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Happy holidays! (For which religion, though?)

April 11, 2022 by Dennis Fischman Leave a Comment

Your nonprofit organization probably has donors (and volunteers, staff, and Board members) who practice different religions, or no religion. How do you recognize and appreciate them all?

Happy Passover–if it’s your holiday!

As I write this on April 11, 2022, we are in the middle of the month of Ramadan, for Muslims. We are four days out from Pesach (Passover), for Jews. Easter is celebrated this coming weekend by most Christians in the West, although Orthodox Easter is a week later, on April 24.

A month ago, we passed through the vernal equinox (sacred to Wiccans and followers of other pagan religions). Major Buddhist holidays are still ahead.

How can your nonprofit say, “We see you, and we value you” to supporters from all religions?

Ways to welcome people from different religions

You have several options when it comes to religious holidays. None is perfect, but some are better than others.

Ignore religious holidays

If interfaith understanding is not part of your nonprofit’s mission, you could choose to go secular. Strip out the mention of any religion or its holidays from your communications.

The advantage of this approach is that it’s apparently neutral. The disadvantage is that in a society where Christian culture is assumed, a secular approach is not neutral at all. If you have an event with food during this time, for instance, Muslims will not be able to eat any of it until after the sun goes down, and observant Jews will have to avoid bread, cake, pasta, or anything that might have leavened ingredients.

Plus, as we’ve seen in December, a certain number of Christians will view the non-mention of their holidays (Christmas or Easter) as erasing them. So, I do not recommend this approach. Ignorance is not bliss.

Acknowledge them

When you’re creating your communications calendar, make a note of the holidays that occur each month. In your newsletter or on your social media feed, make mention of them and say, “To all those who celebrate these holidays, we send good wishes.”

I used to do this in the staff newsletter at the agency where I worked, and it was mostly appreciated. When I missed a holiday, however, I had to apologize humbly and sincerely, make up for it, and learnt to do better. (And this is not just about religious holidays. When I failed to mention National Hispanic Heritage Month, one staff member was incredulous. “It’s been a holiday since 1968!”)

Mere acknowledgment can sometimes feel tokenizing, however. Having blue-and-white decorations along with red-and-green doesn’t change the fact that a party in the third week of December is a Christmas party.

And in your communications, you don’t want to make mistakes that say you’ve never met a Jew, like having matzah and a shofar in your Chanukah greetings. (They’re for Passover and Rosh Hashanah, respectively.) You may not be marketing products like the ones featured on Hanukkah Fails, but you are speaking for your nonprofit. You really don’t want to send the message, “All your piddly little holidays look the same to us!”

Make religious holidays into learning opportunities

I think the best thing a nonprofit can do for all its constituents is to make religious holidays (and other cultural events like Nowruz) into learning opportunities. Here are some questions you can find out more about:

When exactly does this holiday occur? Is it a one-day holiday (and if so, when does the “day” begin)? Or is it a week, or a month?
What does this holiday mean to people who observe it? Does it mean different things to different practitioners of the religion?
What are some of the customs associated with this holiday, and do people from different countries have different customs associated with it?
How will this holiday affect people’s ability to work, or attend Board meetings or community events?
What are some appropriate greetings for this holiday? What would be odd to say then? (“Happy Yom Kippur” doesn’t quite work. Nor does “Merry Losar.”)

If you are a member of the majority culture in the U.S., whether or not you go to church, you may not realize how often people in religious minorities feel foreign. To get a sense of what it would be like if the majority were Jewish and Christians were a misunderstood minority, follow the satirical @JewWhoHasItAll and the explanations on @JWhoKnowsItAll on Twitter.

Learning about others’ religion is a matter of diversity, equity, and inclusion. It’s also basic respect. You do not have to believe a single thing that Baha’is or Shintoists believe in order to say to them (as well as Christians, Muslims, Jews, pagans, and Buddhists), “You belong here.”

