queer ideas

Engaging entrepreneurial donors with creative thinking

Many years ago, whilst working for the YMCA, we created a very successful donor recruitment and development campaign. The only trouble was that we didn't have enough cash to realise it's full potential.

Rather than just sighing and waiting for the next financial year, my boss at the time, Charles Donington, decided to speak to one of the more forward thinking trusts that regularly supported our work.

The result was a six figure grant to help fund our fledgling direct mail programme, thousands of new donors and, within a relatively short space of time, a level of income that put the original grant into the shade.

It's always frustrated me that I've not seen much evidence of this sort of innovative thinking being repeated.

But a recent report from The Social Investment Consultancy shows that such an approach might be more welcome amongst funders than many charities might realise.

Financing Revenue Generation in the Third Sector, investigates attitudes amongst high net worth individuals to funding revenue generating activities.

44% of the 476 people polled said they would be more likely to give to a charity that would use funding for revenue generating activities that would make it financially self-sufficient.

At the YMCA, this approach enabled us to significantly speed up our supporter recruitment programme, but this report suggests than any charity involved in independent revenue generation should consider asking donors to help expand this area of work.

Many entrepreneurs are excited by creative approaches to charitible activities and would welcome working more closely with the third sector. It's perhaps best summed up by Sir Richard Branson...

"It's so exciting to see the growing opportunity for charities and donors to work together to create new entrepreneurial approaches to help drive the scale of change we need in the world."

The full report can be downloaded here.

What direct mail fundraisers can learn from charity box collections

So much fundraising research concentrates on the relationship donors have with charities via direct mail that we tend to forget that cash is still the most common way to give.

The latest data from NCVO / CAF shows that 48% of donors gave cash gifts during 2008/09. And a significant proportion was given via the humble collection box.

A fair amount of creativity is used to make boxes more effective. Sofii features over a dozen examples that show the different ways that fundraisers have tried to increase income. The RSPCA nodding dog is probably my favourite.

But boxes haven't been completely ignored by researchers. There are a few studies that are worth sharing. Not just because they could help in the design of new boxes, but because they give us an insight into how donors think about giving more generally.

In Quirkology, Richard Wiseman recounts an experiment he undertook to see if he could influence the amount people donated by changing the appearance of a charity box.

He linked up with Borders bookstores and conducted a week long study across the UK. Participating stores received four charity boxes for the National Literacy Trust. All were identical in shape and size but each carried a different message:

• Please give generously
• Every penny helps
• Every pound helps
• You can make a difference

When the cash was counted up, one box outshone all the others. Every penny helps generated 62% of all donations, while Every pound helps trailed in fourth place with just 7% of the take.

Psychologist Robert Cialdini has an idea why changing just one word could have such a huge impact. As Quirkology points out:

 "Many people are concerned that putting a small amount of money into a box will make them look mean, so they avoid making any donation. 'Every penny helps' legitimises even the smallest of contributions. In contrast, 'Every pound helps' confirms people's fears that their donation will appear paltry so they give nothing at all."

Box colour was also tested and red was found to be the most effective, perhaps because it is eye catching and carries a sense of urgency. This might cause problems for organisations with brand guidelines that preclude its use (when the Smithsonian first put up six-foot oyster-grey collection boxes back in 1993, they were so bland they were ignored by visitors).

Interestingly, the Quirkology experiment also uncovered the fact that London customers were most generous, donating over 20 times more than people in the store with the worst return, Birmingham.

Another experiment worth looking at was undertaken in New Zealand. It was motivated by research that I've featured in a previous post on prompting larger gifts through sharing social information.

The experiment took place in Wellington's City Gallery and ran for three years. Admission to the gallery was free, but donations could be dropped in a large transparent collection box in the entrance hall. The researchers manipulated the social information available to visitors by altering how much money was visible in the donation box. Depending on the day, visitors would see:

• A few large denomination notes
• A larger number of small denomination notes
• A large number of coins
• An empty box

They found that the money people dropped in the box mimicked what was already in there – notes generated notes and coins generated coins. However, when there were notes in the box, the number of donations fell. When there was cash in the box, the number of donations grew.

