The Australian Treasury department is holding consultations looking at the new ‘charity commission’ for Australia. If fundraisers don’t consult it could be very damaging for us.

If you are working for, or on the board of an Australian charity please make sure you, your board and your CEO know what is going on.

Info from the new Commissions site:

Australian Charities and Not-for-Profits Commission (ACNC). The ACNC will be an independent regulator and will:

• be advised by an Advisory Board chaired by Robert Fitzgerald AM
• report to Parliament through the Treasurer
• be staffed by around 90 officers, with potential for growth if additional functions are added
• be supported by the ATO in the provision of back-office services

Sounds terrifying – charities will be governed by Treasury. That is too late to change, but what the rules are can still be influenced. No time to delay people – they start their job on 1 July 2012.

I know it is boring, it is Government but if we don’t consult and get this right, it won’t be boring I can promise you that.

http://acnctaskforce.treasury.gov.au/content/content.aspx?doc=home.htm

Back in 1994, a little kitten was born. My friends (and mentor and brilliant fundraising copywriter) Tim and Karen gave the kitten to my partner (Stef) and me. We lived in Walthamstow, NE London.

When he was about a year old he we returned from work and couldn’t find him anywhere. Eventually someone working in the museum opposite our home found him in the museum gardens.

He had been attacked by greyhounds. Badly mauled, he had bits of insides poking out. We took him to the vet and he was given pretty low odds to survive. But the vet did a fantastic job and he pulled through.

He was a tough cat, and a tease – he used to wind up dogs and other cats all the time. He was pretty hard actually.

We got another cat, Brian, who was nowhere near as tough and also a bit soppy and needy. Stef used to say that Tetley took after her, and me after Brian.

In 1997 Stef and I broke up. I moved to Brighton for a few months before South London for a few years then on to Australia in 2002.

Stef left Walthamstow in the late nineties, and took Brian with her, but Tetley didn’t go and became quite a character. A bit like a slightly less adventurous Red Dog from Louis de Bernieres book (and new movie) on the Australian mining town dog.

Life moved on, and Tetley became a memory, like any ex-pet does. But I once got chatting to a stranger a couple of years ago in Hong Kong (or maybe Singapore) who had lived in Walthamstow. They knew Tetley, and knew he hung about the Museum still, which was kind of nice to hear.

But imagine my surprise when Stef sent me the link below to these articles. Tetley died at the end of September and had a New Orleans style community funeral. I wish I had known – I was in Europe then too.

Please take a look at the story. It brought tears to my eyes and happy memories to my heart. (Though I was one of his bully victims. Maybe Stockholm Syndrome at work here). Click the links below the photo.

Funeral for Tetley.
Nice photo and article.

By the way, Tetley was named after the beer. Then they named a beer after him. Funny old world.

So you want to do some good, and establish a new charity to help someone or something?  An option is to set up your own charity.  This is rarely the right option for the cause, though it may be the right option for you.  Whilst it seems, on the face of it, a selfless act setting up a charity is often as much about you as the cause.  This is not a bad thing – after all, Barnardos, Greenpeace and MSF wouldn’t exist and be doing their great work if they hadn’t been set up by someone.

But, and it is a big but – there are now so many charities it is unbelievable.  And many of these are set up and run by well meaning amateurs trying to do some good and make themselves feel good about it.  Maybe they are angry about injustice or just want to do their bit.

Setting up a charity is almost certainly not the best way to help change the world.  Volunteering, fundraising or donating to an existing charity is likely to have a greater impact.

The only factor that would make setting up your own is passion – it is more likely that you will throw everything into ‘your own baby’, which is not a bad thing.

Even so, make sure you do your research and speak with the experts.  Understand the impact that what you will do will have on other organisations.  Remember that the thing you are excited about is likely to be because you happened to see and witness it, but it is probably not the most pressing problem in that country or region.

Here are some examples of how well meaning amateurs think they are doing good but could end up causing more damage.
* Several INGOs pull out of a region to force an end to specific corruption; you come in and innocently perpetuate the problem.
* A business owner introduces a malaria eradication program in a village in a poor country she has vacationed in.  Infant mortality from malaria in that village goes down – but malnutrition zooms up and conflict with the next village escalates.  An experienced NGO would have combined the malaria reduction with sexual and reproduction advice and worked with local villages to implement and spread the model.
* A returning holiday maker decides to distribute pens, school bags and other stationary to a school they happened to visit.   When the kids go home, bullies from other schools pick on them and nick their stuff.
* A manufacturer decides to sell shoes to affluent westerners and distribute a free pair to a poor person in a particular country. Unless the shoes are made local to the poor beneficiary, it is likely that the shoe manufacturers in their region will be put out of business; creating more problems.
* A woman is helped to set up her own business buying fish direct from the fisher, not the local wholesaler.  This makes her business better, but of course damages the wholesaler.

