What is Your Nonprofit Against? Here’s My Own One Word Answer…

Posted on February 16, 2011 by Pastor Foley

I liked Scott Goodson’s What Is Your Brand Against? post today in HBR so much that it leapfrogged the whole stack of other things I liked about which I had planned on writing. A quick excerpt should suffice to infect you with equal enthusiasm:

Here’s a modest suggestion: If you really want to show the world what you believe in and stand for, how about telling us what you stand against?

Recently, my agency StrawberryFrog launched a new campaign for smart car that was rooted in this kind of oppositional thinking. We understood that the smart car brand stands for some pretty good things: efficiency, economy, reduced environmental footprint. But put way, it sounds rather dull and predictable.

By defining instead what smart is against — over-consumption, excess, thoughtless behavior — we began to craft a statement with more of an edge. As we boiled down the idea some more, what emerged was a simple yet powerful declaration of principle, stating that we are “against dumb.” It felt a little more gutsy and provocative than your typical ad line, which may be why the campaign immediately drew press attention. At the same time, by giving customers something to rail against (everything from gas-guzzlers to oversized Venti lattes), the campaign created a vocal community of smart car advocates. In a short period of time, the brand more than quadrupled its audience.

Of course the temptation of the nonprofit and church sector is to respond with predictable enemies, e.g., Our organization stands against hunger… Our church is steadfastly opposed to sin… We stand against illiteracy in all its forms.

True but hardly shocking stuff, that.

And it’s true that in many ways it comes so naturally to us nonprofit and church types to talk about what we’re against that we’re often faulted by the world for it. “”You Christians are so negative. You’re anti-everything. And you definitely hate gay people.” In fact, an ad campaign from the United Church of Christ played off this very tendency quite successfully (watch sample “banned” commercial here).

But isn’t this all the more reason to think carefully and creatively (and, I might add, with greater theological precision) about what we really are against?

“Love the sinner and hate the sin,” for example, is a fascinating quote from Mahatma Gandhi, not Jesus, and I’m not sure it’s ever caused anyone to respond by saying, “Ah–thanks! That really clears things up!” and nodding knowingly.

And by saying that we are “against hunger” (or illiteracy, or halitosis, or a whole host of other ills), have we really distinguished ourselves at all? Who, after all, is for hunger?

But if we were to say, for example, that we are against the defacement of the image of God in human beings, we’d perhaps enter into a far more interesting conversation about hunger.

So take a few minutes today to think about what your nonprofit–or you, or your church–is against. I found the exercise quite stimulating and clarifying, ultimately concluding that what this blog is against can be stated in one word:

Professionalization.

Or, to be a bit more long-winded, this blog–and the Whole Life Offering branch of the Transformational Giving family tree–is against the professionalization of ministry, which, among other things, has led a generation of nonprofits to conceive of fundraising as asking for money to support their professional ministers and ministrations.

In contrast, this blog proudly contends, with Ephesians 4:11-13 as its rallying cry, that all Christians are called to full maturity in Christ, with Christian leaders tasked by God to serve the Holy Spirit in that equipping. It contends still further that fundraising should be fundamentally rethought as a way of raising a pool of funds that individuals and groups draw on jointly to finance their shared endeavors to further the cause, with organizations (churches and nonprofits) serving as platforms for, not the doers of, those efforts.

Feel free to practice in the Comments section, below, about what your own organization is against. I’ll be happy to give you feedback on your effort.

And I promise not to “love the poster and hate the post.”

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The Most Strategic Resource a Nonprofit Can Raise Up? Role Models, Not Donors

Posted on February 14, 2011 by Pastor Foley

Great to see Katya Andresen blogging daily–an inspiration to the rest of us three-posts-a-week sluggards. And the frequency is improving her content, not diluting it. Imagine that.

Case in point: Katya’s recent post on the new Edelman trust barometer which shows that our trust in people like us as sources of business information is falling (Edelman suggests that “over-friending” is the culprit), whereas trust in “credentialed experts” is “soaring.”

Her conclusion is vintage Katya:

Here’s what I believe to be true: people trust your organization less than an expert AND less than their friends.

Her advice:

If you want credibility, get a third party doing the talking.  Use a combination of trusted authorities (who don’t work at your organization) and your biggest champions, who are great spokespeople for their own circles of influence.

Agreed. And yet let me pile on here a little more, noting a different study that also came out this month, namely, Barna’s report on who teens turn to as role models. The upshot of that study:

So who do teenagers name as their role models? Even while limiting the answers to non-parents, family members still comes out on top. The most commonly mentioned role model is a relative—37% of teens named a relation other than their parent as the person they admire most. This is typically a grandparent, but also includes sisters, brothers, cousins, aunts, and uncles.After “family,” teens mention teachers and coaches (11%), friends (9%), and pastors or other religious leaders they know personally (6%).

Notice that a majority of teens indicated that the people they most admire and imitate are those with whom they maintain a personal connection, friendship, or interaction.

Beyond the realm of the people they know personally, entertainers (including musicians and actors) were named by 6% of teens, followed by sports heroes (5%), political leaders (4%), faith leaders (4%), business leaders (1%), authors (1%), science and medical professionals (1%), other artists (1%), and members of the military (1%).