Fundraising Tuesday: Make the Calendar Your Friend. Easy!

January 25, 2022 by Dennis Fischman Leave a Comment

What if I told you there was a way you could reach out and touch your supporters more often, with less effort, with more impact, and raise more money for your nonprofit? Would you be interested?

There is, and it’s called an integrated donor communications calendar. And it’s easy!

Why Planning Your Posts and Your Asks Makes Life Easier

Did you ever have this experience? You open your computer, see that you haven’t emailed, Facebooked, tweeted, etc., to your donors in weeks. Your heart sinks.

“I really have to get in touch with them right now,” you say to yourself. “But what in the world will I say?”

I sympathize. There’s nothing more off-putting than a blank screen (unless it’s a blank piece of paper). Many’s the time I’ve got up and made myself a cup of tea, or cleaned the cats’ litter box…anything to delay that fateful moment when I have to have an idea.

The problem isn’t with you, or me. The problem is that we are leaving too much to chance.

Yes, a blinding flash of inspiration can strike just at the moment when you sit down to write. It can happen. But that’s not the way to bet.

Instead, we can more or less guarantee that we will have something to write about. Not only that, but we can make sure that we’ll be sending out the right messages at the right time, to the right audience, making them feel seen and appreciated (and more likely to donate when asked).

Planning ahead makes life easier for us and better for our readers and donors. So, how do we start? We start with a calendar.

What to Put on Your Donor Communications Calendar

The three types of content you want to share with your supporters are:

Seasonal
Campaign
Evergreen

Seasonal communications

Topical content is what will be top of your donor’s minds and close to their hearts at any given time.

If you know your audience, you know what they care about, specifically. For example, the Martin Luther King holiday is just another Monday off for some communities. For others, it is the most important day of their year.

Think about what will be front and center for the audience that gives to your nonprofit throughout the year. Take out a calendar, go month by month, and list the topics. Then, think about what your organization is especially well positioned to say about them. (For instance: “Did Martin Luther King play a role in promoting Fair Housing?” is a good post for a Fair Housing Commission, but it would be weird and distracting for a group focused on environmental racism to put out.)

Now, put that precise topic on your calendar, on the date when you want it to go public. Plan backwards from that date f0r

when you want to finalize and schedule it,
when you want to create different formats for your email and your various social media,
when you want to write it,
when you want to assemble photos, links, quotes, etc., for it
when you need to interview anyone for it (because anything that involves more than one person will take longer!)

When you put those steps on your calendar, you won’t wake up in a panic in mid-January wondering what to post. You’ll come back to work after New Year’s Day, look at your calendar, and have your plan for your MLK Day post in order. Simple!

Do the same thing for as many significant dates during the year as you can come up with. You’re off to a great start for the year.

Campaign communications

Let’s say your organization advocates for new policies when the legislature is in session–or runs a summer camp–or has an annual gala. Unlike the seasonal topics, these campaigns are not events that donors will necessarily know about by themselves. But you want them to pay attention!

Talk with your Executive Director and colleagues about what the organization will be doing over the course of the calendar year that you want the public to pay attention to, and perhaps even get involved in. Figure out the key dates, the essential themes, and the calls to action you want to share. Plan multiple messages across different platforms.

Now, block out the time on your calendar when most or all of your messaging is going to focus on that campaign.

Evergreen communications

Between seasonal content and campaign content, your communications calendar is starting to look substantial! Remember, though: consistency matters. Your donors and other supporters should look forward to hearing from you regularly. If you do a monthly newsletter, it should be every month. If you do a weekly Facebook post (I’d suggest more often), make sure you don’t skip a week. If you’re on Twitter, you can do variations of the same tweet multiple times a week, or a day. And so on.

Where are you going to get all that content? That’s where evergreen topics are so, so helpful.

Evergreen content is the kind of story that your donors will find interesting no matter what week, month, or year it is and what else may be going on. It’s what they care about, always. If you recognize what matters to them and serve it up regularly, they will keep coming back for more.

