Changing Demographics and the Impact on Philanthropy

services@supportingadvancement.com — Fri, 01 Sep 2006 00:59:00 GMT

Much of what we realize in our philanthropic efforts has to do with the changing demographics of population. How often to we think about or deal with this on a conscious or proactive basis?

Birthdates and your place within time to a large extent determine your attitudes and inclinations. For example, those people born during the great depression have a much different attitude as a group towards saving and purchasing than someone born even as little as 15 years later.

If baby boomers are defined as a group born between 1945 and 1965, with the peak in 1955, the ways in which we approach target groups within the broader population should be quite different if we are to be effective.

Those at the late end are in a position where mortgages are beginning to be paid down and children have finished college. This group is much more able to consider their philanthropy than those in the early end, who are still paying mortgages, and applying much of the rest of the fruits of their labor to the education of their children.

The baby boomers create mega trends as a whole, but this on an average as opposed to distinct populations within the group. The example of a mega trends would be the borrowing of money to buy homes in the suburbs to raise families, large cars, and other family startup costs. This has significant implications for rates of return on investments, what will be done with these returns and for philanthropy.

All of this speaks to the need for us to be much more effective targeting our constituents based on age demographics. The competition for dollars has increased greatly, and almost all organizations are now doing, or are planning major gift fundraising. This is also a pronounced international trend, with many organizations outside North America now running or planning large campaigns.

It also speaks to the need for split testing, and the use of techniques of variable content in all of our media interactions with our target markets. Data mining will continue to play an ever expanding role in managing demographic interactions in the future, and in the last 5 years or so, we have witnessed an explosion of the use of these techniques in our operations. We’ve started to see many more job postings in the last 2 years for these skills, and these jobs are paying large premiums for skilled practitioners. We’ve moved much more towards data driven decisions.

There’s lots of literature, web sites, and other information on these and other trends. If you haven’t already, you need to begin to learn and understand how to utilize them.

Judith Nichols includes a number of these trends and discussions in Modern Donor
http://www.moderndonor.com/

More about population demographics including Canadian Population Pyramids:
http://www.davidfoot.com/pyramids.html

Responses and Observations on Email Solicitations

services@supportingadvancement.com — Fri, 01 Sep 2006 00:59:00 GMT

Responses and Observations on Email Solicitations

Response by Jim Moore from CommUlinks of Colorado (www.commulinks.com) to a question on the appropriateness of sending out a solicitation to people for whom you have their email addresses, when you have not informed them in advance that you will be using these for solicitation purposes.

1. I can't speak from the perspective of alumni, but I do have experience with memberships.

2. Permission & Respect

a. Your organization's contacts expect you to communicate with them.
b. They have a relationship with your organization.
c. When they share contact information with you, they are not granting explicit permission for you to exploit it to the fullest, but only the most naive individual would expect that you would not exploit it to some degree.
d. I believe "Opt-In" appeals are self-defeating. People are far less likely to invite what amounts to commercial appeals than they are to passively accept them as part of the relationship with a nonprofit organization. If I send you a letter that asks, "Can I pester you for money every so often? Check yes or no. "What would you choose?
e. "Opt-Out" options are far more useful. They demonstrate respect without making it too tempting for a person to shut the door on you. Be sure to use an email tool that fully automates this process and prevents re-adding the email address. Make sure you can impeccably honor opt-out requests.
f. RESPECT: as with any communication medium, you must be willing to accommodate the (typically rare) demands of a few constituents for "special handling." Just as you would respect a donor's appeal to "Send just one appeal per year," or "No calls," or "I like to donate in June," you must accommodate similar caveats regarding email. VERY few donors will be so angered by the first contact that they abandon you on the first attempt. Just be ready to accommodate those for whom email is a bad fit.

3. Ensuring Loyalty:

a. Communication should take several forms-not just appeals for money. Multiple types of messaging will ensure that your constituents don't feel as if all you want is money. If only one in four or five contacts is an appeal, your mail will be opened far more often:

i. Education
ii. Advocacy
iii. Grass-roots organization and involvement
iv. Propaganda
v. News
vi. Marketing--fundraising

4. Media-if a constituent shares a means of communication-mailing address, phone number, email, fax, other?-there is some recognition that you will use it.

i. I believe a case can be made that email is the least intrusive and most readily shielded form. To be on the safe side, junk snail-mail must be opened and examined lest something of value be discarded - Ever notice the envelopes Ticketmaster uses to deliver tickets? Recipients must pay to have the trash hauled away, pay for the bags and handle the trash-perhaps shredding items containing anything remotely resembling personal info.
ii. Phone calls can be very intrusive - that's why we have do-not-call lists.
iii. Faxes are intrusive, and they cost the recipient in paper and ink. In the world of nonprofits, this is the only medium that may require explicit permission from recipients-even members and donors. This may vary by jurisdiction.
iv. Email is the least expensive, easiest to filter against SPAM, and easiest to delete unread. I contend that it is the least intrusive medium for contact.

