A group of web developers created a competition: who can design the worst possible volume control?

The results are funny, including random number generators, setting the volume level at your longitude automatically, and having to brush in front of a virtual curling stone to get it to the volume number you want.

It made me think…  Pick the nonprofit organization that is most abhorrent to your own values and say you got hired to run fundraising there tomorrow.  (If you have trouble thinking of one, picture being the KKK’s CDO.)  You have two goals:

1. Bankrupt this organization.
2. Do so in a way you can defend. You want to ride it all the way down and get paid for doing it; you don’t want to get fired halfway through and have someone else resuscitate the organization.  So no sending appeal letters that are just a picture of your middle finger, no cursing at major donors, etc.

How would you do it?  I’d love to have your ideas, but here are a few:

Acquisition.  What acquisition?  You have a leaky bucket and you want to put as little in the top as possible.

But someone might insist you think of the future.  That’s when you look at your friend cost-to-acquire.

Make a case for this to be your one and only acquisition metric.  That precludes any direct-to-sustainer acquisition, as that might have a cost.

It also means you aren’t looking at the long-term value of your names (or are looking at it without naught but sabotage in your heart), so you’ll pick the communications (usually premium-based) that bring people in the front door but do little to keep them from going out the back.

Apply this same cost-to-acquire sense everywhere — your goal is to be hyper-efficient, spending so little on fundraising that your ROIs look great… unless you are spending nothing to raise nothing.

You could also bankrupt the organization by spending so much on acquisition you burn through all their cash, but death-by-attrition gives you more company and thus cover.

Branding.  You can put a lot of money here before anyone notices.

Your goal is to make the organization look unlike what it looked like before and unlike what donors expect.  If your new name sounds like a consulting firm or a pharmaceutical, you are in clover.

When these changes are questioned, talk not about how it will appeal to the donors you have but to the ones you might hypothetically get one day.  Bonus points for using a generational term like Gen Z.

Cadence.  You think the moral of Goldilocks and the Three Bears is to make very hot, or very cold, porridge.  You can destroy a program going to either extreme: 1) our donors only need one or two asks per year – they’ll give if they want to or 2) you only get money when you ask, so if you haven’t cracked three digits in the ask category, you aren’t really trying.  Pick your favorite and go for it.

Or, better yet, mix and match!  Our sustainers are our best donors, so we should bombard them for one-time asks whether they give to them or not.

But our house file looks at active donors as last 12 months and our lapsed donor program doesn’t kick in until 24 months, so we’ll pretend like you don’t exist for 12 months.  Or vice versa – you’ll get double the appeals during that time.

Also, once someone reaches a certain gift threshold, they become beatified beyond direct marketing.  Someone who gives over $X could not possibly sully their hands with a mail piece or, worse, a call from a telemarketer.  This rule applies even if that’s how they’d been giving previously.

Channels.  Get as many banned as you can.  Telemarketing?  So gauche.  Door-to-door fundraising?  Not on brand.  Videos on YouTube?  Have you seen the other content on there?  It doesn’t matter whether the donor likes a channel or not; what matters is whether you like it…  and you don’t.

Then make entirely different offers on different channels.  Your mail donors should be able to find neither hide or hair of the envelope-based offer they have on your web site.  And vice versa.  Donors are classified by their channel, not by any other factor – this is an online donor and an online donor they shall stay until the end of their days.  Stoke jealousy and hatred among channel managers so they are not tempted to do anything that doesn’t impact their own section of the budget.

Communications.  The snoringly generic tagline that came out of your branding exercises because it would appeal to the most people (something like “Tomorrow’s solutions today.” or “Helping people help each other.”) should be the lead “offer” in communications.  You want to brand that into the minds of every consumer.

Your organization is the hero; the donor is a passing acquaintance of the impact they are having, mentioned only when there is an ask.  Every communication must talk about your every program, regardless of what your donor is interested in.  You want to grab the donor by the ears and educate them to within an inch of their life.  You have zero interest in why the donor is giving

Database.  Contrary to what you might think, you love databases!  You want as many of them as possible in as many formats as possible!  But if you ever try to do anything crazy like find out whether your online donor gives offline, that should be done by csv files and VLOOKUPs.  No database should ever talk to any other database.

Design.  Get the youngest person in your office to design them.  It’s cool to have eight-point fonts that are grey on a slightly lighter grey background.  Bolding, underlining, bullet points – having any form of emphasis is against your brand standards.

Pictures are a must: four-color glossy pictures in print and images throughout your email communications.  You want your emails to scream “promotional” to spam filters, then be utterly impenetrable to anyone with images off in their email client.

Donor services.  Remember your mantra: donors don’t really know what they want.  You will probably get fired if you actively ignore donor preferences, so just make it as hard as possible for donors to contact you.

Wow, this is already getting lengthy and I’m only to the Ds.  Any other ideas for ways to kill your opponent’s fundraising operation?

And remember, the person advocating for these methods of malpractice may just be that mole or plant trying to destroy your organization from the inside out…  Proceed with caution around them…

Nick