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Know Your Audience Better, On a Budget

by 3 Comments

“What’s that guy’s name again?”

“Where does that woman work?”

“When did we last speak?”

When you’re building relationships with donors, clients, customers, or business partners, a good memory helps.  But research shows that we can only really keep track of 150 relationships on our own.  Beyond that, we need tools.

You can spend tens of thousands of dollars on a really sophisticated customer relationship management system.  (Well, you can if you have the money.)  But suppose you’re a grassroots nonprofit organization with a limited budget.  How do you keep track of all the people you want as your supporters?

Use Tools You Already Have, For Free

You can turn tools you have, right there on your desktop or on the web, into your relationship management system.  All it takes is time.

Microsoft Outlook

You probably already know you can store addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, web page URL’s, and the company and job title of each person you know in Microsoft Outlook.  But did you ever:

  • Use the Search function to find all the people in your Contacts who work at a particular company, or who have a specific title, or whose email address ends with @NameOfTheirOrganization?
  • Add photos so that you recognize them on sight?
  • Use the notes section to store research you did on them?
  • Check your email to and from that person to remind you what you talked about last?
  • Search the Calendar to see when you met with them last?
  • Use the Tasks section of Outlook to remind yourself to talk with them again, or send them something, or do something for them, by a certain date?

Google

If you live in the Googleverse, you can do a lot of the same things that an Outlook user can do, and more.

  • Aside from the usual Contacts information, you can record birthdays, nicknames, how their name is pronounced, and the names of their spouses, children, and other relationships–including the name of the person who referred you to them.
  • Instantly see whether you are on Google+ together, and the Circles to which you have assigned them.  Easily click over to Google+ to see what they’ve posted there.
  • Follow people’s YouTube channels if they have them.
  • Set up a Google search for that person’s name so that anything that appears on the web about them will show up in your Gmail box.
  • Easily share documents with that person without worrying about whether the email bounced, using Google Drive.

LinkedIn

On LinkedIn, other people do a lot of your work for you.  If you connect with me on LinkedIn, you will find not only my contact information but my Twitter handle and my website information, too.

I put those up.  I also posted:

  • Summary of who I am and what I do
  • Experience
  • Projects I have worked on (with links to the end results, and the names of people who worked on them with me)
  • Professional courses I have taken
  • Languages I speak
  • Skills & expertise
  • Honors & awards
  • Education
  • Interests
  • Organizations

People have recommended me, and I have recommended them, and both types of recommendations are right there on my profile.  LinkedIn will also show you the LinkedIn groups I belong to, the people I follow, and the people who have connected with me.  Now you know more about me than my mother does!

But how am I related to you?  Next to the Contact Info tab on my profile is a tab marked Relationship.  There, you can write notes about me,  set your self a reminder in relation to me, write down how we met and who introduced us.

Use whichever of these tools feels most natural to you, and you’ll never have to wonder again.

Spending Money to Save Time

Free is not always the best price.  Using Outlook, Google, or LinkedIn as your CRM takes work.  If you want to send a series of emails to a person over a period of time, it would be a lot easier if you could automate the process.

Idealware has posted an excellent article, “10 Things To Consider in a CRM.”  If you are considering buying software, read the article first.  Then ask yourself: what is it worth to this organization to know everybody the way we know our best supporters?

 

Know Your Audience Better, On a Budget

by 4 Comments

“What’s that guy’s name again?”

“Where does that woman work?”

“When did we last speak?”

When you’re building relationships with donors, clients, customers, or business partners, a good memory helps.  But research shows that we can only really keep track of 150 relationships on our own.  Beyond that, we need tools.

You can spend tens of thousands of dollars on a really sophisticated customer relationship management system.  (Well, you can if you have the money.)  But suppose you’re a grassroots nonprofit organization with a limited budget.  How do you keep track of all the people you want as your supporters?

Use Tools You Already Have, For Free

You can turn tools you have, right there on your desktop or on the web, into your relationship management system.  All it takes is time.

Microsoft Outlook

You probably already know you can store addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, web page URL’s, and the company and job title of each person you know in Microsoft Outlook.  But did you ever:

  • Use the Search function to find all the people in your Contacts who work at a particular company, or who have a specific title, or whose email address ends with @NameOfTheirOrganization?
  • Add photos so that you recognize them on sight?
  • Use the notes section to store research you did on them?
  • Check your email to and from that person to remind you what you talked about last?
  • Search the Calendar to see when you met with them last?
  • Use the Tasks section of Outlook to remind yourself to talk with them again, or send them something, or do something for them, by a certain date?

Google

If you live in the Googleverse, you can do a lot of the same things that an Outlook user can do, and more.