5. Efficacy:

a. In my experience, response rates to email are significantly lower than to snail-mail. There are many reasons why this may be true:

i. Instant delete -- The very nature of email makes it easy to ignore.
ii. It doesn't sit on the counter, nagging recipients to respond-even if it's not deleted, after another 8 or 10 emails hit the inbox, it's off-screen and may never be seen again until the "big purge."
iii. It has no reply envelope - on-line transactions may be easy, but for many people, nothing beats a check for making a gift.
iv. Two words: SPAM FILTERS

Recommendations:

1. Use email;
2. Start gently with quality information and high-value content;
3. Embed a very discrete opt-out in every communication;
4. When a donor asks for TLC, give it to him or her. It's really not much of a burden, and very few will demand it;
5. Don't expect too much. Email is just another piece of the communications puzzle. It supplements, but it does not replace other media.
6. While you're at it, get a couple of Blogs going. Well known organizations should be able to entertain constituents on dozens of topics, from sports, to research, to awards, to scholarships, and so on. "What do you think?" questions are very engaging.

That's more that 2 cents worth, but I've had quite a bit of experience and success with email. A great model for how to use email effectively is (forget the politics of this please) Planned Parenthood. Their email campaign comes at constituents on many fronts-just one of which is fundraising.

Jim Moore

CommUlinks of Colorado
www.commulinks.com

Redesign or Redevelopment? Be Clear What Your Site Needs Before You Start Work.

services@supportingadvancement.com — Fri, 01 Sep 2006 00:59:00 GMT

Redesign or Redevelopment? Be Clear What Your Site Needs Before You Start Work.

By Michael Stoner

Last week, Karine Joly from CollegeWebEditor <http://www.collegewebeditor.com> asked us to identify the top five mistakes that college and university staff make when redesigning their websites. I'm not going to steal Joly's idea or share my top thoughts (I identified more than five mistakes!)Ñuntil after her article appears in University Business Magazine <http://www.universitybusiness.com> in Dec 2006. But I will share with you my thoughts about the top mistake I think internal staff make when approaching their own websites, as well as their institution's web presence.

It is: thinking of your project as a redesign project when it's really about *redeveloping* your site. So what's the difference?

In our lexicon, "redesign" involves creating a new look and feel for a website. And sometimes that's exactly what you need to do-make your website look better, fresher, more au courant. Rethink the background color, adjust your logo, add some new images, and you're all set.

But far (far!) more often, institutions need to rethink fundamental aspects of their web presence. This is "redevelopment." And it's hard to do.

I see an institution's web presence-its Internet presence-as a collection of individual websites, like admissions, student affairs, the physics department, and many others. Some people enter your web presence through the front door, but many don't. So looking at your web presence as a whole is a necessary first step before looking at the individual pieces.

These pieces should be related to each other, and related to the whole. Visitors need to be able to get around within your web presence. They need to find what they came to find: a faculty member, the application, an academic department website. And to do that, they need navigation and a lot of other visual cues. They need to be reassured that they're at the same institution when they move from department site to department site. They may need services of one kind or another (i.e. apply or give). So within the best web presence, individual websites should connect to each other and to the whole.

What makes you different?

Take it to the next level by thinking about what visitors learn about your institution when they visit websites within your domain. Can they quickly (it's the web, so they're scanning) learn what makes you better than your competitors? Can they learn about the distinctions of faculty when they visit a department website? This is a complicated thing to do, and you don't do it without thinking about the wholeÑand the sum of the parts.

In this scenario, you don't think of presentationÑlook and feel-as a first-order issue. Instead, you have to start by asking the question of what your visitors need, and then explore how your site is serving their needs. This is about themÑnot about your institution. To do this well, you have to look at some pretty messy stuff, like how staff could be better organized to create a better web presence for visitors. This involves clear thinking about institutional culture and politics and, to make a difference, you need to look at how your overall web presence, as well as individual websites within it, are managed.

In most of the redevelopment projects we do, we address significant issues of how information is organized on the web; how content that is relevant to visitors is developed and managed; and how technology is deployed to make content mananagement more efficient and to help create a better experience for visitors to the site. Only at this point do we address look and feel.

