A Better Way to Do Good

Pledge TeeVee is Cool, but more importantly, It's Free and Effective.

Image of Pledge TeeVee

At Click & Pledge we’re excited about Pledge TeeVee, our new video fundraising tool. Everyone describes it as “Cool”.   I am very glad that it is cool.  But I’m more impressed with its design and function; it is intended to increase donations and we believe that it will.

After 20-plus years in the advertising biz, I found that it is easier to double the selling power of a commercial than to double the audience of a product.  Therefore, I suppose that it is easier to double the selling power of your organization by giving you powerful new communication and selling tools like Pledge TeeVee.    Pledge TeeVee will deliver three benefits:

• The power of video and audio to deliver a clear, compelling message.
• “Impulse Easy” giving…credit card donations right on the video screen.
• Increased donations.

And it’s Free.

Free Webinar: My Top Secrets to Fundraise with Blogs

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Blogs enable you to spread the word about your cause and draw supporters into conversations with you. This informative webinar will give you plenty of practical information you can use right away.  You will learn:

• the Do’s and Don’t’s of creating a blog
• why you should start one
• what's involved in setting up a blog
• my secrets to fundraise with blogs
• tips to generate content and use information you already have
• glean ideas from my list of best blogs to read   

Date & Time: Thursday, July 30 at 2 PM Eastern Standard Time
Duration: 1 Hour
Click Here to Register

Sandy Rees CFRE, a fundraising coach and consultant, will be presenting this webinar. Her passion is showing small nonprofit organizations how to raise more money, strengthen their Boards, and build relationships with donors. To learn more about Sandy visit her website, sign up for her free newsletter "Bright Ideas for Fundraising" or read her blog.

And at the end of the webinar we will have a drawing to give away 5 copies of Sandy's book, Fundraising Buffet - A Heaping Helping of 101 Practical Ideas to Increase Donations and Deepen Donor Satisfaction.

Register here to join us.

Build your community without adding overhead

Times are certainly changing in the nonprofit sector. One change is the notion that a nonprofit has to do everything in-house. Build a website, send out a newsletter, manage social networking – are these really projects a nonprofit should manage in-house? Can a volunteer or an already over-worked staff member handle all the projects efficiently? Will the quality of the product be the same? What are the real costs of committing staff time? Are projects like these better suited for a professional? More and more I see nonprofits choosing to have professionals manage marketing projects so the nonprofit can stay focused on its core mission.

Today the hot project on most nonprofit “to do” lists is social networking. All nonprofits have a community, but the challenge is to engage and grow it. Social networking tools like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Flickr and branding/fundraising sites such as Café Press are all the rage. If you are still wondering about the importance of social networking, then read Shirin’s blog entry Be my friend!

I mention this because an interesting study has just come out on the trends of social networking in the nonprofit sector. See the press release: http://news.prnewswire.com/ViewContent.aspx?ACCT=109&STORY=/www/story/04-28-2009/0005014488&EDATE=

The study found

• 80% of nonprofits are committing at least 25% of a full time staff person to their social networking effort

• Over 50% of nonprofits plan to grow social networking project staff over the next year

If you consider the cost of dedicating 25% of full time staff person or hiring staff to handle social networking, this could be a huge expense. Nonprofits need to make their marketing/fundraising decisions by considering their potential Return on Investment (ROI). If you have the ability to outsource this project to a professional at a fraction of the cost, isn’t that a better business decision?

Another issue, do organizations need to increase their overhead expenses by adding staff? In tough economic times supporters are increasingly scrutinizing the organizations they contribute to. A primary concern for donors is the overhead expenses of an organization. Donors give their money to organizations that keep their overhead low and show big results from their services.

So if you need assistance with community building (websites, social networking, newsletters), visit our Community Builder webpage. We just released a solution tailored for you. And the best part is you can scratch that project off your “to do” list without breaking the bank.

Be my friend!

