I am tired of giving donations to causes that either need it, or have asked me, or because I am moved by their work and you know what I hear back?
Nada. Nothing. Zilch!
We are very, very HARD on our clients (just ask them). If you want to work with us, together, you need to respect the people who help you. We have this fancy-schmantzy name for it – we call it “donor centered fundraising”, which to dumb it down, means – you CARE about and FOR your donors. It means you take the time to craft special appeals that your donors will care about – not the same thing you did last year with a new stock image…
It means, you know, treat them like individuals who are doing something VERY special for you.
If you don’t care about your donors, then we want nothing to do with you. And they won’t either.
Here’s what I am proposing – a money back guarantee. Hey – if Sears can do it – you can do it.
If I give a donation to you – and you don’t THANK me, ACKNOWLEDGE my existence, TELL me how I’ve helped, treat me with a bit of RESPECT within – hmm – let’s say 30 days – I can ASK and GET my donation back.
Am I crazy?
You shouldn’t be ordered by the government to do this or brow beated by your peers and colleagues to do it.
But I plead with you, right now – GO FOR IT.
I would give to ANY charity in a heartbeat if they had this guarantee. Who wouldn’t?
I bet the first client I can convince to do it will reap some fantastic benefits.
Do you think you could do it?
ALSO POSTED AT THE Agents of Good blog: please feel free to register there for all of our posts. Thank you!
Every time we turn around we are being told by the experts that we need to be blogging, be on twitter, dive into social media – and start making conversations and interacting with people – developing relationships. We are scolded and told we need we are not to be “all about me”. We are warned that not engaging with those who are reaching out to us – is the very worse offense. And “the experts” are right.
What troubles me, is the very “do as i say and not as I do” attitude of these experts. This past weekend, one of them asked me, pleaded with me to please come by their blog and say hello, because so many of his hundreds and thousands of readers never do! “Just say hi!” he says.
I commented:
Why Chris? Listen I like you, i enjoy reading your emails and stuff. I’ve watched most of your vids, read Trust Agents… I’ve tweeting to you, I’ve RT’d you, I’ve commented on your thoughts or forwarded your posts – but not once have you even acknowledged any of it. You have many thousands of followers, you have God knows how many subscribers to your blog – and I’m sorry – but after a while – it just becomes a little fake to me. I love what you preach, but not how you practice it – and i speak only for myself. I make sure i take the time (and GOD knows it takes a lot) to interact with those who interact with me and that’s why I have no aspirations to be a “Chris Brogan”. Some of “you folks” have a lot of interest, eyeballs, readers and followers – but we both know after a certain level -you can’t keep up. And as soon as you get to that point – you start moving into hypocrite territory. I like you Chris, I like what you say – but please – don’t do a blog post or tweet about how you want my input and then can’t even acknowledge it. That’s not cool.
I noticed after my comment he started acknowledging people’s comments – even at one point saying – “oh but see how much WORK this is???”
Dude. You asked for it. Don’t complain to me.
Bottom line: don’t ask for someone – be it a client, customer, donor – anyone – to engage with you and not acknowledge it. Don’t tell someone that these are the rules but you don’t need to play by them. Don’t complain that you are so important to so many people that you can’t do the very things you are constantly telling them to do. Especially when you are the “expert” in this kind of thing.
Just a reminder: please resubscribe over at our new blog which can be found at: http://blog.agentsofgood.org
Hopefully in the midst of all the busy work you do, you take the time to celebrate the successes and victories – not just the big ones, but the small ones too. But when was the last time you celebrated a failure? Certainly, there is more value to you in a failure than a success isn’t there?
What did you fail at today?
Just a reminder: please resubscribe over at our new blog which can be found at: http://blog.agentsofgood.org
I, like many others knew about SOFII. I was a registered user and once in a while would check it out if I had some time to kill. I LOVED the idea behind SOFII.
To have a online, living and breathing museum of fundraising that I could access anytime – FOR FREE! – was almost too good to be true. And in a way it was.
I found it largely unusable. [EDIT: To clarify this statement, I found that due to varying navigation and overload of links and images, SOFII, for me, was hard to use as a tool.]
Kimberley described SOFII to me as “a fundraising conference every day“.
SOFII founder Ken Burnett describes it as: “…an archive, a historical record, a repository of wisdom, tips and insights and also hopefully a stimulus to new innovation too. It’s much more than just a stimulus to new ideas though, important though that function is.”
SOFII is a great idea in theory but in practice, was it working?
Ken Burnett acknowledged it might be working, but it could work far better. A redesign and overhaul was on the table for 2009 and I knew I wanted to be a part of that.
Full disclosure – I knew to have my name attached to a project as important as SOFII would be fantastic. To be able to work closely with Ken to help redefine and re-imagine a site like SOFII would be a great communications and design challenge and, I hoped, would expose the work my firm is doing to fundraisers from all around the world.
I offered up the skills and experiences of my partner Mark Haak and I to Ken, and hoped they would let us help.
I knew that the most important thing, the make it or break it moment of the new SOFII would have little to do with design and more to do with its functionality.
The content on SOFII is, in a word, phenomenal. The problem is how to find it. There are so many links and graphics on every page it is difficult to know where to go to find what you want.
The current site also has a search function but it still requires a bit of work to find what you might be looking for.
So we knew from the “get go” we had to make the site functional, clean up the navigation and design and build in stronger search functionality.
