We're Not Kiddin' June 28, 2007 By RussBurke

Maybe you thought we were posturing when you saw the Mission Research mission statement: Our Mission is to Support Your Mission? The company and its leadership have done several very cool things to make that statement a reality in what we do and how we do it.

The latest example is the incredible Mal Warwick Webinar, available free to all GiftWorks customers. Why incredible? Simply because Mal Warwick is one of the best known and most well-respected nonprofit gurus anywhere. And it yours, free. That's free...to hear directly from a recognized direct mail fundraising expert. Free to submit questions that can amplify your takeaways. Free to gather, in minutes, the understanding that Mal has invested years in accruing. You will truly benefit from Mal's years of highly varied, rich experience and his skill in presenting this content.

Our Mission is to Support Your Mission. No, we're not kiddin'. We want you to succeed!

Checking Donor Perceptions June 27, 2007 By RussBurke

Very recently I had recounted to me a major outcome from a highly charged meeting.  This outcome was the recognition that the various "at odds" viewpoints represented were powered by unshared perceptions of what had transpired. This concept is not too hard to grasp...our percpetions of what we experience is so often colored by our past, our expections, and our emotions.

Think about your donors. Think about the interactions, the calls and the mailings they have received from you. Do you know what your donors think about the content, tone and delivery of those contacts.

Let's take a common but critical example. There's been a lot of very good research about segmenting solicitation mailings to test the effectiveness of various "packages" (colors, size, number of pages, etc.).  Usually, effectiveness is measured by response rate or income per piece generated. But it shouldn't end there.

Consider the value of asking other questions when you evaulate your solicitation devices.  Consider selecting your top 10 to 20% of responding donors and surveying them to learn what reached them at a more presonal level. Did this "ask" leave you understanding how important you are to making it possible for our mission to go forward...to helping this family have a roof over their heads...be part of something so much bigger than all of us? Understanding what your donors are really thinking provides a much better guide to developing productive solicitications that both presents the immediate ask and cultivates that donor for future commitments. Doing this in person with your core of top-most donors is, in itself, great stewardship and cultivation.

The critical piece is to begin to test whether what you think you are communicating actually gets across by the device, content and delivery you've chosen. As with so many human interactions, perception is everything.

Shared Memory June 21, 2007 By RussBurke

There is a tragic waste of talent, time and resources in many nonprofits. It results from the lack of distributed knowledge tools. Your donor-constituent-friend database should be immediately accessible by more than the gifts entry staffer or the development director.

For our users, the solution lies in putting GiftWorks on the desks of other development staff, the CEO, the community outreach liason, and your volunteer coordinator.

The cost is fully justifiable. Lets start at the simple end of this equation: More stations mean less paper and time wasted. For example, the time a CEO spends writing down and emailing a simple address change means he or she could have just as easily entered it into GiftWorks, saving notepaper and all the staffer time on that task. Similarly, it occurs every time a CEO requests a donation report or SmartList.  Of course, don't discount the time lag that interupts the CEO's thought process because the data is not yet in hand.

I am not picking on CEO's. I've seen some who didn't want to be anywhere near that database...and others who insisted on having their own log-in to a system that was easy to use. But I can observe that, invariably, the advancement effort was more productive in the latter camp. That better performance, by the way, has nothing to do with the increased time and paper-use efficiency. It resided in shared memory.

When your nonprofit has a constituent database that is actively shared across the leadership spectrum, good things can happen more easily. For starters, the data grow richer faster...there is more detail in donor records, more complete contact records, more complete mailing records. more opportunity for the creation of shared SmartLists that function as interactive work management tools.

Because the data is "at hand" donors will get better responses from you on the phone and you'll have that detailed rich data to help you knowledgeably plan cultivation and solicitation strategies for your major donors. Just as important, you will have a place to record what that plan is so that information gets out of someone's head and into a place where it can be shared...and improved! Intelligently shared information gets improved.

One of our Consultant Partners, Ruthellen Rubin, recently remarked that this "shared intelligence" was absolutely necessary for building a sustainable nonprofit. Well said! Help your organization build a legncy of information.

Employee Turnover June 18, 2007 By Steve Fafel

Several of the nonprofits in which I'm involved have been going through some tough times, and one of the natural outcomes is employee turnover. At one, a longtime employee, who represents the heart and soul of one of the programs, decided it was time to leave after a series of management miscues that made her job not very fun. So she left and started her own business doing the same thing but under her own domain. So perhaps we can say this  nonprofit inspires entrepreneurism, but we know better.

