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Ten Best Online Fundraising Resources of 2006
By Michael C. Gilbert, February 13th, 2007
Continuing our series of "Top Ten" articles in honor of our tenth anniversary, from our 2006 news I've selected the ten best resources related to online fundraising. These resources are listed below in the order in which they were published. If you have your own top ten items related to this topic, please feel free to send them in!
I was pleased to see the release last week of a benchmarks study sponsored by a number of major commercial technology providers to the sector, supported by two foundations, and administered by a couple of very respectable organizations. I'm giving this one a careful review, but at first glance I would say it is an important milestone. Some of its conclusions are a little obvious, such as if you spend more money on technology you tend to produce more results. Others are speculative, such as when the authors try to guess what is causing declining open rates. But if you want to know many of the key numbers for some of the largest nonprofit online efforts, you have to read this study.
Laura Quinn and company are doing some very important work over at Idealware and I hope you will support them in whatever way you can. Today, I read Robert Weiner's article on the Ten Common Mistakes in Selecting Donor Databases and clapped aloud at the list: 1. Letting Techies Make the Decision. 2. Wishful Budgeting. 3. Prioritizing Price above Everything Else. 4. Randomly Looking at Demos. 5. Falling in Love with Cool Features. 6. Falling in Love with the Salesperson. 7. Buying More Than You Need. 8. Confusing Highly Functional Software with Highly Trained Staff. 9. Hoping That the Database Will Install Itself. 10. Leaving the Database to Fend for Itself.
Seth Godin's latest free eBook is called Flipping the Funnel (18 page PDF). It's a clear and compelling description of the three stages of fundraising (or marketing, if you want to look at other editions of the eBook): (1) Turning strangers into friends. (2) Turning friends into donors. (3) Turning donors into fundraisers. The focus is on the last element, and is part of the whole trend toward permeability. I recommend this not so much because it is new, but because it is explained in Godin's delightfully clear and compelling style.
I just recently discovered Jane Bradshaw's Fundraising Guide for NGOs (30 page PDF). It focuses on old-media strategies and is written for international volunteer based organizations that would otherwise be a little lost. I think it's a good resource to recommend to such folks.
Last Summer, Michael Stein interviewed me for GetActive's newsletter about The Enduring Power of The Gilbert Email Manifesto. With permission, I'm publishing the interview here, because I want to share Michael's great questions (and my answers) with you. I am still pretty pleased with my three recommendations for vendors, and the four reasons I give for the interest that persists in my otherwise outdated manifesto.
As you have heard me say before, "best practice" is a meaningless term unless you present criteria where you compare those practices against others. Nevertheless, I am recommending EmailLab's article on The Ten Most-Ignored Best Practices , by Loren McDonald and Stefan Pollard. We ignore some of these at Nonprofit Online News as well and they may be worth considering. The ten practices are: 1. Provide a subscription-administration center in each message. 2. Provide a site search function. 3. Provide a forward-to-a-friend link. 4. Provide a subscription link. 5. Add-to-safe-senders-list request. 6. Link to a Web version. 7. Provide a telephone contact number. 8. Display the recipient's email address. 9. Provide navigation links within the email and to the Web site.
10. Provide an email address for feedback or sender contact.
I've been warning for several years now that the moment nonprofits caught on about email, they would start treating it like any other medium with which to deluge their stakeholders. (Recall last week's image of the statement: "We don't need another call to action. We need a call to stillness.") Now there is interesting research on Calculating the Cost of Increased E-Mail Frequency . This really starts to add weight to the idea that we need to back off on "scaling up talking" and start focusing on "scaling up listening".
Hat tip to Ms Finn for pointing out this email related research paper from M + R Strategic Services asking: Do Images Help or Hurt? (for some reason, a 4 page PDF rather than a web page). The conclusion is quite interesting. Images appear to have no statistically significant impact on email results. I am reassured in my abstemious ways.
My article on the Twelve Ways To Fail at Email has been available up to this point only in our Journal and in the Guide to Nonprofit Email. With the second edition of the latter out , (along with a lot of new, exclusive content), I've decided I want to share this piece more broadly. Here are the twelve big mistakes, as I see them: (1) Not Collecting Email Addresses, (2) Buying Email Addresses, (3) Investing More in Their Web Site than in Email, (4) Not Having an Email Strategy at All, (5) Not Responding to Email, (6) Communication Lacks a Human Voice, (7) Not Converting People to Online Communication, (8) No Email Newsletter, (9) Not Testing, (10) Not Giving Stakeholders Control, (11) Not Acting upon the Profile, Preferences or Behaviors of Stakeholders, and (12) More Concerned with Content than the Relationship.
Here's the thing that's great about Idealware's article on Choosing a Bulk Email Software to Match Your Communication Goals : They have provided you with an annotated checklist of requirements, rather than recommended a few systems with which they happen to be familiar (which is a common model). I'm hoping that this gives organizations one more tool to help them be clear about their communication needs before diving into software.
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