september 2009 journal of the dma nonprofit federation

It is a remarkable statement on the character of the American people that in difficult economic times, individuals give gener-ously to those who are less fortunate than themselves. President

Kennedy once said, “The raising of extraordinarily large sums of money, given voluntarily and freely by millions of our fellow Amer-icans, is a unique American tradition.” This spirit of generosity is something we should celebrate and promote, not discourage. Unfor-tunately, the Obama Administration has proposed reducing the tax deduction for charitable giving, which would discourage individu-als from giving money at a time when many are struggling.

Charities provide invaluable public services to those in need, es-pecially during difficult economic times. The services provided by charitable organizations are frequently more targeted, more effec-tive, and more sustainable than comparable government services.

Volume 12: Issue 3 | September 2009

Also in this Issue

9 Premium Fundraising: Where Art Meets Science 11 State Charity Registration Laws 16 The Way We Write Is All Wrong 23 New Leadership, New Century: NAACP Case Study 26 Cutting Your Print Newsletter? Think Again! And MORE...

cont. on page 6

Charitable Giving Should not be PunishedUnited States Senator John Thune, South Dakota

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ChAIrSusan M. LothDisabled American Veterans (DAV)

VICe ChAIrGeoffrey W. PetersCDR Fundraising Group

MeMbersMary ArnoldChildFund International

Vinay BhagatConvio

Jennifer BielatEaster Seals

Mary BoguckiAmergent

Brian CowartALSAC/St. Jude

Ken DawsonInfoCision Management Corporation

Diana EstremeraMay Development Services

Karen GleasonAmerican Cancer Society

Jeanne HarrisSCA Direct

Tom HarrisonRuss Reid Company

Beth IsikoffMerkle

Karin KirchoffDefenders of Wildlife

Mimi LeClairMercy Home for Boys & Girls

Steve MaggioDaVinci Direct

Kristin McCurryMINDset Direct

Matt PanosFood for the Hungry

Chris ParadyszParadyszMatera

Chris RagusaEstee Marketing Group, Inc.

Kyla ShawyerOperation Smile

David StraussNational Wildlife Federation

Atul TandonUnited Way

Kim WalkerMemorial Sloan-KetteringCancer Center

Kathy WardAmerican Institute for Cancer Research

sTAFFChristopher QuinnExecutive Director

Helen LeeSenior Director

Alicia OsgoodMembership Manager

2009 LeadershipFollowing are the members of the DMA Nonprofit Federation’s Advisory Council:

MAnAgIng edITor: Alicia Osgood

PubLICATIon desIgn: Andy Farkas, SCA Direct

News UpdateNonprofit Only News & Information

Delivered to Your Inbox Each ThursdayContact Alicia Osgood @ [email protected] to sign-up!

3

Much has transpired in the nonprofit and charitable sector since our last issue. Before delv-ing into those matters, however, I want to thank everyone who attended our 2009 New York Nonprofit Conference. It was a stellar program and truly wonderful to see so many people from around the country. Our speakers received overwhelmingly positive reviews and the networking event at Papillon Bistro made for a terrific time.

None of these good times would have been possible without the extraordinary work of the con-ference co-chairs, Lynn Edmonds of LW Robbins Associates, Independent Fundraising Consul-tant Margaret Carter and Craig Zeltsar of NNE Marketing. Lynn, Margaret and Craig were sup-ported by an extraordinarily dedicated Planning Committee who overcame any obstacle in their way. Everyone involved brought their A game to the table and for that we are most grateful.

In the midst of the conference, the Federation formally welcomed our new Advisory Council leadership into their roles. Susan Loth of Disabled American Veterans is now Chair of the Advisory Council and Geoffrey Peters of CDR Fundraising Group is now Vice Chair. We also welcomed three new members to the Advisory Council: Ken Dawson of InfoCision Management Corporation, Karen Gleason of American Cancer Society and Kyla Shawyer of Operation Smile. With such an immensely talented and accomplished group of people behind us, there is no limit to what the Federation will achieve in the coming year. We also said farewell to outgoing Ad-visory Council Chair Jo Sullivan of ASPCA as well as another long time menber of the Council, Joan Wheatley of Special Olympics. They will be missed. Technology is something that has changed here as well. The DMA Nonprofit Federation has em-braced the times and expanded our reach by entering the world of social networking. The Federa-tion has its very own LinkedIn group and Twitter account. Links to sign-up for both our LinkedIn group and to follow us on Twitter are available on our website www.nonprofitfederation.org.

Be on the lookout for new and improved communications as we refine our methods to keep you informed in the most efficient and effective way. You will find this Journal a bit thicker than past issues. Look for expert advice on acquisition, harvesting the power of online and the brave new world of fundraising via social networking. A hallmark of each issue will be a Legislative and Regulatory section. Coverage will include pending legislation and articles by elected of-ficials, such as this issue’s cover article by United States Senator John Thune of South Dakota.

I hope you enjoy this edition of the Journal. We welcome any feedback you have on this or any future issue.

Yours truly,

Christopher M. QuinnExecutive Director

Letter from the Executive Director Christopher M. Quinn, Executive Director

4 5

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unITed sTATes PosTAL serVICe:

The United States Postal Service con-tinues to experience unprecedented declines in mail volume and revenue and projects a net loss of $7 billion this fiscal year. The Government Ac-countability Office has again placed the financial condition of the Postal Service on its High-Risk List. Faced with such daunting challenges, the Postal Service has launched programs with incentive pricing for increased volume including the current Summer Sale. Congress has also examined several options to ease the financial burden including a restructuring of payments to the Retiree Health Ben-efit Fund (introduced as HR 22 and S 1507) as well as studying the impact of reducing the number of days of delivery to five days a week from the current six.

ChArITAbLe deduCTIon:

As the debate continues on Health Care Reform through its August recess, Congress searches for a way to provide adequate financing for this legislation. Although currently not found in any legislation, reducing the charitable deduction rate for those who make over $250,000 from 35% to 28% remains an option. There is also a modified version of this proposal which would take effect in 2011 when

tax rates increase to 36% or 39.6%. The modified version would then keep the deduction rates at 33% and 35% instead of rising with the tax rates. Our staff and the DMANF-lead Coali-tion continue to monitor this issue and meet with members of Congress stating our firm opposition to any disincentive to give.

ConsuMer FInAnCIAL ProTeCTIon AgenCy ACT:The Administration has proposed a bill, the Consumer Financial Protec-tion Agency Act (CFPA), which would give sweeping authority to a newly created agency to protect consumers in the financial services and products area by transferring authority from a number of existing federal agencies, including the FTC, to the new agency. As currently written, the CFPA is too broad and goes beyond consolidating the actions of the financial regulators in one agency, and includes broad authority over the advertising and marketing of a wide range of financial products and services, which could potentially include many nonprofit organizations. CFPA would also give the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) greater rulemaking powers in these areas, as well as expand the scope of the FTC’s remaining enforcement authority over non-financial activ-ity. CFPA would also give the FTC

authority to pursue those who assist others in violating the FTC act. Our staff continues to monitor this legisla-tion as it moves forward and will keep you apprised of further developments.

onLIne behAVIorAL AdVerTIsIng:Online Behavioral Advertising (OBA) is the collection of information for the marketing of offers or charitable solicitations based on a user’s pref-erences while online. Privacy and other interest groups are advocating for increased regulation of behavioral advertising. In response to calls from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to develop more far-reaching self-regulatory guidelines for behavioral advertising, DMA and a coalition of key trade groups have released comprehensive privacy principles for the use and collection of behavioral data in online advertising. The new principles are the result of an unprec-edented collaboration of representa-tives from the entire marketing-media community. These principles will be incorporated into DMA Member Guidelines.

For questions or concerns, please contact Chris Quinn at 202.861.2410 or via email [email protected]. Also contact Alicia Osgood at 202.861.2427 or via email [email protected] if you are not already receiving our weekly News Update.

PubLIC PoLICy sCoreCArd

6 7

I am not suggesting that people make charitable donations solely in the interest of receiving a tax break. In-stead, Congress has long used the tax code as a means to facilitate charita-ble giving. While the charitable dona-tion deduction is not the primary mo-tivation for generosity, any decrease in the deduction will limit potential philanthropy, with the beneficiaries of charitable organizations suffering the most.

In 2007, Americans gave more than $300 billion, roughly two percent of our gross domestic product, to chari-table causes. Roughly three-fourths of these donations came from individu-als. This scale of generosity is un-matched in the world. It is estimated that 70 percent of American house-holds make charitable contributions on an annual basis. Studies of the reduction of the charitable tax deduction proposed by President Obama earlier this year indicate a reduction in charitable giv-ing by as much as $8 to $16 billion annually. To impose these losses on charities at a time when the troubled economy is already costing charitable organizations billions of dollars would be disastrous.

The Foundation Center, a leading authority on American philanthropy, recently released a report detailing the severe impact of the economic downturn on charitable organizations. According to the report, foundations lost over $150 billion in assets in 2008. A recent survey of 900 non-profit organizations found that only 12 percent of surveyed organizations expected to finish 2009 with an op-erating surplus, compared to the 40 percent that ended the year with an operating surplus in 2008.

Protecting the full tax deduction for charitable giving should be a top legislative priority for the nonprofit sector. President Obama’s Fiscal Year 2010 Budget proposed reduc-ing the deduction, and the President and administration budget officials have continually defended the pro-posal. Earlier this year, I offered a

“Sense of the Senate” resolution as an amendment to the National Service Bill that expressed support for the preservation of the full deduction for charitable giving. Unfortunately, the amendment failed in the Senate by a single vote.

The issue was again debated in the Senate when the FY2010 budget was considered. I again offered an amend-ment to preserve the full tax deduc-tion for charitable giving, and this time the amendment was successful by an overwhelming, bipartisan 94 to 3 vote. Unfortunately, my amendment was not included in the final budget resolution.

The issue of tax deductions for chari-table giving is not likely to go away. A struggling economy means more fami-lies and individuals will need extra assistance, which will lead to further strain on the budgets of charitable organizations. I am confident that Americans will continue to be gener-ous with charitable donations and vol-unteer work to help the less fortunate, and I believe the federal government should remain dedicated to facilitat-ing private acts of charity and com-passion. Together, we must continue to raise awareness of this issue in the United States Congress to ensure that the unique American tradition of giv-ing continues.

John Thune represents the state of South Dakota in the United States Senate. Thune serves on the Agriculture, Nutrition & Forestry Committee, the Armed Services Committee, the Commerce, Science & Transportation Committee, and the Small Business Committee.

Charitable giving should not be Punished continued from cover

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Using premiums in fundraising makes sense. As mailboxes become increasingly crowded, adding some bulk to a fundraising package that is well designed may be what gets your mail piece opened. Sometimes, the

desire to see what gift lies within is enough motivation to open the envelope. As numerous nonprofit organizations would agree, choosing the right premium for your donors is not always easy.

