Communicate!

Helping you win loyal friends through your communications

TY Thursday: The Love You Save May Be Your Donors

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leavingWhen a donor stops giving, it’s like a lover walking out the door.

They didn’t just wake up one day and decide to leave. Their reasons have been piling up, little by little, over time, until they just couldn’t stay any longer.

What are the reasons that donors say goodbye? Jay Love lists five:

1. Thought the charity did not need them 5%
2. No information on how monies were used 8%
3. No memory of supporting 9%
4. Never thanked for donating     13%
5. Poor service or communication     18%

Poor communication kills marriages. If your donors are saying, “You never listen to me and we hardly talk except what you want money,” they are going to file for divorce.

Get some help with your communications now. This marriage can be saved.

Where Nonprofits Should Spend their Time

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A business woman who’s exploring our nonprofit sector asked me: “If a nonprofit has to choose between investing time in establishing and maintaining a Facebook presence versus crafting content for SEO, where should the nonprofit invest its time?”

My answer? It depends on the audience you want to reach.

Why Nonprofits Shouldn’t Worry about SEO

Search engine optimization, or SEO for short, was all the rage a few years ago. Businesses (and some nonprofits) were paying good money to SEO consultants who promised to get them on page 1 of Google searches.

But most nonprofits shouldn’t worry about SEO. Here are three reasons why.

  1. You might not need to be found.  If you’re a nonprofit, these days you may already be serving more clients than you can handle! The Great Recession is officially over, but many people are still worse off and depending on nonprofits for help.
  2. It’s easy for them to find you. Surveys show that the single most common term people type into the search box when they’re looking for your nonprofit organization is…the name of your organization. They have already heard of you through word of mouth. It’s the word of mouth you need to boost–not the SEO.
  3. What do they find when they get there?  Improving the content on your website may get you better results for less money than increasing the number of people who ever happen to take a look at it

You shouldn’t worry about SEO–but paying just a little bit of attention to it might be worth your while.  Here’s a piece I wrote about “How To Get Found: SEO and the Small Nonprofit.”  It includes ten tips on getting more eyeballs to your site.  (But most of them are not SEO.)

Should Your Nonprofit Invest in Social Media?

So if SEO is less important, should nonprofits put more time and money into social media? You can’t answer a question like “Should we invest in Facebook” without answering these strategic questions first:

  1. Who are the audiences we’re trying to reach?
  2. Toward what end? (Once we have built up a nice, preferably two-way, relationship with the audience, what will they start to do that they weren’t doing before?)
  3. What do we already know about these audiences? What do we need to find out to give them what they’re looking for?

There is no point in using a communications channel if your audience isn’t using it. For most nonprofits, Facebook is the social media common denominator—but you don’t need to know about most nonprofits. You need to know what your specific audience uses and enjoys.

Putting First Things First

Let me be blunt: using social media at all could be a waste of time if you don’t answer these three strategic questions.

And even if you do have a fully-developed strategy, social media may not be the first way to put it into practice. You could invest in:

  • writing better permanent content for your website
  • creating a blog
  • cleaning up your email list and sending out email your readers really want to read

These are the basic building blocks of communications.

Before thinking about social media, make sure you have those building blocks in place. (Think of SEO as how you build them, not as a separate set of blocks.)

TY Thursday: More Than a Thank-You

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For many nonprofit organizations, December is a time to worry. Will you see checks in the mail (or clicks on the Donate button) from the donors who gave last year?

You have a right to worry. In the U.S., only 30% of first-time donors to nonprofit organizations renew their gift the next year.

You read that right! If you’re like most nonprofit organizations, more than 2 out of every 3 new donors will give to you once and then forget all about you.

You can curse your fickle donors. You can rip the month of December out of your wall calendar, or scroll past it on your computer. Or…

You can turn that one-time donation into a renewal.  In one week. This week.

Here’s how.

The One-Week Impact Report

A massive earthquake killed thousands in Nepal and India on April 25, 2015. The massive 7.9 magnitude earthquake hit Nepal with devastating force less than 50 miles from the capital, Kathmandu.

Nepali girl near Kathmandu

Nepali girl near Kathmandu

My wife and I know people who come from Nepal, and the images of the devastation touched our hearts. So, on April 27 we made a small donation of $50 through the international charity Global Giving.

We received a report from Global Giving about what they were doing with the donation and what difference it made.  Not in December. They emailed us on May 6–one week after the gift!

Global Giving made a convincing case that they knew the organizations on the ground that could use the money well. They told us what those organizations were doing. For instance:

The Nepal Youth Foundation is providing emergency supplies to hospitals, sheltering and caring for people discharged from hospitals who cannot return home, particularly women and children.

Global Giving didn’t stop there. “You can click on the link to any of the individual projects to see the updates they’ll post about how they are using the funds,” they told us. “We have also posted a link to frequently asked questions on the page.”

All this for a $50 donation. All this, in the first week.

When Rona and I give again to Nepali relief, why wouldn’t we channel our donation through Global Giving?

More Than a Thank You

Now, I know a lot of nonprofit organizations are still struggling to send a timely, personal thank-you letter. And if you’re one of them, absolutely, do all you can to make that happen. But that’s the minimum that donors expect.

As fundraising consultant Alan Sharpe says:

The secret to getting donations for your non-profit is to give donors what they want. People give to causes to make a difference in others’ lives. And what donors really want to know is how their donation will help people.

Are you telling them the impact of their donation? Start! Do it this week.

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