Timing July 27, 2005 By Steve Fafel

Steve Martin used to do a thing about comedy, how it's all about ti-MING--no!--timing, timing...which leads me to mailings. We send out mail on occasion to introduce people to GiftWorks. We did a December mailing that was disastrous--we need it would be but we did it anyway because we're sometimes not very smart. This Spring we sent out a lot of CDs to lots of nonprofits, and the response rate varied depending on the message and the time of the week or month the nonprofit received it. This week we did a mailing--or tried to, except the mailing house failed to get it out on time last week, and dropped on a Tuesday this week, and will do another drop maybe on Friday, and I have to say I'm not happy about the ti-MING of it.

Are your donors home when you send an appeal? Does it show up on a major junk mail day and get discarded with other mass mail? Does it show up on a Saturday? Do donors open your mail in the Fall but never the Spring? It's important to learn the best timing to send mail to your supporters. Because ti-MING can be costly and frustrating.

So do any of you use mail houses? Or do you you bring volunteers in? Tell me by clicking on Comments below. [Kintera, Blackbaud, Donorperfect, fundraising, nonprofit software, yeah, these are keywords]

The Personal Call: Increasing Returns July 22, 2005 By Steve Fafel

Your top donors likely make up between 50% to 80% of your revenue. Call them, update them on your progress, thank them for enabling your work, and say that you look forward to seeing them later this year. Easy, right?

Some people have a tough time talking with their donors casually. In the back of your mind you're thinking "don't blow it" or "they know we want their money" or "how are we going to raise all of this in only 3 months."

I know. It's hard. I have had to raise money for projects, nonprofits, political campaigns (including my own), and startup companies. Asking for an investment is hard.

Investment. It's an investment. In your cause, in your campaign, in the work you are doing, in your mission, in the people you help. I don't just donate to good causes. I donate to the support the effect of the mission. The nonprofit serves as a proxy for me--I don't have the time, energy, skill, or inclination to put together the resources and passion to make things happen for one thing or another, so I depend on the nonprofit to to that. It's an investment.

Get on that phone and nurture those investors in your cause. Make it part of your daily routine--1 hour of nothing but calls, and don't ask for any money. 

The investment will follow.

Moving Day July 21, 2005 By Steve Fafel

Mission Research moved to new space about a week ago--with no interruption of service! Chris did an excellent job of managing the move. This is the first time I've moved where phones and internet worked from Day 1!

The new space is in an old tobacco warehouse in Lancaster. Our floor is 8400 sf, has brick walls and high ceilings and there's room to for growth--we'll need it!

Here are some pics: First, the Big Empty...

...the big mess

...and Steve with the big sugar overload.

The personal note July 20, 2005 By Steve Fafel

There's a lot of debate over whether you should hand sign your letters or just use an image of your signature--or no signature at all. Personally I don't care about the signature. I respond to personal notes. About every month I get some sort of fundraising letter from some politician running somewhere on the East Coast because once I donated a decent amount of money to somebody's campaign. These people don't know me, but campaigns require money so they send appeals to people who have given to some campaign sometime before. I keep using ambiguous terms because that's how their letters come across--I'm just someone on their list.

But every year I get a letter from Gillian at Witness.org. And every year, whether I can afford it or not, I send what I can because I know Gillian and Witness are doing important work, but even more than that I know Gillian appreciates my support. Now, I'm very high maintenance; if I don't hear from Gillian, who is an incredibly busy executive director with 2 very young children, international travel obligations, and a vastly larger staff than when I volunteered there, well, if I don't hear from her personally then I get a little, well, hurt. Yeah, I'm sensitive. But I donate.

Now, not every organization I give to sends me personal notes, and I don't think you need to send personal notes to all of your donors. But if you write 10 short personal notes a day--just a few lines--every day, that's 300 a month, or 3600 a year. That's a lot of personal contact. People appreciate the extra effort. You don't have to send them right away--you can wait for a major mailing. The difference could be substantial--just by making that small personal connection on a regular basis can turn smaller donors into bigger donors and large donors into longtime sustaining donors.

So do you send personal notes? Does it work for you, or is there no difference? Let me know--click on Comments below to add a comment!

What About Bob? July 18, 2005 By Steve Fafel

We love all of our customers. But yes--some more than others. Below is our dear friend from the Pacific Marine Mammal Center, Bob. I called last Friday just to hear the seals' voices, and Emily Wing sent me this great picture of her new favorite patient.

From their website: Pacific Marine Mammal Center (PMMC) is a non-profit organization staffed by dedicated volunteers and funded by donations. Its mission is to: rescue, medically treat and rehabilitate marine mammals that are stranded along Orange County, California beaches due to injury or illness; release healthy animals back to their natural habitat; and increase public awareness of the marine environment through education and research. You can donate by visiting their website.

Donors Recruiting Donors July 11, 2005 By Steve Fafel

Your donors support you for a variety of reasons, the most important of which is they believe in your mission. Turn your donors into evangelists for your cause--equip them to recruit other donors. Here are a few ideas:

• Have them hold house parties in your honor, where either you or they make a brief (5 minutes) presentation.
• Ask them to recruit two friends for your next low-pressure general event. While ultimately you want them to donate, you have to win over their hearts first. Use educational events as a way to develop their support first, then make the ask later through a phone call or letter.
• Ask your donors to email their friends asking for support. Create the email for them and ask them to personalize it. Make sure the email has a link back to your site, which should have ways to donate in plain view. If you don't take donations online yet, try PayPal.com, Acteva.com, or Networkforgood.org (there are many others, and we will offer something this Fall that integrates nicely with GiftWorks).

