I’ve never been bootlegged before. I’m not even sure that’s the correct phrase!

But Elaine Fogel recorded this from my Who’s Telling YOUR Nonprofit’s Story? session at the American Marketing Association’s 2011 Nonprofit Marketing Conference last week in Washington, DC.

The wider context for this segment is I’m illustrating how diverse our communication options are now. The slide immediately prior to this reminisces about having only 3 or 4 TV channels.

(c) The Fundraising Coach, LLC

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Other Possibly Related posts:

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3. Why People Ignore Your Nonprofit’s Marketing and What to Do About It

Earlier this week, I read Mark Phillips post Who should influence fundraisers? Make your vote count.

In the spirit of his post, I’ll list the names of the 10 people I voted for.

First, please choose to not be offended if your name isn’t on this list. I have the privilege of knowing many very talented people but was only able to list 10.

Second, I think I did the vote wrong. As I started listing people, I found myself listing either:

• the people that mentored me, or
• the people who’s content, books, videos I keep going back to.

In reading the Fundraising Magazine post, I see that it was intended to be the most influential in 2011. One person on my list is deceased and another retired. So I may have voted wrong.

Now that the apologies are out of the way, here’s my list:

1. Harold “Si” Seymour
   Thanks to the wonders of BookFinder.com (before it was BookFinder.com!), Si’s Designs for Fundraising was the first book I read in my fundraising career. I’ve returned to it many times and it’s still influencing me today.
2. Jerry Panas
   Jerry’s books and trainings have been influential since I got started. I had the privilege of presenting at a symposium that Jerry keynoted. He’s as personable as his writing.
3. David Dunlop
   Whether you know it or not, Dave is a giant in the field of fundraising. I had the privilege of getting to know him in the ’90s. His ideas and his imploring me to always involve volunteers in my fundraising continue to influence me. I refer to him in almost every training I do.
4. Mal Warwick
   Like the others, Mal’s writings have had a profound impact on my fundraising and my teaching others to fundraise. Mal’s clear English writing and data backed research will be guiding fundraisers for years to come.
5. Tom Ahearn
   Tom’s blunt, no-nonsense analysis of nonprofit communications is as refreshing as it is profoundly helpful. And I’m constantly impressed by how many people tell me Tom’s work influences them.
6. Kay Sprinkel Grace
   I love Kay’s donor focus. Her passion for helping nonprofits is inspiring. And she played a pivotal role in encouraging me to keep going with my first book.
7. Whitney Kuniholm
   Soon after reading Seymour’s Designs for Fundraising, my fundraising mentor Bob Grinnell handed me a small green & white booklet. It was Whitney’s The Ministry of Fundraising, a piece he wrote while he was working at Prison Fellowship. This little booklet helped me see how fundraising fit in with my Christian faith. When he told me he wasn’t planning on having it reprinted, his work became the starting point for my “Fundraising in the Bible.”
8. Amanda Rose
   This is probably the most surprising addition to the list. But Amanda Rose is the founder of Twestival. Her creative use of an emergent technology (Twitter) and her ability to motivate thousands of volunteers around the globe is amazing. She’s helping keep “fundraising” in the hands of volunteers.
9. Tom Suddes & For Impact
   I really wanted it to be Tom Suddes & Nick Fellers…but I didn’t know if having 2 names on a line would disqualify the vote. I love how the guys at ForImpact keep us focused on the big picture. And how making an impact is really what donors really are interested in.
10. Chris Davenport
    Chris’ name might not be familiar to you, but Movie Mondays probably is. His free Movie Mondays [affiliate link] are viewed by thousands around the world every week. I’m proud to be one of them. I think the global reach of these fundraising movies definitely qualify him as “influential”!

There’s my list. Even as I’ve written this post, I have thought of others equally worthy of putting on the list. Who would be on your list? Let me know in the comments.

Once you have your list, learn how to cast your vote at Fundraising Magazine poll.

