let me help you change the world?

RWR Preview: Where Should I Focus?

Tomorrow I’ll be speaking at the annual Run-Walk-Ride Conference in Atlanta. As is the case every year, our team will have a large presence at the event and will be leading several sessions today and tomorrow. I wanted to share a quick preview of my keynote tomorrow, reprinted from the Event 360 blog. I hope to see you at the conference later today!

Last month, I wrote about the link between strategy and focus for the Event 360 blog. Specifically, I mentioned that in an increasingly busy world, competitive advantage isn’t about being able to do more, but rather about being able to focus on those things that make a difference. We all have limited time and resources. Trying to be excellent at everything is the quickest way to guarantee you won’t actually excel at anything.

In the several weeks since we published the article, I’ve heard from many of you who’ve essentially said, “Okay – I believe you. I’m ready to focus. But, where should I focus?”

The answer to this question obviously depends upon your function within your organization and upon what your organization is trying to accomplish. No two specific answers are the same. That said, the general answer is always the same: You have to focus on what is going to make the most impact.

So the real question is, how do you identify what is going to make the most impact? And, how do you know what is going to deliver the most return?

Just like all questions of strategy, these aren’t ones that can be solved with a calculator. It would be great to plug numbers into a spreadsheet and find out where you need to focus your time. But of course, life doesn’t work that way. There’s more to what we do than math. Still, I want to share at least one mathematical property that can help you focus your efforts.

At the beginning of the 20^th century, an Italian economist named Vilfredo Pareto was studying the distribution of land in his home country. He noticed something interesting: 80% of the land was owned by the wealthiest 20% of the citizens. A century later, we’ve inherited this observation under a few different names: Pareto’s Principle, the power-law distribution, or as it is most commonly known, the 80/20 rule.

Now, it’s worth mentioning that there’s nothing inherently magical about the numbers 80 and 20. It could be that 60% of your management headaches come from 10% of your team members. Or that 70% of your monthly income is spent on 15% of your hobbies. What the principle is really saying, in more general terms, is that in many situations, a large part of the result is caused by a small number of the inputs.

What is amazing about Pareto’s Principle is how many applications it has. You can find it in business (the bulk of the revenue of Fortune 500 companies is concentrated in a small number of the largest firms). You can find it in healthcare (the bulk of money spent on healthcare is directed at a small number of patients). You can find it in social issues (the majority of crime is perpetrated by a small percentage of criminals). And most importantly for our use, you can find it in fundraising, where it is very common that most fundraising revenue comes from a small number of donors.

In our consulting work we have seen power-law distributions in almost every level of every fundraising initiative we’ve studied. Most fundraising programs derive the vast majority of their revenue from a small percentage of constituents. Sometimes, programs that look to have thousands of donors are really powered by a handful of generous people. The bad news is that this means our organizations are dependent on far fewer constituents than we might imagine. The good news is that this means that to influence profound change we usually need to direct our efforts to a small subset of our total universe.

After working with dozens of nonprofits I’m convinced that Pareto’s Principle applies to our day-to-day activities as well. Most of what we spend time on does not directly impact our missions; and most nonprofit leaders I talk with can quickly identify what actually impacts their organizations and what is busy work. Answering trite emails, sitting in bland management meetings, reviewing work other people are supposed to do – these are activities that usually contribute little or nothing to our long-term goals and, yet, often occupy the bulk of our time.

To make significant change, we have to be willing to decrease or eliminate the time we spend on busy work, and shift our focus to those things that directly power our missions: meeting new people, sharing our vision of a better world, and asking others to join us in creating that world. All of the above is easier said than done. To learn more, I invite you to join me at next week’s Run Walk Ride Conference in Atlanta, where I’ll explore Pareto’s Principle, what it means, and how it can help us change the world.

Your vision: A considered purchase.

What are you trying to do at your social impact organization? You’re trying to change the world, right? Good!

So what are you asking your donors to do? Are you asking them to change the world — or give you $10? Are you asking your event participants to change the world, or to show up somewhere?

I’m working on a few different datasets right now and one thing I’ve seen in all of them is a disconnect between the expectations we have of our work and the expectations we have of our constituents. More specifically, we have much lower expectations of our constituents than what we have written in our vision statements.

Here’s an example. One fundraising program I’m analyzing has about 33% retention, meaning about 33% of the participants come back for a second year. (Yes, that’s right, meaning 67% do not come back. Unfortunately low retention is common in many types of fundraising.) Of the 1/3 that come back, nearly 80% perform at the same level or lower the second year. In other words, not only do most people not come back — the vast majority of the precious group who are engaged enough to come back don’t give at greater amounts. When you add onto this the fact that in event fundraising many constituents do not donate at all (it’s true; commentary here), you’ve got either a rather depressing picture or a rather huge opportunity to communicate our visions more powerfully.

I see this again and again: Our constituents will rise to the expectations that we create for them. When we tell our constituents that they can help change the world by texting us a donation of $5, they believe us. When we tell them that they can help change the world by just showing up at an event, they believe us. When we tell them that they can help change the world by buying mailing labels, they believe us. And the vast majority of the time, their subsequent behavior will follow the first expecations we’ve set.

But the thing is, we have higher expectations. Don’t we? We actually want to engage people in profound change. Right? 

Believe me, I understand the value of small gifts. And I understand that our asks and offers need to be tailored to different groups of constituents. In fact, I do a lot of work — and speaking — on both subjects. But effective segmentation is one thing; settling for the lowest common denominator is something else altogether.  

Don’t be afraid to paint a big vision and then ask for engagement commensurate to the scope of that vision. If you create reflection upfront, you might find that people slow down in their decision-making. But you’ll also find they will value their decision more once they make it.

You’re worth it. A better world shouldn’t be an impulse buy. 

A Great Fundraising Ask Is...

Yesterday I shared my 4+1 Very Simple, Very Easy, Not-At-All-Intimidating Steps To An Ask. Catchy, huh? The post was intended to offer a bit of reassurance that a fundraising ask doesn’t have to be as difficult as we make it out to be.

Since I was thinking about the subject, I thought I’d offer a bit more advice on what separates a mediocre ask from a great one.

A great fundraising ask is…

• Tactical. I’m busy. Tell me exactly what you want me to do. Don’t tell me to care about world hunger. Ask me to bring three cans of food to X location at Y time. 
• Practical. A great ask is within my means to carry out. Don’t ask me for $50,000 if I can afford $50. The latter makes me consider your mission; the former makes me question my career.
• Authentic. A great ask is for a cause/mission/change/better world that you, as the asker, believe in. You have to believe in your mission.  
• A question. Too many fundraising asks get derailed in the punctuation! Maybe it is because asking feels awkward, but we often let our audience off the hook by making a statement instead of a solicitation. For example, “So I hope that you will donate today.” That’s not an ask, it’s a sentence. (And it isn’t tactical, either.) How about, “Will you help create a better world by donating $50 today?”
• Uttered! A fundraising ask actually needs to be asked! Speak your change to power!

As I wrote yesterday, asking isn’t brain surgery. It sure is intimidating — but it doesn’t have to be. It can be fulfilling and inspiring and enriching.

Which gets me to the picture in this post. What does the smiling popcorn boy have to do with fundraising asks? Well, to be honest, nothing really — that’s my son Danny. But he sure is cute!

On the other hand, his joy reminds me of asking — of what it can feel like to give, of what it should feel like to speak about the nobility of our mission, and more than anything, about what the world will look like when we accomplish our goals. 

Good luck and best wishes. I know you can do it.