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Cybergifts, Part 3

By Adam Corson-Finnerty

Read Cybergifts, Part 1
Read Cybergifts, Part 2

Push:

A Push strategy takes your site, or your message, and sticks it in your prospect's face. The most obvious instance is "spam" email, where a prospect receives an unrequested message about a product or service.

The fact is, we get advertisements and products pushed at us all day long. They come at us from the radio, from the television, from banner ads, from our newspaper, from telemarketing calls, from billboards, from pop-up coupons at the supermarket. Even "And-have-I-told-you-about-our-two-for-one-apple-crisp-special?" is a push.

Personally, I prefer the "pull" of the popcorn smell in a theater lobby. The "pull" of a measured dose of caffeine in a can of Diet Coke. The "pull" of reading about Gwyneth or Regis or Demi or Julia while I stand in a supermarket checkout line. I really dislike spam, I can barely stand the "Attention Shoppers" announcements in my local grocery store, and I and getting ready to unlist my phone number because the telemarketers are trading it amongst themselves with liberality.

So why spend time on "push" methods for Internet fundraising?

Two reasons:
  1. Because it exists, and I am trying to be catholic.
  2. Because, rightly done, it may be the most powerful tool we have for bringing in online gifts.

Any organization with a web presence can use traditional "push" methods to try to drive traffic to their site. This can be as simple as putting your URL in Direct Mail pieces, to having a radio announcer say "or contact www.sywash.edu/go-team/newlockerrooms/donate.html"

We are all familiar with traditional advertising methods, so I will not go into those in this article. Rather, I would like to focus on methods that are unique to the Internet.

Spam

First up is spam. We all get those unwanted emails from time to time, and most of us delete them with varying degrees of emotion. Spam is cheap-practically zero in marginal cost once you are on the Internet-and if only .01% of the people you spam respond to your pitch, you are ahead of the game. Not popular, but perhaps profitable.

I have yet to receive a spam email from a non-profit organization, including ones that I support. I haven't even heard of one, so I can't cite or castigate anyone. Theoretically, there is an argument for spam fundraising--defining spam as unrequested email-since it is a cheap way to get the word out fast. The Red Cross, for example, might be tempted to send a follow-up appeal to the 9,000 people who have made online gifts this year for Balkan Relief. Or, if not an appeal, then an "update" on their relief work, with a subtle or not-so-subtle pitch for additional contributions.

The World Wildlife Fund may decide to send one, or a series, of messages to everyone who visits their site. All they need to do is openly or covertly capture email addresses. Or Sywash University may decide to run an annual appeal message out to every alumna/us who has given their email address on an "update" form. Why not? Sywash pays a professional telemarketer to pester its alums at dinnertime twice a year.

The reason "why not" is that in these theoretical examples, the WWF would be violating the privacy of its visitors, and Sywash would be violating the trust of its alumni. So it's a High Sense of Ethics that keeps non-profit organizations from spamming friends and strangers, right?

Sorry. It's not ethics. It's practicality. The anti-spam culture of the Internet is pretty strong. The backlash could be tremendous, especially if you are the first to cross the line. An NPO that spams its constituents will probably lose constituents. Besides, there are other more sophisticated ways of utilizing "push."

Banner ads

Banner Ads, for instance. Some charities have taken to running such advertisements on heavily-visited sites, and why not? The Internet Culture does accept banner ads, the same way we accept advertisements during our favorite TV shows. So any of us could run banner advertisements inducing visitors to "click here" to learn about our organization.

Banner Ads can be very sophisticated these days, and they will be getting even more sophisticated as time goes on. The first time I discovered this for myself was when I searched on a popular site for gay activist organizations. The search engine started pitching "gay-friendly" products at me. I am certain that the search engine would have been happy to send me Act Up promotions if that organization had wanted to pay for such coverage.

Let's say I search for news about the recent Turkish earthquakes. Could the search engine begin popping up banner ads for Save the Children? You bet!

And, as any good Development Officer can tell you, paying hard money for banner ads is only one way to proceed. Why not ask the Yahoos and other portals to donate banner ads to your cause? (Some of them have as much as 85% of their theoretical ad space unsold, which represents an opportunity for charities.)

Internet Push is in its infancy, and at this early stage one can imagine any number of other tactics that might be tried:

And so on. Internet "push" is here to stay, and we cannot even imagine all the forms it will take in the future.

But that's then, and this is now. Right now, most of us are ignoring the most fabulous "push" technology available: email.