None of the above examples are necessarily wrong; and maybe the benefits outweighed the advantage – but all of them had undesired and unexpected impacts that only someone who is involved in such work could predict.

Usually the side effects are benign, and manageable but occasionally things go horribly wrong.  Stories like this one about a false orphanage run by an Indian missionary are rare but people are often desperate when they are poor and it is easy to make up a scam and take advantage of well meaning tourists.

Of course, established charities make mistakes too – but on balance they are going to get more things right than wrong.

If you still want to set up a charity (in Australia), check out Philanthropy Australia’s guide here.
http://www.philanthropy.org.au/research/faq.html

Thankfully, many organisations are getting the idea that they should be telling individual stories, not using statistics and mind-bogglingly technical jargon if they are going to really engage with donors.

This message appears to be getting through with direct mail appeals, but before a recent Fundraising Institute of Australia breakfast session in Brisbane on the topic of storytelling, I went to the websites of the 30 or so nonprofits that were attending. Only one had a story on its homepage. All of the others had information about the organisation, not beneficiaries.

Storytelling needs to be in your soul, and should be the driver of all communications. If you are a fundraiser, the only thing you have to sell is stories.

The best storytelling communications I have ever seen are by Cancer Research UK. It takes the stories developed from its television ads and makes much more in-depth versions available online.

Another organisation that gets this right on its homepage is Vision Australia. There is always a story slap bang in the middle of its homepage. The fundraising and communications people there are very switched on. They know that telling stories is much more powerful than using stats.

Of course, these stories need to be interesting, motivating and emotional. They also need to really bring the donor and the beneficiary together. One tactic for this is ‘witnessing’.

I went back to Vision Australia’s website and had a look at some of its copy. Could it be improved by witnessing a story?

I did a quick rewrite. For the purpose of this exercise, I have made up a couple of things – like the name of the therapist.

Before

Vision Australia’s Children’s Services provide teams of specialists to assist families with children who are blind or have low vision from birth to 18 years of age. Your donation means we can ensure more children like Chelsea (pictured) benefit from these specialised services.

Seven-year-old Chelsea Nagle, was born with no vision at all due to a rare genetic condition known as Leber’s Congenital Amaurosis. Her parents were totally shocked and distraught after finding out that their daughter was completely blind.

Vision Australia provides free specialist help and support to children who are blind or have low vision, which is critical for families who are faced with the shocking knowledge that their child has little or no sight. Your donation today can help ensure our services are available when Australians need help the most.

When the occupational therapist started, Chelsea couldn’t even hold a toothbrush well enough to clean her teeth – with children who have no sight, there’s no impetus to reach for things or pick them up as a sighted child will and there’s no learning by observation. Everything has to be encouraged and taught. The therapist helped Chelsea to explore things by using her sense of touch and to develop more self-help skills such as eating with a spoon and fork, brushing her hair, all to build up her independence.

Learning to use a cane was something else that required physiotherapy – Chelsea had to work on her wrist, arm and shoulders so that she could learn to hold out the cane properly and be able to walk confidently.

Every single one of her achievements has taken a lot of effort. Vision Australia’s support has been a vitally important part of getting Chelsea ready and able to attend school. To prepare Chelsea for school we provided counselling, physiotherapy and occupational therapy.

“Vision Australia’s support has been extremely valuable and I don’t think we could have survived without it, and I don’t think Chelsea would have developed into the independent, active and adventurous child she is today.” Lynda Nagel (Chelsea’s mum).

After

“It is so hard to describe the change in our lives. From teaching Chelsea everyday things like brushing her teeth to using the cane to get around safely, Melissa has been a godsend,” she told me.

Part of my role at Vision Australia is to speak with children like Chelsea and their parents. I have just got off the phone after assuring her mum, Linda Nagle, that I will do my utmost to ensure that the service that has helped her child so much will continue.

Linda reiterated the huge impact services funded by caring and loving Australians has had.

Melissa is our trained occupational therapist – completely funded by donations.

“Every day that I wake up I wonder what it would be like without the help of Vision Australia – not just Melissa – but also the enormous support from the whole team. It also gives me a great lift to know that this is all funded by wonderful people.

“These are strangers, people across Australia that I have never even met.”

“To have so much love and generosity from strangers is truly wonderful. If I have time to sit and think about it, I can’t help myself from crying.”

“I hope that you can tell them what a huge impact they are having on the life of my little child and our whole family,”  Linda said, as she watched Chelsea cross the room to get a doll.

You can see that Linda wanted me to share her thanks, and tell you about the impact you are having. I could think of no better way to fulfil this wish than to share her words with you. Please, help me fulfil my promise to Chelsea and Linda by making a gift today.

I do hope that you can see the differences in the stories, but more importantly, I hope that you can see how to apply ‘witnessing’ to your copy.