In short, the amount of money donated was pretty constant. What was perhaps most depressing was the fact that only 2% of visitors gave anything at all. The gallery could double income simply by charging a ten cent entrance fee.

A synopsis of the study can be downloaded here (PDF) or you can watch a video presentation here.

This experiment usefully demonstrates that when giving is a public act, social norms come in to play. And how those norms are perceived is incredibly important.

When the norm is seen to be a gift of a few coins, more gifts will be generated. But set the bar too high and you move people out of a comfort zone that depresses income. Worst of all is to present a norm that it's OK to give nothing. 

So what lessons can we learn from this that can be transferred to the world of direct mail fundraising?

First off, make your ask appropriate to your audience. I've posted before on the massive positive impact that the right financial request can make to the bottom line - click here to read it.

Second, use testimonials to show what other people are doing – giving. Normal people explaining why they have given can significantly increase response rates. I've often seen them beat celebrity endorsements. You can read more about my thoughts on the use of testimonials here.

Third, if people don't read your communications, they won't raise any money. Relevant and personal wins every creative test I've ever undertaken in direct mail.

Finally, giving should be enjoyable. If people get something out of donating to your charity, the cash will keep on flowing in your direction. By the sound of things, the people dropping hundreds of coins in this collection box aren't finding the process too painful.

If it's hard to read, it's hard to do

Bluefrog's Creative Director, Aline Reed, has been running a competition on her blog. It's taken the form of a fundraising quiz, and last week she focused on the joy of fonts and reversed out copy.

I've had a few 'conversations' over the years as I've tried get people to reconsider the 'edgy' font they've decided to use. I've gently suggested that something a little more legible, though less distinctive, might generate a better response.

The response has often been the questioning of my parents' marital status, a request to see a design qualification and a demand to see proof of my peculiar hypothesis.

The last two have been difficult to deliver. I missed out on art school and have yet to test the benefits of using Comic Sans, reversed out of acid green on a fundraising pack.

But Neuromarketing has come to my aid on the matter of legible fonts. A recent post highlights research by Hyunjin Song and Norbert Schwarz (PDF)  who have studied how font use can impact on the way we perceive information.

They put together an experiment that gave people instructions on an exercise regime. Some were given instructions in Arial, the others received theirs in Brush.

The results were remarkable.

Those that received instructions in Arial, estimated that the exercises would take just over eight minutes to complete. Whereas those who received theirs in Brush, thought the regime would take nearly twice as long - 15.1 minutes.

Those that saw the exercises as taking eight minutes were much more likely to engage with them. As the authors noted:

"Apparently, the students' brains mistook the ease of reading about exercise for the ease of actually doing push ups and crunches, and this misunderstanding motivated them to think about a life change. Those who struggled through the Japanese brushstrokes (Brush) had no intention of heading to the gym; the reading alone tired them out."

The experiment was repeated with instructions on how to make sushi and the results were the same. The hard to read font increased the estimated time to complete the task and reduced participation.

As Neuromarketing suggests:

"If you need to convince a customer, client or donor to perform some kind of task, you should describe that task in a simple, easy to read font. Since this phenomenon is related to the concept of cognitive fluency, you should also make the type size easy to read and use simple words and sentence structure. These steps will minimise the perceived effort needed to accomplish the task, and your success rate will increase."

What would make a donor give more to charity?

Back in 2006, a Bank of America / Indiana University study looking at the charitable motivations of high net-worth individuals identified a very simple fact.

It's a fact that at Bluefrog, we see time and time again in our research.

When donors are asked what would motivate them to give more, few talk about the attraction of an organisational brand, shared values or knowing more about the goals of a charity.

What is important is that they know the charity is using funds efficiently and effectively. Usually phrased in 'donor speak' as an organisation having 'low administration costs'.

Just behind, is the desire to determine what impact their gift makes. Donors want to know what their £100 or $100 has actually helped achieve.

