Places like Facebook are called walled gardens.  You can play all you want in the garden while you are there, but everything stays in the garden.

From a marketer’s perspective, however, they are more like a Roach Motel: data checks in, but it doesn’t check out.

It’s not just Facebook.  Try to use the major ad platforms nowadays.  To get your results, you must give them any data you want to build into the model.  They combine it with second-, third-, and ninth-party data* and eye of newt to create your model, then use it with no visibility into the inner workings.

Imagine having to show up at a restaurant with raw chicken thighs, sea salt, and fennel.  Then, they tell you how good the meal they cooked with it was.

In addition, all the data you don’t bring to the table – second and third-party data – is in common to anyone using the platform.  Thus, if you work at the Loving Shepard Foundation, your mortal enemies at the Shoving Leopard Foundation can work from the same hymnal as you.

What is a cause to do, short of welcoming our new data overloads?  Two things:

Grow your own data garden.  That is, ask your donors for information about themselves.  We know that the right questions in the right context will be answered and those who don’t answer questions are less valuable anyway.  But these data are also a defense mechanism: get them from the horse’s mouth and you won’t have to pay for them.

They also have the advantage of being 99.9% accurate (one must allow .1% for user error).  If Facebook says someone is interested in environmental causes or interior design or cinema of the Ukraine, they are X% certain that is true, where X is close enough to 100% that people will pay to target that segment (and no more).  If a person says they are interested in environmental causes, it’s true.  And they won’t mind if you target them based on that information – they gave it to you.

Get people out of other people’s gardens.  Facebook is now giving nonprofits free donation processing.  Of course they are.  They want to Hungry Hungry Hippo up that data of who is giving to what.  And they won’t share that info, even with the organization to which the donor is purportedly giving.  In short, when you are trying to set up a walled garden, everything outside the garden is the enemy.

And yet the humble hyperlink.  With your ads and posts you can steer people from them to you.  And if you can get them to sign on the virtual dotted line for a white paper, infographic, free toolkit, magnet, advocacy alert, petition, screening tool, etc etc etc, that constituent is now yours.

No longer does the cynical Golden Rule – those who have the gold rule – hold sway.  Those who have the data rule, because they charge gold for it and even those with gold need it.  You need to own the constituent, the relationship, and the information about the constituent that makes them valuable and allows you to speak to them like they want to hear from you.  And thus you must be a strategic accumulator of data, lest you have to sign a check and say “mother, may I” to communicate effectively.

* Ninth-party data, as defined by the classic Ferris Bueller’s Day Off: “My best friend’s sister’s boyfriend’s brother’s girlfriend heard from this guy who knows this kid who’s going with the girl who saw Ferris pass out at 31 Flavors last night. I guess it’s pretty serious.”