(c) The Fundraising Coach, LLC

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With this guest post, I’m pleased to introduce Katya Andresen. Katya is the COO of Network for Good and the author of Robin Hood Marketing. I love Katya’s ability to help nonprofits focus their marketing and I talk about her in most of my trainings!

1. Nonprofit Narcissism

   (also commonly diagnosed as Mission Myopia)
   The dangerous habit of putting your mission statement and your needs at the heart of your messages. Get over yourself and focus on your donor and the difference she can make in the world! This isn’t about you. It’s about what your supporters can do through you.

2. Field of Dreams Syndrome

   The wrong-minded assumption that supporters should be expected to find you – and interact with you – on your website. Don’t build a fan page or donate page and expect them to come. Go to where they are online. As I like to say, if there’s a community of people congregating online to discuss the fact they were struck by lightning (www.struckbylightning.org), there is surely a community that cares about your cause already self-organizing out there somewhere.

3. Information Overload

   If you imagine more information is better, stop. Information alone does not prompt action. Spend less time innundating your supporters with facts and more time moving them with short stories and authentic engagement. Too much of anything – especially passive information – is bad for health and sanity. Less truly is more.

Give your year-end marketing a check-up to make sure it’s not afflicted by these diseases!

(c) The Fundraising Coach, LLC

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Last week Good Day New York invited me to talk about career stress in light of Steven Slater’s quitting his job by jumping out of a JetBlue plane.

The interview is below. But there was so much more that I sent to Good Day New York. The entire 5-page article is available here:
Changing Careers Without Facing Felony Charges.

Here’s the interview:

But be sure to read the article. There’s a lot more there!
Changing Careers Without Facing Felony Charges

(c) The Fundraising Coach, LLC

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I’m surprised by how many nonprofit professionals see “marketing” as a bad word, a practice that is somehow beneath them. If that’s your attitude, a new book called Guerrilla Marketing for Nonprofits will help you move beyond that and become excellent at communicating your message.

This book is packed with useful ideas, detailed strategies, and helpful tips from experienced professionals. The authors discuss crafting your message, defining your “product,” using traditional media, using new media like blogging…they even cover how to effectively use social media tools like Twitter and Facebook.

I’m thrilled that the authors also include great fundraising strategies in their coverage of marketing.

Guerrilla Marketing for Nonprofits clearly outlines ways to market your nonprofit and conduct effective fundraising initiatives. Best of all, you’ll be able to to easily implement them with relatively little cost.

Here are the chapters in the book:

1. What Nonprofits Need is Better Marketing
2. Getting to Know Nonprofit Guerrilla Marketing
3. The Guerrilla Marketer’s Personality
4. How to Turn Your Mission Statement into a Marketing Tool
5. Guerrillas Focus on People
6. Guerrillas Understand Their Marketplace
7. Mini-, Maxi-, and E-Media Weapons
8. Info-, Human-, and Non-Media Weapons
9. Attributes and Attitudes of Your Organization
10. Guerrilla Publicity
11. Guerrilla Marketing on the Web
12. Guerrilla Social Media
13. Niche Marketing Guerrilla Style
14. Meeting Needs While Changing Minds
15. Expressing Your Organization’s Unique Identity
16. Cultivating Winning Relationships for Your Nonprofit
17. Seven Golden Rules for Fundraising Success
18. Seven Platinum Rules for Recruiting Volunteers
19. Guerrilla Marketing Behavior Change
20. Launching and Maintaining Your Marketing Attack

The parts of the last chapter are indicative of the whole book:

• Write a Marketing Plan in Just Seven Sentences
• The 17 Secrets to Maintaining Your Marketing Attack
• How to Spy on Yourself and Improve Your Marketing

And that’s just one of the chapters! The subtitle of this book is “250 tactics to promote, recruit, motivate, and raise more money”. And I believe them.

Read it yourself or buy a copy to give to your favorite cause.

I know it’s a book I’ll keep returning to!

(c) The Fundraising Coach, LLC

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Waterville’s amazing librarian, Sarah Sugden passed on this terrific article from the New York Times, How to Market Your Business With Facebook.

