The Naked Idea

Idea Design

Creative and Strategic Communication for Charities

Home Work Biographies Blog Contact

A weekly look at how charities can communicate better with donors through design.

Are you an Agent of Good?

December 13th, 2009

What is an Agent of Good?

And Agent of Good is someone like you. You exist in the world to make positive change, you live your life guided by the principals of being a good human and the desire to make some sort of difference in this world.

You are an Agent of Good if you love what you do, as difficult as it is sometimes, and you love to work with others – not to make yourself look better – but you know your weaknesses and can admit that the help of someone else will make the end product far better.

We are Agents of Good and – so are you.

Before I go much further, if you are a subscriber to The Naked Idea:

1: You are obviously an Agent of Good so you must click here NOW and enter in your email on the right side. I do NOT want to lose you. Go ahead. I can wait.

2: I want to thank you for subscribing and hope that you will follow me along to my new blog.

The Naked Idea was created out of a desire to talk about fundraising simply and honestly. No hidden cards, no rope-a-dope, no bait and switch. It was fueled by the need to acknowledge and comment on the good and bad that is taking place in our industry. And obviously, it was a marketing device for my design studio Idea Design.

But I’ve know for a while, I wanted to go further than that and so began the building of Agents of Good. If that’s all you need to know then please, before you go, please click here now and register your email so you keep getting the blog posts. But if you want more, keep reading.

Agents of Good was created out of the desire to do more. To do more for the charities that needed it because what they were getting (or weren’t getting in many cases) was NOT good enough.

First off, Agents of Good love to collaborate and work with others. That’s why I work so closely with Jen Love and Mark Haak, my two other partners. That is also why we work so closely with the charities and agencies who have already seen and acknowledged how much stronger and better everything we do comes as a result of sharing and working together. As it has been said, all ships will rise together. We will all share in the victory, we will all learn from the failures, but no matter what happens, we will be in this together.

Together. Everything we do together will be better and it will be stronger.

Agents of Good was a necessity because the way some charities are working with consultants or agencies is failing.

People like you who work day to day in our sector and are tired of paying too much for not a whole lot of result. People like you, who want to be listened to, and who are made to feel like their opinion matters. People like you, who want to be a part of something bigger and more fulfilling.

Those of you who are nodding – you are Agents of Good. And we need you. We want you! I want you to come on over to Agents of Good now and exclaim “I am an Agent of Good too!”

Agents of Good is a club, and an exclusive one at that.

Not everyone qualifies. But I have a feeling that if you are still reading this and you can acknowledge that this for you is not a job. If you can acknowledge that you don’t “work” in this sector – you live in it, if you can acknowledge that making change, big and small every day is a REALLY F’ing exciting thing and you LOVE being a part of that… if you can acknowledge that you do this thing called “fundraising” everyday to leave something better behind than when you started… you are an Agent of Good and we need you and we want you.

Please join us now. Join the club and come help us make a difference.

One last note: this will be my last blog post from The Naked Idea so please sign up over at the Agents of Good blog to keep getting our blog posts.

Thank you for reading.

Posted in Blogs | 4 Comments »

The morning after…

December 3rd, 2009

Like waking up after a night of crazy partying, I asked myself this morning, did that all just really happen?

and I’m pretty sure it did.

Three days, one conference.

The AFP congress held in Toronto wrapped yesterday just a few minutes after two pm with a lovely lunch and awards show and then it was time to come home and decompress and reflect on the things I learned.

Firstly, if you were a delegate there (or for any conference for that matter) please DO NOT head back to your office and file away all the crap you collected. Sit down, with a notebook or open up word and write down the FIVE most important things you learned then forward it to your coworkers and colleagues. Go through all of those business cards you collected and throw out all the ones where you don’t recall meeting the person. Take what’s left and make a few notes about your conversation(s) you had and think about emailing them early next week just to keep in touch.

Now what I just wrote there is not “networking“. That is called relationship building. And that sort of relationship building will serve you wonderfully through the years of your career.

So once you are done those things, go through all the brochures, trinkets, etc and vet it down to the items that had the most effect on your or you know you will need in the near future.

Now what?

Remember that session we were in, where the speaker said that little nugget of info, and we collectively had that epiphany – that moment where we go “OMG, if we do this one thing – what a difference it would make”… ok – get out your whiteboard that hangs by your desk and in big letters write “2010 Actions”. Below that write down one, or two, of those epiphany’s you had and leave them there. And as you plan for your next year, DO THEM. Not maybe, or we’ll see… DO THEM.

It’s too easy to come back to a million emails, an overflowing list of things to do but do these things and you will be grateful you did.

So what are five things I learned that I want to share with you?
1. USP: Unique Selling Proposition. We live in a country with almost 160,000 charities and not for profits. What is your USP? It’s not your mission, it’s not about your board. It’s about your voice and your story. Your donors support your cause, not your charity. USP. Think about it and record it and then celebrate it in everything you do.
2. Always, always, always… ALWAYS concentrate on the needs, the wants – the SATISFACTION of YOUR donors. This is called donor centered fundraising.
3. Google Insights for Search. This is data that google collects about the surfing trends of web users. You can use it to find a lot about… well, anything actually. Here’s one I did to look at the difference of traffic in 4 cancer charities this past month across Canada. Funny how the traffic on Prostate Cancer is the largest… I wonder what they were up to? Hmmm…
4. Communications: Don’t talk about your “house”, talk about what the “house” does. Don’t talk about all the great work you are doing, your donors DON’T CARE. Talk about the great work they are doing with you, because of their support.
5. Asking for donations. Present the problem, discuss the solution and make the solicitation. Three lines or in thirty pages. PSS. Problem, solution, solicitation.