It's a distinction around the concept of responsibility that more charities would do well to emphasise.

Though the charity is responsible for effective use of the donation, the donor is responsible for the life that is changed.

The more we recognise this simple fact and demonstrate it to our donors, the more money we will raise.

The twelve tweets of February

The January round up seemed to go down very well, so the tradition continues with my twelve favourite things found on Twitter in February.

The same rules apply as before. Everything has something to do with fundraising and everything is credited to the tweeter who found it. If there's no credit, it's one of mine.

Eyes down...

'Mad Libs' style form increases conversion 25 to 40% via @rydesign

A great piece looking at how online sign-up can be improved with more personal and engaging forms.

Successful Fundraising – Not for the Thin Skinned via @PamelaGrow

A useful reminder about putting complaints into context and avoiding the knee-jerk reaction.

Email Newsletter Usability via @Delicious50

The executive summary of a Nielsen study into eNewsletter usability. Identifies an emotional connection that websites lack. Looks at subscribing, unsubscribing, Inbox issues and the importance of making scanning easy.

Keeping Control on One Wild Ride via @CharityTimes

The recession hasn't been that bad after all.

Donor Centred is Just Jargon via @KimberleyCanada

Thoughts from a range of fundraisers on what being donor centred actually means.

Study of High Value Donors (PDF)

Bank of America / Indiana University study into why high value donors give, why they stop and how they need to be treated in order to give more.

The Customers Always Write via @AlineReed

Two articles on SOFII (registration required) written by George Smith that look at what can happen when people who don't understand how to communicate get involved in writing copy.

Great selection of Fundraising Case Studies via @SeanPowell

Includes eMarketing, social networking and text benchmarking studies along with reviews of a number of issue specific campaigns.

Promoting the Joy of Giving: A Fundraising Revolution via @frdetective

Thoughts on creating a new model of fundraising.

The Irresistible Urge to Rebrand

Why do so many charities review their brands?

Research on Christmas DM Fundraising Activity

Statistical research looking at what lies behind the boost in Christmas giving (the number of people giving increases by 5% - average gift stays the same).

When nonprofits deny their mission via @JeffBrooks

Just because your charity undertakes work outside your core mission, you don't need to weaken your fundraising proposition.

It was a tough month to whittle things down to just twelve tweets. I probably could have done twenty quite easily. if you'd like to see some of the other ideas that almost made it, check out my twitterstream.

If you have seen (or posted) a great tweet this month, please add it as a comment.

And if you'd like to have a smile on your face for the next few minutes, check out this non-fundraising related tweet – healin'.

You can follow me on twitter by clicking @markyphillips.

How did giving to Haiti compare to previous emergencies?

CAF have recently updated their disaster monitor research which looks at long-term patterns of giving to emergency appeals. All figures are for the UK.

The key findings are:

• Just under half of people surveyed gave to Haiti (in comparison to 81% of people who gave to the 2004 tsunami appeal).
• Women were most generous (51% gave compared to just 44% of men).
• People aged 35-44 were most likely to give (in comparison with those aged 25-34 for the tsunami appeal).
• People in Northern Ireland were most likely to give (those in the North of England were least likely).

Where the research gets interesting is when it analyses what motivated donors and how they actually gave. There has been a fair amount of comment on the importance of social media such as Twitter and Facebook in generating funds and awareness of the disaster. But this research shows the continuing power of traditional media in driving donations – 75% of people interviewed said that reports on TV inspired their gift.

New media did have an impact. 5% of donors said they gave because of online communications, though email was seen to be surprisingly unimportant, standing at just 1%.

It backs up data from Hitwise, which saw the biggest increase in traffic to charity sites coming from news sites. Visits from Facebook and Twitter remained static.

Where new media has demonstrated its importance is in how people actually chose to give. Back in 2004, just 7% of people gave to the tsunami appeal via new media. In 2010, 17% of people surveyed chose this route to support the Haiti appeal.

Donating cash - through traditional collections – remains the most popular route to give. 40% of respondents gave in this way.