This is where art and science come together. Whether you’re choosing a premium to illustrate your mission, the season, or your donors’ interests, effectively using them throughout your program will allow you to increase and retain your donor base more rapidly. To create the right combination, you need a mix of eye-catching art, compelling copy and a premium that relates to your donors.

Knowing why your donors identify with and give to your organization is important. This will help you determine what your particular constituents identify with, since the premiums that work for one organization might not work for yours. Or, what previously didn’t work might work now. The Guideposts Foundation learned this when they retested a greeting card package against the longstanding stacked premium control. By replacing the notepad, labels and bookmark package with five all occasion cards, the organization saw a lift in response of 84 percent.

With the results of previous mailings as your guide, the trick is to continually test and retest. If you have a control that is showing signs of fatigue, there are several ways to reinvigorate that campaign, such as testing a backend premium against the control. A small sports membership organization did that with success. Their backend offer of a T-shirt at the $35 gift level raised both response and average gift. The offer, which mailed in conjunction with a name label package, beat their existing control name label package without the backend offer. Before moving forward with a back end offer, however, it is imperative that you work all of the fulfillment details out in advance. Fulfilling an offer within the promised timeframe will build trust with your donors, and in turn strengthen their relationship with your organization.

Another way to strengthen a donor’s relationship with your organization is to offer premiums as a way of saying “thank you.” For major or frequent givers, it is important to recognize their continued and future support. As it is less expensive to renew a donor than it is to acquire

Premium FundraisingWhere ArT MeeTs sCIenCeBy Megan Gibeau and Andrea Manseau, PEP Direct

10 11

one, creating loyal donors through sending a high velocity or logo-treated premium is beneficial to your organization.

Some other things you should do when selecting a premium for your program are:

• Trydifferenttypesofpremiums.Usable premiums, such as notepads and name & address labels will work for some programs, while response enhancers like decals and photo cards will work in others. Remember, though, that finding the premium with the right fit will take some testing and time.

• Capitalizeonholiday-relatedpremiums or significant times of year with ties to your organization. National awareness days and months connected to your mission are great times to reach out to your donors.

• Beobjectivewhenchoosingyourpremiums. Sometimes the most effective programs don’t resonate with you or your agency, but they work with your donors.

• Testapremiuminaweakerappeal slot. It might be the extra something needed to make that appeal more successful.

• Testandretest!Apremiumthatworks for another organization might not work for yours. Also remember to test other elements of the package, such as gift ask strings, copy and art.

While all of the above points will get you on the path toward a thriving premium program, there are many factors that could derail your success:

• Forgettingtokeeppostalrequirements and costs in

mind. The format you choose may bump you into another mail class, resulting in higher postage than you have budgeted for the program.

• Ignoringwhatotherfundraisersare mailing. Remember that what is working for them might not work for you, but they can serve as a reference and be the inspiration for your next strategic breakthrough.

• Assumingthatthepremiumthatworks for one donor segment will work for all. Maybe men and

women respond differently to calendars or greeting cards, or different age groups respond to different art. Keep testing until you find the right mix.

• Expectingthepremiumtosingle-handedly improve your results. It needs to work in concert with the rest of the elements.

• Disregardingtheadviceofyouragency. They have experience working across different types of organizations and their insights may prove invaluable.

Using premiums has worked for many large, established nonprofits, as well as many smaller, regional ones. Approaching the process of choosing the premiums for your fundraising program with both art – a beautifully and aptly designed package with gripping copy – and science – results and testing – in mind is the best thing you can do to get your mail

noticed and opened, the first step towards creating a donor for life.

Megan Gibeau is Vice President, Strategic and Client Services, and Andrea Manseau is Sales & Marketing Specialist for PEP Direct, a full-service direct marketing agency specializing in strategic premium fundraising. They can be reached at [email protected] and [email protected].

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10 11

As you prepare your direct mail, email, website or other solicitation for your nonprofit clients, you will add considerable value to your work

if you alert your clients to the implications of new IRS requirements and state charity registration laws. All states have laws that require charities to register with officials when they solicit. Your clients cannot stop fundraising—it’s their lifeblood. Yet they should know how to operate their programs in compliance with the laws.

State charity registration laws have been ignored for decades. Until earlier this year, I wouldn’t have been allotted space to write about them. There is no penalty for breaking most of them and the few states that have penalties rarely enforce them, so there has been no incentive to comply. That is, until the IRS stepped in.

This year, the Service’s vastly revised Form 990 comes into effect, with a few hundred new questions and a score of new schedules. Form 990 is the information return filed annually by nearly all nonprofits. With this first update in about 30 years come two questions asking explicitly about your clients’ compliance with laws where they must register.

While it is just two questions, there is a great deal of work that goes into answering them completely. Do your clients know where their organizations must reg-ister or seek exemption?

The state registration laws—different in every state and the District of Columbia—agree on one thing: nonprofits register in states where they solicit. ‘Solici-

tation’ means different things across the states, but the various definitions fall into a few categories.

In many states, like Arizona, Florida, Illinois, New Jersey and New York, the mere existence of a website that accepts donations is a solicitation. Do your cli-ents offer their donors online giving options? If so, they must register in the above listed states as well as others.

Add California and Utah to the list if your clients send emails or otherwise encourage donors to go to a web-site where they can make a donation. Add in Texas if your clients encourage online giving through direct mail or by phone.

Email that requests a gift irrespective of a website is a solicitation that triggers registration in all of the above states plus Massachusetts, Oregon and Washington.

Direct mail requesting a donation is a solicitation in all states and that may have the most significance for your company’s nonprofit clients.

In order to answer those Form 990 questions, chari-ties must research the requirements in every state in which they solicit donations. In Part VI of the 990 charities are asked for a list of states where they must file the 990. It’s a part of the registration requirements in nearly every state. Schedule G asks in which states the charity is registered or if the states have notified them of exemption from registration.

All this brings us to an interesting point. Exemptions

Tony Martignetti, Managing Director of Martignetti Planned Giving Advisors, LLC

Part I

OMB No. 1545-0047 Return of Organization Exempt From Income Tax 990 Form

Under section 501(c), 527, or 4947(a)(1) of the Internal Revenue Code (except black lungbenefit trust or private foundation) Department of the Treasury

Internal Revenue Service

� The organization may have to use a copy of this return to satisfy state reporting requirements. For the 2008 calendar year, or tax year beginning , 2008, and ending , 20

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Part II

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Gross receipts $

Doing Business As

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b sTATe ChArITy regIsTrATIon LAWs:What Direct Marketers

shoulD tell their clients

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exist in close to all the states; some are quite broad while others are rather narrow. In many of the states that offer exemption, the organization must apply for it and receive a decree that they qualify. In others, the institution decides it is exempt and moves on to the next state.

Where you sit usually determines where you stand in these areas. If you are a state or federal regulator, you would most likely see narrow exemptions in the best interest of the public. Narrow exemptions provide the broadest protection from charity fraud, but then you would have to process more registrations. Registration is typically processed through a state’s attorney gener-al or secretary of state. Florida is an exception, where registration is processed through the Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services. In D.C., charities work with the Department of Consumer & Regulatory Affairs and the Office of Tax and Revenue.

Regulators and legislators alike might favor limited exemptions because they increase revenue. There are fees for registration, which, for the largest nonprof-its, can run as high as $400 in Florida and $300 in California. Like many others, fees in those states are graduated based on gross revenue in a year. A few thoughtful states base the fee on revenue from within their borders. Surprisingly, New York’s price tag is a low $25 for all comers, plus another $25 for the larg-est. Perhaps I shouldn’t publicize that…

Not surprisingly, nonprofits are looking for the widest exemptions. Nonprofits come in all stripes and in-clude broad charitable missions like education, health care and religion. In Arizona, though, your clients are

required to register unless they are a government body or fundraising for a political cause. But that’s not the most onerous state—or should I say ‘comprehensive?’ Some jurisdictions, including D.C., Idaho and Indiana, offer no exemptions at all.

The federal Form 990 exemptions will shrink over the next few years. Currently, every nonprofit with gross receipts of at least $1 million or total assets of $2.5 million or more must file the 990. In two years, those thresholds will be down to $200,000 and $500,000. If it’s not already there, the Form 990 is coming to a nonprofit near you. Those exempt from the 990 are not forgotten. There’s a 990EZ, with one registration-lite inquiry.

The nonprofit 990 filing requirement is an impetus for ‘getting right’ with state registration laws where your nonprofit clients solicit donations. The 990 is filed four-and-a-half months after the close of the fiscal year and one of your client’s officers signs it under penalty of perjury.

Your clients should also want to operate on the right side of the law. It’s the right way to do business.

And while enforcement at the state level is near non-existent, do they want to take the chance that they will end up a test case? Do their board members know they are asking them to take that chance? If their charity is not registered where they solicit, it is break-ing the law. Under the principles of fiduciary duty, the charity’s board members can be held individually liable.

Most states don’t have penalties but some do. Further-more, in some states the penalty is part of the criminal code. In Florida you are looking at a 3rd degree felony and an up to $5,000 fine. There is the potential for jail time as well—it’s a felony. And Florida offers very limited exemptions: soliciting for a named individual (think child’s cancer treatment fund) or only from the organization’s members. That’s it. Likewise, in Ari-zona, Pennsylvania and Washington, noncompliance is criminal. In most states the penalties are civil, so while there will be no perp walk for your clients’ CEOs and CFOs, the fines can be hefty. For instance, fines run as high as $25,000 in Georgia.

To stay on the right side of these laws requires more

Your clients should also want to operate on the right side of the law. It’s the right way to do business.

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than initial registration. Notice that I slipped an ad-jective in to introduce the foreboding new phrase ‘ini-tial registration.’ In the majority of states, an organiza-tion will have to renew registration annually, and file a financial report as well.

Renewal isn’t typically as memorable as their first time, but they do have to remember the anniversaries and spend some time together.

There is a long-term, less palpable consequence of be-ing outside the laws. Your clients risk a gift challenge down the road from a family member or heir who has some (probably pecuniary) motive for making trouble over a solicitation. An attorney will look for any way to invalidate a gift and by having it ruled illegal—be-cause the nonprofit was not registered at the time—will go pretty far in that endeavor. There is no end to the mischief that can be made when a disgruntled heir hires an enterprising attorney.

State charity registration laws are a messy web with which to tangle. They are not complex, but they are time consuming and cost some money. As soon as your nonprofit clients have a website with a donation page, or email a request for a gift, or mail a solicita-tion, they are in the thick of it.

Here is a plan for how your clients can get started. Charity begins at home, so they should register first in their home state. I trust by now you recognize this does not mean incorporating in the state. This is also not registering a Charitable Gift Annuity program, for your clients that have one and if their state requires it. Those having been completed, your clients must com-ply with this additional layer of home-state regulation.

Then I recommend the charity look at where they (or you) send the largest number of solicitations. If their fundraising is mostly from online giving, I am talking about web based solicitations. Rank the states in de-scending order of population and start at the top, work-ing through the states where the website is considered a solicitation. California is the most populous state. I described their definition of ‘solicitation’ above. (I am sorry, but I cannot go into detail state-by-state because if I apply the law to direct a specific action then I am giving legal advice. In an article, I can only go so far as to tell you what the law says.)

