Flash appeal - results are in!

Many of you have asked me how our results have been on our first flash appeal, especially since the consensus is that text emails perform just as good, if not better than flash. Well, we are proof that sometimes it is just worth trying for yourself.

Last year, we sent a text email mid-Dec, which is exactly when we launched our flash appeal. It brought in a total of $6,200 from 27 donors. This year, the flash appeal raised $12,547 from 66 donors, more than doubling our response from last year.

I have to admit, however, that it may not entirely be the flash appeal, as the company we worked with conducted a campaign where we keep re-sending to those who have not given (up until a certain point) and also those who have not opened, which has had a major impact.

So, for those of you that can send and track that in-house...it may be worth trying a campaign. For those of you like us that have IT challenges and can't track...it may be worth it to spend money on a vendor that has those capabilities.

Bottom line....I can't say that flash is absolutely the way to go. I can say that we have had many positive responses (especially from parents) on the presentation. My thought is that it's always good to try something new. But, if all you do is keep sending flash after flash, it may lose its appeal and perform the same as a text email.

I would love any feedback on this subject, so please feel free to comment.

Finally - our first flash appeal!

Well, we finally did it. We launched our first flash appeal yesterday and we are very excited. So far, we have received 20 donations and many positive comments in our first 24 hours. I am pleased thus far. It's been a little crazy, as we are automating our call center as we speak (a story I'll save for another post).

If you would like to see our appeal, please click here and enjoy. I welcome any feedback.

Warning - Pure Gossip Here

Don't Tell the Donor has been reporting on the Red Cross sex scandal this past week. For some reason (which I can't explain), I actually feel a little sorry for these people with their dirty laundry exposed so much, yet I'm also human and can't stay away from wanting to know the details.

If you want to know more, make sure to check out Don't Tell the Donor to get the scoop.

Saying Thank You

As we head into Thanksgiving, there isn’t a more fitting time to talk about stewarding donors than now. In honor of this holiday (one of my favorites), I thought you might appreciate some helpful websites on better stewarding your donors.

1. Twelve Ways to Say “Thank You”
This site has some good reminders on ways to steward donors. One example is to send informal photos of the results of their gifts in action. Our stewardship team has been taking photos of current facilities under construction through various phases and sending them to lead donors, so they can tangibly see the outcome of their gifts. So far they have been very well-received.

2. The Art of Recognizing and Thanking Your Donors
This is a great article, which discusses the importance of using statistics when sharing the impact of gifts.

3. Donation Thank-You Letter Mistakes to Avoid in Direct Mail Fundraising
These are some good “what not to do” situations to review.

4. Thanking Donors – Once is Never Enough
We’ve all heard that we should thank a donor seven times. This article tells you how to do it and even throws in an eighth thank you!

5. Smaller Charities Need Creativity and Care when Recognizing Donors
This article talks about the difference between acknowledgement and recognition and how not every donor wants/needs to be recognized, but every donor should be acknowledged.

Besides the fact that Thanksgiving dinner is my favorite meal of all time, I value the opportunity to reflect on all that I am grateful for. As I reflect this year, I feel fortunate to have all of you who continue to challenge me daily in your quest to make a difference. I think we should all take a moment to realize the cumulative time and effort that is spent on making this world a better place through our philanthropic work. Thank you for all you do. May you and your family have a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday!

"As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them."
– John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917–1963), 35th President of the United States

"Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it."
– William Arthur Ward, author and teacher

Face-booking Your Cause

I apologize for the short hiatus. Is anyone else feeling a bit crazy this month?

Charlie Melichar from Intermedia commented on my last post about social networking. I promised I would post my thoughts on Facebook and how we currently use this social networking site and our plans for the future.

First off, I think Facebook, My Space, etc. makes our job easier. If you really think about it, there really shouldn’t be any reason why we aren’t raising more money now than 10 years ago. Ten years ago we relied mostly on direct mail pieces and the phonathon (with manual sheets). Today, we have automated phone centers and other vehicles like online giving, recurring giving and social networking sites such as Facebook, Linked In and online alumni communities to help locate and engage our alumni. Ten years ago, we relied solely on the alumni office to connect our alums. Today, students and young alumni are self-connecting through these sites. How can we not capitalize on this?

Some of the ways we are using Facebook at Gonzaga include:

• We’ve created an official Gonzaga alumni group on Facebook - we’re using this group to get important information out (i.e. Young Alumni Weekend announcements).