At another, smaller nonprofit, one of the employees is leaving because of disagreements and negative interactions with management (I'm deliberately keeping it vague). This is after less than a year of part-time work, and she was a valued contributor.

Employee turnover is costly. Sometimes it's appropriate; an employee or Director is the wrong person for the job, and it only makes sense to recognize that and help them find a more suitable career. In fact, I believe in those cases all pretense should be dropped and the move made as soon as it's clear it's not working--make it surgical, as my Dad used to say (a doc, of course). The drag on an organization by a poor performer or inappropriate hire is likely greater than the hole left by their absence.

But when good people leave the organization, it is substantially more painful all around, and can often be an indictment of management, policies, behaviors, etc.  This is when everyone questions leadership, and rightfully so. What's not working? How can we do better? What does the former employee think? What does she think we could do better and correct? What advice can she give us?

Replacing good employees is expensive and tough. The process can take many months, and in the meantime, you have holes to fill. So my advice? Hold on to great employees. Listen. If they must leave, ask them to recruit their replacement. But the question remains: what are the underlying problems that led to the departure, and can you address them?

Decisions, Decisions June 11, 2007 By Steve Fafel

I sit on a few nonprofit boards. One is the local YMCA, which is building a new building in downtown Lancaster. We don't talk about fundraising software, fundraising tactics, or nonprofit issues these days, just buildings. We've decided to build a green, LEEDS-certified building, which will have a great, positive impact on the community and the membership. At the same time, membership has pushed for all the features you'd expect--competition pool, full gym, his and hers steam rooms, etc. It's going to be a great place.

Except to accommodate all of those things we have had to build a rectangle. Even with a green roof this isn't very appealing. So the balance is between parking, curvature, and building features.

Sigh. Aesthetics will lose out on this one, but there might be things we can do with the skin--glass, shaped facade, maybe a copula. The nice the facade, the easier it is to market for building membership. Then again, do we really need to invest in a curved exterior? Sigh.

More Stories on SalesForce reliability June 9, 2007 By Steve Fafel

Up front: SalesForce.com is a competitor. Very well known and  very much at the forefront of the "hosted only" model; in fact, their slogan is "No Software". Well, perhaps some software would be helpful when it comes to reliability. It seems they continue to face challenges as they grow.

It's a tough position to be in--having all of your data on remote servers without some sort of fallback; that was our problem in 2005 when we were a customer of SalesForce. They've apparently invested somewhat in performance, but continue to have issues, however minor they might seem in the greater scheme of things.

One thing I like about desktop software is that the data is right there on your own computer or network, so even if the software has an issue, the data is available. And the primary reason we built software for the desktop that's web-enabled instead of a pure hosted application was that nonprofits consistently told us in surveys that they don't trust their data on the web. Out there.

We use something we call MissionWorks for our customer and sales tracking, along with some hosted applications like mass email and site analysis. The desktop software performs much better, but the hosted software offers some conveniences. We like a hybrid, and call our platform the Hybrid Web, which is a logical mix of the desktop and web.

I hope SalesForce gets it together and offers a better way to swap out servers and keep their customers running 24/7. It's a real challenge for them, and perhaps a greater one for their customers when they reach for the service and the dialtone isn't there. With so much riding on it, I imagine they'll aggressively work to solve the issues. 

Not All Nonprofits are Green (from Russ Burke) June 3, 2007 By Steve Fafel

Because Mission Research is grounded in this business of helping nonprofits, and we are committed to green principles and sustainability as a company, I think a lot about the principles of living green being extended to the nonprofit community (beyond environmental and sustainability nonprofits (which of course are green by nature). I take the position that they certainly should.

Can they afford it? Certainly, for many things, and many nonprofits can actively engage their supporters to help them move toward greater green responsibility, just as they can actively engage volunteers to help guide them. Working for the greater good can be more holistic and pervasive across the spectrum of your activities and consumptions.

There is a real social value here, both for those who support us and those we serve.  For those who support us, we can demonstrate that we take seriously the notion that we steward and value them and their environment, caring about things they care about.  It's the same for those we serve. We care about the world they live in, the things that are vital to them, and we are pledged to "do no harm".

Almost any nonprofit can do the simple things, like reducing energy usage, insulating, and recycling. Others can think bigger, like replacing their home visit cars with hybrids (or fuel-efficient cars of any kind), retro-fitting buildings with heat exchangers, and making all sponsored events green (even zero waste). Other, more experienced and studied folks have many more ideas than these. The opportunity to be more green grows more each day as does the urgency to do so.

Nonprofits should jump in to take the lead. You can be a beacon of hope, a green beacon!

--Russ Burke [had a bit of a Typepad login problem, so posted by Charlie...]