It’s well worth reading for nonprofits too. For instance, take this great advice:

Some basic rules: Buy-buy-buy messages won’t fly. The best practitioners make Facebook less about selling and more about interacting. Engage with fans and critics. Listen to what people are saying, good and bad. You may even pick up ideas for how to improve your business. Keep content fresh. Use status updates and newsfeeds to tell fans about specials, events, contests or anything of interest.

You can read the whole article at: How to Market Your Business With Facebook.

(c) The Fundraising Coach, LLC

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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!

(c) The Fundraising Coach, LLC

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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!

(c) The Fundraising Coach, LLC

Know you should be fundraising but just need a little kick? Sign up for the weekly Fundraising Kick!

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In Secrets of Closing the Sale, Zig Ziglar says:

Each year over 5 million quarter-inch drills are sold, yet it’s safe to say that nobody wants a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.

Isn’t that great? We do that in fundraising too. Donations are our “drill.” We spend lots of time talking about donations and ways to give. But in reality, no one wants to write a check, enter a credit card number, or make a planned gift.

They want the quarter-inch hole: a specific impact from their gift.

Personally, this is alot like the problem I tend to have with the United Way. I can’t really get my head around all they do. And whether the money goes to them or the organizations they serve. So every year when I hear about the annual pledge drive, I hear “payroll deduction.”

I hear drill not hole. And I support them, but more because I have to than because I want to.

But recently, an interesting message that came through our internal email at the hospital. Look at the skilled way the sender sold us a hole:

As you all know, our 2008 United Way Campaign is coming to a close tomorrow. We are only 70% of our goal of $22,000. Please, please, please consider giving if you have already not done so! With some of our money raised last year:

• 5 domestic violence victims and their children had court advocacy and protection orders;
• Family of 4 burned out of their home had emergency food, clothing and shelter
• 10 individuals in crisis were able to get emergency response counseling
• 10 elders had a hot healthy meal delivered for 3 months
• 15 homeless individuals had 4 nights of emergency shelter and 8 meals
• 20 individuals received bereavement support due to the loss of a loved one
• 150 children had quality after school care until 6 PM

The storytelling in this email did if for me. They showed me the hole I wanted. (I’m sure they’ve probably been doing things like this every year, I just “heard” it this year.) I’m sure it helps that they listed one of my biggest hot buttons first: helping victims of domestic violence. The others are very compelling too.

What would you put on your list of holes?

It’s all about nonprofit storytelling. Do you see how telling your story can be done in one sentence? Some argue it can even be done in six words!

As we approach the New Year, will you join me in pledging to improve our storytelling ability?

If you said “yes,” here are some resources to help get you started:
Free storytelling resources

• Fundraising Coach storytelling blog posts
• Andy Goodman’s website
• an interview with Katya Andresen, author of “Robin Hood Marketing”
• Network for Good’s “7 ways to improve your storytelling”

Resources to purchase

• my Who’s Telling Your Story? – Storytelling ideas for nonprofit marketing and fundraising
• Beyond Bullet Points by Cliff Atkinson
• Jim Weiss’ retelling of classic stories

This isn’t nearly a comprehensive list, but it’s a good start. Feel free to use the comments below to suggest other storytelling resources!

(c) The Fundraising Coach, LLC

Know you should be fundraising but just need a little kick? Sign up for the weekly Fundraising Kick!

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Anyone that’s attended any of my fundraising seminars knows I’m a big fan of storytelling.

The NY Times offers a great article called 5 Tips for Telling Better Stories.

In short, they are:

1. Keep it simple
2. Openings and closings are very important
3. Be mindful of your story’s spine
4. Make sure not to alienate your audience
5. Tell the truth

It’s amazing how easy it is to miss any of these.

Read the entire post at: 5 Tips for Telling Better Stories.

Thanks to Keith Ferrazi for pointing out this link.

(c) The Fundraising Coach, LLC

Know you should be fundraising but just need a little kick? Sign up for the weekly Fundraising Kick!

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