Though research shows that social media doesn't appear to be that important, I don't think we are necessarily asking the right questions in research. The impact of a stream of reminders and the power of social compliance can't be ignored.

I'm involved in some meetings next week looking at how we can measure the fundraising impact of group influence generated by online networks. I'll be sure to share what we uncover once the research is complete.

Until then, here's a short and entertaining video showing how powerful it's psychological impact can be (thanks to Social Hallucinations for finding the clip).

glumbert - Elevator Psychology

For details of what happened in the USA where 13% of donors gave via text, take a look at this post here.

New research on text giving

I picked up on an interesting stream of tweets from @seanpowell last night.

He was attending a US benchmarking presentation from M&R Strategic Services and MobileActive on text messaging.

Following the American Red Cross's Haiti text campaign – which resulted in more than one million Americans donating over $26 million through $10 text donations – there's been a growth of interest in texting as a fundraising medium.

There isn't much publicly available data on success rates, so it's great that we have access to some detailed market intelligence based on campaigns undertaken by the American Association for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, Planned Parenthood Federation of America, NARAL Pro-Choice America, The Humane Society of the United States, Defenders of Wildlife and Human Rights Campaign.

The key findings are:

• 80% of texters were recruited via online routes (by entering their mobile number on advocacy, donation or text message sign-up pages).
• Text lists grew at an an annual rate of just under 50%.
• Most growth came from gathering mobile phone numbers from existing supporters.
• Annual churn rate for text lists was 30.7%.
• The unsubscribe rate was 0.69%.
• At 0.92%, fundraising messages generated the highest number of unsubscriptions.
• When charities texted people with a campaigning message, asking them to call a decision maker on behalf of the charity the success rate was 4.7%.
• This compares to a response rate of 0.82% for campaigning emails that asked people to call a decision maker.
• The average number of text messages sent each month by a charity was 1.6.

Sean's twitter stream also shared some anecdotal information that's worth mentioning:

• $800,000 was generated by the Red Cross through misspellings of the word Haiti.
• $2 million was raised via texting in 2009. Over $35 million has been generated so far during 2010.

The full study can be found here. It also points out a number of interesting text case studies that are worth a read:

How an aquarium used text messaging as a means to recruit new visitors (click here).

How Keep a Child Alive generated $450,000 from more than 90,000 texts after Alicia Keys broadcast a request for help to American Idol's 30 million viewers, generating a response rate of 0.3%! (click here for the PDF)

How The Humane Society used text messaging to uplift donations to an email campaign (click here).

You should also take a look at this survey of text givers to the American Red Cross – 19% said they would rather text a gift than give online or write a cheque.

I'd also recommend you visit Sean Powell's blog, The Give Grind. As well as sharing more thoughts on the text survey, there are number of great posts on online giving. 

Why charities should be excited about the iPad

Newsletters and magazines can raise huge amounts of money and be fantastic engagement tools.

They can also be boring justifications of a charity's existence that do little more than turn people off.

The boring kinds are often summed up in research in a similar fashion:

"I don't really look at it, but it's nice to have just in case I do."

It's why I'm so excited about the iPad. I think it could soon be the most exciting way that charities will communicate with supporters.

Take a look at this demo piece from Sports Illustrated. Rather than football players throwing footballs (in a USA style), imagine seeing a new well being dug and – in one click – watching people talk about it's impact.

Rather than seeing shots of baseball, you might see a group of disadvantaged children having their first trip to the seaside or a cancer researcher showing you a cell being disrupted in microscopic scale.

With a few sweeps of the finger, donors will see how their money is being used and be able to share details on a favourite project with friends via Facebook.

With another sweep, they could be sending a campaigning message to the prime minister.

As you'll see, even the ads will be interactive. Upgrades could be a joy for donors.

And, most excitingly, readers can construct the magazine that works for them. Policy statements and items of high internal importance can be included and the donor can promote or relegate them according to their interests.

Take a look and just think what your charity could do.

You really should write to your grandmother more often

One of the first tasks that I give to trainee copywriters is to write an appeal letter to their grandmother.