I suggest a government source for population ranking for greater reliability. I would look to the U.S. Census Bureau (www.census.gov) as the source.

If the solicitations are not primarily through a website then I would presume they are mostly using email or direct mail. Rather than relying on an outside source, they should start with their own database. Select those they solicit and query for state of primary residence, getting output ranked in descending order by state frequency. Start the registrations at the top, with the state where they (or you) send the most solicitations.

With time devoted to taking on a few new states every month, your clients will achieve compliance. And re-member, they might enjoy exemption in some places. Remember too, there are some exemptions for which they must apply.

Whether or not your clients adopt my plan or proceed down another path, they must get started. In order to protect their organization’s good name, their board and their officers, your nonprofit clients need to operate on the right side of state charity registration laws. They cannot ignore them any longer.

Tony has been supporting the fundraising needs of nonprofits since 1997. He is the author of Charity Registration: State-by-State Guidelines for Compliance and Managing Director of Martignetti Planned Giving Advisors, LLC. His two websites are www.StateCharity-Registration.com and www.mpgadv.com. To contact Tony, email him at [email protected].

As soon as your nonprofit clients have a website with a donation page or email a request for a gift they are in the

thick of it.

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scenes from the 2009 new york nonprofit Conference

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A new kind of data mining from the scholarship of linguistics and rhetoric has uncov-ered disturbing artifacts in the discourse of fundraising. These discoveries are the product of my doctoral studies at The Peter Drucker School of Management and

Claremont Graduate University School of Educational Studies.

I Found ThAT The dIsCourse oF FundrAIsIng Is broKen.

Like a linguistic MRI, my computer-based corpus analysis revealed surprising linguistic and rhetorical patterns in fundraising texts. These underlying patterns profiled a discourse focused more on transferring information than creating interpersonal involvement. Fund-raising texts sounded cold and detached like doctoral dissertations rather than warm and friendly like personal conversations. Rather than gaining reader attention with emotionally rich human-interest stories, these texts contained less narrative than academic prose. They contained even less narrative than official documents!

A seVere judgMenT? ProbAbLy. ACCurATe? unForTunATeLy, yes.

These counterintuitive conclusions grew out of research that mined 1.5 million words of on-line and printed fundraising texts from America’s largest charities. Of the 880 organizations represented, 735 reported direct support of $20 million or more on IRS form 990, line 1a or 1b. I analyzed 2,412 web- and print-based documents across nine philanthropic sectors. The largest study of its kind to date, my research offers insights that can help improve com-munication among fundraisers at all levels—from direct mail to major gifts. The method-ology was patterned after research Ulla Connor and Thomas Upton of Indiana University conducted that examined 316 fundraising letters (2003).

The Way we write *

*is all wrong

A Profile of and Prescription for Fixing The broken discourse of FundraisingFrank C. Dickerson Ph.D.

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My sTudy WAs bAsed on A MuLTIVArIATe FACTor AnALysIs.

Douglas Biber (1988) performed a factor analysis that profiled approxi-mately 960,000 words contained in three corpora (bodies) of texts. The first was the LOB (Lancaster-Oslo/Bergen) corpus that represented a wide range of published documents. The second was the London-Lund corpus, comprised of spoken English that included panel discussions, private conversations, interviews, telephone conversations, radio broadcasts, spontaneous and public speeches. The third corpus was a col-lection of personal and professional letters. Analysis of these corpora yielded profiles for 23 text types (al-ternatively referred to as genres or registers). Biber’s seminal work laid the foundation for follow-up studies that measured and compared the linguistic content of new text types against the linguistic benchmarks his groundbreaking factor analysis calibrated for spoken and written English.

As A ruLer desCrIbes LengTh, LInguIsTIC

sCALes reFLeCT A TexT’s CoMMunICATIVe AIM.

Biber’s factor analysis measured 67 linguistic features in texts, and discovered that certain groups of features occurred together to achieve specific communicative aims. Per-sonal pronouns, contractions and private verbs (e.g. I think, I feel) co-occurred to create interpersonal involvement in personal letters and conversation — two genres located on one pole of a continuum between

high involvement and high informa-tion. Conversely, on the high infor-mation pole of the same continuum, long words and nominalizations that transform verbs and adjectives into nouns by adding ion or ity (e.g. eval-uate becoming evaluation or intense becoming intensity) co-occurred in order to serve the communicative aim of creating an informational focus in genres like academic prose.

I MeAsured And CoMPAred The

LInguIsTIC ConTenT oF FundrAIsIng TexTs To bIber’s 23 genres.

While the analogy of a ruler is helpful, Biber’s analytic framework measures texts on seven dimensions of variation, a procedure he calls multi-dimensional analysis. So to be adequate my analogy would need to stretch and include an ensemble of measures like those a doctor makes when he or she draws blood for a bat-tery of tests, weighs you on a scale, measures your blood pressure, etc.

My study measured fundraising texts on five of Biber’s seven dimensions of variation. I summarize and bench-mark scores on two of those dimen-sions in Tables 2 and 4. The analysis included four steps: 1.) first I tagged and tallied counts of linguistic

Table 1. The Twenty-eight Salient Linguistic Features Whose Co-Occurrence Defines Dimension 1

Positive Features: DO as pro-verb BE as main verb Sentence relatives Negative Features:

Private verbs Analytic negation Causative subordination WH-questions Nouns

THAT-deletion Demonstrative pronouns Discourse particles Possibility modals Word length

Contractions General emphatics Indefinite pronouns Non-phrasal coordination Prepositions

Present tense verbs 1st person pronouns General hedges WH-clauses Type/token ratio

2nd person pronouns Pronoun IT Amplifiers Final prepositions Attributive adjectives

Note. Adapted from Biber, (1988).

Dimension 1 – Interpersonal Involvement versus Informational Content

Sum of Z-

Scores Biber Corpus Connor & Upton

316 Corpus

Dickerson IRS 880

Corpus INTERPERSONAL INVOLVEMENT FOCUS

35 Face-to-face conversations

30

25

20 Personal letters

Public conversations

15 Interviews

10

5 Romantic Fiction

Prepared speeches

0 General Fiction Professional letters

-5 Science Fiction

Religion

-10 Popular Lore Academic Prose -11.9 -12.8

-15 Press Reportage

Official Documents -20

INFORMATIONAL CONTENT FOCUS Table 2. Scores on Dimension One Positioning Texts on the Continuum Contrasting Those Focused on Interpersonal Involvement with Those Focused on Creating Informational Content. Note: Using Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), both the Connor & Upton 316 Direct Mail Corpus and the Dickerson IRS 880 Corpus were compared to the scores of 14 of the 23 genres in the Biber Corpus. Dimensional scores represent the

summed frequencies of the linguistic features that make up the dimension. Before summing the occurrence of these features, their raw scores were normalized to a per-thousand-word ratio in order to eliminate skewing based on text-length. Then these scores were converted to units of standard deviation (z-scores, with means of zero). Adapted from Biber (1988, 1995)

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features in my corpus of texts; 2.) to avoid text-length skewing, I normal-ized these counts to their occurrence per 1,000 words; 3.) then I translated averages to units of standard devia-tion; finally, 4.) I compared my texts’ dimensional scores to those of Biber’s 23 common genres. The frequency counts of 28 linguistic features made it possible to locate and compare my corpus against Biber’s genres on a continuum between two poles: interpersonally focused on one end and interpersonally focused on the other. Table 1 lists linguistic features measured and Table 2 shows how fundraising texts in the Dickerson IRS 880 corpus compare to Biber’s corpus and the Connor and Upton 316 Corpus.

In fundraising, narrative has long been championed by practitioners like Jerry Huntsinger and Mal Warwick. In fact, one of Huntsinger’s letters scored highest among those studied. This remarkable letter featured the narrative account of a young girl who was rescued by Cov-enant House workers from slavery to sex traffickers. It put a human face on the appeal. Most of us know a good story when we see it. But seeing what makes a story good—well . . . that’s another story. Table 3 lists the ten linguistic features which indicate the presence of narrative content in a text. Then Table 4 shows how fundraising texts in the Dickerson IRS 880 corpus compare to those in Biber’s corpus and those in the Con-

nor and Upton 316 Corpus.

In AddITIon To ProFILIng TexTs, I

surVeyed Those Who WroTe TheM.

My goal was to learn what factors these executives believe make a fundraising text effective. To this end, I asked respondents to score the importance of using an argument-centric (expository) writing style on a 1 to 5 scale (with 5 being high). Only 5.04 percent rated exposition high.

I then asked them to score emotional, human-interest narrative writing. Those rating narrative high grew by a ratio of nine-to-one over those rat-ing exposition high. But despite the increase of those favoring narrative to 45.21 percent, the linguistic evidence of their writing revealed a wide gap between what they believed about good writing, and what they actually wrote. Belief did not match practice.The root of the disparity is that we all tend to take writing for granted.

We all can write. And we all think we can write well. Yet the evidence of linguistics analysis refutes this assumption. The problem is that few of us critically consider the rhetorical and linguistic substructure of what we write. We don’t critically consider the language.

Stephen King drove this point home in explaining what motivated him to write On Writing, his book about composition principles and tech-niques. King’s motivation came from a conversation with author of The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan. He had asked her “if there was any one question she was never asked dur-

Table 3 The Ten Salient Linguistic Features Whose Co-Occurrence Defines Dimension 2

Positive Features: Synthetic negation Negative Features:

Past tense verbs Present participial clauses Present tense verbs

Third-person pronouns Attributive adjectives

Perfect aspect verbs Past participial WHIZ deletions

Public verbs Word length

Note. Adapted from Biber, (1988).

Dimension 2 – Narrative Versus Non-Narrative

Sum of Z-Scores Biber Corpus

Connor & Upton 316 Corpus

Dickerson IRS 880 Corpus

NARRATIVE

7 Romantic Fiction

6 General Fiction

Adventure Fiction

5

4

3

2 Biographies Spontaneous Speeches

1 Prepared Speeches

Personal Letters

0 Popular Lore Face-to-Face Conversation

-1 Religion

Press Editorials -2 Telephone Conversations

Academic Prose

-3 Official Documents -3.1 -3.0 Broadcasts

-4

NON-NARRATIVE Table 4. Scores on Dimension Two Positioning Texts on the Continuum Contrasting Those Containing Narrative with Those Containing No Narrative. Note: Using Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), both the Connor & Upton 316 Direct Mail Corpus and the Dickerson IRS 880 Corpus were compared to the scores of 15 of the 23 genres in the Biber Corpus. Dimensional scores represent the summed frequencies of the linguistic features that make up the dimension. Before summing the occurrence of these

features, their raw scores were normalized to a per-thousand-word ratio in order to eliminate skewing based on text-length. Then these scores were converted to units of standard deviation (z-scores, with means of zero). Adapted from Biber (1988, 1995)

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ing the Q-and-A that follows almost every writer’s talk . . . . Amy paused, thinking it over carefully, and then said: ‘No one ever asks about the language’” (2000, p. 8).