  • Aside from the usual Contacts information, you can record birthdays, nicknames, how their name is pronounced, and the names of their spouses, children, and other relationships–including the name of the person who referred you to them.
  • Instantly see whether you are on Google+ together, and the Circles to which you have assigned them.  Easily click over to Google+ to see what they’ve posted there.
  • Follow people’s YouTube channels if they have them.
  • Set up a Google search for that person’s name so that anything that appears on the web about them will show up in your Gmail box.
  • Easily share documents with that person without worrying about whether the email bounced, using Google Drive.

LinkedIn

On LinkedIn, other people do a lot of your work for you.  If you connect with me on LinkedIn, you will find not only my contact information but my Twitter handle and my website information, too.

I put those up.  I also posted:

  • Summary of who I am and what I do
  • Experience
  • Projects I have worked on (with links to the end results, and the names of people who worked on them with me)
  • Professional courses I have taken
  • Languages I speak
  • Skills & expertise
  • Honors & awards
  • Education
  • Interests
  • Organizations

People have recommended me, and I have recommended them, and both types of recommendations are right there on my profile.  LinkedIn will also show you the LinkedIn groups I belong to, the people I follow, and the people who have connected with me.  Now you know more about me than my mother does!

But how am I related to you?  Next to the Contact Info tab on my profile is a tab marked Relationship.  There, you can write notes about me,  set your self a reminder in relation to me, write down how we met and who introduced us.

Use whichever of these tools feels most natural to you, and you’ll never have to wonder again.

Spending Money to Save Time

Free is not always the best price.  Using Outlook, Google, or LinkedIn as your CRM takes work.  If you want to send a series of emails to a person over a period of time, it would be a lot easier if you could automate the process.

Idealware has posted an excellent article, “10 Things To Consider in a CRM.”  If you are considering buying software, read the article first.  Then ask yourself: what is it worth to this organization to know everybody the way we know our best supporters?

 

Robin Hood Marketing, by Katya Andresen: a review

by 3 Comments

You care passionately about something.  You want other people to get involved.  You want their time, money, ideas, commitment.  How do you reach them?  Do you send out mail?  Work on your website?  Go deep on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram?  Sometimes it seems as if there’s a new way to reach out to people every day.  How do you figure out what will really work for you?

Robin Hood Marketing  Stop. Take a deep breath. Now, read Katya Andresen’s Robin Hood Marketing: Stealing Corporate Savvy to Sell Just Causes.Andresen, until recently the chief operating officer and chief strategy officer of Network for Good, has been a journalist, a marketer, and a nonprofit executive.  She doesn’t let the latest fad distract her.  She gets right to the point.  And the point is that good causes will not sell themselves–we have to use the most effective approaches to market them.Read the book for the “Robin Hood rules” she has robbed from the rich for-profit world and adapted for use by nonprofits.  Chief among those rules are “focus on getting people to do something specific” and “appeal to your audience’s values, not your own.”

Raising awareness is not enough: what action do you want people to take?  And making converts to the cause is too much, at least all in one step.  Get people to do something good for their own reasons (because of how the good action makes them feel about themselves, for instance).  They’ll be more likely to listen to your reasons later.  But even if they don’t, she asks, do you want to change minds or do you want to change the world?Read the book for a guide on how to plan your communications.  Step by step, Andresen shows you how to get to know your audience, your competition for support, and your potential partners, and how to shape your message to make a case that will connect with people and lead them to act.Read the book for excellent tips drawn from case studies and interviews.  Read it in order to ask yourself the right questions. For example:

  • What can we ask people to do that will be “fun, easy, popular, and rewarding”? (for supporters)
  • “Who wins when we win?” (for partners)
  • How can we supply information that is expert, fast, first, accurate, and tells a good story? (for journalists–they are a target audience too!)

I cannot give you a good enough sense of how rich this book is in a review.  It is so chock-full of detailed suggestions and examples that the best summary of the book is reading the book itself.  And it is very well organized, with bullet points up front, highlights marked throughout, and interviews at the end of each chapter.  I read the first edition of the book, originally published in 2006, and it still feels timely and up to date.  That’s what comes of focusing on the relationship between the organization and the audience and not on the constantly changing media.

My one reservation about this book is the same one that’s been coming up in my mind as I read a lot of books about communications, marketing, or psychology lately–even books I really like, such as the Heath brothers’ Switch and Made to Stick, and Beth Kanter and Allison Fine’s The Networked Nonprofit.  These books offer great ideas on how to change an individual’s behavior, or even a lot of individuals’ behavior.  But that is not the same thing as social change.

Social change generally means going up against entrenched structures of power.  Reading these books, you would never imagine that capitalism, racism, sexism, and tightly defined norms around gender affected anybody’s lives.  You would think that getting people to smoke less, use condoms, eat healthier diets, and donate to good organizations would revolutionize the way we live.

Perhaps it’s just that social change is outside the scope of these books.  But the authors market the books as if social change would come from better communications strategies alone.  That’s selling their books too hard.  They are worthwhile to read on their own merits.  People working for just causes need and should take advantage of the savvy that Katya Andresen supplies.

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