Most often, this is what a site needs. Why? Because most college and university web presences exhibit organic sprawl, reflecting the way they were built. But this is no longer good enough. Today, a university or college web presence needs to be visitor-centric, ensuring that visitors can find what they need and accomplish the tasks that are important to them, while allowing them to move freely across the websites that make up the institution's web presence. This only happens if a team undertaking a project understands that their role is not just to make a website look nice, but to make an institution's web presence welcoming to visitors.

Education, the Concepts of Transformation, and What is Community?

services@supportingadvancement.com — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 00:54:19 GMT

Education, the Concepts of Transformation, and What is Community?

Thoughts about some of our common words ….

Course – Continuous learning for everyone from anywhere in the world, anytime, anyplace. Through web technology, we can offer hundreds of thousands of courses. Lifetime classes without borders as an alumni benefit.
Credit – History of online behavior and rewards systems for “good behavior.” Attendance and participation in class using an instant messenger program. Alumni rewards system for initiating and forwarding class notes in our online community.
Curriculum – Training in philanthropy. Systems that initiate the communication between students and donors when students need to send a thank you letter for a scholarship.
Colleague – Someone anywhere in the world. International alumni. What’s the service model in a web based world? Glocalization.
Community – Information and interaction as opposed to a physical presence. It’s harder to get them back to campus when the campus is no longer a physical presence.
Campus – They are becoming very virtual.
Colleges – Templates and individually branded presentations, that syndicate and feed up in to the master, or central space. Again, very virtual.
Customer – Now everyone, less specific, global. Less patient, busier, international, multi cultural.

All of this need to be reflected in our online and in-house models. Kenyon College has adapted a philosophical approach, Web First, Print Second.

We need to extend our thinking to a much greater distribution of our customer base, which is no longer traditional. I.T. has changed our customer, and given us a much greater ability to customize service models. Log in to our community, and the content changes.

We’re still at a point in history where re-definition of “community” is as radical and as important as when the printing press was invented.

How will we work in this future where place and the meaning of community is so different, and is changing so quickly?

Vodcasting, Like Podcasting, Like Television, Like New

services@supportingadvancement.com — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 00:54:19 GMT

There are a few different approaches to video production and the subsequent deployment through a web site:

Talking heads
Interview and Response
Video as a window within a screen, (screen captures with voiceover), and at the same time, so you can re-arrange the elements on the screen to present different points of information. This third approach is a hybrid, and is obviously a way to be more successful on the web.

Successful video casting combines interactive elements along with other screen elements to try and get the participant to interact. This is a step beyond a “traditional” approach to video, which is normally highly passive.

Production and post production needs to consider the workflow of the particular activity. i.e. A web site visitor fills in a form while a video simultaneously explains how to fill out the form, why, or gives you a message after you submit. This approach is also parallel, in a fashion, to the idea of advertising or presenting a video to you based on an online behavior.

Practical

Consider the workflow in any Flash or e-solicitation piece.

What is the focus, speaker and screen?
Gather your gear. We all like gadgets.
Record and edit the video.
Define the points of user interaction. (skip, replay, action item.) We’re used to these concepts and choices through out use of DVD players.
Think about the abstraction of the video into text. Caption for disabled people, and abstraction into text helps you formulate supporting information right from the onset. The static presentation and the video presentation “interact” on your web page.
Create an XML document that describes the product and make sure it’s compatible with iTunes. RSS feeds allow your users to add to their subscriptions. feedburner.com is a good site for explaining how feeds work.
Remember, your video library will grow over time and they take up a lot of space. Plan your server and web site space growth accordingly. Disk space is inexpensive.
Deploy. It’s actually easy to do this via a blog. That way, people can subscribe, add their comments. Ultimately you want to deploy in multiple ways to take full advantage. When you have the video produced, make sure you get done in multiple formats. You may wish to play on a television monitor at your events.
Add tags to your video. http://del.icio.us/ - you can post at this site, and set up your own description.

Ubiquity and your Vodcasts

The psychology of busy people. Make it easy, eliminate barriers. iPods, or other inexpensive technologies and broadband devices are in use everywhere. Take advantage by making it easier for your users.

Conventional and Unconventional

services@supportingadvancement.com — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 00:54:19 GMT

Take a look at Boldly Brown, the campaign site for Brown University.

http://boldly.brown.edu/index_wmv.html

Good campaign site, with videos, podcasts, headlines and more provides an engaging page for understanding the campaign, the goal, and serving up interactive updates that help to entice the visitor to click and find out more.

The video on the opening page is a good example of a video piece inserted into a page in order to provide an instructional message that can be played while you’re reading some of the other materials. Also some good photo galleries of various events.

