Jeff Brooks is always full of great advice and delightful humor.
In his blog post, You Can’t Control the Conversation, he offers these tips:
Here’s what to do:
- Pay a lot of attention to your donor experience. What does it feel like to donate to your organization? Do they get acknowledged promptly? Do they learn about the impact of their giving? Do they get choices about what their money does and how you’ll communicate with them?
- Make sure what you do is really, really cool. That’s partly a matter of describing what you do in a way that wins hearts and minds. It’s doing something nobody else does, or doing it in a better way. Or doing it in a way that more closely involves donors.
- Don’t have a scandal. That’s right, just take that scandal right off your calendar. It will follow you around for a looooong time if it happens.
Donors will say things you don’t like. People will say stuff. But that’s the nature of “conversation.”
If it’s just your organization talking, it’s a monologue.
