A Moment of Thanks

Thank you…


    Thanks so much…


          For your continued support…


                For your help which enables us to make an impact…


                        For everything you do and continue to do for us…


                               Thanks for “paying it forward…”


                                        How can I count the ways?


A little woozy, just came off writing 100 personal notes on our annual appeal letters.

And it’s almost Thanksgiving, to boot!

But it is a moment for acknowledging what a village we are…as in, it takes a village to create social change.

Scrolling through our list, I see vendors, consultants, clients. Former staff and former board members. Personal friends and, yes, relatives. Fans and colleagues and advisors. And that’s just my list – each of our board and staff members have their own similar lists.

The request? To enable Cause Effective to be there for the nonprofits who need us. It certainly makes it easier to ask for help for others – rather than simply for ourselves.

But isn’t that what we all do – ask for help for our beneficiaries, our clients, our communities?

And so I wear out my hand muscles penning thanks – on behalf of everyone working for community-based change, to everyone who might be part of this family, this village toiling together.

Ownership begats responsibility.

Act as if.

And give thanks – for the gift, for the intention, for the communality.

The Paper Bag Appeal

It's Appeal Time!

All over town, nay all over the country, people are folding and stuffing - and exhorting their board members to write inspiring, heartfelt notes at the top.

What an engine this is... well-oiled and rolling.

And Yet.

I was at a meeting last week where a development director remarked "I could send out an appeal on a paper bag and as long as I got it out early, it would be effective."

Well, kinda sorta.

It does matter that there's white space, and a catchy opening, and that the organization's impact is personified. And that there's a note so the letter is from a person to a person.

But, yes, it could be a note from my board chair on a paper bag, and if she sent it to someone who mattered to her, the equation stops right there.

Should that discourage those wordsmiths among us from carefully crafting a compelling case? No, because that inspires the asker - those note writers - as much as it does the recipient.

But it does mean that inspiring the asker, all year long, needs to be as much of a focus as gathering the names and addresses come mid-November.

The Impact Gap

Starting to write our annual appeal letter again – Fall is in the air.

It’s always a time for me to wet my finger and stick it in the wind…

But it’s tricky – between when I write the draft, and when it arrives on people’s desks (yes we still do snail mail, it proves effective time and time again) – the world could have changed around.

I remember in 2000 I wrote two endings – that was the election that went on and on…(ouch).

In 2008 I held my breath and couldn’t even write until November 5th.

Occupy Wall Street is the obvious zinger this year. I could write about how so many Cause Effective clients have been working on those issues on the ground for years…and then what?

Will they still be there when the letter hits?

Will the political scene have shifted in some notable way?

Is there an impact I could point to –

Or could I spin a story about how Cause Effective has to be here to help the nonprofits on the ground slog through these issues day in and day out…year in and year out?

Too important too ignore, too volatile to pin down.

Stay tuned to see how I solve this one…..

The Courage to Ask

Many nonprofits I know are sending out e-appeals this year along with their postal missives.

The question is – how much is too much, and how much is not enough?

There’s a fine line between making giving opportunities accessible; and being “in your face” in an aggressive way.

Many groups I know are erring on the cautious side. “We don’t want to annoy people,” they reason. But then they’re missing out on the implications of this remarkable phenomenon:

“22% of giving happens on the last two days of the year between the hours of 10am and 6pm.”

That startling fact comes from Allyson Kaplan’s December 14 compendium of year-end hints titled Best Practices for Year-End Fundraising.

There’s a stereotype of the overbearing huckster that often horrifies the kind of person who enters the nonprofit sector. “We’re here to change lives, not to be salesmen,” goes the thinking.

And, somehow, even for people who can get past that in 1-1 asks, appearing in someone’s in-box feels like having one’s hat out right on the steps to the subway – like you’re in their face…in the way of someone’s real business.

This is no time to be shy.

The world is a mess. Let’s not pussyfoot around that.

Unless we, as nonprofits, have as much impact as we can, it’s only going to continue to get worse.

And money is one part – an important part – of what enables us to get our work done.

So I say – within the bounds of taste (it doesn’t help if your donors-to-be turn away from your return address line, saying “Oh man, not again!”) – we need to be out there making our constituencies’ needs known.

It’s our moral imperative to get our job(s) done. And year-end fundraising is too important a component of that to let false decorum stand in our way.

The End of Year Letter...A Call To Conscience

It’s end-of-year letter drafting time again, and people are adjusting their tone, calibrating their messages, trying to figure out how doom-and-gloom to make their letters.

Do we talk about how we had to cut back last year? How we had to put whole programs on hold, literally fight not to close our doors? Or how the families we assist, the kids we educate, the communities we serve, didn’t have the same options in their lives in 2009?

Or do we sweep all that under the rug because people are tired of bad news and it seems like it might be getting slightly better (here’s hoping that’s not just a mirage)?

It’s a dilemma, and I’ve seen people address it in every which way.  There’s no wrong call, as long as it’s done with dignity and respect for the intelligence of the reader – and from the viewpoint of the reader, not the nonprofit.

What do I mean by that? That end-of-year letters are not about how well you’ve performed your service (or the cuts you’ve had to make).

A well-written end-of-year letter targets what the reader cares about, and brings out that sense of the reader’s “best self” – that part of the reader that truly cares about others.

The end-of-year letter as call to conscience…making us a better, more committed community in the process.