Fundraisers, of all people, should care passionately about the art and craft of telling stories on paper. In fundraising, language is everything. Someone selling a service or product creates an exchange based on the value of what is being offered. And before buying, a prospect is able to kick the tires or thump the melon. But for a fundraiser, the weight of raising money rests squarely on the power of words. Yes, there are those occasions when a person visits a charity, or sees a video about its work. But most potential donors de-cide to give based on what they read. And unfortunately, what they read is usually not that good.

WhAT hAPPened?

One explanation may be the way we are raised to write. Our educational upbringing teaches us to use an ab-stract impersonal writing style that is diametrically opposed to the expert advice of fundraising practitioners. The persistence of this kind of fund-raising discourse is consistent with re-search by Peters and Wolfred (2001), who found that 58 percent of nonprofit executive directors hold Master’s degrees or doctorates. They write what I call discourse de facto (Latin for as if or as a matter of practice).

They write as if they were still gradu-ate students. They continue to pro-duce a style of discourse appropriate to a past-bound setting, dedicated to a past-bound task, created for a past-bound audience. Fundraising requires a different style of writing,

but they seem to be living in another place, at another time, writing for a professor who is no longer there.

neurosCIenTIsTs AT ITALy’s unIVersITy oF

PArMA shed LIghT on hoW We ProCess

LAnguAge.

An important source of insight on effective writing comes from the University of Parma, led by the seminal research of neuroscientist Giacomo Rizzolatti and his research team, which identified a special class of neurons that fired in the brains of macaque monkeys during specific grasping activities. The researchers linked the discovery of this me-canism to understanding language processing. This “mechanism was the neural prerequisite for the develop-ment of inter-individual communica-

tion and finally of speech” (1998, p. 190). They write:

We provide a unifying neural hypoth-esis on how individuals understand the actions and emotions of others. Our main claim is that the funda-mental mechanism at the basis of the experiential understanding of others’ actions is the activation of the mirror neuron system. A similar mecha-nism, but involving the activation of viscero-motor centers, underlies the experiential understanding of the emotions of others (2004, p. 396).

At the core of the Gallese, Keysers, and Rizzolatti discovery is evidence from fMRI scans of human subjects for what was only suggested in their experiments with monkeys—that the human brain contains “. . . neural mechanisms (mirror mechanisms) that allow us to directly understand the meaning of the actions and emo-tions of others by internally replicat-ing (‘simulating’) them without any explicit reflective mediation” (2004, p. 396).

uCLA And usC reseArChers Found ThAT nArrATIVe TexTs

CreATe PoWerFuL neurAL resPonses.

Lisa Aziz-Zadeh from USC’s Brain and Creativity Institute and Marco Iacoboni, director of UCLA’s Tran-scranial Magnetic Stimulation Lab at the Ahmanson Lovelace Brain Mapping Center in the David Geffen School of Medicine, found evidence that the triggers of mirror neuron re-sponse are not limited to visual input alone. Evidence suggests that just reading or hearing about an action

Our educational upbringing

teaches us to use an abstract

impersonal writing style that is diametrically opposed to the expert advice of fundraising practitioners.

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can produce the same response as seeing the action firsthand.

The research team found that among 12 volunteers studied, the premotor cortex of their brains indicated the presence of the same neural activity when they heard words describing an action as when they saw it. “In sum” Aziz-Zabeh writes, “these results support a key role of premotor areas with mirror neuron properties for embodied semantic representations of actions, whether they are delivered through visual or linguistic modali-ties” (Aziz-Zadeh, Wilson, Rizzolatti & Iacoboni, 2006, p. 1521). Their research explains why it’s hard to put down a novel, but easy to fall asleep reading a textbook.

The evidence of neuroscience sug-gests that the current style of writing dominant among fundraisers actually circumvents the way the human brain is hard-wired to process language. The implications: fundraisers should not shy away from emotion, they should tell stories, and they should not over-edit and formalize texts.

Science writer Gordy Slack sum-marizes the implications of mirror neurons to creating, processing, and interpreting language. He not only states, but also artfully illus-trates implications in a brief text that marshals linguistic features to paint a narrative scene (note his use of past tense to report past actions and move the reader sequentially through time), intensify interpersonal involvement (note his use of contrac-tions, first person pronouns, private verbs, and conversational style), and produce empathy (note how he makes you feel, thus achieving his rhetorical aim—to make you care).

A young woman sat on the subway

and sobbed. Her mascara-stained cheeks were wet and blotchy. Her eyes were red. Her shoulders shook. She was hopeless, completely forlorn. When I got off the F-train, I stood on the platform, paralyzed by emo-tions. Hers. I’d taken them with me. I stood there, tears streaming down my cheeks. But I had no death in the family. No breakup. No terminal di-agnosis. And I didn’t even know her

or why she cried. But the emotional pain, her pain, now my pain, was as real as day. (2007, p. 1)

The data in my research confirms that linguistic features like those Slack used above—features that involve readers and paint connect-ing narrative moments—are woefully absent in fundraising discourse.

Frank Dickerson has been involved in fundraising since 1969. He holds a BA from The Ohio State University, a Masters from the International School of Theology, an MBA from Pepperdine, and a PhD from Clare-mont Graduate University, where he studied under Peter F. Drucker. He is president of High Touch Direct Mail, a California direct mail company specializing in hand-personalized

direct mail and also heads up a new research organization, The Written Voice. To discuss having your fund-raising discourse analyzed, Frank can be reached at 909.864.2798 or at [email protected].

reFerenCesAziz-Zadeh, Lisa; Wilson, Stephen M.; Rizzolatti, Giacomo; Iacoboni, Marco. (2006). Congruent embodied representa-tions for visually presented actions and linguistic phrases describing actions. Cur-rent Biology, 16(18), 1818-1823.

Biber, Douglas. (1988). Variation across speech and writing. Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press.

Biber, Douglas. (1995). Dimensions of register variation: A cross-linguistic comparison. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Connor, Ulla & Upton, Thomas A. (2003). Linguistic dimensions of direct mail letters. In Pepi Leistyna & Charles F. Meyer (Eds). Corpus analysis: Language structure and language use (pp. 71-86). Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2003.

Gallese, Vittorio; Keysers, Christian; Riz-zolatti, Giacomo. (2004). A unifying view of the basis of social cognition. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 8(9), 396-403.

King, Stephen. (2000). On writing: A memoir of the craft. New York: Scribner.

Peters, Jeanne & Wolfred, Timothy. (2001). Daring to Lead: Nonprofit Execu-tive Directors and Their Work Experience. San Francisco: CompassPoint Nonprofit Services.

Rizzolatti, Giacomo & Arbib, Michael A. (1998). Language within our grasp. Trends in Neurosciences 21(5), 188-194.

Slack, Gordy. (2007, November 5), I feel your pain. Salon.com. Retrieved April 23, 2008, from http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/11/05/mirror_neurons/print.html.

fundraisers should not

shy away from emotion, they

should tell stories, and they should not over-edit and formalize texts.

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It’s autumn, and you know what that means; you have either just started your fiscal year or

are planning for the upcoming one. And, if you are like most of us, the budgeting process has to somehow squeeze in amongst your other daily responsibilities.

Are your crystal balls, magic 8-balls, and other fortune telling toys, tools, and devices handy? Or did you smash, burn, or throw them out the window when 2009 results didn’t turn out the way you envisioned? Is it the latter? Good. There is enough uncertainty in this environment and there are better ways than a “game of darts” to project your organization’s future acquisition. Many of the same considerations and tools to manage risk can also be used to capitalize on opportunities.

There may not be a more important budget in the organization than acquisition. Renewals may get the star treatment, but what might those revenues look like had you invested 10% more in acquisition two years ago? Bet you wish you could have

done that... Do not sell this upcoming year’s acquisition budget short as you will pay for it when 2012 budgets roll around. So where do you start…

Leverage What You Know: Despite what you may think, your past results yield much information about the future. So often, past results are cast off for being affected by factors ranging from deliverability issues to package changes and deemed useless as a result. In fact, they are the most underrated piece of information in budgeting. Within these results are trends to help project future performance. Unless your list mix changes dramatically from month to month, there is built in consistency to the names and behaviors affecting your plans. Additionally, most mailers have main control offers that are mailed often throughout the year. By combining list and package trending together you have a stable set of results and trends to review.

The idea is to remove the “clutter” from your history and avoid looking at individual campaigns within the context in which they were mailed.

Review trends across mailings, isolate the factors, volumes, and packages that unite them vs. isolate them. One such method is reviewing top performing lists across mailings to gauge their seasonality against the bottom tiers of your mailings. What can these lists tell you about leveraging seasonality or opportunity for expansion? Another example of isolating data is by way of package results. How are your packages faring against one another or across mailings? Don’t have this information handy from 2009? Set up panels for 2010 mailings to gauge the changes over time. Plant the seeds for 2011 and reap the performance you can leverage in 2010. Either way, organizations often have more reliable data than they realize. When leveraged appropriately, one can avoid making assumptions for the coming year.

Manage Program Needs: When building your budgeted volumes, consider the impact your acquisition budget has on the renewal budget. Evaluate the optimal mix of volume and seasonality that will drive in more

ACquISITION BudgETINg A ChALLENgE?sIgns PoInT To yesBritt Fouks, Director of Account Management at ParadyszMatera

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donors and revenue earlier in the fiscal year, manage risk in investments, and allow your team to be more reactive to possible changes that need to be made with time to make changes and adjust expectations and plans.

Plan for Change: As much as we may be in denial about factors such as postal hikes, paper expenses and so forth, plan for what changes seem the most likely. Change will occur; it’s inevitable. Therefore, manage the amount of change that comes as a surprise and factor in adjustments to include costs hikes.

Another area of potential change to consider is how your renewal strategy will impact acquisition efforts. We have seen mailers change the way they treat deeply lapsed names by putting those names into their acquisition program, yet they did not adjust for the inevitable decreased output from outside lists that will occur when those lapsed pools take priority over outside list universes. Make sure you consider how these two pieces of your direct mail program interact with each other.

Another plausible change some organizations had to deal with in 2009 dealt with cuts in funding (end of year vs. beginning of the year). Is this a possibility in 2010? Incorporate what you know about past cuts and how to thwart them in the coming year. Acquisition is often the first place organizations turn to in an effort to cut costs during the year, but it can have devastating effects on revenues and donor counts in just a year or two. If forced to make cuts, make sure the board understands what 2011 and 2012 will look like.

Evaluate Risk: Risk, risk, risk…how does one evaluate it throughout

the year when you’re in the midst of managing it daily? Most pertinent to 2010 budgets are the management of three key risk variables that affect most organizations in varying degrees.