Not people like their grandmother. They write the letter to their grandmother – by name.

It doesn't matter if the appeal is for overseas aid, medical research, animal protection or anything else. What the writer needs to do is build an emotional connection with the reader.

And to really understand what that means, you have to write real letters to real people.

To my my mind, too many appeals allow brand guidelines, broad demographic target audiences and lists of statistics get in the way of the emotional link necessary for great fundraising.  As a result, we end up with communications that are little more than fact based justifications of a charity's existence.

When people talk from the heart, these elements are jettisoned. That's why I prefer, when writing an appeal, to speak to people with real experience of the issue in question. What can be gleaned from these interviews is far more important than anything I find in reams of project reports.

An example of this type of apeal comes from one of my favourite books on fundraising. Asking Properly, written by George Smith, is required reading for anyone who works or wants to work in our industry - you can get a copy from Amazon or, even better, straight from the publishers, The White Lion Press.

On page 92, George includes a brief excerpt from an appeal written in 1987 for Oxfam. To me, this short piece gets over values such as honesty, care, the need for justice and importance of child rights far better than any brand guidelines.

Dear <supporter>

Doesn't it upset you to walk among people who have lost everything? Doesn't it distress you to see small children dying in their mothers' arms?

I am often asked these questions when I return from a disaster zone. Quite frankly, it does and it doesn't...

It doesn't because I'm busy when I'm visiting the scene of a disaster. I don't feel the helplessness you feel in front of your TV. Just the opposite, I have the privilege of being able to do something to ease the suffering.

But of course it hurts when someone you've got to know dies.

In the civil war in Uganda I was visiting camps for people fleeing the fighting. We picked up a very sick mother and her starving children to take them to hospital in Kampala. In the crowded jeep a little boy of five or six sat on my lap. We smiled at each other as the jeep bounced along the rough dirt roads. He died before we reached hospital.

That evening I just dissolved into tears. I have a child about the same age.

That's the sort of organisation and, perhaps more importantly, person I'd trust with a donation.

Are your donors simply paying spectators?

There's a great video on Social Hallucinations produced by David Gauntlet from Making is Connecting.

David looks at everyday creativity and writes about seeing a cultural shift - from a sit back and be told one to a making and doing one.

So what's this got to do with fundraising?

Quite a lot.

Something that we repeatedly find people mention in our research at Bluefrog is a sense of disappointment with charities. They enter into a relationship with an organisation in the hope that they are going to be an active part of something good. What they receive is a stream of communications talking about what the charity is doing and requests for money.

Disillusioned and unengaged, they soon stop their support (This behaviour is often incorrectly described as lapsing).

But when people can actively do something more than sit back and give, they create cultural capital that benefits them as much as the charities they support.

An example of this is craftivism.

And an example of craftivism is Save the Children's Knit One, Save One campaign. This generated over half a million knitted hats for newborn babies in developing countries. It was also responsible for generating 50,000 messages that were delivered to Gordon Brown encouraging him to do more to help prevent deaths among children.

Save the Children isn't unique. When you think about it, there are a number of examples of this type of engagement already offered by charities.

Child sponsorship provides donors with an opportunity to write (and receive letters). Kiva enables people to help set-up new businesses (and see how they are performing). Care International offers supporters the chance to send advice and good wishes along with educational materials to school children in developing countries.

Organisations that fill the gap between giving cash and full-time volunteering are benefiting from the desire people have to create and connect. It doesn't matter if this is done on-line or off-line, but by giving people the chance to create change rather than simply be paying spectators, we offer them a welcome opportunity to add meaning to their world AND move it in the direction many of us would like.

That's the sort of approach that drives real engagement. It's an idea that I find really exciting. If you've got a few minutes to spare, you should really watch this video.

How do donors choose which charity to give to?

I've just read a very interesting piece from Beth Breeze in Civil Society looking at how donors decide which charities to support.

As we've seen in other pieces of research, donors continue to struggle to distinguish one organisation from another.

They feel restricted by the lack of information. This makes it difficult for them to weigh up the differences between charities.

