The E-Card Deluge

I’ll admit it – I have mixed feelings.

No sooner did I post the last blog about the importance of personal communication (i.e. handwritten notes) then I got hit with a profusion of e-cards from nonprofits – at the rate of 5 or more per day. Now perhaps because of Cause Effective’s perch overlooking many nonprofits we’re getting more than the average Joe – but maybe not. And it’s a positively dizzying pace…

My feelings are mixed because it’s part of the Cause Effective doctrine to reach out and touch the members of your organizational “family” on more occasions than just when it’s time for a direct ask. And a holiday card reflecting on “where we’ve come to over the past year” is a nice touch. Kind of like an “annual report” but a little warmer.

But quite frankly (and maybe it’s me or maybe it’s my age – I’m on the other side of 40), I remember the actual cards we got – even those where the only individual touches were a handwritten “Dear Judy” and “Love Amy” – more than the deluge of e-cards (some of which are actually designed quite nicely).

But e-mail is fleeting. You read it, or not, and it’s gone. And it’s so easy to do e-newsletters that everyone’s caught on. Hence, the flood.

So mixed is where I remain. I literally got 30 messages titled “Happy Holidays” or something to that effect in the past two weeks. And about 5 cards through the mail.

But those cards are on display near our staff mailboxes and I smile every time I see them.  Which is not the expression on my face when I see my crowded in-box...

The Power of Handwritten

Fundraising is about relationship-building…that’s 101.

Most times this relationship-building doesn’t have to cost very much, just some extra effort…that’s 102.

So why are so many mass holiday e-cards coming across my transom…and so few hand-written notes?

Sure, there’s the idea of not wasting paper… but wasting is consumption with an inappropriately low level of return – resources being squandered. Wasting is different than using, investing, carefully calculating the footprint and the benefit – that’s the nonprofit manager’s stock in trade.

Investing in results? A hand-written note of appreciation for a donor, a board member, somebody who’s given you some free advice, a vendor who’s always cut a little extra cheese off the block (and given you some slack when you paid for it slowly)… those are resources well-spent for the lubrication in human relations gained.

Practicing outcomes management? For those of us who exist through “the kindness of strangers” the outcome is that little extra that those of us who can’t “buy” our way through the world need, in order to pull a rabbit out of the hat, again and again.

It’s not random. As any businessperson knows, kindness out = kindness back (or something like that).

And the handwritten message on that card?

You notice. You respect. You connect.

Hit By The Recession – And Asked To Give

Someone just asked me: “Why should we sink our resources into individual donor development…nobody’s got any money?”  She was asking the million dollar question: Is it still possible to raise money from individuals this year? 

Let me counter that with a case for giving that I’ve been using which is making money fly out of people’s pockets (feel free to borrow and use it).

It goes like this:

By this point, just about every single person in this room has been hit by the recession this year.  There’s nobody that hasn’t been touched, in some way.   But that makes it even more important that everyone steps up to the table and gives this year.  People aren’t going to be able to give as much as they have in past years – so it’s even more important for each of us to do our part. That’s why we’re reaching out even more broadly, and asking everyone, even people who haven’t given in the past, to step up.  If we all give, and we get a broader base, then we can all carry the weight forward together and get the job done. So I’m asking every one of us to dig into our pockets, and come up with what we can, knowing that it may not be as much as it was – but if we all do this together, it will be enough.

I have presented this case in group meetings, and literally had people come up to me and say: “I was one of those people and I wasn’t going to give, but now I see how important it is and I’m willing to do so.”

Of course, you have to have a good cause, and have targeted people who share your beliefs about its importance – but framing the conversation this way removes the barrier of “My income has downsized so I’m not going to give this year.”

The fact is, just about everyone’s income, or assets, has downsized through this financial maelstrom – making it even more important that we all step up to the plate however we can.

Try it – and let us know the results.

Born With The Urge

“Biologists see in humans a natural willingness to help,” The New York Times pronounced earlier this week. 

Michael Tomasello, a developmental psychologist and co-director of the German Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, writes in a recent book, Why We Cooperate, that “Children are altruistic by nature” – and naturally selfish.  Parents’ job, as those who’ve been there know, is to reinforce the cooperative behavior so as to tip the balance toward socially empathetic norms.

There’s something to this.

In Cause Effective’s 28 years of working on fundraising in the grassroots, we’ve been lucky to stand in support of hundreds of different cultures.  From immigrant money-lending circles…to childcare cooperatives…to African street vendors taking up a collection to send a deceased vendor’s body back to his country of origin…we have never come across a culture without a deep-seated norm of coming together to take care of its own.

The notion of a nonprofit 501(c)(3) corporation may be unique to the United States, but the urge to help others is embedded in basic human biology.

What lessons can we take from this?

The most important, for me, is to dig deep, past the rhetoric, the program descriptions and statistical statements of need, to connect with this fundamental human drive to lend a hand.  How does your organization help people?  And what is the tale you’re conveying to the donor that helps him/her fulfill this impulse toward altruism?

In other words – fundraising for mission, not for the scaffolding (program structure) that allows you to accomplish your mission.

The second lesson, interestingly enough, is connected to the idea that the innate human capacity for cooperation “seems to have evolved mainly for interactions within the local group,” as Dr. Tomasello writes.  It’s the notion of enlightened self-interest – that donors need to see the benefit to themselves, their peer group, their values, their social structures – before they’ll be moved to give. 

It’s why we place such an emphasis on story-telling in fundraising; we need to establish a foothold through which potential donors can find the comfort of “we’re all in the same clan.”  It’s the eternal search for the “we” of fundraising.

Altruism.  A term coined by Auguste Comte in 1851, to denote the benevolent, as contrasted with the selfish propensities.

Sounds like the basis of most nonprofits’ reason for being, doesn’t it?