Email -- the best "push" technology for today

Email? Fabulous? How can this be? Email is old technology already. It's downright boring.

True, but how many of us have come to depend on email to get our work done? To stay in touch with friends? To lightly remind our daughter at college that she still has a family at home who love her dearly and would like to hear from her once in a while? To request a service or ask a question or make a complaint or tell President Clinton what we think?

Email. Total pieces of first class mail delivered in 1998 = 107 billion. Total pieces of email delivered in 1998 = 3.4 trillion. (Business 2.0, April 1999)

Email. Total marginal transport cost of sending first class mail to 100 additional addresses = $33.00. Total marginal cost of sending email to 100 or one million additional addresses = $0.

Surveys indicate that 80% of the people who plunk down hard money for an Internet Service Provider cite email as their main motivation. My wife's mother bought her first computer system at age 80, so that she could join the email circle that her three daughters and six grandchildren have created. My children thought the Web was boring (especially at pre-cable-modem speeds) but abandoned TV and even the phone for email. (Though they quickly discovered that they could be on the phone and do email, and listen to rock music and check out cool web sites all at the same time. They also claimed they were really doing homework.)

Email. In Part 1 of this article, I cited the USA Today cover story on the astonishing success of MoveOn.com. They raised over $13 million in pledges for political candidates by sending out an email petition. The petition asked Congress to censure Bill Clinton and then "move on" to more important business. "Within days, the couple had generated 500,000 electronic petitions, so many that they had to be parceled out to avoid choking the computer servers on Capitol Hill." (August 31, 1999)

When the couple, Wes Boyd and Joan Blades, later sent out an appeal for donations of time and money to defeat anti-Clinton activists, they got back pledges for $13 million and 776,000 hours of volunteer time. (http://www.moveon.org)

Says Joan Blades, "[Online giving] makes it simpler for people to contribute. You don't even have to find a stamp. It's pretty danged easy."

It's pretty danged easy, says the woman who has raised more money online than anyone else in the universe. What made it easy was the high level of political passion that Boyd and Blades tapped into. Keep in mind that they did not accomplish their results through direct mail, or even direct email. They were successful because people passed the message on to their friends. Chain email.

So this is the first thing to note. The power of chain email. Chain email is not spam, though sometimes it feels like it. Chain email is what one friend passes along to another. If it is something that people feel passionate about, or think is funny, or cute, or insightful, or compelling, or alarming -- it can literally go around the world in minutes.

Here is an example my wife loves. A fifth grade class in a small Canadian town sent an email out into the ether. "We are trying an experiment," they said. "Our teacher says that email connects people all over the world. If you get this message, please send a message back to us and tells us where you live. And please pass it on to others. We are going to see how far this message travels in 30 days." Cute. My wife sent a note saying that we lived in Pennsylvania, and passed the message on to her two sisters. After a day she got back an automatically-generated message from the school's ISP. Messages were avalanching in to the school. The responses had shut down their computer after the first few days.

Chain email can be a very powerful marketing tool. In fact, it already has a name: Viral Marketing. "Viral marketing" is just a wired update on "word of mouth" marketing. But what an update!

MoveOn.org will not be the only NPO to profit from this technique. How can other non-profits use viral marketing and chain email for fundraising? I shudder to think.

Click to Give

I will probably never forget the impact of a recent conversation with Tim Snyder, director of advancement technologies for Wake Forest University. I had called to talk with him about the nuts and bolts of establishing online credit card giving mechanisms. What kind of results was he getting, I asked.

Pretty well, he said. A number of web-based gifts had been made, some in the $5,000 range. And they had found that email with a link back to the giving site was a great way to collect on unpaid phonathon pledges. In fact, one alum, who received an email annual giving solicitation, wrote back saying that if they promised to never phone solicit him again, but used email instead, he would double his pledge.

They say that sometimes the student falls asleep during long meditation sessions at the ashram. The teacher carries a long bamboo stick, frayed at the end so that it doesn't hurt. When he sees that you have fallen asleep, he smacks you on the back. Occasionally, the smack brings instant enlightenment.

Of course, I thought. Put a giving link in email messages. "Click here to donate." Enlightenment followed.

You, the reader, get it right away, yes? It's simple. You are now reading email. You probably have "enhanced" email, so that an http link will be clickable. Try these links just to verify the concept:

I hope that when you stopped at Wake Forest you made a donation. If the email-hyperlink-donate concept is new to you, Tim Snyder just gave you an idea worth millions of dollars.