Economic Impact. How do you weigh last year’s economy against the projections for the coming year? One way to judge the impact of last year against the coming year is to understand the trends in first quarter 2009 mailings against second or third quarter trends. In other words, was there less of a year-over-year drop in response in later mailings that can be attributed to an improved economic environment? This should help you understand how much each mailing was impacted. Back out the assumed 2009 economic impact to response and start with a fresh baseline by mailing for 2010. From there, one can more easily add in further fatigue (if you are more pessimistic about the coming year) or a boost for an improved econ-omy (if you believe the worst is behind us) without the worry of overstating the impact of the 2009 economy.

Package Fatigue. This is another risk variable organizations may need to factor into their budgets. This is especially pertinent to building bud-gets if the organization has a single premium-focused mail piece. When evaluating how much fatigue to layer into budgets there are a number of variables to consider. Although it is easy to view your budgets in reference only to your own mailing trends and results the competitive landscape is something to consider. How many other mailers in your category and beyond are using your same offer and creative? If the answer is “most” or “many” or there are reported in-creases in premium use this should be weighted into your budgets as a nega-tive variable.

How long have you been mailing the budgeted creative? Was 2009 the first year you mailed it? What can old re-sults tell you about package fatigue of a new creative? Implement this into your budgets. It is better to set an expectation up front that a package’s lift will not hold at the levels of the previous year.

As it pertains to fatigue, not all mail-ers will see fatigue. Many of our clients have weathered this latest economic storm by way of having multiple controls that they’ve rotated throughout their acquisition program, prolonging the life of each control and keeping the audience engaged. This brings me to the third risk factor…

Testing. More than ever, nonprofits cannot afford to cut testing. With limited budget dollars and more focus on ROI, what gets tested and at what risk level is under greater scrutiny by boards and donors alike. What are your organization’s goals? Do you need to bring in higher gift amounts to feed better performing renewal pools? Then make sure you budget for ask array testing. If package fatigue is a big factor for you, then package test-ing needs to be budgeted for early in your fiscal year. Evaluate what you need to learn over the course of the year, so that you’re set up for success in the following fiscal year.

By seeking out some of the informa-tion outlined above and ensuring that you weigh potential risk factors, you should be able to build an acquisi-tion budget that your program results adhere to with minimal tweaking throughout the year.

Britt Fouks, Director of Account Management, ParadyszMatera, Minneapolis Office 763.647.5134 or [email protected]

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A new president and a new blueprint for action are helping to invigorate its fund-raising efforts as the nation’s oldest and largest civil rights organization, the Na-tional Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), enters its

second century.

While the economic recession is pulling down nonprofit fundraising in many organizations, the NAACP is bucking that trend with sizeable growth in retention and acquisition in its direct mail program.

Certainly a lot of the excitement in the NAACP’s program stems from the fresh face who has just taken over the helm of the 100-year-old organization: 36-year-old Benjamin Todd Jealous. Despite his youth, Jealous comes to the organization with a strong and diverse back-ground in working to advance social justice and some history with the organization he now heads. Educated at Columbia University, the Rhodes Scholar, a fifth-generation member of the NAACP, interned for the group during college and also served as a community organizer who helped stop the closing of a hospital in Harlem.

He served as director of domestic programs for New York-based Amnesty International. As a former journalist he also headed the National Newspaper Publishers Association, a trade group that represents the interests of African-American journalists.

His most recent position was as president of the Rosenberg Foundation, a San Francisco-

By Beth McConnell, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)

neW LeAdershIPneW CenTury dIreCT MArKeTIng suCCess For The nAACP

A CAse sTudy

24 25

based organization that establishes grants to provide opportunities to those in need.

It’s likely this combination of activ-ist and foundation experience is what attracted the executive committee of the NAACP to unanimously endorse him as president over more traditional candidates with backgrounds in busi-ness or the clergy.

Ben Jealous entered an organization with some significant financial chal-lenges, acutely illustrated by the deci-sion in 2007 to lay off half of the staff due to accumulating deficits. And he began fundraising months before as-suming office in September 2008 in order to eliminate a debt of over $2 million.

With new leadership, came the oppor-tunity for foundations to take a fresh look at the NAACP. In fact, emphasis on foundation support and increased investment by individuals has been a major change in direction, with Jeal-ous trying to steer away from too much dependence on corporate dollars.

To this end, the NAACP has instituted a new major gift and planned giving program.

It also means increased investments in direct response. The vast majority of NAACP’s direct response efforts, or 94%, are direct mail. Another six per-cent in is telemarketing and right now there is a new investment in online fundraising.

Direct response is a critical and grow-ing contributor to NAACP resources, covering around 21% of the annual budget.

Direct mail response has been exceed-ing expectations. Scott Melton, Na-

tional Director of Annual Funds, said acquisition response was exceptionally strong in 2008 and is remaining steady this year. That’s certainly more than a lot of nonprofit organizations can say. The NAACP is averaging a response rate of between 0.85% and 0.95% with an average gift of $24. Last year the acquisition volume was 4.2 million, which was more than had been budgeted. Melton said

that although the organization has battled with concerns over the cur-rent economy they ultimately decided to increase their acquisition level for 2009. Results have been strong enough that the group is planning to be more aggressive as it finishes out the year.

Retention has also been trending strong. It hovered around the 40% mark for several years and then fell to 34% in 2007. But it jumped all the way to 55% in 2008.

There has also been a heavy push for monthly giving in the direct mail program. Monthly giving programs

provide a steady, fairly predictable stream of revenue and many donors appreciate that they will rarely be called upon to make additional contri-butions. The NAACP has had mixed results in the past with monthly giving programs but they are off to a good start for 2009 and are currently ex-ploring a number of different options for acquiring monthly donors.

The NAACP has obviously fared bet-ter than many organizations through-out the recession. It has not drastical-ly changed its message but continues to focus on its core goals to provide justice and equality for everyone.

Fundraising has benefited enormously from the energy surrounding the Cen-tennial Action Plan that kicked off the 100 year celebration. It has been a huge factor in keeping donors and members engaged in contributing.

The Centennial Action Plan, which has been liberally shared with donors and members, highlights 100 years of change, marks the great progress that has been made on many fronts and reminds supporters that the long march toward justice and equality has not reached the finish line.

From the ballot box to the classroom, the NAACP and its supporters and leaders have championed social justice and fought long and hard to ensure that the voices of African Americans would be heard. The talent and tenacity of this organization and its members have truly saved lives and changed many negative aspects of American society.

Formed in 1909, NAACP began a multi-decade struggle to stop the lynch mobs that killed thousands of African-Americans and other racial, ethnic and religious minorities. In

emphasis on foundation support and increased

investment by individuals has been a major

change.

24 25

1932, the organization took up the mantle to reverse Jim Crow laws. Two decades later, segregation was de-clared illegal.

In 1960, the NAACP initiated a sustained effort for political inclu-sion. That effort reached a dramatic and celebratory climax in November 2008, with the election of an African-American president and the highest number of African-American elected officials since Reconstruction. While celebrating these achieve-ments, the NAACP’s Action Plan is igniting supporters to work with it on unfinished business. In its new cen-tury, the NAACP is focusing on safe communities and good schools – fun-damental desires that all Americans share but that are disproportionately out of reach for African Americans as well as other minority populations.

Hand in hand with these goals is the NAACP’s overarching centennial goal: a fair chance for all Americans. It’s an audacious dream, the group admits, but it is represents the core of what engages NAACP supporters.

Despite the great progress made over the past 100 years, here are some quick facts that put the problem in perspective, organization leaders say: The economic recession is difficult for everyone, but the African-American unemployment rate is higher than for any other group, at 12.6%. In these tough times people of color are impacted when they borrow money, paying higher annual percentage rates than their white counterparts with equal incomes and credit risks. At the same time foreclosure rates for African-Americans and Latino home-owners are almost three times that for whites. And perhaps most concerning of all, of the 9 million U.S. children

without health insurance, more than 5 million are children of color.

The NAACP says that correcting these and other persistent inequities is the key to providing every Ameri-can with a fair chance at achieving economic stability and providing a better future for their children.

This message is resonating with its members and with an expanding universe of contributors who want to build now on the historic political events of the past 12 months.

An invigorated organization, with new leadership, clear goals and an engaged and enthusiastic base of sup-port, the NAACP is entering its new century inspired and determined to forge a future with greater opportu-nities and freedoms for everyone in America.

26 27

Is the economic slump forcing your nonprofit to cut costs? Before you make the mistake of eliminating your print newsletter, consider

this:

At Gillette Children’s Specialty Healthcare, we recently transformed our 20-year-old donor news-letter into a moneymaker. And with the right strat-egies, you can do the same.

FACe The FACTs

Don’t get us wrong. We sympathize with the im-pulse to cut and run. Print newsletters can be cumbersome. They’re expensive, they require a significant amount of staff time, and — worst of all — they can be hugely ineffective.

After reviewing results from the past 20 years, we discovered that our quarterly newsletter, Momen-tum, was producing an annual net loss of almost $40,000. A 2004 readership survey yielded only

91 responses. (We mail to 20,000 people.)

IdenTIFy The ProbLeM (IT’s ALWAys The sAMe ProbLeM)

Despite these less-than-stellar results, we didn’t give up on newsletters entirely. A thorough review of Momentum quickly revealed a fundamental problem.

We were telling the stories that made our organiza-tion look important — not the stories that made our donors feel important. We helped children walk. We opened new clinics. We conducted suc-cessful fundraising programs. We did amazing things!

But all of our incredible accomplishments left the reader with a nagging question: “If you’re doing so great, why do you need me?”

Angela Lindell, Publications Writer, Gillette Children’s Specialty Healthcare

Andrew Olsen, CFRE, Senior Annual Giving Officer, Gillette Children’s Specialty Healthcare

CuTTIng your PrInT neWsLeTTer?

how We Transformed ours Into a Moneymaker

ThInK AgAIn!

26 27

gIVe donors WhAT They CrAVe

We set out to create a new publication that spoke to our audience in a way that makes them feel essential. Con-nections, our new donor publication, gives our readers the information they crave. With the right messages, your newsletter can do the same.

Donors want to hear a few simple — but incredibly, important — things from you. Effective newsletters must include the following messages to donors:

• You matter. Show your donors why they are essential to your mission. Speak directly to read-ers using a personal tone that relies heavily on the word “you.” Reframe your accomplishments as their accomplishments. (“Be-cause of You, Douglas Can Visit an Imaging Center Without Cry-ing!”)

• You have invested wisely. Prove that your organization is worthy of an investment. No one likes to back a loser. Be transparent, sharing facts about your organiza-tion’s financial health and future plans. Instill confidence in your

readers that their investments will yield long-term gains. (“Your Gillette Investment Will Always Yield Returns.”)

• We still need you! Build long-term relationships by letting your donors know just how much they can still accomplish through your partnership. Share new needs,

opportunities and goals. Even when telling an amazing success story, leave your donors crav-ing another interaction with you. (“Help Us Change More Lives!”)

If you fail to communicate these things, you’ll lose your donor to a non-profit that does.

QuesTIon your AssuMPTIons

Once you’ve hooked your readers, you want to make it as easy as possible for them to make a gift. It sounds simple, but many nonprofits get this wrong.

