People talk too much.  Especially fundraisers.

Fundraisers spend way too much time spouting their elevator pitch, talking about their needs, making “asks” from the podium at the gala, regurgitating the major goals of the organization’s strategic plan. Blah blah blah blah blah.

Here’s a little secret: most donors don’t care much about any of that stuff.  What do they care about?  If you really want to know, why not just ask?

No one wants to go on a date with someone who only talks about him/herself. I do this, I did that. I want this, I need that. Blah blah blah blah blah.

Stop having me-me-meetings with potential donors and instead, try asking these three questions:

• The Success Question: “What do you want to achieve?”
• The Frustration Question: “What do you want to avoid?”
• The “Right-Charity” Question: “What helps you decide which charities to support?”

Ask these and other open-ended questions and you’ll find yourself in a conversation that’s (surprise!) about them, and not you. In this way, you’ll learn what’s important to them and what they’re looking for.  You’ll start to figure out if they’re the right fit for you and if so, what kind of time and effort it will take to convert them to a donor.  You may even learn things that will help you in your cultivation of other donors.

So the next time you find yourself in front of a prospective donor, shut up! Unless you’re asking a question.

For more tips on establishing donor trust, visit the resource library on the Bristol Strategy Group website.

Giving Tuesday will be upon us before we know it, so organizations everywhere are (or should be) starting to plan their campaigns to solicit support from the vast ocean known as the Internet. Hopefully, instead of shooting arrows in the dark, your organization will take a more intentional, strategic approach to executing your crowdfunding campaign.  Here are some pointers:

1. Conduct a social media audit. Make sure that you already have a robust, interactive social networking community. All of your platforms – website, blog, email marketing, social sites, crowdfunding portal – should be up to date and coordinated. If they’re not, then stall your campaign and make it happen before proceeding to step #2.
2. Build an inner circle. Formulate the team that’s going to drive and manage the campaign. Ideally, it would consist of a mix of board, staff, and volunteers who have robust and interactive social networks. The inner circle will devote the time and brainpower to build the theme for the campaign, develop scripts and content, and recruit ambassadors to push the campaign out to the public.
3. Seed your campaign. Successful campaigns raise 30% of the funds in the first 10 days.  Ideally, you’ll have a good portion of this amount raised before the campaign even starts.  Try to identify a major donor who is willing to provide matching funding to support your campaign. Announce the matching gift in the 2^nd trimester of the campaign, to offset the inevitable lull that is common at this phase.
4. Develop the campaign messaging. The ideal campaign is six weeks in duration, with roughly 8-12 unique touch points throughout. Be concise in your messaging. Appeals should be short, (three or four sentences should do), include a compelling or inspiring picture, and encompass a human-interest story related to the cause.  All of the appeals should end with “please click here to make a donation to help us achieve our goal of $$$$$.”
5. Work your contacts. The inner/outer circles should not only re-post/forward the campaigns to their networks, but also make personal, one- on-one appeals (by phone, email, in person, or online) to solicit gifts and other ambassadors (using the scripts that were developed at the beginning of the campaign). This is tedious, cut and paste work.  If your inner and outer circles aren’t willing to schedule time to get it done, the campaign will be a flop. Or it won’t raise as much as it would otherwise.
6. Invest in expertise. If you have Ice Bucket Challenge aspirations and want your campaign to go viral, it’s wise to bring in an social networking expert (before the beginning of the entire process) to provide professional guidance on content development, messaging, and search engine optimization.
7. Stay in touch. Thank your donors right away. Keep in touch with them on the platform in which they originally engaged you.  Make sure they’re periodically tagged in your posts. Research their giving habits.  For those with the potential for higher giving or deeper involvement, schedule meetings so you can ask them a whole lot of questions.

Have questions, challenges or ideas about your crowdfunding campaign? Book a free consultation so we can talk about it.

So how’s that cure for ALS coming along?

CONFESSION: When the Ice Bucket Challenge went viral, I was more than a little bit jealous. As a fundraiser who has spent many days and nights scraping and clawing for every dime, armed with a noble mission and compelling case statement (and not a cheesy gimmick), it filled me with envy to see all of those buckets of cash pouring into the coffers of the ALSA.

And I’m still bitter. Because the outpouring of support for ALS had much less to do with the actual cause (many people didn’t even know what ALS was), and much more to do with the vain, solipsistic, “look at me” mentality of our society, which was fed by the opportunity to film one of those inane ice bucket videos. Should it matter that people weren’t really connected to the cause? No. ALS is an insidious disease, and the association got an amazing infusion of cash that can be used for treatment and research, which is a very good thing for ALS victims and families.

So back to my original question: How’s it going?

According to this week’s edition of TIME, The Ice Bucket Challenge brought in $115 million – roughly four times the amount that the ALSA brought in the previous year.  At press time, the ALSA had spent $47 million, with about $31 million allocated toward research, $11 million spent on patient and community services and the remaining $5 million on education, fundraising, and processing fees. I won’t bore you with the geeky science of it all, but the infusion of cash has already yielded some encouraging results with respect to both treatment and cure.

So I guess it’s time for me to stop being bitter and focus on what I, and other fundraisers, can learn from the Ice Bucket Challenge.  Did the ALSA catch lightning in a bottle, or is there something there that the rest of us can use, learn from, build on in the future to make our fundraising more successful?

Sigh. I’m still bitter. Maybe another time.