Check out Cancer Research UK‘s brilliant TV ads and stories and, of course, Vision Australia’s homepage.

Jonas Salk made it possible.  After inventing the polio vaccine, he was asked who would own the vaccine.  He replied “Well, the people I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?”  A true hero responsible for providing the key tool to hammering polio.  It was quickly snuffed out in nearly all countries and is now endemic in only four countries – Afghanistan, India, Nigeria and Pakistan.

We are amazingly close to finishing the job – just $535m short of funding in early 2011.

But now an Australian student will be able to add those words to his CV, along with an inevitable “Young Australian of the Year” award.

This Australian, Michael Sheldrick, was the final speaker at the FIA WA Conference a few weeks ago.  And his talk was incredibly motivating.

Even though he says “I am not a fundraiser” I think it is fair to say he bloody well is.  He managed to convince the Australian PM to give $50m, provide a platform for Bill and Melinda Gates to chuck in $40m and a few other Commonwealth countries in the UK to pitch in too.  Combined with the brilliant efforts of the global Rotary movement millions of kids will grow up, like Michael did, to never experiencing the disease. A seriously large chunk of that $535m will be knocked out thanks to the work of Michael. He is quick to point out that it was not him alone.

Managing The End of Polio Campaign was his role with Global Poverty Project. “It was very much a team effort and would not have been possible without ‘All hands on deck’. In particular, a stand out Concert Producer.”

It is so tempting to write up his story here, but it would ruin it – it is best coming from him.  He is a gifted storyteller, and this was key to his success. Check out his video.

Following the rock concert he was involved with, a government minister asked him to introduce the minister to Bill Gates.

If you see him speaking somewhere, go see him.  For those coming along to the Pareto party in Melbourne on 1 December don’t worry about asking him to tell his story, he is happy to tell all.

The barriers for asking for large gifts from individuals are numerous:

“I need to do more research”

“The timing is not right”

“I don’t know how much to ask for”

“The chairman should ask this one”

and lots more.

Many of these are valid, but ultimately not asking is a failing strategy.  If you want to get $1m from someone then  you almost certainly need to build a relationship with them, and going straight in with an ask will not get you that $1m.  But done well, a smaller ask is unlikely to put them off their bigger one.  In fact, it is part of building a relationship.

If that person was already a donor, then there is some form of relationship already in place.

For example, to lift a donor from $500 – which they donate in response to your annual Christmas appeal – to $5,000 is much easier than following the full seven steps to developing major donors; and it helps bring them along the journey too, if you follow it up properly.

If you have a lot of higher value donors who donate to your appeals, but you don’t really do anything else with them, try ringing them up and having a chat.  Ask them why they support you, if they have friends that do too.  Try and set up a meeting.  Maybe 1 in 3 or 4 will catch up with you.  There you can look to ask them for a more substantial donation.

It isn’t that hard, and I have worked with many organisations to formalise this approach as a process, and with all but one it has led to significant extra income at little cost – and bringing those donors closer to a really big gift.  I call this ‘Major Donors: Next Week” because you need to do it next week, or it doesn’t work.

Lucky Australians can find out more about major donor fundraising from an excellent bunch of practitioners at the Fundraising and Philanthropy “Art and Science of Major Gift Fundraising” event at the end of the month.  A bargain at $600.  Check it out here.

Frankie Airey helped raise around $500m in one campaign.  Gulp.

Charlotte Grimshaw will also be speaking at the event.  She can help identify potential major donors from any list of donors.

The final session of day one at the WA state conference was with a young entrepreneur award winner, Tenille Bentley.
A very interesting session, beginning (like all social media sessions) with all the huge numbers but refreshingly localized for Australian market. Mind blowing numbers; I loved one analogy – as Australians continue to give up cigarettes they become addicted to Facebook. The infamous unfair break, the smoko, is replaced by the facebooko (or face-o).

Some good tips:

• Only worry about Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn
• 80% of your social media communications should be about your topic, indirectly about you – only 20% about your products (something I call ‘Fluff and Bite’)
• Don’t think of social media with a ‘what is the ROI’ approach. That is like asking ‘what is the ROI on my mobile phone’. It is about relationships
• Gave example of peril of ignoring social media; someone working at Dominos spits in a Dominos Pizza, video goes viral, Dominos no idea why or what to do about it. Eventually they counter on YouTube and begin to recover sales
• Always have policies that people agree to to allow you to remove inappropriate comments. But be aware they will just post them elsewhere
• All charities should have a Business Facebook page. Allows for analysis
• Great use of you tube, blender manufacturer blends things like iPads
• Biggest growth on Facebook is 55-65 year old women
• How often should you update?
  • Facebook 2 x a day on business page plus 5+ conversations on others walls
  • Twitter 5-10 days
  • LinkedIn once a day, business focus
  • YouTube when you have something good and worthwhile

Frightening end- managing a social media brand takes about 26% of a working week.