The perception is that a cost-effective newsletter must be an unsegmented self-mailer that’s printed in one or two colors. Our former newsletter fit this description. Momentum was an 8-page, 11- by 17-inch self-mailer printed in black plus one color. A reply envelope was stapled into the publication, and the newsletter mailed at the nonprofit bulk rate. We spent approximately $15,000 per quarterly issue ($60,000 per year) to mail 20,000 pieces.

CoPy WhAT WorKs

Improving performance required us to make significant changes to the format. But we also wanted to avoid increasing costs. Using the same ex-pense budget of $15,000 per issue, we found we could make several smart and effective changes.

• Newsletter Format: We cut the format from eight 11- by 17-inch pages to four 8.5- by 11-inch pages. As a result, we slashed word counts by more than 50 percent. For example, our lead story went from more than 1,200 words to just 500. We replaced the long, comprehensive features with shorter, more compelling

We were telling the stories

that made our organization

look important — not the

stories that made our donors feel

important.

how We Transformed ours Into a Moneymaker

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00101001011010111011010001010101011101010111010101010110101010101011101010100001110101100010101110001010101100110101010101010101010010110101010100101001011010111011010001010101011101010111010101010110101010101011101010100001110101100010101110001010101100110101010101010101010010110101010100101001011010111011010001010101011101010111010101010110101010101011101010100001110101100010101110001010101100110101010101010101010010110101010100101001011010111011010001010101011101010111010101010110101010101011101010100001110101100010101

stories. Now, powerful headlines, captions and pull quotes facilitate easy skimming.

• Personalized Letter and Reply Device: Cutting the size and page count allowed us to spend more of our budget on personaliza-tion. We include a personalized cover letter and reply device (an 8.5- by 11-inch double buckslip) with language that corresponds to a donor’s past giving behavior. Now, we can segment our news-letter mailings for more effective delivery and measurement.

• Outer Envelope and Live Stamp: By reducing its size, we could still send our newsletter at the non-profit rate, even with the inclusion of a cover letter and reply device. Now it now fits in a standard no. 10 envelope. We went from us-ing an indicia to using a nonprofit

stamp, resulting in only a marginal increase in postage costs.

TrACK your resuLTsWithout spending any more money on our newsletter program, we developed a smarter and more effective publica-tion. Momentum generated a net loss of $39,549 in 2007. By comparison, the first four issues of Connections have generated a positive net return of $56,705.

For us, the results are clear. Our donor-focused newsletter is building lasting relationships with donors and inspiring them to invest more of their charitable gifts with Gillette. And that means we can provide care for even more kids at our hospital and clinics across Minnesota!

About Gillette Children’s Specialty Healthcare: Gillette, an independent, not-for-profit hospital and clinics, is internationally recognized for its work in the diagnosis and treatment of children and young adults who have disabilities or complex medical needs, such as cerebral palsy, complex orthopaedic conditions, craniofacial anomalies, neurological conditions, brain and spinal-cord injuries, spina bifida and juvenile arthritis.

Since 1897, Gillette has been at the forefront of medical treatment, tech-nology, education and research for children with disabilities. Gillette’s mission is to help children, adults and their families improve their health, achieve greater well-being, and enjoy life. For more information, visit www.gillettechildrens.org.

TSM DMA Journal half pg Ad OL.indd 1 8/12/09 10:12:28 AM

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What’s different over there?

I’m asked this almost daily. As an Aus-sie who has fundraised in Australia, the

UK and now North America, I feel I can answer this question reasonably well. So grab a coffee, arm yourself with pencil and notepad and prepare for some real gems, the answers to all your fundraising prayers from across the pond, the ‘next big thing’ that will revolutionize your organization.

You can probably sense my sarcasm, for the answer is ‘not bloody much.’

In reality, donors behave the same, lots of people (and I include fundraisers) don’t like face to face fundraising (also known as direct dialogue – basi-cally signing up monthly donors on the street and door to door), despite its enormous impact on the sector. I also hear the same myths, barriers, and excuses and, as I have found several times recently, fundraisers generally aren’t sure why they need more money and what direction their organization is planning to take.

Though fundraisers worldwide seem to have an energetic passion for their cause, they are often the poor cousin in the charity family. In my eighteen months in North America, I met with hundreds of fundraisers in different situations: in new business meetings, when delivering training and at confer-ences.

When I meet with a fundraiser for the first time, I ask two key questions. Firstly, what seems a fairly

simple question: why do you need more money? Secondly, what are the organization’s growth plans? Invariably I get blank stares to both questions – and often not for lack of asking on the fundraiser’s part. When I go on to probe them about the makeup of their fundraising program, income levels, number of donors etc, again I get lots of confused and embar-rassed murmurs and a raft of reasons why they don’t have the information with them.

Put simply: we need this data to make informed and sensible decisions about where we are headed and how we are going to get there. These things are intrinsically linked. It’s no wonder we struggle to articulate why we need more money if we aren’t even sure how much money we raise and how many people support us!

Can you imagine a lawyer trying to defend a client without the evidence (data) and precedents to sup-port their case, or a surgeon about to operate on a patient without their medical history and summary of previous operations of that kind?

The answer is they wouldn’t. And why should we, as fundraisers, allow ourselves to make decisions affecting our beneficiaries without having access to this information? This is not a North American is-sue, it is an international one. So let’s stop making excuses and start arming ourselves with real data that allows us to take stock of where we are, under-stand where we want to go and how we are going to get there.

using information on your donors to fuel growth in your program By Jonathon Grapsas, Regional Director for Pareto Fundraising in North America

The Power oF data

30 31

Data should be at the heart of what we do. I want you to become data led, even data obsessed. Remember though that being data led ultimately means being donor led.

Quite frankly, in the work that I do data is the backbone of every suc-cessful campaign we develop, and is the difference between achieving mediocre campaign results and out-standing campaign results.

A donor led strategy simply means using the data you have available on your donors as part of your fundrais-ing strategy. By incorporating a true donor led approach into your strat-egy, you’ll be amazed at how much more money you will raise.

It still surprises me that so many charities rely on gut instinct, an-ecdotal evidence, or just personal taste when deciding how to spend their fundraising dollars – when, in actuality, their data does not back up these decisions.

Here is a recent example to illus-trate the importance of data in push-ing your program forward.

The National Heart Foundation of Australia, one of the biggest chari-ties in the country, approached us about converting cash donors into monthly givers. They wanted to chal-lenge their prevailing belief that you should wait a few months (some even suggested one year) before ask-ing new donors to make a regular monthly gift.

It was only by having a thorough look at their data, that we found out that the right time to ask new donors to make a monthly gift was just two to three weeks after they made their first gift.

By analyzing the information held on their donors, we helped the National Heart Foundation develop a much more profitable conversion strategy for monthly giving – new donors were now contacted within one month following their first gift.There are three specific types of data you must be armed with when devel-oping your fundraising strategy and tactics: environmental, analytical and personal.

Let me explain how these differ.

Firstly, analytical data. This is the kind of information used in my pre-vious example. You can obtain this information simply by looking at your own charity, your own donors and how they behave as a group (overall and/or by segment).

Environmental data is information obtained by external sources. Every charity and not-for-profit organiza-tion has access to a wealth of data from sources including governments, research institutes, annual reports

and commercial agencies, like the one I work for, that run benchmark-ing studies.

It can provide you with insights into overall trends, such as how much people are giving or whether face-to-face fundraising is growing. But while environmental data can be a good additional guide, it’s analytical data that really sits at the top of the hierarchy enabling you to uncover ’the truth’ about your donors behav-ior.

Now for the icing on the cake: per-sonal data. For one-to-one personal-ized communication, personal data is absolutely essential. Every charity holds basic personal data on its do-nors (i.e. transactional information such as when they made their last gift/how much their last gift was and biographical data such as name and address). By incorporating these donor details into your communica-tions, you’ll raise more net income, and be able to help more of your beneficiaries.

The brilliant part about personal data is you can dig even deeper and find out the real reasons why your donors support you, what they think your work and what makes them tick.

As you get to the end of your latte, ask yourself how well are you using donor information in your efforts to get closer to those who support you? Jonathon Grapsas is the Regional Director for Pareto Fundraising in North America.

If you would like more information on this topic please contact Jonathon at [email protected] or 416.915.4114.

Data is the difference between

achieving mediocre

campaign results and outstanding

campaign results.

30 31

You may assess your organization’s effectiveness on-line as the following: yes, we are online but my busi-ness is about relationships. I never really bought into the Internet hype of 2001. Fast forward 8-9 years down the road and we now take donations online and add everything we produce to the Web. Online rev-enue, however, is currently only about five percent of our total revenue.

Where online fundraising works well is by procuring new and younger donors and higher average gifts. One particularly strong area is event fundraising online. It allows your donors to maintain personal fundrais-ing pages that have been a veritable rainmaker for a number of organizations in terms of acquisition and monetization.

The Internet is still in its infancy and should be recog-nized as such. Think of the recent ubiquity of broad-band (high speed) access and high quality content. By this standard the Internet is only about 1-3 years old. So if you are just beginning to understand this Inter-net stuff, do not give up. The best is yet to come and the time is right for further investment. The Internet is truly the lowest cost strategy out there and offers a highly interactive experience with your brand 24/7. The online market hype is beginning to converge with reality; creating solutions and opportunities that are delighting constituents.

All strategies need a compelling sense of urgency to propel them from strategy to execution. Perhaps the

challenging economy will provide the impetus for a new look and focus toward online fundraising. It’s a new day. Make the most of it.

There are two areas in particular that should be ex-plored by the corporate Internet strategist who seeks to monetize and dominate the Web with your brand message.

First, consider a partnership with a high quality online content provider like Hulu. Develop an interactive advertising platform to facilitate audience engage-ment. Hulu characterizes itself as “the web’s leading premium content library to effectively reach millions of consumers whenever they watch online. Serving hundreds of millions of streams per month, Hulu is a Top 10 online video property featuring an immense collection of premium entertainment across all genres and formats — television shows, feature films, clips and more, regardless of network or studio.”1

To help you visualize this concept, first imagine watching a sporting event. As you watch the event, alongside is an interactive advertisement that allows complete customization of a running shoe right down to size, color and graphics. A few clicks later and you check out with a purchase of your customized running shoes. This model could easily extend to the automo-tive and social entrepreneurship arenas. You can see how these advertisements would become an attraction to rival that of the program content itself.

goIngBig onLIneWhat’s next and how can first movers monetize online in down markets?Michael H. Duley, Senior Director e-Commerce StrategyContributor: Alicia Osgood, DMA Nonprofit Federation

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A partnership with a high quality online content provider like Hulu produces a triple win. Your prospect wins by having a highly interactive experience with your brand, your content provider wins with a lucra-tive business model for premium ads, and your nonprofit wins by mining previously untapped or underutilized sources of income. Simply put, your nonprofit will attract a high income, online demographic to your file that I refer to as ‘Urban Barons.’

