A Better Way to Do Good

Merry Christmas & Happy Holidays

Merry Christmas & Happy Holidays from all of us at Click & Pledge.  Each day I’m privileged to talk with nonprofit professionals and citizen do-gooders alike. 

Nonprofit organizations of every size or design, from around the globe, call here daily seeking better solutions and striving to improve upon services to nourish and enrich their mission; each one passionate, enthusiastic, and engaged.

Upon reflection, though, I am awed by the steady stream of individual do-gooders that have a genesis of a philanthropic idea and want to go to work in their spare time.  These folks are committed to something and just want to make a doggone difference. They are willing to invest their time, skills, energy and money just to give it all away to others.  Awesome!

Yesterday a lady from North Carolina had a real sense of urgency to get a nonprofit venture started.  She told me she was already a year behind; she wished she had started a year ago. 

Encourage this pursuit of new ideas; the world can’t get enough.

All this reminds me of a quote:  “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” – Gandhi
We should all be thankful and optimistic that many happy holiday seasons are in our future.

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.

Simple Works. It Never Fails.

Recovering from a few weeks of travel and speaking engagements, I look back on the messages I delivered to nonprofit audiences.  My supposition was that the majority of us is bombarded with technology and information.  Websites, Google, Bing, Ning, Facebook, MySpace, Blogs, Twitter and so on batter and overwhelm us all.  We do not know what to do first or next to increase online fundraising.   

My advice is to simplify.  Don’t try to do too much; a trap of the mediocre majority.  Instead, pick one online fundraising goal, like setting up a blog site or developing a community of friends on Facebook.  Focus and do it very well.  When successful, add one additional goal.  Time lines be damned.   

Even more emphasis must be focused on simplifying nonprofit websites!  Data from a recent nonprofit website usability study show:

• 53% publish unclear content and use confusing terms
• 47% offer poor page design
• 17% of sites unable to find the DONATION button

In general, I see way to many sites that the homepage is overloaded with information.  It’s easy to be verbose; it’s very difficult to be brief.  But remember, brevity delivers clarity of message. 

 Donors want to see two things:

1.  Mission:  Tell them your mission in five words with a picture.

57% of sites tested did not state the mission.

2.  Donations:  How will my donation of time or money be used? Tell them where the money goes!

Only 4% of nonprofits cited use of donation money.

Build a homepage restricted to three elements: A picture and five words describing your mission, bullet points of how the money will be used and a big, simple donation button.

This example is from Yéle Haiti.

Now, go do it.

 

Looking Good.

It was a perfect spring day in Washington DC as I walked across the Mall.  Then I heard one mythical donor say to another, “Annie, I would have donated to that nonprofit you mentioned, but it was too confusing.”   Believe this.

You must make donating to your cause “impulse-easy” and simple.  One of the most effective ways is through design.   Simple, elegant web page design connotes confidence and promotes understanding. 

Patrons decide to support your cause, or not, based on the character and make-up of your organization and the end results of your efforts.  Presenting your ideas clearly online and encouraging donations/volunteering with simple forms delivers positive results.    There is an avalanche of competition for charitable dollars, so do not confuse or frustrate your patrons with poor form design.  

Journalist Dan Rather once said that Americans will put up with anything as long as it doesn’t block traffic.  Bad web page design blocks traffic to receiving donations online.  It pays to make all of your presentations project good taste.  Poor design suggests a poor organization. 

There a very few organizations which do not benefit from being given a first class ticket through life.

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”

Which Way Widgets?

From Jim Barney:

Don’t worry. You already know what a widget is.

You have used widgets.  Widgets are everywhere on the web.

For example, they are stock trackers, pizza trackers and blood drive trackers.  I use widgets to tell me what time it is and to tell me what the climate is.

Nonprofits often use them.  Thermometers to measure progress toward a goal are always the most requested.   Widgets are great tools to add function and fun to any website.  And, most importantly, they are easy to install and use. 

Widgets are easily delivered to you by inserting a snippet of code into webpages or blogs or desktops.  

Widgets are neat and easy and can add elements of interactivity to your web pages.  But beware, they must be well thought out and expertly designed and they require some level of support. 

You will see some very nice widgets soon from Click & Pledge.  Our goal is to provide nonprofits with long-term, practical widgets that will have database functionality with live, updated content, the ability to customize the look and feel with graphics, design in social elements and mobile phone capability.  

In this post, we've included images of widgets we're developing for nonprofits at Click & Pledge.