Note that business leaders don’t fare nearly so well in this study, garnering a meager 1% of response.

What’s the difference?

  • The Edelman study asked, “If you heard information about a company from one of these people, how credible would that information be?”
  • The Barna study asked, “Other than your parents, who is the person whom you most admire today?”

So Edelman’s conclusion really shouldn’t be that trust in people like us is down; it should be that trust in people like us is down in the area of information about companies.

The Barna study reveals that trust in people like us remains high as shapers of the lives of those in our sphere of influence. And the Barna study shows why that’s true: character in proximity.

Respondents described a wide range of reasons why they named a particular role model. The most common rationale (26%) was the personality traits of that person (e.g., caring about others, being loving and polite, being courageous, and being fun were some of the characteristics mentioned most often). Another factor in teens’ thinking was finding someone to emulate (22%) or that the teen would like to “follow in the footsteps” of their chosen role model.

Encouragement is another reason for teens’ selections (11%), which included those who said the individual “helps me be a better person,” is someone who is “always there for me,” and is the person who is “most interested in my future.” Other reasons: the role model accomplished his or her goals (13%), overcame adversity (9%), works hard (7%), is intelligent (7%), performs humanitarian effort and activism (6%), maintains strong faith (6%), has great talent (5%), and exudes self-confidence (1%).

Taken together, the studies lay out a clear path for nonprofits:

  • Don’t seek to be experts, but
  • Don’t raise up champions to sing your praises either.
  • Instead, serve as a platform whereby champions can get experience and training in how to serve as role models to those in their own spheres of influence, leading a new generation to care about and participate in the cause you all share.
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Research: Want a Successful Newsletter? Make it Harder to Read.

Posted on February 9, 2011 by Pastor Foley

Call & Response’s Michael Jinkins calls our attention to a nice piece in The Economist on the stunningly inverse relationship between readability and retention:

A PARADOX of education is that presenting information in a way that looks easy to learn often has the opposite effect. Numerous studies have demonstrated that when people are forced to think hard about what they are shown they remember it better, so it is worth looking at ways this can be done. And a piece of research about to be published in Cognition, by Daniel Oppenheimer, a psychologist at Princeton University, and his colleagues, suggests a simple one: make the text conveying the information harder to read.

Dr Oppenheimer recruited 28 volunteers aged between 18 and 40 and asked them to learn, from written descriptions, about three “species” of extraterrestrial alien, each of which had seven features. This task was meant to be similar to learning about animal species in a biology lesson. It used aliens in place of actual species to be certain that the participants could not draw on prior knowledge.

Half of the volunteers were presented with the information in difficult-to-read fonts (12-point Comic Sans MS 75% greyscale and 12-point Bodoni MT 75% greyscale). The other half saw it in 16-point Arial pure-black font, which tests have shown is one of the easiest to read.

Participants were given 90 seconds to memorise the information in the lists. They were then distracted with unrelated tasks for a quarter of an hour or so, before being asked questions about the aliens, such as “What is the diet of the Pangerish?” and “What colour eyes does the Norgletti have?” The upshot was that those reading the Arial font got the answers right 72.8% of the time, on average. Those forced to read the more difficult fonts answered correctly 86.5% of the time.

Weirder yet, the results held when the experiment was transposed from the lab to the classroom, leading researchers to conclude that textbooks should be made harder, not easier, to read.

This of course flies in the face of everything you and I have been led to believe about newsletter, brochure, and appeal letter design, where the rule since forever has been: The infographic style of USA Today beats a 1920’s New York Times look any day.

But this weekend I had an experience that gave me some insight into the Princeton study.

I was handing out a song sheet at church.

(Yes, a song sheet. It’s like a, you know, overhead projector slide, only printed on paper.)

I wanted to give more than the lyrics to the song. I wanted to note that literally every line in every stanza of the hymn was drawn from Scripture.

So at the bottom of the sheet, below the lyrics, I reproduced each of the Scriptures keyed to each line, using a complicated three-letter matrix and eight-point type.

Hip Hymnalz this was not.

But the effect on the recipients was fascinating. Aside from having to sing the hymn with the songs sheet three centimeters from their faces, they were clearly intrigued as they reviewed it, and they kept referring back to the sheet through the rest of the evening. Several made notes on their sheets. And everyone took their song sheet with them.

Not one song sheet left behind.

So I think the lesson of the study is not to use the worst font you can find and the worst layout you can muster. Rather, I think it’s that sleek, simple design is not always the unmitigated good we have assumed it to be. Sometimes simple says, well, simple. As in, “There’s not much substantive here. We’ve got your big photo, your tear jerker headline, your oversimplified testimonial text, and your ask. Feel free to skip this and move right on to the response device (which, interestingly, is the most complicated looking piece in the package).”

So don’t use this as an excuse for bad design. But do take this as a vote for substantive communication that looks substantive. I did a quick scan through communication I’ve sent to champions recently, and it’s fascinating how information rich it is–often an article (printed or emailed) with a post-it note (or the email equivalent) providing an index into deeper waters.

Kind of like this blog post.

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