For the partnership itself, I recom-mend negotiating a cost per acquisi-tion, revenue share pricing model until performance meets your expec-tations. Know that you will receive significant brand exposure along the way in the premier frontier where the ‘Urban Baron’ resides. Online content providers like Hulu may wel-come the opportunity to help a few nonprofit partners reach the next lev-el and reap the public relations ben-efit of working for the greater good in the midst of a down economy.

The second area for your strategist to explore is interactive video gam-ing. Interactive entertainment is not a fad and is exploding in popularity across all segments, including young women. Every major gaming plat-form now includes Internet access, which is a new frontier for interactive experiences. According to tracking firm NPD analyst Anita Frazier, the industry was poised to achieve record breaking revenues of over $22 billion in 2008.2

By launching interactive advertising campaigns and exploring embed-ded advertising, nonprofits are able to connect their brand messages to wholesome games and create the sort of interactive experience donors want with their brand. This is an area

that requires imagination and much more development, but as with many things those who start early make out better in the long run.

To glimpse what the future could be, enter “Project Natal” in your search engine. “Introducing Project Natal, a revolutionary new way to play: no controller required. See a ball? Kick it, hit it, trap it or catch it. If you know how to move your hands, shake your hips or speak, you and your friends can jump into the fun -- the only experience needed is life experience.”3 According to Steven Spielberg, “This is a pivotal mo-ment that will carry with it a wave of change, the ripples of which will reach far beyond video games.” 4 Can you imagine your brand at the heart of this amazing interaction? The pos-sibilities are endless.

For those of you looking for the next big thing and to achieve the biggest pop on the Web, go for quality online. Revenue follows quality. While not perfected yet, interactive advertising platforms hold the promise of desir-able demographics and higher gifts. I do not recommend exploring the world of interactive advertising with-out a partnership in place. It would prove to be cost prohibitive for most, if not all, nonprofits. So get out there and share the value of social entre-preneurship with online content pro-viders and the video gaming industry.

Beyond the Basics -- What are some actionable takeaways to gain an advantage online now?

• PlaceanInternetstrategistatthehelm of your interactive and Web teams

• Makeyourmessagesinteractive,engaging and entertaining as well as ensure your creative brief lists

an interactive experience -- think about the Web at the beginning, middle, and end of a creative project

• PartnerwithhighqualityInternetcontent providers and interactive gamers and go on a journey together -- it’s measurable, and cost effective

• Makeaninvestmentininteractive content creation -- there is no better platform to build relationships

• Gobigonlineandgainfirstmover advantage by taking your brand to the high value online demographic; it’s a differential competitive advantage; it’s your future, lead

• Leverageyoursocialnetworkcommunities to test run these experiences before you buy/launch. These communities are vocal and active groups in which to assess usability and engagement. Share with them early and often

• Startnow,catchthewaveandgobigger than you ever imagined

1 COM score and Hulu website2 Informationweek, July 18, 20083 Xbox website4 Xbox website Michael leads an international online business delivering 10 million plus pages of content per month across the portfolio with revenues exceeding $35 million annually. He has achieved academically an undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering (EE) and a Master of Business Administration (MBA) from Vanderbilt University, Owen Graduate School of Management. Michael’s passion is building high performance teams that use the Internet in new ways to change the world.

32 33

If you are responsible for maintaining your well deserved and valued rela-tionships with your donors and advo-cates, you should step into the waters of building your email files with seri-ous caution. With the available social networking opportunities exploding daily, it’s difficult to know how best to develop online relationships with your constituents without alienating them in the process.

ACCordIng To M&r sTrATegIC serVICes “enonProFIT benCh-MArK sTudy”,

• While social media gets most of the buzz lately, email clearly is still king, at least for now.

• The number of online gifts and total dollars raised online con-tinue to increase; the increase in number of gifts helped to offset a decline in average gift from $86 to $71

• Email lists continue to grow, but at slower rates than in past studies; almost 20% of email ad-dresses go bad every year due to bounces or unsubscribes

Fortunately, there are proven means of building and updating your email databases and keeping your organiza-tion’s brand in the forefront of your valued donors’ attention. Each can be a brilliant marketing tactic or a cus-tomer relations debacle. This article

is a frank look at ten critical issues to be considered by savvy marketers try-ing to grow and update their lists.

dIreCT LIsT-buILdIng oPTIons

Before you even consider other op-tions, are you already asking every-where for email addresses? On your website or landing pages? At all points of sale? Through your call cen-ters? Via social networks? Have you attempted to request an email address or reconnect via direct mail?

Organically-grown email addresses are the least costly to obtain and will provide you with the low-hanging fruit. But even doing everything right will probably only yield email addresses for approximately 25% of your constituent or donor base, and your growth rate, while steady, might not meet your marketing goals.

Once you have optimized your web-site and constituent contact points for the above, here are a couple of other time-tested methods for building your email address database.

Email appending is a quick and ef-fective way to build an email database by utilizing a vendor who will match opt-in email addresses to your donor/advocate postal records. An email appending vendor will match your input file to opt-in email addresses from licensing websites and then send a permission message on your

organization’s behalf (with the look and feel of coming from your organi-zation) to confirm deliverability. In approximately twenty business days, a reputable vendor will provide to your organization guaranteed deliverable email addresses for 10% to 20+% of your donor/advocate postal records so that you can begin to build an online relationship with them.

Email Change of Address (ECOA) can help you reconnect with those with whom you have lost contact due to a bouncing or inactive email address. Re-engaging with your valued constit-uents online is typically a welcomed reconnection, by matching volun-teered updates to your bouncing and inactive records. An ECOA process will provide matches from one unique electronic identifier (i.e. bouncing/inactive email address) to another unique electronic identifier (current preferred email address), thereby pro-viding you with greater assurance that the updated email address is the right email address for your existing donor/advocate.

doIng your hoMeWorK When eVALuATIng VendorsBefore you decide on a service part-ner, take time for a little sleuthing. Find out who they are, what their in-dustry reputation is, who their clients are, and where they’re located. Ask for references. Be wary of vendors

best practices for establishing online relationships with your donors and advocates

building and updating your email database:

Rita Allen, Manager/Nonprofit Group, FreshAddress, Inc.

34 35

with incomplete contact information, match rates that seem too good to be true, or unverified clients, employees, or testimonials on their website.

Knowledge, expertise, and hands-on experience may sometimes be dif-ficult to determine so it’s best to use reputation and integrity as your initial screens. Ask the vendor how long they’ve been in business, which pro-fessional associations they belong to, what kind of industry presence they have, who their partners and clients are, and what other services they of-fer. Don’t risk being a guinea pig for some fly-by-night company.

seLeCTIng A Vendor Ever heard the expression “a penny wise and pound foolish?” The least expensive solution is not always the best solution. If you do opt for a low-cost provider, be sure you know exactly how that vendor is provid-ing you quality service and results for that bargain-basement price. A poorly-performed email append can bring down your entire email program and the few pennies you saved per address will pale in comparison to the revenues lost and damaged reputa-tion you’ll incur by picking up invalid email addresses and spamtraps.As for ECOA services, check to make sure your provider operates a website where these old and new email ad-dress updates are collected. Again, in purchasing any email address services, let “buyer beware” be your mantra as there are many companies offering ECOA and other opt-in email database services that are doing something altogether different behind the curtain.

APPendIng And eCoA besT PrACTICes

Yikes! Watch out! Building or updat-ing a third-party or prospect list is not recommended unless you want a high spam complaint rate. And a high spam compliant rate will ruin your email reputation and result in your emails getting blocked or blacklisted. When utilizing email database ser-vices, be sure you only use only your donor or member lists (i.e. individuals with whom you have a relationship that never got around to giving you their email addresses for one reason or another or have forgotten to update their email address with your organi-zation).

InsIsT on 100% oPTed-In dATA

A high-quality, trustworthy vendor should be able to promise you 100% opt-in (volunteered) email addresses (with detailed opt-in info, including source information and date & time stamp). Your vendor should be able to tell you exactly where their data came from.

On a related note, insist that your vendor send a permission message to their email address matches to con-firm deliverability and provide your donors and advocates with an op-portunity to opt out before results are returned to you. Most vendors’ opt-in databases have bounce rates of 30% to 50% or more. We’ve seen some as high as 80%. Without the added screen of a permission message, you or your ESP risk experiencing these same high bounce rates when messag-ing raw results. Doing so could result in your being blocked or blacklisted by the ISPs: not pretty...

InsIsT on LIsT CLeAnIng And

suPPressIons As PArT oF your dATAbAse ProCess

Your vendor should automatically perform robust hygiene services on your list—scrubbing and eliminating typos, errors, and other problematic addresses from their raw matches—to ensure your results are clean and deliverable. In addition, your vendor should adhere to all CAN-SPAM regu-lations and run all required suppres-sions, including FCC Wireless Do-mains, the DMA’s Do Not Email list, and your own unsubscribe list. They should also discuss other optional suppressions that may be legally re-quired for your industry, such as the Utah and Michigan Child Protec-tion Acts. Bottom line, your vendor should be as vigilant with your data as it is with its own.

InsIsT on 100% guArAnTeed deLIVerAbLe resuLTsAny emails you pay for should be deliverable. Period. Not only that, but they should also be the preferred email addresses of your specific do-nors and/or advocates. If they bounce (within a reasonable post-append grace period)—and 1%-3% of results typically do—your vendor should credit your account immediately. Don’t settle for a credit towards a fu-ture project that you might never want to do with this vendor.

PAy ATTenTIon To The IMPorTAnCe oF your oPTed-ouT eMAIL resuLTsAs previously mentioned, part of your email append process and Email Change of Address service should include permission messaging, where

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the newly-appended email addresses of your donors and advocates are pre-sented the opportunity to opt out of an email relationship with your organiza-tion. Respect and protect their priva-cy rights as well as your organization’s reputation by ensuring your deliver-able email results file is accompanied by a list of any recipients who opted out. And honor those unsubscribes!

sendIng PersonALIzed eMAIL MessAges To househoLd APPend resuLTs

A marketer’s nightmare is a personal-ized email flub (e.g. sending [email protected] an email with the salutation “Dear Beth”). Not only might it give poor Bill an identity crisis, but it probably completely alienates you from any future email relationship with that household. Be careful. If your email appends are the result of a household match, skip the personalization. On the other hand, if your emails are a result of an indi-vidual append, go for it.

segMenTIng neW dATA FroM your house LIsT

Just because you now have the email addresses of your donors and/or ad-vocates doesn’t necessarily mean they’re ready to donate or sign that petition! Yes, they are familiar with your organization, but they didn’t ask you directly to solicit them via email. So, how do you handle these newly-appended and/or updated email ad-dresses?

• Send an unobtrusive “welcome message” to your newly appended email addresses that introduces them to this new mode of commu-nication with you and explains its

value — what kinds of informa-tion, offers, and/or ideas you will be sending them, and how often

• Explain that the cost savings for you translates into more monies available for those that truly need help

• Re-engage your constituents with value added text and any new of-ferings (e.g. newsletters, company highlights, online opportunities to contribute or engage, etc.)

