A lot of what I’ve learned about the importance of timing in fundraising I learned from selling funeral flowers.

Let me explain.

My father was a florist– a business that heavily depends on emotion-driven buying impulses — funerals, weddings, Mother’s Day, birthdays and anniversaries – with most transactions completed over the telephone and by credit card.

But back in the ‘50s there were no credit cards. Thus my Dad instructed me that on the very day of the funeral I must mail the bill for the flowers to the customer.

I remember feeling a bit queasy about the timing, until he explained that the bad pay rate increased rapidly with every passing week after the funeral. “Roger, you have to get ‘em while the grief is hot.”

Consumer and donor expectations have changed markedly since then. Thanks to a combination of changing demographics and heavy reliance on the Internet consumers are more demanding, less loyal and less trusting. They want easy and quick responsiveness and service now. They seem prepared to switch brands and organizations at the drop of the hat.

Unfortunately, I fear the nonprofit sector has not kept pace with those consumer/donor expectations. I also suspect that our sector’s investment in technological innovation is no better—and probably worse– that in the for-profit world.

This disturbing trend is reflected in the money spent by consumers on technology vs. that spent by companies on their information technologies. Mark Hurd, the CEO of Oracle noted thisyear that “consumer IT spend has grown five times in a decade. Companies’ IT spend in that time frame is flat –and 82% of their spend is on maintenance; only 18% on innovation.”

In short, according to Hurd, “consumers are innovating “in the ways they buy. Companies are not in the way they respond to customers. And I’m certain nonprofits aren’t either.

Despite heighted consumer and donor expectations of user ease, instant gratification, prompt and stellar customer/donor service what our sector offers is by and large dictated more by outmoded mechanical limitations than by proven possibilities.

For example, test after test shows that the more prompt the thanks and follow-up to an initial gift the better the response for a second gift. The better the donor service, the higher the retention rate. And so forth.

The fact is that in fundraising—whether in funeral flowers, e-commerce or giving– timing is important. And today’s technology makes more and more responsiveness to donors’ needs and desires possible.

Yet, let’s admit it. The reality of execution in most of the fundraising world seldom matches the known desirable. We know a lot about “when” an action should take place, but settle for far less when it comes to making it happen.

Too often we settle for the dozens of organizational or vendor-imposed delays in cashiering, data entry, printing, inserting, mailing, telemarketing schedules, setup fees for minimum runs, user-unfriendly payment systems, and on and on ad nauseam. Seemingly small delays and inefficiencies that add up to one big unresponsive swamp.

It’s time to wake up — and act — on the fact that we operate and compete in a world where real-time data, real-time analysis, and real-time follow-up are no longer an isolated exception.  If Target, Wal-Mart, Amazon and hundreds of other consumer companies can build growing and lasting relationships with millions of consumers, why can’t we do it with those same consumers, many of whom also happen to be our donors?

Of course, we can. Indeed the survival and growth of our sector depends on our capacity to understand and take advantage of the value and power of now.

One of the reasons we all rejoiced a generation ago at the advent of the internet, the World Wide Web, and all the new media tools was because we thought they would provide easy, fast, cheap and bountiful solutions to the task of acquiring then building lasting relationships with donors.

Few understood that the real reason for celebration was that, for the first time in marketing, there was a channel and technologies that could deal with the elusive ingredient of “when”.  Marketers had long known how to target and deliver messages to folks likely to suffer headaches. They had the “Who” nailed down tight. What they couldn’t target was “when” someone would actually get a headache and seek relief.

The online channel took care of the elusive “when” factor, because now people would simply searched and instantly found a variety of ways to deal with their headache, served up by marketers with the aid of a variety of tools putting them in direct touch and offering persuasive information for that headache-ridden consumer.

What did the nonprofit world do? Set up websites … put them in the hands of webmasters divorced from communicators and fundraisers … subscribed to a CRM service to more easily send out emails, update web content, and capture online information. Of course, the difficult but essential task of integrating the main fundraising database — the one used for the vast majority of fundraising tasks — was ignored or put off to some distant day.

Today, 20 years later, the critical components of a contemporary fundraising program — real-time data, analytics, modeling and messaging, donor feedback loops — are forced into separate silos, ensuring that neither the “Who’ nor the “When” will meet when it matters most – Now!

Five years ago I had lunch with one of the most forward-looking, innovative, results-oriented and truly multi-channel-oriented fundraisers alive. He lamented how he had to spend enormous amounts of staff time and money cobbling together the databases from his CRM with his off-line legacy database, and still couldn’t get any real time data or analysis to take advantage of the power and value of now.

I’m sure that today he’s facing pretty much the same predicament. Our sector simply hasn’t made the investment in technological innovation –and the skill-building necessary to use it– that’s essential to keep up with donors’ expectations and needs.

In this day and age, with reasonably priced data and technology, this frustrated fundraiser’s vision was and continues to be right on the money.

He wants to know now— not in three weeks — who’s taking an advocacy action, or making a gift, or seeking information;

He wants to know now –not three weeks from now –when his supporters are taking action, and what their potential is for doing more;

He wants to act now, based on real time data, predictive analyses and his tested and proven messaging strategies, to move at once with an appropriate response for each donor.

He knows that the power and value of now is much more than a dream.  It’s the only hope of awaking from the nightmare of slow, continuous and inexorable decline.

The tragedy is that the technology and know-how exists and is relatively inexpensive. So why do so many organizations ignore the essential investment in exploring, employing and mastering the relative low-cost technologies that could get them to now?

Please share your insights.

Roger

P.S. Putting technology to work isn’t just a simple matter of plug-and-play.  As Tom notes in Wallowing in Delusion in fact it makes matters more difficult because the level of skill required is higher.