• We’ve created a Sr. Fund Kickoff Event - we invited all the seniors mainly through this site and we had more than 100 confirmed attendees (150 actually attended). More importantly, we had 168 maybes and 148 reply that they were not able to attend. So, that means more than 400 seniors (nearly 50% of our population) heard about the Sr. Fund solely through this one vehicle.


• We have a Telefund group to inform current Telefund employees as well as keep Telefund alumni connected to the University.


• We have posted employment advertisements for Telefund callers and our Sr. Fund chair.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. In Newsweek’s “Face-booking Philanthropy” they explain the new “Cause application” which allows Facebook users to tap into the hidden viral power of their social networks for good causes. Since the “Causes” application launched, 27,000 Facebook causes have been created to benefit 12,000 pre-existing nonprofit organizations, charities, relief groups, churches and political parties.

I don’t know what our plans will be exactly in the next five years with social networking, but you can bet that very soon, you will see Gonzaga University as a cause. I’ll keep you posted on the results!

Inspiring Thoughts - Alumni Relations and Annual Giving Working Together

I am so excited to share my first blog interview with all of you today. I asked Andy Shaindlin, the Executive Director of the Caltech Alumni Association at the California Institute of Technology to be my first interviewee.

Andy is also the creator of Alumni Futures, a blog for alumni relations professionals, which looks towards the future in advancing that field. I actually modeled Inspired Annual Giving after Andy's blog and I highly recommend subscribing, as it is helpful to know the challenges and opportunities our colleagues in alumni are facing. I asked Andy to be my first interview on Inspired Annual Giving because I believe that in order to achieve the greatest success in philanthropic support, there must be a good partnership between alumni relations and annual giving. I hope this information helps any of you that want to better partner with your alumni relations department.

Dori Sonntag (DS): You've been in the alumni relations profession for years and have done some consulting as well. You obviously know the advancement realm well and have seen many alumni and development operations. So, in your opinion, how can alumni relations and annual giving professionals better partner and experience success for both programs?

Andy Shaindlin (AS): I've been in alumni relations since 1989. There are some historical conceptual differences between fundraising and alumni relations which will be with us for a long time. But there are some clear-cut opportunities for alumni programs and annual giving to partner, as you suggest, and to bolster each other's achievements. One such area is volunteer management. These programs share a reliance on volunteers, both for "work in the trenches" and for leadership. It goes without saying that an office with a strong volunteer management system should share best internal practices and should do so actively across campus. A logical outcome of this would be more well-educated and better trained volunteers who can serve many programs. For example, an annual fund chair who is stepping down is a good candidate for an alumni board position. This person can educate alumni relations volunteers - and staff - about the importance of annual giving, while creating formal and informal links between the programs. That can make it easier to create a collaborative culture in the long run.

Staffing partnerships are another kind of opportunity. Any school with reunion programs can create ways for alumni and development staff to share the labor and benefits of volunteer and event management. This goes beyond class reunions; at Caltech we recently started staff-led "House Reunions," since undergrad Houses (dorms) are the strongest campus affinity for most of our undergrads. Larger institutions will have school and college reunions, and there are always special interest groups - fraternities and sororities, student group reunions (such as marching band or school newspaper), or even academic groups, which might organize graduate alumni reunions. Staff can and should collaborate in all these areas.

Anecdotally, I am hearing more examples of annual giving programs coming into the same shop on campus as alumni relations. The necessity for integrated programs in these offices goes without saying.

One final thought. In a survey of our alumni a few years ago, we learned that a large fraction of our alumni did not know that the Alumni Association and the Annual Fund were completely separate offices. But we also learned that a large number (though still less than half) didn't seem to care one way or the other whether the organizations were separate or not. This may not be an argument in favor of integrating the offices, but it's certainly an indication that we shouldn't panic if alumni mistake the alumni staff for the annual fund sometimes.

DS: Many alumni associations still have dues paying memberships. Do you have any suggestions how to better coordinate memberships to the alumni association and also annual fund gifts so we aren't nickel and diming donors?

AS: A couple of things are very clear here. First of all, it's important that both kinds of organizations be willing to have a "check off" on their solicitation materials for the other group. So when someone pays dues to join the alumni association, they should also have the opportunity to make an annual gift. And vice versa, all other things being equal. Second, we should give donors credit for knowing how they want to support the institution. But for them to make good decisions, and for us to respect their intentions, we have a responsibility to state very clearly what their options are and how they are related. If someone is presented with a line for membership dues and a line for an annual gift, we cannot assume they understand the difference. But we have an obligation to make sure they are not confused because of something we wrote, or something we omitted.