• Don’t just begin by asking them to make a contribution; build your online relationship first like you would build any relationship

A Word To The WIse

Don’t expect your appended emails to immediately start performing as well as those in your house file. Have real-istic expectations. Marketing studies have shown that it takes anywhere from 7-10 impressions to get someone to notice. Email is no different than any other marketing medium. Eventu-ally, these emails will perform as well as those on your house list.

Excerpt from: The Convio On-line Marketing Nonprofit Bench-mark Index™ Study

“In a world of increasing email spam, geographical mobility, and job hopping, the rate of attrition for most nonprofits’ email files will likely increase unless they continue to en-gage with their constituents and pro-actively provide ways for constituents to update their email addresses and communication preferences.”

Like fish in the refrigerator…some things begin to spoil after time:Be ready to message your new and updated email addresses as quickly as your vendor provides them to you. With an approximately 20-30% at-trition rate each year…be cautious.

When you first start messaging your appended email addresses, you should expect a few bounces due to unpaid accounts, full mailboxes, and everyday Internet issues. A handful of complaints are also not unusual as you are messaging recipients at an email address they didn’t directly provide to you. You can prepare for this in advance by alerting your mem-ber response department and putting extra effort into crafting your welcome message.

If you decide to pursue an Email Ap-pend or Email Change of Address ser-vice, play by the rules. Be sure to pay serious attention to planning, pricing, and process. When performed in an ethical, conservative, and conscien-tious manner, Email Change of Ad-dress and Email Appending services can provide you with guaranteed deliverable email addresses for up to 15-25% or more of your donor/advo-cate base on your first project. The potential gains in revenue growth, market penetration, and deeper rela-tionships with your constituents are yours for the taking … and yours for the losing. Just make sure to tread carefully and work with a partner that shares a similar philosophy!

In addition to servicing Fortune 1000 clients, Rita is responsible for managing the Nonprofit Group at FreshAddress, Inc. She is an active member of the DMA Non-profit Federation (including a seat on the Membership Committee), a contributor to the DMA Nonprofit Federation Journal, author of industry white papers, and a frequent participant at national Nonprofit Technology Network events as well as a participant and speaker at local and DMA Nonprofit Federation conferences. Rita’s previous experience includes national sales with the Art Institutes and American Showcase as well as corporate marketing and sales with The Chocolate Dipper/Bos-ton. She earned her BS in Art Education from SUNY Buffalo.

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In May of 2009, an incredible intersection of compassionate people, Twitter Key Influencers and creativity came together to launch a campaign for Operation Smile called 140 Smiles. Since launching this campaign that continues through October 2009,

I have often been asked to give advice on raising funds via Twitter.

My answer is always the same; let’s chat about the nature of the Twitter beast first, then you’ll have the tools you need to identify a campaign that could work for your organization. I was named Operation Smile’s Social Media Strategist in February 2009, having previously served as Donor Relations Supervisor and been really passionate about donor service. I saw social media as a channel to listen to, respond to and inspire our donors and future supporters. Together with our marketing and web team, we decided early on that Twitter was a great channel to pursue and in doing so learned a few basic lessons I will share here.

Listen Up! Listen to the various channels; follow conversation threads or mentions about your organization or key topics. Tip: you can go to search.twitter.com

right now, enter your organization name or keyword and see what folks on Twitter are saying about you! This attentive listening will help inform how you use the medium; for instance it can be a great customer service tool as you respond to any concerns or issues expressed.

You can follow similar organizations to see what information they are sharing and determine if you want to go that route or create your own format. What you will most likely find by listening is that anything goes! Tip: When you start talking rather than just listening, BE AUTHENTIC; don’t use a sales voice, PR voice or Development voice! Use the voice of

TWeeTIng bAsICs for a successful fundraising campaignRenee Alexander Hamilton, Marketing and Social Media Strategist for Operation Smile

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a friend sharing information that is interesting, valuable or entertaining. That is the best (and only) way people will really start to follow you, respect you and Re-Tweet you!

Do not re-invent the wheel! The first thing I did

as Social Media Strategist was to identify the nonprofit superstars who have their finger on the pulse of applications, practices and tips. For me this was Beth Kanter, Wendy Harmon of the Red Cross, Carrie Lewis of the Humane Society and Holly Ross of NTEN. By following these few social media experts I was sure to get the latest information and tools and understand tactics that were working or not working for other organizations. There is an incredibly helpful community of NPTech folks and lots of free resources. I would encourage you to check out www.wearemedia.org, a complete wiki with tool kits, slide decks and step by step instructions to help you form and manage your Social Media Strategy.

Jump In! Once you have listened, and culled resources from the experts it’s

time to jump in. With Twitter there should be no fear. As long as you are speaking in an authentic voice you can’t go wrong. It may take some time to adjust to the short message format and determine what works, what generates Re-Tweets and sparks interest, so just play around with content. You don’t have to worry about being overly structured and on-message. In fact a few generic messages are great “How is

everyone in the Twitterverse” etc. and don’t forget to re-tweet. Twitter is about community, reciprocity and conversation; the more you talk, the more people will listen!

Shift your ROI Paradigm

Social Media is not about the fast buck, but the long term donor value and brand loyalty. Here are some fields to add to your spreadsheet that will help you gauge Twitter success.# of Followers: Do not be fooled, just like anything else you want quality not quantity. It doesn’t matter that you have 4000 followers if 3000 of them are spam or spammers. Do not be lured into the “Get 1000 followers overnight” gimmick.

#of Re-Tweets: A Re-Tweet is the highest Twitter honor; it means someone liked your post enough to re-broadcast it to their followers. Not only does this help your Twitter rank-ing, but it helps spread your message and acquire more followers. Tools that help you calculate Re-tweets and Twitter ranking include: www.retweetrank.com, retweetist.com, twit-ter.grader.com & twinfluence.com

# of Click Throughs: This is right out of traditional marketing. How many people clicked your links from Twit-ter. You can track your click throughs with URL Shorteners like bit.ly, tr.im & owl.ly. The site backtweets.com will also allow you to track click throughs.

# of Key Influencers: We note when Key Influencers (i.e. Twitter power users) mention us or ReTweet for us. This is akin to getting a celebrity to

mention you on Entertainment To-night and has intrinsic value. You will be able to slowly build a rapport with these Key Influencers and then mobilize them around social media campaigns when you launch them. To find out who’s hot on Twitter, check out these sites: wefollow.com, www.twellow.com, twitterholic.com.

Note: There are a ton of new applica-tions for Twitter every week. I per-sonally use Tweetdeck for searching, tweeting and tracking. HooteSuite is also a stellar all purpose tool for managing your Twitter usage as is Co-Tweet. The trick is to find the ap-plication that is most intuitive for you. All of these services have great sup-port staff that will help make sure you are getting the most out of the tools. And the beauty is, all you need to do is Tweet your question and most likely you will be tweeted back quickly… Twitter is an awesome customer ser-vice channel!

Launching a Twitter based fundraising campaign:As I said in the beginning, we launched a great campaign in May via Twitter with a goal of raising 140

Social Media is not about the fast buck, but the long term

donor value and brand loyalty.

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Smiles/$33,600 (in honor of the 140 characters allowed in Twitter). This campaign came about as a result of listening to supporters on Twitter and identifying Key Influencers. @Adventuregirl, a suggested Twitter “Power User” who now has over 850,000 followers, tweeted about Operation Smile. By monitoring Tweets through Tweetdeck, we caught the tweet, responded and through that correspondence had the opportunity to launch a campaign in tandem with TWTRCON, the first Twitter for business conference.

We worked with Common Knowledge, a nonprofit marketing firm on a strate-gy and mini-site making the campaign a live case study. We held a launch party, engaged key influencers that would be present at the conference and tweeted non-stop to the general Twitter community. Now a few months after our initial launch we have raised enough funds for 48 surgeries and counting. As this live case study cam-paign rolls on, we continue to have opportunities to alter and reinvigorate the campaign in an effort to reach our goal. Recently the 140 Smiles campaign was selected as the official charity for the San Francisco Twesti-val, a hugely successful annual chari-ty Tweet-Up. Our hope is through this final push we will meet our financial goal. In addition to raising funds, we have also created invaluable connec-tions with brands for potential Cause Related Marketing, entertainment en-tities and the tech community.

The key take-aways from 140 Smiles and our first real quarter of Social Me-dia Strategy is to be flexible, be real, pay attention to the medium (the more you look and listen/the more opportu-nities you will find) and to be fearless. Use the resources that are in great abundance to get you started and help

you grow a Social Media Strategy. The best advice I can possibly give to you is to have fun and make sure you smile while you tweet!

Here is a Top 10 list of nonprofit folks to follow to get you started:

@Kanter - Beth Kanter is the preeminent expert and aggregator of resources and organizations successfully navigating the social media waters@Wharmon - Wendy Harmon of the American Red Cross. After Hurricane Katrina, Wendy was the first nonprofiter thrust into the Twitterverse in response to tweets about the devastation and needs. She is creating an incredible social media hand-book as a resource to all nonprofits.@afine - Allison Fine, author of Momentum, keynote speaker and social media guide for nonprofits offering great perspective and resources for nonprofits of all sizes @katyaN4G - Katya Andreson, a blogger, writer, nonprofit marketer, Robin Hood Marketing author, Network for Good COO and an incredible resource for all things marketing@Ntenhross - Holly Ross of NTEN (Non-Profit Technology Network). If you are not yet a member and you are diving into the social media world, I highly recommend joining. They offer

incredible webinars, resources and trainings each month to keep you up to date at whatever level of expertise you are.@nonprofitorgs – The nonprofit Twitter account of Diosa Communications that only follows nonprofits and posts information for the industry as well as tweeting about what organizations are doing on Twitter@DannyBrown – Danny Brown, a social media PR and marketing professional offering a great network and resources on the intersection of the tech world and marketing/PR @bBravo - Britt Bravo is a blogger, podcaster, nonprofit consultant and dogooder. Britt offers fun and easy-to-understand tips as well a wealth of helpful links that include technical tools as well as marketing and campaign strategy resources@Philanthropy - The official Twitter account for the Chronicle of Philanthropy@Mashable - Not nonprofit specific, but the pivotal Twitter blog with all of the latest news and resources- a MUST follow!

Renee Alexander Hamilton is the Market-ing and Social Media Strategist for Op-eration Smile, an international children’s medical charity. In her role as Social Me-dia Strategist, Renee is dedicated to using Social Media for donor engagement and relationship building. Operation Smile’s adventurous social media plan includes innovative ways to integrate event based fundraising and promotions with the lat-est social media tools. Renee encourages people getting into emerging media to embrace social media as tools to comple-ment a new consumer centric paradigm in public relations and marketing. She is on a personal mission to shift the thinking of those responsible for branding from one way messaging to two way conversations with donors and consumers using these new technology tools.

be flexible, be real, pay

attention to the medium, and be fearless.

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