These are just a few ideas. Most of them are things political candidates do for their campaigns--there is a lot to learn from them. Tell me your thoughts on this--do you have any ideas about recruiting new donors?

GiftWorks 2.0 -- Blazing New Trails July 7, 2005 By Steve Fafel

We've been working for over 6 months on GiftWorks 2.0, which we plan to release later this summer. This is one of these transformational products that will likely shake up the nonprofit software sector, which is laden with companies like Blackbaud (Nasdaq:BLKB)that charge a lot of money for their software, or Kintera  (Nasdaq:KNTA), which is reasonable for larger NPOs but out of reach for small orgs. Even Microsoft is selling into this sector with a pricey CRM system. When so many companies target the large and mid-sized nonprofits, the smaller ones get left out in the cold. That's where we come in.

Wildcat (GiftWorks 2.0 code name; free GiftWorks license to anyone who guesses our code name system and posts the answer in comments) is just entering beta and is already getting attention from larger nonprofits. So what's so great about it? Well, besides and price ($299) and the beautiful design that makes it so easy to use, the new features are really, really cool. The mailing section gives a deep look into the overall direction of the software as a direct marketing tool, with mass mailing tools like one-click mailings (patent-pending), uploads to online print services, mass email (and later email marketing and response tracking--very cool). This is the beauty of the platform--we merge the power of the desktop with the utility of the internet. You get the best of both worlds, and for not a lot of money.

The big 2.0 sports lots of other helpful features like the cool new dashboard with info fed from the web as well as donor info from the software, the elegant way it handles households, memorials, and honoraria, etc...but I think the most exciting thing for geeks like me has to be the upcoming SDK--a software development kit. Any Visual Basic-level developer can build new applications with the SDK and Design Guide, both of which are due in Beta form sometime this Fall. So you'll start to see add-ons from consultants and software companies, and in a few cases you'll even see our "competitors" licensing our technology as they move away from their antiquated legacy code. Now THAT's really cool.

So we're not your typical software company. We're pretty agressive, and we're relentless in our pursuit of better software for our customers. We've been talking with existing customers this week about the new features--many of which came from their feedback--and they are really excited. Any owner of the current version gets the new version for free, which makes them even more happy--no upgrade costs. I have to say--we love our customers! Y'all have been so amazingly supportive, friendly, and helpful as we evolve good software into great software. We didn't get to everything into this version, but there's a ton of new stuff, all implemented with that same care you've come to know and love.

So are we on the radar screens of our competitors? You bet. We've gotten calls from some, some hit our website regularly, and others have downloaded the trial. A lot of software out there was developed organically out of consulting experience, with lots of features but terrible interfaces. We hear a lot of customers complain about the huge expense of other software, where they pay for features they don't--or can't--use. We feel your pain. We wouldn't want to use that software either, and we don't. In fact, we have been using a popular sales program to track our customer information, and we think it's too expensive and too hard to use, so we're giving up on it and actually using GiftWorks instead (I use it for my own nonprofit already).

Anyway, we're having fun. Tomorrow we move into a very large space in an old tobacco warehouse. It's more New York loft than Lancaster office space...very open, brick walls, etc. Chris will post pictures as we move in. Things are really enjoyable these days! Maybe you can come by for the open house?

Fundraising is Easy--Summertime July 3, 2005 By Steve Fafel

Is it? Many people are on vacations, but not everybody goes at the same time. Summertime is a great time to keep your supporters in the loop on your activities. Send to supporters a letter that doesn't ask for money--try it. Tell them about your accomplishments, plans, and progress, and tell them to enjoy their vacation knowing that they've helped improve the world by supporting your efforts. Donors want to feel appreciated, and want to feel as though their money is going to good use and that they are part of the solution, not part of the problem.

Do you collect summer home addresses from your larger donors? You might want to consider that--some people spend months at a vacation home, and would appreciate news from their favorite nonprofit (you, we hope!). But be careful about the direct appeal--if your donors are on vacation, they might not want to feel obligated to do anything other than relax. Sending positive news reinforces their image of you and the effect of their support, but sending an appeal might be an intrusion into their peace of mind. Sending news keeps them aware of you going into the Fall fundraising season.

Summer fundraising events and appeals can work particularly well, however, when sent to home addresses. Why? The majority of nonprofits send their main appeals between the months of September and December, and use the summer to prepare for that or to focus on their missions. It's easy to get lost in the large amount of Fall and holiday bulk mail , but in the summer the volume goes down, giving you a chance for increased visibility.

Of course, it depends on who your donors are. If they are New York City venture capitalists, the likelihood they will be in the Hamptons at the beach house or away for a full month is a lot higher than if they are suburban professionals from the Midwest. You have to gauge your support base; either way, fundraising--or just keeping in touch with donors--during the summer months can be very productive. I'm personally about to send out a mailing for the Crystle Policy Center--wish me luck!

Let me know if you've had any success with summertime fundraising--post your comments below.

ps: GiftWorks tracks as many addresses as you'd like, by the way, as does Kintera[KNTA] and Blackbaud[BLKB]. Some fundraising software does not--be careful to look at how fundraising software handles addresses before you buy it.

de.licio.us : [fundraising software] (de.licio.us is a "social bookmarking" website--a way of organizing the web the way you want it. Check it out!)