I had a great time at congress having lots of memorable and meaningful conversations with people who love and are challenged by what we do. So here are quickly some of the best.
-Being rubbed affectionately by Sean Triner during his presentation on data and the Joy of Donors.
-Getting goosebumps and shivers listening to Dr. Ron Archer speak about the work we do and in particular where he said that often you must have a break “down”, in order to have a break “through”.
-Meeting the enthusiastic, lovely and next years chair of Congress, Tania Little and having a short conversation that left a smile on my face for the rest of the day.
-Sharing a bottle of wine and quiet conversation with Kimberley MacKenzie and my wife Tara, at the close of day one, way after we should have gone to sleep.
-Hearing how the CEO of an agency on the other side of the world had heard about this new “agency” in Canada called Agents of Good who were shaking up the sector.
-Getting hugged by Mike Johnston (our relationship has been upgraded I am happy to see).

As I think about this, there were so many small moments that really made me proud to be who I am, work in the sector I do and so happy to be surrounded by the positive and brilliant people I know.
So how about you – how was your congress and what was the #1 memory or learning that you took away from it?

Posted in Inspiration | 4 Comments »

AFP Congress

November 29th, 2009

I’m off tonight to attend the Association for Fundraising Professionals Congress that runs in Toronto until Wednesday.

I’m looking forward to this one for many reasons.

1. It’s always amazing to get out and actually meet some of these “tweeters” who I talk to almost every day and have some really challenging and enlightening conversations. To top if off, Congress will be using a twitter board (sort of like they did in Holland at IFC) so we can not only feel like we are part of the action, but keep our colleagues who couldn’t make it, up to speed. You can follow along by tacking the hashtag #afpcongress.

2. Can’t wait to see some people speak who I’ve always admired like David Love (with my main gal Jen Love) talking about Loving your Donors, Harvey McKinnon and Mike Johnston who will be yakking about ways to kick start your mutli-channel fundraising campaign. And there are some like Ted Hart who will be covering social networking and Tom Ahern covering the in’s and out’s of a communication audit, who I’ve heard a lot about but have never heard speak.

3. Over 950 delegates. Need I say more? I have to honestly congratulate Mark Hierlihy, this year’s chair and his entire committee for, as Mark told me, keeping this year’s congress accessible to everyone. They’ve managed to do that in many ways. Also, the Congress staff headed by Cynthia Quigley have worked tirelessly with presenters, volunteers, agencies and God knows who use to make sure it all runs without a hitch. Well done to all.

4. I will be attending under my newly formed collaborative called Agents of Good. There will be more on that another time, but looking forward to meeting other “agents of good”, the people who work tirelessly, day after day in our sector to make real change in this world with not a lot of appreciation or support sometimes.

Like a lot of things, they say Congress is what you make it. Get engaged, dive in, ask questions, introduce yourself, share what you learn, and, most importantly, have a fun time and feel the love of being surrounded by almost 1,000 others who are there for the same reason you are.

Make this your congress to remember. See you tomorrow!

Posted in Inspiration | 2 Comments »

The ReImagining of SOFII

November 22nd, 2009

It was very early this year when I saw a tweet go out from Kimberley MacKenzie about SOFII.

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.

Thanks for your help and support.

Posted in Basic Design, Case Study, Inspiration, Two Cents | 8 Comments »

Some Last Minute YEAR END Appeal Tips

November 17th, 2009

Jonathon Grapsas posted this video about some last minute tips that can have an impact on how well your year end appeal will do. But you might find that some of his tips will work for any mailing you work on during the year. Take a look:

Creatively, there tend to be two approaches to year end appeals that you can consider. You can either use the holiday season or Christmas thematically to tie in the importance of a gift – especially as the donors start to madly run around buying gifts for all of their loved ones, you are sending a friendly reminder to consider your cause as well. Secondly, you can use another traditional device – the thermometer. The message revolves around the idea that it is year end, and as much as your donors have rolled up their sleeves, you are not… quite… there… Again, reminding them of the things you’ve been able to accomplish to date and the few things you are hoping to do before the year runs out and how important that last gift will be.

One last thing: try not to mail your appeal in a white #10 (because everyone else will be!). If you have to use a #10, consider using coloured stock, or a bright colour on the front and back.

Good luck with your year end appeals.

EDIT: also found this great post from Pamela Grow for 5 more down and dirty tips you can use on your year end appeal. Thanks Pamela!

And this: Top 10 Ways to Screw up Your Year-End Fundraising Campaign by Gail Perry.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Get out of your box!

November 14th, 2009

Sometimes the easiest and best solutions aren’t found while staring at your computer monitor.

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »