For many readers of this blog, today is the end of the fiscal year. Congratulations! You’ve made it!

What are you doing to celebrate?

We live in a fast paced world. And our organization’s financial needs are insatiable. All too often, our year end is merely punctuated by a flurry of direct mail and phone calls. Then we come in the next day with a higher goal to start the new year.

One of the most suprising things my coaching clients tell me is how much they appreciate my reminding them to stop and celebrate. What?! It’s not all my sage advice? Nope. It’s my giving them permission to stop and pat themselves on the back for a job well done.

Celebration helps legitimate the past. We get to relive the war stories, talk about the one that got away, and get energized by the successes we accomplished.

From everything I’m reading, this next year is going to be just as challenging as this past one. So why not stop for a moment, and buy a round for everyone in the office?

When I got started in fundraising, I used to celebrate a successful campaign solicitation by treating myself to a latte from Starbucks. I know a client that used to bring a dozen donuts to work and shout “Happy New Year!” to his co-workers.

Even if your fiscal year doesn’t end today, how do you celebrate?

Feel free to use the comments section here at http://fundraisingcoach.com/ (or reply to this email) to let me know!

As the recession continues, and our need for funds grows, I continue to believe we’ll need a combination of face-to-face experiences with donors augmented by a robust, but appropriate, use of online tools.

In my article Bananas and Websites, I give an overview of Seth Godin’s concept that, when looking at a web page, all of us are organ grinder monkees. We just want the “banana” - we want to clearly know what we’re supposed to do.

Our job as website designers is to make the banana really obvious.

In my seminars, I show a picture of Yahoo! and ask “Where’s the banana?” It’s pretty confusing, lots of things happening and no clear “one thing” that a user is supposed to do.

Then I show a picture of Google. On their main home page, they have a very clear banana: search. There is virtually nothing else to distract us from doing that one thing.

Well in the “oldie but goodie” category, the Chronicle of Philanthropy posted an article on making “online donations surge.” This appear back in May of 2008 and is a brief report on research done by DonorDigital. [The DonorDigital link goes to a PDF of the entire study.]

In short, the study shows that:

• Bigger “click to donate” buttons work better
• Red ones work better
• And donors are more likely to donate when asked only for the minimum information

Basically, make the banana obvious and make it easy.

This probably seems incredibly obvious, but so few of us do it. For instance, take my alma mater Milton Academy. This is a very successful and very established New England prep school. Kudos to them for making their giving page only 1 click away…if you think to look for it down in the footer.

But look at what you’re faced with when you go there: http://milton.edu/alumni/pages/annualfund_fs.html. 37 possible fields to fill in, check off, or choose from.

I can buy a book from Amazon far more easily!

I find it intimidating to use. Sure, schools want this info about their alum. But wouldn’t all this be better served on an “alumni notes” page? To me, it seems that if a donor wants to make a gift, why not let them? Credit card info, billing address, and amount is all that’s needed. And a comments field in case they want to designate their gift.

How does your nonprofit do? Do you make it easy to give from your site? Or are you putting up lots of hurdles?

Here’s a great piece from Lois Lindauer’s latest “Development News” email:

AHP Study Demonstrates Value of Fundraisers in Recession

The Association of Healthcare Philanthropy (AHP) just released results from its 2007 benchmarking survey, which examines nonprofit hospital giving during a period encompassing the early months of this recession.

Reviewing development programs across American hospitals, the survey found “the highest performing fundraising organizations put stronger, longer-term emphasis on cultivating major gifts.” Among participating hospitals, the average of major gifts from individuals was $55,000.

Allocating more resources for annual fund programs also paid off — hospitals that invested more in this area had the highest returns.

In announcing the report, AHP President and CEO William McGinly says, “Health care executives and boards should think twice before downsizing their fundraising staff and mix of fundraising activities to cope with the recession; …. hospital services and daily operations need philanthropic support. Rising joblessness is challenging nonprofit hospitals and health care systems to find the wherewithal to deal with growing numbers of uninsured patients while they cope with inadequate reimbursements and accelerating expenses.”

The results of the 2007 AHP Performance Benchmarking Service are available to AHP members on the association’s web site. For a synopsis see, Hire More Fundraising Rain-Makers During Recession, New AHP Study Concludes.

Notice the title of the synopsis? “Hire More Fundraising Rain-Makers During a Recession.” The research supports growing your development effort only in the areas that make sense, like emphasizing the role of major gift officers.

It sounds counter-intuitive, but getting better at fundraising now, and increasing your capacity, significantly enhances your future ability to fund your cause.

What do you think? Do you think this applies to non-hospital organizations too?

I’ve been through a flurry of bad powerpoint presentations recently. At the last one, the speakers turned their backs to the audience and read the slides word-for-word. I kid you not.

Perhaps it was because the words were so tiny none of us could see them.

If you’re using Powerpoint or a similar slide-style program to communicate your fundraising story, this has got to stop!

Reading your slides not only insults the intelligence of your audience, it also makes you look ill-informed. After all, if the speaker isn’t interested enough to master the topic, why should we be interested in listening to her? And if the speaker is the leader of a nonprofit, why would we want to invest money with her if she can’t even remember her presentation?

I think part of the reason people end up reading their slides, is that their slides are:

• overly burdened with clipart,
• too dense with words and bullet points, and
• too cluttered with a background images that seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time.

You want your audiences eyes to be drawn to the slide, not repelled by it.

I’ll be the first to admit I’m not a Powerpoint expert. In fact, I didn’t even really make a Powerpoint until I recorded my “Fundraising 101″ webinar for CharityUniversity back in 2003. Fortunately the content outweighed the very bad Powerpoint slides!

Being a relative late-comer to Powerpoint, I’ve done some reading and found some tricks for making sure you get your story across rather than lulling your audience to sleep. Here are some of my favorite recommendations:

• Always remember 6×6: If you must use bullet points on your slides, use no more than 6 bullets and no more than 6 words per bullet.
• Use a black background for all slides: Help your listeners to focus on the content of your slides. Black backgrounds usually blend in with the unused portion of the screen. So rather than focusing on a white box and hopefully seeing the words or images in them, people actually see only the words and images. It’s makes a big difference.
• Avoid templates like the plague: Most of the people that write about effectively using Powerpoint strongly advise against using the built in templates. I used to think it was crucial that every slide had a “Fundraising Coach” logo on it. But people smarter than me say that if your audience needs to be reminded about who you are on every slide, your content must suck. Any of us should be able to hold a person’s attention for the time of our presentation.
• Images over words: Studies consistently show that people retain more information if they see an image and hear the narration. If we make them see an image and read words while trying to listen to a speaker, their retention drops dramatically. It only makes sense: we’re asking them to process an image, read the bullet points, and hear what we’re saying at the same time! Talk about distraction. And if you’re trying to raise money, the last thing you want is a distracted donor!
• No apologies: No matter how important your graph or information is, if you have to say, “I know you can’t see this but…” it doesn’t belong in your presentation. Period. Do the hard work of figuring out how to make it work for your audience.

As you can see from the fundraising talks I’ve posted to SlideShare.net, I’m increasingly becoming a fan of using one image on a slide. Each slide boldly reinforces my verbal comments. The results have been extraordinary. My audiences used to get a glazed-over information overload look; now they’re leaving my talks energized and seem to be getting much more from them.

Check out my “Successful Fundraising in a Recession” slides from my keynote last week. See if you can understand the information. Then listen to the comments of people that were in the audience. Do you “hear” the energy?

To help improve your use of slides and storytelling, be sure to check out work by Andy Goodman, Cliff Atkinson, and Seth Godin.

For what it’s worth, for my fundraising trainings, I buy most of my images through: iStockphoto or stockxpert.com. Of course, you’d want to use real people from your own nonprofit in your own presentations!

Apparently 2009 is going to be the year of learning to delay Alzheimer’s.

In today’s news, work is apparently officially proven to delay Alzheimer’s. The equation? 1 year or work = 6 weeks of delay.

Earlier this year, I read that drinking strong coffee may reduce the risk of dementia or Alzheimer’s by 65%!

What does this have to do with fundraising? Probably not much.

But perhaps by providing a form of work our nonprofits are helping our volunteers stay in their right mind. And if we add strong coffee for the nonprofit employees, are we moving toward a more sane society?

Last week, I had someone pay me a huge, though unintended, compliment when unsubcribing from my email newsletter. She said the content was “far too basic” for her.

I was thrilled! I strive to make fundraising simple, basic, and easy to understand. Many of you have heard me say that the most extreme thing about fundraising is doing the basics:

• doing research,
• engaging prospects,
• asking for money,
• thanking donors and reporting back on how donations are used.

Most importantly, asking!

Isn’t it amazing how often we don’t directly ask for money? We insinuate, suggest, imply, send letters. But somehow we forget to do the simplest, most basic part of fundraising: clearly ask for a specific dollar amount!

That’s why I loved a recent blog post by Nick Fellers. In it, he shared three questions he encourages his coaching clients to ask themselves every day:

1. What can I do to bring in more money today?
2. What am I doing to advance the ball with my top 10 prospects?
3. What are my next action items to line up visits?

No doubt the person who unsubscribed from my newsletter would write these off as too basic. But before you blow those questions off as simple, therefore unimportant, re-read them.

These questions are so profound.

Fundraisers have incredible demands placed on us. Each year the bar is raised. As Simone Joyaux said at a recent conference, it’s like our organizations think we just print money in the basement!

All that pressure can have us forever looking for the latest and greatest thing. The shiny new toy to play with. The silver bullet to all our funding problems.

But the truth is: people give to people. Or rather, people give to people who ask them.

And that’s the beauty with these three questions. They focus our attention on what matters most. To the 20% of work that really matters in getting the 80% of our results.

In times like these, we certainly need focus!

So this week, I encourage you to:

1. Read Nick Fellers’ blog post.
2. Print out the three questions and tape them to your computer monitor.
3. And ask yourself these questions as you plan each day.

I think you’ll find the simplicity and focus as helpful to your fundraising as I have!

This is the time of year when all the nonprofit geeks gather at NTEN’s Nonprofit Technology Conference and when the rest of us who feel techincally savvy realize we’re probably just geek-wannabes.

Even if you not in San Francisco, it’s very easy to keep up on what’s happening. To see the conference’s Twitter stream, simply search Twitter for the hashtag #09NTC. That stream will be up long after the conference and it’s worth checking out.

There are also many folks who are live blogging from the conference. (Well they’re trying to. Apparently the San Francisco Hilton didn’t prepare for increased wifi usage so internet access has been down most of the conference. Wouldn’t that be one of the first things you prepare for when hosting a tech conference?!)

One of those bloggers is Kivi Leroux Miller. In her post, Here Comes Everybody - Lessons from Clay Shirky at #09NTC, she shares thoughts from one of the conference keynotes. Here are some nuggets from her post:

• With sharing on social media, “a problem solved by one person is now solved for thousands of people.”
• People can organize without having an organization. And they don’t need your org’s permission to organize around something related to your organization.
• Flash mobs - social media is not just a source of information, but of action. Flash mobs started as a way to mock the participants and now it is a real tool for organizing with an enormous variety of uses - users control what happens with social tools, not the designers. Take twitter - who cares what you are eating, but look how people are using it now!
• ”Failure for free” and “fail informatively” - this is the attitude that organizations need to approach social media with. Try it. Need lots and lots of experimentation to make sure that we get something good out of it.

You can read all of her takeaways at her blog. (I highly recommend you adding her RSS feed to your blog reader.)

You can also follow the comments throughout the day on the Twitter search for #09NTC. Even better, you could plug #09NTC into a great tool like TweetGrid. TweetGrid automatically refreshes so you see tweets as they come in.

Since this month marks the 1 year anniversary of the publication of “Ask Without Fear!“, I’m deciding to have a party!

On April 28 at 12 noon Eastern Time, I’ll be offering a free teleclass on fundraising in today’s economy.

To join the call, you just need to go to the registration page.

The call costs $37 but you can get in free if you know the “password”: the fourth word of the second paragraph on page 50 of “Ask Without Fear!”

(In the ebook, page 50 is “52 of 98.” If you have the Kindle version, it’s the fourth word at location 1047.)

This call will be part class, part roundtable. I’ll be sharing some strategies that are working but there will be plenty of time for group coaching as well!

We’d love to have you join us! Just go to the registration page.

This call will be recorded and available for purchase afterwards.

I was just on a call with fellow members of the Association for Healthcare Philanthropy folks when someone asked, “Does anyone here use Twitter or Facebook?”

It appeared I was the only one. Many wanted to be but their IT departments wouldn’t let them.

Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn and YouTube are sites that are in the broad category of “social media.” Social media sites are sites that make it really easy for people to connect with other people. And social media sites often have made-up names or names with weird spelling like Plurk or Flickr. But the best part of all of these is: they’re free!

In a time when everyone’s being cost conscious and penny-pinching, I find it hard to believe that people wouldn’t be at least experimenting with free marketing sites!

Engaging in Conversations

As fundraisers, one of our primary responsibilities is to engage donors and prospective donors in conversations. We often do that by giving tours of our facility or taking people out for coffee. These will always remain important tools. But some of my colleagues are saying the current economic downturn is making it more difficult to get appointments.

Wouldn’t it be easier to engage donors in conversations they’re already having?

Millions of people are using sites like Facebook and Twitter. They’re using these sites for professional networking, for personal relationships, and even for sharing family photos to far flung family members, and for expressing their views on just about anything.

Our donors, board members, and local elected officials are using them too. So why wouldn’t we at least experiment with them?

These are ways we can engage in conversations at no additional cost to the organization. Moreover, as people join our “cause” on Facebook or tweet comments to us, their friends see their affiliation with our organization. Haven’t we all wanted more people to tell their friends about us? Or have our patients publically thank our hospital? If they join a page or cause on Facebook, they are. Their friends will see what they’re doing and may decide to check out our organization.

Professional Development

As professionals, these sites also become a terrific, low-cost way to access continuing education. Groups like the Association of Fundraising Professionals and the Association for Healthcare Philanthropy and publications like the Chronicle of Philanthropy and FundRaising Success have presences on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

A few months ago, I was writing a fundraising appeal and hit a major case of writer’s block. I know the postscript is the most important part of the letter but I wasn’t able to create a compelling one. So, in desperation, I tweeted “This PS sucks, can you help?” and included the P.S. Within minutes I had suggestions that were far better. And one person even asked me to send her my entire appeal to look over. Her edits made the letter even more compelling!

And as members of these professional groups attend conferences and seminars, an increasing number of them are sending updates while they’re in the session! We all saw this as congressmen and women tweeted during President Obama’s not-the-State-of-the-Union speech. If we aren’t able to be physically present, we can still use these tools to learn what others are learning.

All for free.

When I first joined Twitter, I started following a bunch of fellow fundraisers. We ask questions as issues come up during the day. Some of these fundraisers tweet from conferences their attending. They’ll often append their tweets with a label so it makes it easy to follow those threads. In one case, people thought I’d been at a conference in the UK simply because I replied to tweets from conference attendees!

It’s not Twitter, it’s the Relationships, Stupid

It’s so easy to get enamored with new technology. But it’s not about the tools. It’s not about obsessing over Twitter or Facebook. Social media sites allow you to extend conversations with donors, build stronger relationships between them and your organization, listen to what others are saying about your cause or your organization, and meet colleagues for training and for real-time help. And it’s free.

Who wouldn’t want a free tool that offered all that?

Finally, even if we’re not experimenting with these tools, our donors are. More and more donors are finding ways to use social media to raise funds for their favorite causes. And most of these folks aren’t “asking permission,” they’re just doing it. Wouldn’t we all want donors like that?!

So even if Twitter or Facebook aren’t your cup of tea, it’s good to be familiar with the lingo and methods. That way when a donor starts one of these fundraising drives, you’ll be able to help her out rather than take up lots of time asking her what she’s talking about.

Hopefully I’ve convinced you to at least experiment with these tools, and helped your IT department see how helpful this can be to fundraising. But before you jump in and start spouting off all the virtues of your organization and begging people to visit your website, take a deep breath and listen to the conversation that’s already going on. Each site has its own culture and etiquette. Would you go into a business after hours and just spouting off headlines about your organization? Of course not, you’d quickly become a pariah, avoided by everyone. Just like at any networking event, it’s important to introduce yourself—you as a person not you as an organization—and engage people in conversation. Ask questions. Listen to what others are saying.

If you’re on Twitter, I’m at http://twitter.com/marcapitman. I’d love to start a conversation with you!

And if you work in an IT department, I am only beginning to fathom the enormity of the task you face each day. That which seems simple to us is usually far more complex that we’d ever imagine. But would you please consider lengthening the internet leash of your fundraising colleagues? The better they do their job, the more resources you’ll have to work with!

In the last edition, I mentioned some points taught by Betsy Rigby, Director of Development with Partners HealthCare at the New England Association for Healthcare Philanthropy annual conference in Rhode Island last month. One was the two managment theories, ingloriously named, Theory X and Theory Y. Along with of these, she mentioned the role assumptions play in management.

As managers, we really want our people to succeed. So we implicitly expect:

“success” = “what it took to get us where we are”

That assumption helps shape the systems we create, the actions we reward, and the attitude we show to our employees.

What if your basic assumption was that to be successful, you need to work at least a 60-hour work week. Preferably 80 hours, especially with some time on Saturday.

As a good manager, wanting your employees to succeed, you’d assign work expectations to meet those assumptions.

But your employees may have a different view of success. For them, a fulfilling, incredibly productive 40-hour week may be “success” because it allows for time with family and friends.

Can you see the friction? You think you’re being generous by bringing pizza to the office at 6 p.m. but they see you as being a miserable slave driver.

The toughest part is that, for you, 60-hour work weeks did bring success.

One of the most important things we can learn is that there are many paths to excellent results. As leaders, we are responsible for the results. So we need to make sure that those results are crystal clear and well defined. Goals really need to be measure on results, not the way those results are achieved. Steven Covey calls these “win-win agreements.”

But if we hired well, we can give our employees some room in getting to those results.

But why not schedule 30 minutes or an hour this week to check in with your success assumptions and whether they are positively or negatively impact your leadership?