Unable to make the 'best' choice, they fall back on different strategies to help them make the decision as to which ones they should support.

Beth has identified three main approaches:

Taste-based

Supporting a charity that undertakes the work that matters to them. This might be work of high need such as giving after a disaster, but also might include borderline charitable activities such as restoring steam engines.

Personal experience

Beth describes this in terms of people creating 'philanthropic autobiographies' based on their life experiences. It relates support for charities to positive contact. Donors often described favoured organisations as being "near to the heart" or "admired".

Path dependent

Support based on past actions. Few donors disregard past giving behaviour and were seen to make "incremental changes to their portfolio of favoured charities, adding new recipients that fit within pre-existing categories that have already been mentally 'approved'."

These are further influenced by ties of loyalty and the influence of celebrities and authority figures.

But it's the impact of the lack of knowledge that is most revealing. Judgements on charity competence were often based on how little money was spent on staff salaries and on whether overheads were low.

And obviously, given the fact that mailing packs are the main interface, they were often seen as an indicator of general efficiency. Interestingly, Beth found that too few communications is as bad as too many.

Her solution is to give the donor control over what they receive. That's advice which is right on the button.

But few organisations actually ask donors. Those that do get some startling results.

In any case, the research shows that donors are content to 'muddle through'. This is backed up by Blackbaud's 2009 State of the Not-for-Profit Industry Survey (PDF), which reports that donors don't seem to make any extra demands for feedback on how donations are being spent – only 1 in 5 UK charities have seen any increased interest in more feedback.

But the fact is, when we show donors what they have helped achieve, we drive significant levels of engagement. Supporters aren't necessarily driven by successful outcomes if they don't feel any ownership.

Bluefrog demonstrated this with our research on mid-value donors back in 2007. Beth's research seems to back this up:

"Donors' prime concern may often be as much about maximising personal satisfaction than seeking the best social outcomes...our findings suggest this outlook is not exclusive to major donors."

The focus for charities must be less on building self-congratulatory brands. Rather than using WE to talk about what the charity has done, the emphasis should be on allowing donors to engage in what they believe in by bringing them as close as possible to the work they have made possible. The word YOU is far more powerful in this respect.

In developing  communication plans, charities would be well advised to take some advice from the pizza restaurant on the right. People don't want to support the best charity in the world, they want to support the charity that is best for them.

You'll find the full research on www.cgap.org.uk soon. Beth will announce the publication on twitter. You can follow her at @UKCPhilanthropy.

Fundraising is child's play

Few of us (in the UK) will have not picked up on Charlie Simpson, the 7 year-old boy who raised over £200,000 to help people in Haiti by doing a sponsored cycle round his local park.

But Charlie isn't the only child from whom fundraisers can learn.

Markita Andrews was an American Girl Scout (Girl Guides in the UK), who sold over $80,000 worth of cookies as part of a fundraising drive.

Markita had a number of tips as why she was so successful.

First off she maximised her impact by concentrating on being where she could find most customers. She would go from door to door, but she preferred the lobbies of apartment blocks where she would sell to people as they were coming home from work.

But more importantly, she framed her pitch so that customers saw the purchase as a trivial expense. She explained this when she was interviewed on the Johnny Carson show...

"I just went to everyone's house and said 'Can I have a $30,000 donation for the Girl Scouts?' When they said no, I asked would they at least buy a box of Girl Scout Cookies?"

Neuromarketing sees this approach as being similar to commercial sticker price framing. This technique compares the original price on a price tag (usually with a great big red cross through it) next to the sale price, emphasising what a great deal the customer is getting.

This is a technique that can be used by charities to generate donations in other ways than through the sale of cookies. When I was at ActionAid, we regularly compared the price of sponsorship to what else it might buy. One of the most successful ads compared the cost of sponsorship to the price someone might pay for a child's toy.

We would also break that cost down further in the body copy, demonstrating that £10 a month worked out at just 33 pence a day.

