This time, I’m going with a non-fundraising book: Hacking Marketing  by Scott Brinker of Chief Marketing Technologist fame.

The idea is how to take the lessons from the agile software development movement and apply them to more traditional marketing.

In the book, Scott espouses agile marketing values of:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Responding to change over following a plan
• Many small experiments over a few large bets
• Testing and data over opinions and conventions
• Intimate customer tribes over impersonal mass markets
• Engagement and transparency over official posturing

As you can tell, there’s plenty of meat on these bones.  From my dog-eared pages:

What is the template for the donor story?  Last week, I talked about the jobs-to-be-done framework to look at donor motivation.  This asks what is the donor hiring your nonprofit to do at an emotional level?  And are you doing it for them?

Brinker uses that same framework to think about what a constituent wants from you with a story template:

As a ____________ (role), I would like ___________ (content or experience) so that _________ (benefit or reason why).

This ties right into the concept of “Intimate customer tribes over impersonal mass markets.”  This can reflect the donor’s stage in a journey with your organization, but more likely, it reflects their identity:

As a person whose child was just diagnosed with autism, I would like to do things right now that would help my child’s prognosis so that I can gain peace of mind and my child can get a head start.  Enter Autism Speaks’ 100-Day Kit.

As a parent, I would like to involve my children in my philanthropy so that they can learn about the world and see their own duty to help those less fortunate.  This is often attempted through child sponsorship because of letters back and forth with the sponsored child – unfortunately, the success of organizations in filling this need ranges from very good to “oh, there’s a need here?”.

Here’s a good guide for how to create strong donor journeys like this:

Reaction speed isn’t all there is to agility.  I recently had the pleasure of moderating a panel of exceptional speakers on how to work with the news cycle in an organization’s fundraising.  Ann Crowley from Human Rights Campaign, Stephanie Gent from Everytown for Gun Safety, and Geoff Handy from the Humane Society did an outstanding job recounting the lessons they’d learned from their actions and reactions in the news cycle.

One lesson-learned that all three had in common was the need for preparation.  Ann reported that, for example, HRC’s campaign around the Supreme Court case on marriage equality was two years in the making.  To be agile, they also needed to be prepared.

Brinker makes this point well:

“When marketing management has a relatively slow metabolism by which it plans, its reactions to unexpected issues are often hastily improvised. “Quick, drop what you’re doing and jump on this!” It’s a fire drill, as people scramble to address something outside of the plan.  Such improvised reactions can be fast, but they come at a cost.  Team members yanked into those reactionary efforts are pulled off other work that they were in the middle of or were planning to begin.  The work they were originally going to do is either pushed back… or just dropped.  Or, there is a heroic attempt – or demand – to squeeze everything into the same time frame by sheer force of will.” [Emphasis added.]

We nonprofit vets will feel that last sentence acutely, no?

Brinker then observes how quality suffers as time is sliced thinner and we face more context switching – the time it takes to refocus the mind as we switch tasks.  It’s the preparation and systems that enable organizations to move from management-by-crisis into true agility.

There are two types of content.  I really liked this Brinker framework.  Much of content marketing has been passive: blogs, white papers, webinars, etc.  These are fine ways of engaging.  But the consumer consumes; they don’t interact.  That’s why participatory content like calculators, games, quizzes, workbooks, and assessments enter the equation.  Brinker highlights research showing that interactive content is more effective at differentiating, educating, converting, and sparking sharing with others.

Clearly, this last should be a goal for me as well, as I’ve been doing a lot of writing and not a lot of participation.

So,  I’d love ideas how I/we at the Agitator and DonorVoice can do that.

How have you worked to be more agile and responsive at your organization?

Nick