Cast your net to catch evergreen content when it shows up on the internet. (Google Alert and Feedspot are two of the many tools you can use for this.) Create a system for collecting stories from your staff, and a story bank, and you can pull from that treasure trove at will.

Betwixt and between the seasonal and campaign topics, at any time on your calendar, you can share your evergreen content with your readers. Sometimes, that will be what they remember the best!

Integrate Fundraising into Your Calendar

Most of fundraising is what happens between the asks.

Fundraising includes the thanks you send and the impact you demonstrate. It also includes the ways you provide value to your donors and the ways you make them happy to hear from you.

But of course, fundraising is also asking for money. And you should include your direct mail, email, and events fundraising in your calendar, too. That way, your asks can build off what you are already saying to your donors–and your communications can seamlessly lead into your solicitations.

The best day to start your communications calendar is today! List those seasonal, campaign, and evergreen topics and start plugging them into your schedule. Do yourself a favor and never have to wonder “What in the world will I say?” again.

Fundraising Tuesday: Celebrate and Raise Money

July 6, 2021 by Dennis Fischman Leave a Comment

International Women’s Day is March 8th, every year. The month of Ramadan began April 12, 2021. Also in 2021, Passover began on the evening of March 27. (It lasts eight days.)

What do these holidays have in common? Someone found a way to raise funds by celebrating these holidays with the people who observe them.

Three Ways to Celebrate Holidays with Donors

Mary’s Pence invests in women across the Americas. On International Women’s Day, my wife, Rona, got an appeal letter from Mary’s Pence. They knew she is a feminist and she is engaged in interfaith work. It was a reasonably good guess that she might be approachable on International Women’s Day.

Timing is not everything. The letter made much too much of the organization and its programs, too little of the women it helps (and their stories), and almost nothing of the donor herself. It’s all “I” and “we” and hardly any “you.” But by inviting her to celebrate, at least they got her to read the letter!

UNRWA USA sent Rona a card wishing her Ramadan Kareem: literally, a month of Ramadan that treats her generously. They tied that feeling of generosity and abundance to this appeal:

For just $50, you can fill a pantry for a refugee family living under the poverty line in Gaza with a month’s supply of food assistance.

If Rona were Muslim, the chance to give a month’s supply of food during the month of Ramadan might have been an irresistible offer. UNRWA also tied it in to the religious duty of Zakat, or almsgiving. As a Daughter of Abraham, she was impressed, too.

HIAS works around the world to protect refugees who have been forced to flee their homelands because of who they are, including ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities. Its origins are Jewish: it was originally called the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.

This Passover, HIAS sent Rona and me a holiday reading playing on the biblical phrase “Open for me the gates of righteousness.” We could incorporate it into our seder, or we could download the HIAS Haggadah and celebrate our holiday using that as our main text.

HIAS’ mailing was a “soft ask.” It gave us the opportunity to give without pushing for it at the moment. It was part of a longer-term strategy of relationship-building, where they gave us something meaningful so that we would feel more connected with the organization…and more ready to donate when they did ask.

How Do You Know When to Celebrate?

To make your messages hit home with donors, you need to know who they are, and which holidays especially matter to them. By recording this information in your CRM, you can segment your list and send the holiday greetings that they will welcome.

Some cultures celebrate their holidays on their own calendars, so for people who use the Gregorian calendar (January-December), the dates will appear to change. Not for the people in those cultures, though! Eid al-Fitr is always at the end of Ramadan, and Rosh Hashanah is always the first day of the month of Tishrei. Losar is always the first day of the new year on the Tibetan calendar.

Many secular calendars are starting to include these dates, but it would be a good idea for you to look up days that your constituents celebrate and put them in your schedule, too. Here’s a head start for you on the Jewish holiday calendar for 5782 (2021-22).

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Happy holidays! (For which religion, though?)