I've written before about the YMCA £5,000 pack that I ran for years in the 1990s. This pack used to generate a large number of £5,000 gifts, but within it were lower value prompts. These 'drop asks' were a powerful route to engage less affluent donors.

Asking for £5,000 didn't necessarily put people off. But using it, placed lower value gifts into context making them seem far more manageable.

It is one of the techniques that I still recommend today. If, for example, your current banker pack asks for £15, why not try a small test where you dramatically raise the primary donation request, but continue to offer the £15 option within the body of the pack.

It can't be applied without careful thought as it won't work for all packs, all offers or all lists, but it can be a very powerful tool.

This is the good stuff

What part of communication actually matters?

I'd suggest, What you've achieved by giving to us, might fit in the overlap quite neatly.

Thanks to Social Hallucinations, MisEntropy, fffound.

What really satisfies a donor?

Adrian Sargeant found back in 2000 that about half of all cash donors give just once to a charity. Even those people who do give again, fall off the donor file at the alarming rate of 30% a year.

 

The figures look even worse in the US, where an initial attrition rate of 70% is considered acceptable by many organisations.

As Adrian points out, "Donor satisfaction with the quality of service provided by the fundraising team is the single biggest driver of loyalty."

The Rockefeller Corporation has studied why customers defect in the commercial sector and found striking similarities with the results of a study that Bluefrog undertook into donor lapsing back in 2007.

They found:

1% The customer dies.
3% The customer moves away.
5% The customer has a friend (who provides similar services).
9% The customer is lost to a competitor.
14% The customer is dissatisfied with (some aspect of) the service.
68% The customer believes you do not care about him or her.

Price and quality are conspicuous by their absence. Most defections are the result of failings in customer care and the subsequent perceptions of indifference.

It is the same for charities. It is how someone is treated – not what a charity actually does – that makes the difference.

Bluefrog research summed up what sort of treatment donors were looking for very simply...

"Special is normal."

Perhaps it's even the name that we give to the people we depend on that causes us to ignore their needs.

A donor, by definition, gives something away. Their money is seen as a gift or a contribution rather than a transaction. But, as we all know, donors do want something – and it isn't just information on what your charity is doing or believes that they are after.

Michael LeBoeuf neatly summed up what people are looking for when they spend their money in his book, How to Win Customers and Keep Them for Life.

"Despite all the untold millions of products and services for sale in today's marketplace, customers will exchange their hard-earned money for only two things:

• Good feelings
• Solutions to problems"

In putting together a recruitment and retention strategy, giving people good feelings is a great place to start.

You no longer control the message. And that's OK

This is a very short talk (3 minutes) from Alexis Ohanian (one of the people who set up Reddit) about a Greenpeace campaign aiming to stop humpback whales being hunted by Japanese fishermen.

To engage people, Greenpeace put a tracking device on a whale and gave people the opportunity to vote on a name.

The idea was picked up on Reddit and at that point Greenpeace's control went out the window as people power took over. The whale ended up being called Mr. Splashy Pants.

As you'll see, the campaign was a success. The Japanese didn't hunt the whales and everyone was happy.

But it was achieved by losing control.

Modern charities are, by their very nature, largely intangible and most guard their brands very carefully. One of the most frustrating things about my job is seeing fantastic ideas rejected with little thought because they are seen by one or two people in an organisation as being "off-brand".

But search online and you'll find on places like Twitter and Facebook that charities have very little control about what people say about them.

Fighting against this tide seems to be taking an approach like King Canute and we all know what happened to him.

Voices within a charity and from supporters are now more important in shaping a brand than the communications department. When people talk about their experiences of organisations they are brand building as much as the next TV campaign or scripted interview.

Many of the people who support charities find control a turn off. And research and testing shows that authenticity beats strict guidelines hands down when it comes to driving engagement.

Control is usually generated by fear. If you are worried that your supporters and staff might damage your brand by what they say, what does that imply about what is actually happening inside your organisation?

There is only one way to handle the world presented by web 2.0 and that's through concentrating on the experience that you give people. If that's good, your brand will be in very safe hands - even if it's not yours.