So if you haven’t got time to do it, see her because that is what her company provides. Nice, subtle pitch!

Good stuff. The challenge for the fundraisers here is, of course, what role social media can have with their fundraising.

For me, social media is still best used for retention strategies, particularly for online and face to face recruited donors, and overlaying it with Game Layer is the best idea.



Tenille Bentley

I am at the FIA Western Australia State Conference listening to Paul Ramsbottom, a fellow fundraising geek. He is looking at revising the donor pyramid.

This is how the National Park Service in USA illustrates their donor pyramid.

Ken Burnett, who brought the donor pyramid to the attention of many of us in 1992, recently blogged that it was no panacea. Also, the Agitator (The American one, not me) recently blogged about it and how it was not really useful.

Paul agrees. The problem with the pyramid is that it infers people move along it. You bring them in, they make another gift, then another, then become an automatic donor, then a major donor and finally a legator. This doesn’t really happen.

He is getting into some pretty neat maths stuff now – looking at state charts; a mathematical approach in this case looking how people change their state. The key question is what triggered the change in state.

A donor can, at any point, move from one ‘type’ to another. As time moves along, the state of the donor is only ever at one fixed point. He points out that this needs to be managed within charities – he says that Amnesty International in Australia are the only charity he knows of to be working on this topic. If you can’t afford it (but have a database that justifies it) then simply outsource data entry and hire data analysts.

His second maths thing is graph theory. For those who haven’t heard of this, it is simply the theory behind things like how LinkedIn suggests who you should connect with. Also called social network theory.

He shows how Jason Boley managed to use this to spot an incredibly important link between a donor, through the LA Foundation and to another donor – they would never have known without this connection.

The first network map is complex, but Jason drilled down, focusing on LA Foundation and Atlanta Foundation (the red nodes).

Drilling down we see these new connections – that were unknown to the university.

So. We have learned a little about state theory and graph theory, but what does that mean for you?

The key here is that the technology overlay changes the game through four things.  Speed, Scale, Automation and Analytics.

These two theories will help you target better, saving money on marketing to the wrong people and increasing money by getting the right ones. And of course, major donor fundraising will benefit from networks discovered through graph theory.

Paul Ramsbottom

]]> http://www.paretofundraising.com/2011/11/maths-and-fundraising-at-wa-state-conference/feed/ 0 http://www.paretofundraising.com/2011/11/the-evil-of-communications-departments/ http://www.paretofundraising.com/2011/11/the-evil-of-communications-departments/#comments Thu, 03 Nov 2011 23:57:22 +0000 cara http://www.paretofundraising.com/?p=5745 By Sean Triner

At the recent IFC Conference in the Netherlands, I did a session on story telling, and that all fundraising needs to revolve around stories.  Abstract and clever marketing, as well as stats and ‘how clever are we’ stuff just doesn’t work.

Margaux Smith from UK agency bluefrog realised she was the devil (A devil with a good wit and prose though).

And another fundraiser’s reaction on the masterclass to some of the tacky stuff that works…

Check out here what Margaux learned….

Good fundraising programs have excellent returns. Despite the constant nonsense about high cost of fundraising, most charities achieve extraordinary results from little funds.

Investing in direct mail, phone or face to face / direct dialogue can achieve amazing results for charities – an investment of $1m could generate between $500k and $1m net ‘profit’ every year for five years or more – a great return and better than the stock market.

According to Givewell, the top 100 Australian charities* by investment portfolio have about $6.8bn in reserve. These reserves will be invested in property and traditional investment markets.

I have argued before that charities should consider fundraising as part of their investment portfolio. The chart below shows how a decent fundraising program would outperform investments in property or shares, assuming they achieve an average of 8.4% and 10% respectively – both excellent returns in this day and age.

Clearly fundraising can be a better option, but it needs to be good fundraising built on proven techniques to be invest-worthy.

But what if you have no money to invest? Although these big charities have plenty of money, most charities are simply not rich. So how do they take advantage of the excellent returns fundraising can offer?

I know of one charity in the UK that borrowed money from a bank to invest in fundraising. Another decided to use all of it’s income to reinvest in fundraising – not doing any charitable work until it had enough capital.

But Scope in the UK has taken this to another level. Their fundraising shops are doing well, and they want to increase the number of shops from 250 to 350. This will cost more than they have spare, so they are launching a bond. This is the first I have ever heard of at this scale.

They are asking investors for $30m. Just like a company would raise capital. They will repay investors just like a company would.

Brave and Brilliant, and hopefully the start of a new trend of social investment portfolios.

More info here.

* As declared in annual reports 2009/2010. Some charities in Australia do not produce annual reports, including some very big ones with very large reserves.

PS – thanks Jan Chisholm for the info!