I'll even go a little further - we have an obligation to our institutions to explain things as clearly as possible, so that we don't accidentally encourage alumni to "under-give." If someone sincerely believes that his membership dues count as his annual gift then we haven't done enough to educate the donor, and we'll end up selling our institutions short.

DS: How do you suggest we educate current seniors on the difference between the alumni association membership and their donation to the school?

AS: I think that a membership dues organization will do best to stress the connection between dues and benefits. I think the current crop of students and young alumni view this as a value proposition - they ask, "What do I get in exchange for my $55?" or however much they are paying. It's not a cynical question, they're just making an investment decision, and they want a good return. An email account with adequate storage and a school email address? A subscription to an additional publication which non-members pay for? Library access? Discounts on season football tickets, or on campus bookstore purchases? These have tangible value.

This is different from a gift. We know statistically about the importance of establishing a habit of giving, and we've seen the numbers which suggest that if you don't get a gift within the first five years after an alumnus leaves campus, you will never see a donation from that person. So one message about giving by seniors should probably be that the amount is not as important as the act of participating.

DS: What do you think of the term: FRIENDRAISING?

AS: As a definition for what alumni associations do I don't like it at all. I actually nominated that word as one of the "two most hated words" in advancement in a blog posting on Alumni Futures. It suggests that alumni relations is somehow disconnected from, or an alternative to fundraising, and that this work is not measurable. And a good development officer is a friendraiser too, right?

It's worth noting that some folks use the word to denote the process of cultivating relationships with people who are not students, parents, staff, faculty, alumni or donors - yet. This is probably a good use of the word. But used carelessly it can give the impression that alumni relations is no more than "filling fruit cups," as someone quipped. Done right, alumni work is much, much more than that, and done well, alumni relations makes fundraisers' efforts more successful.

DS: What do you like best about your job?

AS: I'm supporting efforts I believe are really important: education and research. And being able to work with such bright and successful people (alumni, staff, faculty and students) is a real privilege.

DS: If you could pick any other area of advancement to work, what would it be and why?

AS: I'm really interested in the rapid evolution of tools for communicating with our audiences. So I'd have to say that communications is a key area. It's converging with alumni relations and development more quickly than at any previous time, and alumni directors should be ready to play a part in making that convergence effective for the institution and relevant to the alumni.

Thank you Andy for paving the way for Inspired Annual Giving and for graciously agreeing to be interviewed!

Webinar Review - Staffing and Turnover: Recruiting in a Seller's Market

I attended the webinar hosted by Bentz Whaley Flessner last week on Staffing and Turnover: Recruiting in a Seller's Market. I have attended some of BWF's webinars in the past and they are all worthwhile.

Below are the highlights from this particular session:

• 2/3 of donors give because of the organization itself, therefore, staffing is critical.


• Around 2015, you will see a 15% drop in 35-44 year-old employees in the workforce.
  
• 76% of current employees nationally are looking for new employment – how do you keep your stars?
  
• The unemployment rate for someone with a bachelor’s degree is only 1.7% - people don’t NEED jobs!


• Voluntary turnover at the professional level rose 5% the last two years and rose 3% at the administrative level (7% at the sales level)


• You need to develop high standards for recruiting. Only the best to join your team.


• You also need to have high standards for performance. Only the best can stay on your team.This instills a sense of pride in being a member, creates excitement and lower turnover.
  
• There is a high cost for low performers.
  
• You pay a high price for turnover – donor relationships, most importantly. You need to focus on retaining your best talent!


• Who are the top 10% of employees (at various levels) – those who if your President or Dean needed a project done – who could you turn to? Who is critical to meeting your goals?


• How can you retain your best talent? How do you take care of your best people? What “stars” need to be retained and promoted in the future?


• What impact would losing one performer have on your fundraising efforts? What if you lost two? How much value do you forgeo by hanging on to poor performers?


• What should be the balance between developing your own talent and bringing in talent from the outside?


• What are other ways to show value other than $? (One example is that the chair of the campaign at one school rewarded people with a trip to Aspen)


• Do you have a promotional pyramid? Should you develop one? If people don’t see a structure to move up, they will move on.


• What is your #1 talent brand? In marketing there are three factors: product, brand and price. You won’t win on all three, so what does your institution have that you won't get working at other development offices? Is it money? Is it flexibility? Is it teamwork? What is it that you should be promoting?


• Do you believe having better people is how you will improve your development operation and maximize gift support? Do you believe that strengthening your staff and their expertise is crucial to your job? If so, then you need to make it a priority.

If you attend a conference or webinar and are interested in writing a review, please contact me at inspiredannualgiving@gmail.com.