A good approach to what is convention (a campaign) for our industry, and our visitors. Something we readily understand and just need a little more information on. However conventional the topic though, the approach is quite modern. The Podcast page on voices for example, has RSS subscription capability so you can receive automatic notifications of additions to the page. In line with modern customer self-serve and service approaches.

Only “flaw” is a student engagement survey, which seems to be done with Survey Monkey, and although branded to Brown with the header, the rest of the survey does not match the rest of the campaign site in look and feel. (Something to think about if you are including forms or interactive materials: Brand them the same way, it’s worth the extra investment.)

So here’s a more unconventional approach to web design, and something you don’t often see in the Higher education space. This is a link to a beta version of Brown’s new homepage.

http://brown.edu/home2/

Now, this has created a lot of comments on the UWEBD listserv, and rightly so, because it seems fairly unconventional in its approach, graphics, and does not appear to be the traditional layout we often see in higher education sites.

The “new” page will at some point beg the question, should the campaign site also be constructed and created graphically to match the home page. Advancement and Development, more than most other departments are the ones responsible for promoting and articulating the institutional brand. How will the current campaign site reconcile to the future home page site, and how would the current differences change a visitor’s perspective?

Not easy questions, and the answers, particularly from younger users of our sites, may actually be surprising.

To All Advancement and Development Services Professionals

services@supportingadvancement.com — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 00:54:19 GMT

For many months, over 2 dozen of your colleagues in the field of advancement and development services have been working diligently to form a new professional association that specifically focuses on who we are and what we do.

A mission statement has been drafted as well as an outline of goals. Several committees have been working on bylaws, marketing and branding, and various other issues. We've had initial discussions with existing professional organizations and have already approached CASE which yielded a very positive response. A second meeting with CASE leadership is scheduled for this October in Washington, DC. Some working committee members are involved with APRA and, in addition, we recently had a preliminary conversation with a member of ADRP.

But our efforts are just beginning and we now need your help.

A survey has been developed that we hope will tell us if we're on the right track and can continue to lay the groundwork for the road ahead.

It is a major step towards finalizing the creation of an organization and your input and feedback are critically important. Please take a few minutes to complete this survey and share your thoughts and ideas.

Thanks in advance for your help and assistance and we look forward to your ideas.

From the working committee members:

Lynne Becker
Joseph Calger
Mark A. DeFilippis
Brian Dowling
Scott Fendley
Gail Ferris
Wendy L. Gasparri
Bill Green
Alan Hejnal
April Hopkins
Charlie Hunsaker
Ann Kaplan
Liz Landry
Anita Lawson
Jonathan Lindsey
Erin Moran
Amy Phillips
Christina Pulawski
Mike Reopell
Pam Rollins
Jeff Shy
John Taylor
Scott Taylor
Stephanie Taylor
Jon Thorsen
Jennifer Warwick
Robert Weiner

Using Student Workers for Data Entry Tasks

services@supportingadvancement.com — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 00:54:19 GMT

To a large part, the use of students for all sorts of data entry tasks can be substantially driven by budgetary resources and to some extent the political realities of an organization's budget process.

Many of us have worked/work in environments where there are simply not have enough staff to enter gifts and we are not able to increase the number of full time positions. Using students may be the only way we can manage. Alternatives might be to distribute bio and gift entry all over campus which would be more difficult to control.

With the proper training, student employees can easily achieve the same levels of accuracy as full time staff. You can also split the levels of donations into tiers and have stronger and compensating control mechanisms for major gifts or special donors. The same can be said for managing volunteers for these types of tasks, but volunteer management often takes more time in terms of recruitment and training.

When we ignore the idea of the marginal cost of processing our transactions, we create systemic inefficiency in the stewardship of major donors, through negative economic necessity. I would rather have a blended or hybrid data entry model that takes advantage of lower cost transaction processing (when appropriate), so full time staff can concentrate on the 2-5% of donors that we get over 90% of our donations from.

Telemarketing students see all measures of donor information, enter pledges, process credit cards and other sensitive information.

The key is that the issues of privacy, confidentiality, and accuracy extend to all staff. With the right training program, orientation, and front and back end compensating controls, it can all be managed.

For many of us, graduating class sizes are increasing at a faster rate than our ability to process and maintain our databases. Many of us are well under capacity in terms of managing our second tier prospect pools and freeing up full time staff can make a big difference in our ability to service our donors. When we free up full time staff from repetitive data entry we give them more time to use their experience and institutional knowledge for more complex tasks.

