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Independence Day 2016

July 4, 2016 by Dennis Fischman Leave a Comment

To many people, today is just July 4th.  In the U.S., it’s the capstone of a long weekend, and a day for picnics and fireworks.

Names matter, however. This holiday is not just a date on the calendar. The name of this national holiday is Independence Day.  It’s worth reflecting on the revolution it started.

The Revolutionary Meaning of Independence

The word “revolution” has been cheapened in the market.  Honestly, people: no car is revolutionary.  No mobile phone is revolutionary.

As Friedrich Engels wrote, a revolution is not a dinner party.

  • In the American Revolution, the colonists took on the responsibility of governing themselves.
  • During the French Revolution shortly afterwards, ordinary people said they could rule without a king or nobility.
  • Around the same time in Haiti, the revolutionaries proclaimed that black people did not have to rely on Europeans to run their country.

What these revolutions have in common is the assertion of independence.

Letting somebody else do our thinking for us is easy.  Coming together as opinionated and self-interested human beings and deciding what’s good for us all is hard.  But that public deliberation is what makes us free.

Let us not depend on cheap, easy cliches in our speech.  Let us seek real consensus and real solutions in our politics.  Ours: not the experts’ or the politicians’, the pundits’ or the corporations’ politics.  Ours.  It belongs to us, inalienably.

Happy Independence Day.

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Nonprofits, Great Customer Service Speaks For You

September 22, 2015 by Dennis Fischman 1 Comment

January 13, 2010:  We woke up to the news that a huge earthquake had devastated Haiti.  Many of the clients at the Somerville, Massachusetts agency where I worked had family in Haiti.  So did some of the staff.  In those early hours, none of them knew for sure whether their loved ones were alive or dead.

Pennies for Haiti

Head Start children collect Pennies for Haiti

We wanted to help.  But what could we do?

First, we spread the word about the disaster to our staff, Board, and email list.

Second, when our state funding agency turned to us and asked what we could do, we responded within the hour.

Third, we collected food and clothing for our new clients: Haitian refugees who started arriving in Somerville.  We helped their families find them places to live.

Finally, we helped raise funds for Haitian relief from our donors using our newsletter and email.

What our agency did was great customer service.

Each of these four responses served a different set of customers–because those are the “customers” a nonprofit has to serve.

  1. Internal:  As Sybil Stershic points out, nonprofits have to take care of our own staff to make sure those employees take great care of our funders, clients, and supporters.  A Haitian employee told me, “When I saw how this agency responded, I knew I was working in the right place.”
  2. Institutional: The funders used our information to tell the public how they were helping Haiti.  We served the funders by making them look good–giving them yet another reason to keep funding us in the future.
  3. Clients:  Clients are a nonprofit’s most important customers.  If we served them poorly, the staff would know, the funders would eventually know…and all the PR in the world wouldn’t make up for it.
  4. Donors:  We gave our donors a chance to do something about Haiti right away, and a trusted channel through which they could provide their gifts.  That served them well and made them identify with our agency more strongly.

 

For nonprofits, customer service is the best marketing.

“Customers” and “marketing” aren’t words that nonprofits use.  But nonprofits DO serve customers, as the examples above have shown.

And we DO engage in marketing. We communicate with the purpose of moving people to support us and our causes.  But what we do communicates better than what we say.

As Laura Click says, “Every interaction and touch point with customers can be scrutinized or applauded and then shared with the world….every employee can make or break a customer’s experience.”

Do your employees know the different kinds of customers you serve?  What are their actions saying to their coworkers, funders, and donors, as well as to their clients?

P.S. Haiti is still in desperate need of help.  Consider donating to Project ESPWA.

 

 

 

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Another Way to Lose a Donor

April 3, 2014 by Dennis Fischman 7 Comments

Last week, I told you how The Nation lost me as a monthly donor: they sent me repeated emails addressed to the wrong name.  Sadly, they have not even noticed my post, even though I emailed and tweeted them directly.  (Maybe I should have called them In These Times?)

Let me tell you another sad story about an organization that lost me as a donor.  You can learn what not to do from the example.

Do you remember the earthquake in Haiti four years ago?  Too few people do.  But here in Somerville, Massachusetts, many of my neighbors were born in Haiti.

My wife Rona and I paid a lot of attention to events on the island.  We realized that Haiti would need help for years: not only disaster relief, but reconstruction and development.

We chose to give a significant amount–significant for us, at least–to Haiti annually through the American Jewish World Service.  It’s a well-run organization, and giving though AJWS would let people in Haiti know that Jews as well as Christians cared about them.

AJWS acknowledged our gift and thanked us for it.  They did it again the next year.  Then, they started soliciting us to give to causes all over the world–at the same high level that we had committed to Haiti.

Clearly, they did not know what mattered to us.  Did they even care?  Or did they think they knew better where our limited resources should go?

Rona and I will be giving to Haiti again this year, but maybe through ESPWA.  Perhaps through Partners in Health.  Probably not through AJWS.  And it’s a pity.  We were proud to donate through them until they gave us the message we were not doing enough.

What message are you sending your donors?

 

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