Permission Email

We now come to the concept that puts it all together. At least for Part 3: Permission email.

Permission email is simple to understand. It's email that you have asked for, or agreed to receive, or haven't said no to. Like the email that you are reading right now.

Since we all have the Cybergifts list in common, let's look at how they use permission email. For me, it started with a straightforward post to one of the fundraising lists that I belong to. A new listserv was forming, called cybergifts, and sponsored by charitychannel.com. The potential contents were described, and the signup mechanism was clear. It sounded right up my alley, so I clicked on over to the site and signed up.

At some point in the signup process I was told that Cybergifts would contain advertisements. I was also assured that it would be easy to sign off the list if I lost interest. So I signed up. Since that time, charitychannel.com, has sought to extend my level of permission from one service to several. First, they started sending me job advertisements. Then they sent postings about other listservs they were starting. Then they added emailed book reviews. I didn't ask for these additional messages, but each message assures me that I can terminate the message flow if I want to - that is, I can "opt out." Since I have not elected to opt out, I have de facto "opted in." That's called "negative permission."

So now I am a "customer" of charitychannel, and they are slowly establishing "trust" with me. Will they seek to keep extending that trust, and sell me additional services? I presume so. But since the benefits are worth it - so far - I continue to extend permission. Besides, charitychannel.com also has a strong personal presence in the form of Stephen Nill, co-moderator. Nill, and co-moderator Mel Krupnick, are very responsive to direct communications, and manage the service with considerable openness to customer feedback.

Permission email is a subset of "Permission Marketing." And the current hot book on this concept is called...Permission Marketing by Seth Godin, VP of Direct Marketing for Yahoo! (Simon and Schuster, 1999). It would appear that Permission Marketing is a subset of "one-to-one" marketing, and the gurus on that topic are Don Peppers and Martha Rogers (The One to One Future, and other titles).

Another name for permission email is "opt-in" email. The "E-Commerce Report" in the New York Times recently focused on this topic and found that commercial entities like Macys and J. Crew are making it a central part of their online marketing. People who elect to receive Macy's opt-in communications make purchases five to seven times more frequently than other site visitors. (NYT, 8/9/99)

When you think about it, the principles of permission marketing are everywhere on the Net. Take stock of all the "permission" email that you receive. If you are like me, it is surprisingly vast: five fundraising listservs, one library listserv, one "company" listserv, newsletters from Business Week, the New York Times, the Industry Standard, the Web Gazette, Byte, and several others that I can't remember how I got started with. I am happy to get them. In fact, I asked for all of them. They are, in the immortal and defining words of Seth Godin, "anticipated, personal, and relevant."

Godin claims that the Internet is the most powerful "direct marketing" vehicle ever invented. Stronger than snail mail, more powerful than telemarketing, able to leap the vast distance between stranger and friend with a with a series of carefully-calibrated bounds. In his book, he asserts that traditional marketing is dying, and that Internet marketing will replace it. But not if the Internet is thought of in TV terms-as a dumb "broadcast" medium. Only if the Internet is seen in its own terms: as an incredible tool for one-to-one marketing.

This is not a book review, so I won't go on. The concept is simple enough: Ask, don't spam. Establish trust. Build a relationship. Make the exchange of clear benefit to the customer. Eventually, you will make a sale, and if you keep the trust, more and more sales will follow. Build your base one-by-one, using the sophisticated "personalizing" power of the computer. When you have built a large "permission" email list of friends and customers, it will be your most important corporate asset.

I am delighted to see that several NPOs are using their websites to establish two-way, ongoing communication with their constituents. A good example would be the Nature Conservancy, (http://www.tnc.org)which offers:

Free! The Nature Conservancy e-News Every Month

Yes! I want to subscribe to The Nature Conservancy e-News! It's a free, electronic newsletter that will help expand the Conservancy's efforts to protect our natural heritage!

With this subscription I'm eligible for the following benefits:

Another example would be the CARE "email update," which offers readers a choice of several options:

Check the email updates that you are interested in receiving:

(See http://www.care.org)

Both organizations are inviting visitors to enter into a dialogue. Both are quite "upfront" about the fact that they will use this permission to ask for contributions.

When it comes to acquiring new constituents through your homepage, Godin makes a proposal that I found challenging: Create two homepages. One homepage is for your members, committed constituents, etc. That page is where you do business and have most of your resources. The other page: the one you promote, the one with the shortest and easiest-to-remember address, is designed solely to attract visitors and gain permission to enter into a relationship with them. Once they have "raised their hand" by giving you their email address and permission to mail to them, you point them to the "members" page.