Googling And Tweeting

From Jim Barney:

This dispatch has to do with social networking.  Is it for the birds or will it fly? 

At Click & Pledge we see lift-off, because birds of a feather really do fly together…and now they can Twitter together.

Come January ’09, we will introduce a community-building package for nonprofits, political campaigns and the like.  One component will be Twitter, a free social-networking service that connects like-minded folks via PCs and mobile phones.

I was shocked that my teenagers were unaware of Twitter; so don’t feel out of the loop if you aren’t up on “Tweeting” and other Twitter lingo.  Personally, the idea of sending or receiving a “tweet” seems silly…but we all Google, so why not Tweet? 

But Twitter is popular and here’s why: 

• It’s free.
• Most everyone sends text messages and Twitter allows you to send the same message to a network or community of followers that care about the same thing. 
• Twitterers communicate with each other in text sound bites of up to 140 text-based characters per tweet.   
• Messages are short; so it’s to the point, it’s fast and it’s easy and efficient.
• Twitter works on any browser, even mobile.

The Wall Street Journal says Twitter is widely popular among 20 to 40 year-olds.   So check it out at Twitter.com.  Give your constituents a way to chat.  It will help you build community among your donors, patrons and volunteers.

Take a Cab to the Game

From Jim Barney:

Sports analogies can get tiresome, but I recently told a venture capitalist inquiring about Click & Pledge, that our product offering, an online fundraising system, is "a fastball."

So we continued our business discussion analogous to baseball.  (He wouldn’t let it go.)

Following a few innings of discussion, he summarized Click & Pledge as such:

“If I attend a World Series game, Click & Pledge is like buying a $15 Family ticket:  I get a good seat, a hot dog, a big bag of popcorn and a large cold drink.  Or, I could opt for one of your competitors and get a lower level box seat.  Ticket price is $115 and I pay extra for all the food and drink I consume."

"But when it’s all said and done, regardless of my seat, I saw the same game.   It’s about value,” he stated. 

I agreed with him.  But I switched the analogy challenge to a cab ride in New York.   

"Click & Pledge is like riding in a Ferrari but only paying for the price for a standard yellow cab," I said.  "That’s value."

He agreed.

I have not heard from him since.

From Jim Barney:

Sports analogies can get tiresome, but I recently told a venture capitalist inquiring about Click & Pledge, that our product offering, an online fundraising system, is "a fastball."

So we continued our business discussion analogous to baseball.  (He wouldn’t let it go.)

Following a few innings of discussion, he summarized Click & Pledge as such:

“If I attend a World Series game, Click & Pledge is like buying a $15 Family ticket:  I get a good seat, a hot dog, a big bag of popcorn and a large cold drink.  Or, I could opt for one of your competitors and get a lower level box seat.  Ticket price is $115 and I pay extra for all the food and drink I consume."

"But when it’s all said and done, regardless of my seat, I saw the same game.   It’s about value,” he stated. 

I agreed with him.  But I switched the analogy challenge to a cab ride in New York.   

"Click & Pledge is like riding in a Ferrari but only paying for the price for a standard yellow cab," I said.  "That’s value."

He agreed.

I have not heard from him since.

A Better Way To Do Good

From Jim Barney:

Like any business, we work hard to find the right words that succinctly describe Click & Pledge.   

As often happens, we stumbled across “A Better Way” during marketing communications discussions.   We sincerely believe that we offer a better way for our customers to achieve their online fundraising goals.   Bad grammar notwithstanding, the phrase “A Better Way To Do Good” defines our business approach at Click & Pledge…so now we own it. 

We simply offer non-profits a “Better Way” to use information technology for effective and efficient online fundraising.

It begins with selling our software-as-a-service.  Normally, you buy software and install it. 

We suggest instead that it’s a “Better Way” to access the software online…and only pay when you use it for financial transactions. Customers save a huge amount of money and time.  No IT staff required. Nor must they sign contracts, pay for maintenance, or pay for upgrades and customer support. 

Click and Pledge is a “Better Way” to manage donors and to build websites.   It’s also a “Better Way“ to lower risk;  to increase security;  to access detailed reporting and a real-time database;  and it’s simple and easy to use.   

There’s more.  Ease of use, great support and low cost access to world-class software are vital to nonprofits’ survival.  They must embrace technology.  So we’ve opened up Click & Pledge to software designers and customers to develop applications and enrich our product offerings beyond anything that our internal R & D efforts could produce.    Customers now use a choice of open source donor & content management systems.

That’s real value.  That’s “A Better Way To Do Good."