It is not hard to imagine why friends are more likely to help friends than strangers.  Friendship is about trust and trust goes a long way in any relationship.  I always find it interesting when organizations ask us how can they raise more money but not how can they find more friends.  If friends are more likely to help friends, why should the question not be more about finding friends than raising money?  Why are the questions not about the people but about their wallet?

In one of Jim’s latest blogs [Donor Econometrics: Time –vs- Money?] he referred to a study that has addressed the effect of volunteering on future contributions.  In this context volunteering in an organization and being a friend of an organization are not much different.  So in this hard economic times, perhaps we should try to find more friends and increase the brand awareness among the constituency than to ask for direct contribution.

At Click & Pledge we are close to releasing the Trio Community.  The Trio Community offers a family of managed tools and expertise that will help your organization find new friends and stay present in the minds of your existing friends.

Stay tuned for announcements!

Shirin Zohdi
Director of Social Media

Donor Econometrics: Time –vs- Money?

Ever wonder about the decision to ask supporters to donate their time vs. donating their money?  If you are a fundraising professional, a worthy question to consider.   For example, should you ask donors for time and then money; or just time or just money?   It’s termed the “Time-Ask Effect”.
Primarily the question is:

“How much time would they like to donate”  -vs-   “How much money would they like to donate”, and how much they ultimately do donate to a charity.  Well, professors Wendy Liu of UCLA and Jennifer Aaker of Cal Berkeley studied these concepts in remarkable depth.* They conducted various experiments and explored many theories on the topic.   Moreover, the professors studied the psychological well-being of the donors after giving time or money or both.  So what are the findings?  To oversimplify, it’s a good outcome if you first ask individuals to donate their time.  This leads to a “significant increase in actual amounts of contribution” of time and money.

Folks that donate time generally get comfortable and confident about an organization and its cause.  After donating time, they gain a sense of well-being and feel good about themselves.   Naturally, they progress to feeling good about donating money because they are familiar with where and how the money will be used.  

Some political grassroots orgs ask donors to substitute their time to make a few phone contacts in lieu of donating money.  It’s clear where they place value and it shows in the huge money rakes they receive.

These new donor econometrics clearly say build a solid volunteer program and the money will follow. 

*Journal of Consumer Research, May 2008: “The Happiness of Giving: The Time-Ask Effect”

Are we getting dummer?

From Kamran Razvan:

Human beings are social animals. We live longer when we are in groups and die younger when we are alone. We recover from illness when surrounded by loved ones and stay longer in hospitals when left alone. Nothing is new in how hungry we are for communication and our thirst for belonging to a tribe. We all search for a place where “everybody knows our name”!

While our ancestors joined tribes to survive and did not have much choice in the tribe since all tribes were mostly geographically bound, today we join tribes for entirely different reasons. Today’s tribes are more like flocks of individuals with common interests and language. In the past, tribal members had to communicate with people they did not like or with whom they did not agree. Today's tribe has no reason to have contact with those with whom they don’t agree.

Facebook, MySpace, and all other social networking sites consist of those that agree with us. Our network is limited to everyone that further amplifies our self-verification needs. We listen to music “our” way, we read the stories that agree with “our” worldview, and we subscribe to podcasts that further prove “our” side of the story.

I truly wonder what this trend will do to our evolutionary process as human beings. Perhaps we are taking a step backward before leaping forward into becoming a super organism. Let’s explore this thought ..

Ants: How do they communicate? How do they behave and function as organisms that behave in perfect synchronicity? Every member’s presence is sensed by others and each serves a function that further complements every other member’s contribution.

What are we doing now? We visit a site and Digg the site and mark it with Reddit and tweet everyone to follow our trail. We are no longer a single entity bound by a geographical presence. We are being followed by everyone that thinks as us and for the most part behaves as we do.

In the absence of diversity and opposing viewpoints are we becoming smarter or just simply dumber?

Do we have to get dumber before we get smarter?

A few links & reading materials.

• Are you in the tribe?
• The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies
• Wikipedia: Superorganism