I am not necessarily convinced that this is a good strategy for non-profit websites, but it does highlight the fact that your webpage should be clearly focused on turning "strangers" into friends.

So, what does all this mean for non-profit fundraising?

I believe it means that we have the tools we need to sell our lemonade. Far back, at the beginning of this article, I argued that Internet fundraising would not work if we just grafted a "give now" page onto our website and waited for people to drive by and toss money. Good web fundraising will require us to use the creative tools that are available-both "pull" and "push" tools-and to use our imagination.

Godin and his colleagues at Yoyodine, a "permission" marketer, honed their tools for commercial purposes. They found that if they structured their offers correctly, they could go from 2% response rates to 36% response rates. Now Godin is VP for Direct Marketing at Yahoo! and we can follow the evolution of his craft by tuning in to that site. I don't know about you, but I intend to set up a "My Yahoo" page and see what happens!

In many ways, we are in a much better position than the companies to which Godin is pitching his message. They are trying to sell mouthwash or used cars. We are Changing Lives or Saving Lives.

There is another book to be written-who knows, maybe I will write it-which takes Godin's principles and applies them to the non-profit world. There is a difference. Dell computer, as agile and clever as it may be on the Internet, is still a commercial entity aimed at "the bottom line." Meaning Profit. Amazon.com, as friendly and "personalized" as it is, still is about the business of making money and boosting its stock value.

Non-profit organizations are about something else altogether. Call it Changing Lives and Saving Lives, since just about everything from a synagogue to a Nature Preserve can fit under that umbrella. (And I didn't invent that term, by the way. I picked it up at a Development conference years ago.)

Seth Godin is a for-profit marketer, and a good one. In his book, he lays out something that he calls the "ladder of permission." Basically, he is trying to help companies turn strangers into long-term and loyal customers. That happens, he argues, when you establish trust and are focused on a mutually-beneficial relationship. Your goal is to keep your customers, get them to buy again, get them to buy "up," and get them to "cross" buy. Meaning, to buy more expensive goods and services, and to buy new goods and services. To go from buying your jeans, to buying your leather jackets, to buying your vacation-packaging services.

At the very core of his method is the strongest of motivators: self-interest. Says Godin: "Permission Marketers make every single interaction selfish for the customer. 'What's in it for me' is the question that must be answered at every step."

And that, dear readers, is not what we are about. We are not ultimately appealing to our donor's selfish instincts. We are appealing to his or her self-less instincts. We are asking people to be compassionate, caring, empathetic. To take joy in helping a child, or a tree, or a homeless kitten. To nurture someone's faith, to give someone a chance at a better life, to help someone get out of a drug habit or an abusive relationship.

We may joke about how "selfish" our donors can sometimes be. We may even become cynical about the premiums, the "naming opportunities," the stewardship dinners. But the bottom line for non-profit fundraising is simply this: we are asking a person to freely part with their money in order to help someone else.

So we don't start where Godin starts. We don't start with people cruising the Net to see "what's in it for me?" In general, we start with people who are concerned about some part of the world and think that we may be able to help. If they end up giving us money, and become loyal supporters (not loyal customers), it will be because they believe in our organization and have faith in our work.

Relationship Management

Clearly, Seth Godin has plenty to teach us about how to interact with our supporters and would-be supporters online. Ultimately, what Godin is pointing to is a relationship. And what he is pointing to is the idea of building an "integrated customer relationship system."

That phrase comes from my other current guru, Patricia Seybold, author of Customers.com (Times Business, 1998). Seybold argues that we should be building a complete relationship system, one that combines all of the ways in which we communicate with our customer and our customer communicates with us. Web site, email, telephone, fax, direct mail, personal visits-the whole ball of wax.

So there we are. It's simple. All we Development Officers have to do is convince our bosses to completely overhaul the entire communications structure of our institution.

There are even two new software terms that describe "packages" which help you accomplish this revolution. One is "customer-relationship management" (or CRM). The other is "electronic relationship management" (or ERM).

Try these out the next time you attend a senior management planning meeting. As in, "Well, I believe we should consider implementing a CRM approach." Try and keep a straight face.

Adam Corson-Finnerty is a Development Officer, Author and Occasional Consultant. Reach him at: 215-635-4084 or corsonf@fund-online.com. Find his web site at: http://www.fund-online.com. This article was originally published as a series of three postings to the CYBERGIFTS mailing list at http://www.charitychannel.com.
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