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Helping you win loyal friends through your communications

TY Thursday: Your Nonprofit Organization’s Best Friend

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loyalty

Who is your organization’s best friend?

Every nonprofit organization has one: the most loyal supporter.  The person who gives as often as she can, or as often as you ask.  The one who volunteers for all your events and brings her friends.

You’d like a thousand like that.  You’d like to clone her.  What if you could?

Businesses have time-tested strategies that create loyal customers.  Some of these strategies work especially well on social media. Nonprofits can adapt and adopt these strategies to thank our donors, volunteers, and supporters.

Danny Maloney, CEO of the social media firm Tailwind, lists “4 Ways to Turn Social-Media Fans Into Raving, Loyal Customers”:

  1. Use a targeted approach.  Find the people who are already talking about you on Facebook, Twitter, and the web at large.
  2. Let your fans know you’re listening.  “If they took the time to share a blog post you wrote or to give you a positive review, be listening for it and thank them.”
  3. Target your special offers.  Businesses give loyalty discounts.  What can you give your most loyal supporters that they would enjoy: a chance to write for your blog? lunch with a celebrity who also supports you? an award?
  4. Curate compelling content.  That’s jargon for finding and sharing information that interests your supporters.  It could be an insider analysis of where their favorite legislation stands in Congress. It could be a video that explains the issue you and they both care about.

Sharing this content with your most loyal supporters makes them feel smarter and happier because they’re associated with you.  It shows them your gratitude. It keeps them coming back to your social media.

And it keeps them advocating for your organization, increasing awareness of you among their friends…who may become your next most loyal supporters.

 

Fundraising Tuesday: Show Me You Care

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careToday I received a letter in the mail from my health insurance company.

You are taking a certain medicine, they said, so every year, you should have a certain kind of blood test.  Are you doing that?  Will you ask your doctor to make sure?

The company called the letter a Care Alert, and everything inside it reinforced the message, “We Care.”

The envelope didn’t: it looked as if it might have been one of those Explanations of Benefits that don’t explain anything at all.  And of course, one of the reasons they care is that if I look out for myself, I can avoid serious health risks that would end up costing the insurance company a lot.

Still, the message itself was caring.  It was personalized, and it treated me like a responsible adult who can make good decisions with the proper information.

A Modest Proposal: Show You Care

I would like to propose that nonprofits aim at making all their communications as personal and as caring as the letter I received.

What would it take to do that?

  1. Knowing, and remembering, a lot about your supporters.
  2. Thinking, “How can I make my agency useful to this person?”  What topics matter to him or her?  What information would she or he find useful–not in a general way, but here and now?
  3. Calling on them to take action…and showing them how.

The tools exist to make all this possible.  Databases, constituent relationship management software and processes, email tools, various programs that remind you it’s time to send this kind of message to this specific person: they’re out there, and not that expensive.

But is your organization willing to spend the time and attention it takes to treating every client, constituent, prospect, or donor with at least as much care as a health insurance company showed to me?

How to Find a Story for Every Occasion

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Storytelling is an ancient art that people in communications fields have begun to appreciate.  But how do you find the right story for the occasion?

archery_homeOnce upon a time, a storyteller (the Maggid of Dubnow) was walking along a road when he saw the most amazing sight.  There was a barn, and on the barn was a bull’s-eye target.  Arrows protruded from the target.  Every one of them had hit the bull’s-eye.  And standing next to them, with a bow and an empty quiver, was a teenager, no more than fourteen.

“Young man!” the storyteller called out.  “How did you manage to hit the bull’s-eye every time?”

“Oh, it was easy,” the teenager replied.  “I shot the arrows first, then I painted the circles around them.”

“And that,” the storyteller told a friend later, “is exactly what I do with my stories. I learn to tell them first, and later I find the occasion to tell them.”

Don’t wait for the next time you’re putting together a newsletter or a funding appeal to think about what stories to tell.  Put some stories in your quiver.  Lean how to aim them.  Then, find the right targets.

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