Do the Word

Joanne Fritz’s blog posts are like the breakfast bar at the Ayres Hotel. You don’t expect breakfast bars at hotels to be good. You expect them to be skimpy, with little boxes of Froot Loops and stale-ish bagels and sometimes even those weird egg patties. They are a business traveler’s last resort.

And then occasionally a breakfast bar comes along like the one at the Ayres Hotel, and it’s actually very good. Surprisingly good. Like you’d go there even if you weren’t staying at that hotel.

So About.com may not strike one as the vortex of the nonprofit world. But that’s where Joanne blogs. And her blog is always really good. Never a weird egg patty there.

So as you read her posts generally, make sure to check out her post specifically about the purpose of nonprofit blogs. Writes good egg Joanne:

I looked at a fair number of nonprofit blogs in preparation for this blog post. Many were really good, but some were simply full of information about the next event, the current fundraising campaign, or where the executive director was speaking next. They were inwardly focused rather than audience focused….

Curation is the cure. Provide information about what you know best…your field. Share your expertise, knowledge, advice, even the news about whatever corner of the world in which you exist. You will be focused, never run out of topics, and will be performing a huge service for your readers. Those blog posts, if well optimized, will be indexed by search engines, drawing in even more people.

Or, as I would say, use your blog (and your press releases) to coach your champions in relation to your shared cause, not to promote your organization.

The classic book on this subject is David Meerman Scott’s The New Rules of Marketing and PR. If you find yourself liking the idea Joanne has suggested but are not sure how to implement it in your context, give that book a read.

And next time you’re visiting Southern California, try the Ayres.

Unless you happen to like little boxes of Froot Loops.

My dear friend Greg Stier authors what I think is the perfect  Transformational Giving Christmas post–check it out here.

Merry Christmas to you and your sphere of influence, and to all a good night!

If you regularly read this blog, you know that I steadfastly maintain that the best fundraising books and magazines and blogs are those that ostensibly have nothing to do with fundraising.

In that vein, here’s my latest fundraising-book-that-has-nothing-to-do-with-fundraising-and-is-thus-an-excellent-fundraising-resource book recommendation:

I was just reading last night in the book Unanticipated Gains: Origins of Network Inequality in Everyday Life by Mario Luis Small the following three insights that have real bearing on how nonprofits interact with potential champions:

1. “…[R]epeated exchanges between people reduced their mutual uncertainty, while…repeated interaction between two parties heightened their mutual affection.”

2. “[T]he more frequently two people interact, the closer they become and the more they trust each other.”

At this point, it’s all fist bumping and high-fiving among the “friendraiser” crowd. After all, it turns out that just showing up and not getting kicked out greatly increases the odds of someone giving to your organization!

But Small’s third insight is the eye-poke:

3. “…[N]ot all activities produced new ties in equal measure. Sociologist Scott Feld has defended the significance of ‘focus’, which he defined as ‘any social, psychological, or physical entity around which joint activities of individuals are organized.'”

Sum it up and say:

• The “support raising” approach, wherein a missionary descends into a church like a UFO, gives a presentation, calls for shares, and then disappears, leaving nary a crop circle, violates basic sociology.
• So does friendraising, which makes friendship the focus of the development relationship. Turns out this really is less effective for motivating action and involvement.
• Sociologically, the preferred alternative involves the development officer/champion coach/missionary repeatedly interacting with potential champions in actual acts of service that correspond to how the nonprofit/champion coach/missionary serves in the field. Such an approach is far more likely to generate significant relationships and commitments to join together in service and ministry through the nonprofit organization.

Darn it if that’s not biblical, too. Funny how that works.