The other thing I wanted to do is give SOFII a new logo that hopefully better represented the spirit behind the site.
I remember an early conversation with Ken. It was important that he knew we were both on the same page about what we wanted from the site, and to make sure he fully understood how we were approaching this redesign.
A philosophy,that obviously wasn’t ours, but we preach to our clients all the time is: WE put the donors at the center of everything we do – which means – we make sure whatever we are designing or writing or asking for is appropriate to that audience, will make sense to them, and puts their needs ahead of everyone else’s.
As I explained to Ken – we were approaching this rebuild in a VERY user-centered way. It needed to work for the user.
So starting with form of the site we broke it downtown into, what we felt were the most important elements of the site and presented this wireframe to Ken and Carolina Herrera.
We knew that most people were coming to the site to look at the exhibits and maybe catch up on the latest news.The search functionality was front and center – it had to be. We wanted people to find the things they might be looking for from anywhere they were on the site.
Trying to organize the exhibits in a way that might be obvious or intuitive to the user was largely one the biggest communication challenges. Especially as we started looking at how exhibits were classified. But ultimately, upon the relaunch and testing by users like you, we will know if we succeeded or not.
My brain was also working on the logo.
I remember I was sitting in a session by Kimberley MacKenzie at Fundraising Day in Toronto this past spring, where she was presenting a session about SOFII. And while listening to her talk and the feedback from the audience (about 95% of whom had never heard of SOFII), my brain kept repeating one statement.
Inspiration leads to innovation.
Of course, it says that there on the SOFII main page:
But to me, the inspiration needs to come first right?
I doodled a couple ideas at the conference which I later mocked up and sent to Ken to consider.
After circulating to some of his SOFII ambassadors, the feedback was that the light bulb just wasn’t cutting it.
The logo needed to say inspiration and without going into a long drawn out ramble about the process we came up with a few more solutions.
Which lead to the selection of the final logo.
So once we had our wireframe approved we moved onto the design. Again, our desire was to keep the site functional and to hopefully make sense to the user as to where they need to go to find the things they might need.
Ken really pushed us to make sure the images on the exhibit pages could be displayed as big as possible so we revised the layout of those pages.
Upon approval, it was time to move onto programming and migration. This whole site rebuild would not have been possible without the incredibly hard work and dedication of our programmer Dean Reeds from Open Web Group.
As we often do, as we started migrating the content from the existing site into the new site, Dean made many video tutorials of the “how-to’s” so he could train Carolina on how to insert new exhibits and articles moving forward, and fortunately due to Dean’s hard work, that process is as simple as creating a word document.
Here are a few more screen caps of the site:
Site map:
Create exhibit:
Articles:
So what’s next?
SOFII has been on a bit of a fundraising drive because there are costs associated to running a site like this. And if you have a moment take a look at this video and then contact Kimberley if you would be able to give something to keep a resource as important as SOFII up and running and moving forward.
We are hoping to relaunch just in time for the new year. I was speaking to Sean Triner this past week about a selecting a few of the current users to act as beta testers to find any cracks that might still exist when it goes live and after the testing is complete, and we’ve made our final tweaks we will be releasing SOFII 2.0 out to you and the world.
A site like SOFII has a lot of potential for growth, and we have some ideas already for version 3.0 which will continue to make it a one of a kind and massively important resource for any fundraiser in the world.
Obviously, if you haven’t already, go to sofii.org and register as a user. Then send it to 10 people you know in our sector and ask them to join.
The success of this site will always require the support of its users. Users like you.
Attention all lawyers,
Great case for you newer grads or those lawyers looking to pad their experience list.
We are a small firm who wants to sue Microsoft and its board for being responsible for producing some of the crapiest software through the years for mac users like us.
We need your help to prepare our case and file for action.
The lawyer who comes up with a solid case and pulls together all the facts and papers and such, the best, we will pay $100.
Good luck and tell all of your best lawyer friends to respond as well!
Love, Idea Design.
No, I jest. This isn’t for real. In “real life” we would never ask a pool of lawyers to do work without proper compensation would we?
This is a issue that I feel really strongly about. The issue of spec work. (I written about it here before as well.)
Sadly, I hear about this issue far too often in our sector and as a creative person who values what I, and my creative colleagues offer to this sector – I take exception.
And let’s not confuse pro-bono with work being done on speculation.
I do a lot (too much) of pro bono work – where I either offer my services at no cost to the charity or I am asked to offer my services for a specific task.
Compare that to a charity or business looking for designers, or writers or whoever, to provide a service for free and if they like it, maybe they will pay for it.
I really want to ask you – please do not do this.
That means no “contests” for new logos, or “open calls” for web site redesign ideas…
This is a great site called NO! SPEC which I invite you to check out for further education and reading.
Poster by Chad Behnke.
EDIT: I posted this post over at the Communication Arts group on LinkedIn and have been astounded at the comments that have been pouring in. The consensus seems to be it would take an industry of people to say no to see this type of work go away but sadly, I think that there will always be those who try to take advantage of those desperate for work. I plan on posting this in some of the Fundraising groups in LinkedIn. I don’t expect the same level of commenting but would love to hear from you about this issue nonetheless.
I leave you with: (some of this sounds way to familiar to me…)
I am a graphic communicator who specializes in working with charities. Idea Design develops concepts and designs direct mail, logos, posters, brochures, and more.