There are many other examples of potential exposure that have even possibly broader consequences than distributing gift entry. For example, how many of us have Excel spreadsheets with thousands of rows of data for mail merges stored on our shared network drives - which are often accessible by fairly large groups.

Changing Landscape for Advancement Services Professionals

services@supportingadvancement.com — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 00:54:19 GMT

Reponse to a FundSvcs listserv posting on some of the changing nature of Advancement Services roles and responsibilities.

If you haven't already done so I would recommend you take a look at the org charts available in the CASE Information Center; they have done a great job of collecting good examples and continue to hope more institutions will add to the pool. Some of what you are seeing - or hope to see - is reflected in many of the job opportunities now being posted for those in the area of advancement services. Most of the positions posted in the past month for AVP or Executive Director of Advancement Services at a number of institutions now reflect responsibilities which incorporate oversight beyond the gift and data processing, prospect research and even information systems which have been the more traditional domains of responsibility. Just a few examples:

Executive Director, Development and Alumni Relations Services; University of Pennsylvania
Reporting to the Assistant Vice President for Development and Campaign Director, the Executive Director of Development and Alumni Relations Services will have responsibility for the overall supervision and integration of development and alumni relations services functions including Communications, Information Technology (including Computer Services and Support), Gifts Administration and Records, Programs and Special Events, Reports and Data Management, and Market Research and Analysis, with the charge to ensure coordination and integration of these programs department-wide, and develop strategies to optimize results across Development and Alumni Relations.

Executive Director, Advancement Operations; George Washington University
Reporting to the Vice President, the Executive Director is the COO of the Division, providing leadership and direction for a staff of 27 in: human resources and staff development, prospect research and management, fiscal operations, gift accounting and processing, database and records management, web development, office management, and facilities.

Associate Vice President for Advancement Operations, Northwestern University
The Associate Vice President will lead a staff of more than fifty, including the Office's central functions of organizational services, budget and finance, user services, information services, gift and record services, and research and prospect management. He or she will: provide guidance to the Vice President for University Development on issues relating to information technology, budget, and personnel; develop and implement coordinated information architecture to regulate donor data flow and security; and establish information portability and self-service for all Office constituencies. The AVP will further develop and mentor the operations management team, while participating on selected University-wide committees.

Here at Temple, our AVP has oversight of gift and data management, prospect information, stewardship, staffing and finance, events, information systems, communications and also annual giving.

Amy J. Phillips
Assistant Director of Advancement Services

Convergence, Congruence and Chaos

services@supportingadvancement.com — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 00:54:19 GMT

Very few organizations have an overall integrated approach to information technology, and this is particularly true of higher education. Even though the split between academic and administrative computing is less pronounce than it was in the past, we have evolved from the first users of computing technology to in a lot of cases, in terms of efficient and integrated approaches, among the last.

Most of us still don’t distinguish between student, faculty and administrative needs, and apply a global approach to all, rather than standardized systems using components depending on the target audience. While systems need to touch all areas, like an email system, they don’t necessarily need to touch all areas equally. The calendaring for administrative needs may be quite different in fact than the calendaring needs for students.

Advancement touches everyone in the organization at some point. Faculty staff, student giving, alumni relationships all coalesce into the use of technology, so it is important that we help deal with the broader and overall campus technology issues, since we do have, or should have a marketing perspective to help proactively change our overall I.T. infrastructure.

More meetings. As advancement or development I.T. professionals our best method of initiating change is to be a good influence. Even though they’re very time consuming, we need to participate on the standard campus committees whenever possible so that we can vocalize and articulate our own perspectives to help plant the seeds of global change.

We need to talk up what we’re doing on our own technology fronts. For example, if you open up a call center, complete a conversion project, implement a new system, new reports, it may be worthwhile to share these and present about these at some of the campus committees.

Education about our systems and promotion of our programs and positive success stories can go a long way to helping a broader group not only understand the benefits of technological change, but how this change relates to one of the fundamental mission of the institution, the “cradle to grave” relationships we attempt to inspire. Not everyone understands the need for continuity and service to all constituents in the same way that we do, since most people in an organization don’t have to touch as many nor touch as often as we do.

It takes time, but truly, it is a win-win.

Archive

Changing Demographics and the Impact on Philanthropy

Responses and Observations on Email Solicitations

Redesign or Redevelopment? Be Clear What Your Site Needs Before You Start Work.

Education, the Concepts of Transformation, and What is Community?

Vodcasting, Like Podcasting, Like Television, Like New

Conventional and Unconventional

To All Advancement and Development Services Professionals

Using Student Workers for Data Entry Tasks

Changing Landscape for Advancement Services Professionals

Convergence, Congruence and Chaos