WARNING: You’re Prohibited From Contacting Donors After 1/1/17

May 13, 2016      Roger Craver

“We regret to inform you that as of January 1, 2017 nonprofits will not be permitted to contact their donors without the express written consent of each donor.”

Once you’ve picked yourself off the floor with the fear you can’t meet next year’s goal, exactly what action steps will you take to prepare for what the majority of fundraisers would consider a disaster of immense dimension?

This is the question — without the dramatic headline and no legislative mandate, yet — everyone should be asking; and the question we should be helping each other answer, because that’s our future.

[Agitator Disclosure: Those consultants, printers, list brokers and other old dogs who don’t give a shit and want to continue making money in the same-old-same-old way don’t have to change your fee model, modify your PowerPoints or sweat it too much. Your volume-driven model is not in immediate danger. Rock on. Buy your clients lunch.]

warningHowever, for the years immediately ahead, whether mandated by regulators — or, far more significantly, imposed by donors themselves — a growing body of evidence reflected in studies of donor attitudes and behavior indicate we’re entering a period when donors are increasingly sick and tired of hearing from us. And, they’re reacting accordingly.

As Grandma Craver would say, “Enough is enough. Too much will make a dog sick.”

For a variety of reasons — aggressive abuse of donors by nonprofits, changing demographics, failure to effectively inspire and communicate, competition, you name it — we’re entering a period of massive change. It frightens many.

And frankly, that was why Tom and I were delighted by the range of questions and responses to the series of posts we ran this week.

Forward-looking Agitator readers instinctively know something’s wrong. Things have to change. Why? For the simple reason that the old business-as-usual-models of ‘ask more, raise more’ are no longer working. At best they’re on life support.

Neither Tom, nor I, nor any folks whose brains we pick and with whom we share Agitator thoughts have the answers. We’re just beginning to even figure out what questions to ask.

What we do know is that all of us need to start questioning more and sharing more. I mean like ‘all hands on deck’, treat all this like an emergency … a sinking ship. Forget about the all DMFA Awards and that nonsense. Those too tired or too stuck in their ways can either reap what’s left in their contracts, their contributions to DMA, retire or die.

The rest of us owe it to the next generation to get busy asking and answering.

Miracle Solution:  The Agitator Fundraising Survival Kit

Well, not really. But one of the reasons Tom and I have pledged our pension trust as collateral to the mean-spirited bozos on the Agitator board, is that we’ve convinced them to let us launch, at our own expense of course:

The Agitator Fundraising Survival Kit

Forgetting the cheap bastards on the board, we’ll be telling you more about it and also seeking your advice in the days and weeks ahead on what should be put into this kit.   But, like earthquake, hurricane, and other natural disaster kits we’re gonna emulate, our best bet is to focus on the awfulness that’s coming and what to do about it. No apologies to the fantasies of Donald Trump.

The great thing is that those of you who can still think will be absolutely fine and still around to get a few free lunches or dinners from your consultant.

Next Steps to Survival — and Growth

Each of us, whether staff or consultant, must spend far less defensive time whistling past the graveyard of the current problems this sector faces. We need to put on our thinking caps. And then try new things. And share the results. Now’s the time.

In the words of Samuel Johnson:

“When a man knows he is to be hanged…it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”

From the perspective of the donor, the hanging gallows are already under construction. Case in point: In the UK, where the regulators have proposed a ‘Financial Preference Service’ enabling donors to opt-out from receiving appeals, the sector is already sweating. And early experiments with how to pull this off have been pretty much a disaster, stiff upper lip or not.

The frightened response from fundraisers there seems to be, “But how will we ask?”  And, that would pretty much be the same here in the US, in Canada and lots of other places around the globe as well. Fundraisers who have an ‘ask’ strategy without algorithms and volume are few and far between.

After all, ‘asking’ is a central tenet of all fundraising. So, when in doubt, go for volume! Ask more, raise more.

As I pointed out in Doing the Same Thing. Hoping for a Different Result, this is a flawed and failing strategy for the long-term. Or as Kevin Schulman put in his comment to my post:

“Why do donors give to you and why do they stop? Build a business around satisfying those identities and motivations and smoothing out the mental pain and effort with crappy experiences and you’ve got a new business model, one not defined by volume and one that is the very essence of customer centric — we understand your needs and preferences and meet those to raise money. 

“The ‘ask’ deserves very little credit in actually raising money (16% by our attribution models) and more of the blame for current world order.

By defining donor-centric as fixing the mess we created it really misses the point, even though volume is horribly broken as a model.” 

 Time to Start Reading and Thinking

Let’s get right into it. 

Richard Turner, a UK fundraiser and thinker I greatly respect, weighed in on this very topic this morning in a post I urge you to read carefully, and take the time to give it considerable thought, please: Do people want to listen to you? And are you listening to them?

Richard’s a 25+ year vet, been around the fundraising track a lot working with large (Oxfam) and smaller (Solar Aid) organizations. In this post he outlines how by ‘listening’ to donors as opposed to constantly ‘asking’ them, he’s grown unrestricted income 400% in the last 5 years.

His main point is we simply have to stop asking the question, “How can we contact people more and more?” to “How will we contact people?” In the answer to that question Richard argues (and I agree) lies our future.

The point is: we need to work our way through a shift in mindset (and that means changing language, tactics, the way we pay consultants, and damn near everything.  The parenthetical conclusions are mine.)

  • From how many people as possible can we target, to a paradigm of how do we contact people who want to listen to what we say.
  • We need to change our metrics from those of attrition (how many donors are we losing?) to one of engagement (how many folks are really involved and spreading the good word?)
  • Holy cow. Change metrics? Get rid of the leaky bucket. Repudiate Craver’s Retention Fundraising. Maybe yes.
  • Folks/donors are simply too wired into so many channels and have so much peer-group influence that we ignore them at our peril.
  • In short, give folks a great donor experience and they’ll not only talk about it but will work overtime in replenishing your pot of gold.

All because you’ve focused on “I want to listen to what you have to say”, rather than, “Please give again today”.

What are you thinking about the future? Do you really want The Agitator to go there?  Do you want to help?

Roger

P.S. For a bit more detail on Richard Turner’s thinking, please also head to his post on 101Fundraising, Is asking the only way to fundraise?

 

 

3 responses to “WARNING: You’re Prohibited From Contacting Donors After 1/1/17”

  1. Michael J. Rosen says:
    May 13, 2016 at 3:29 am

    Roger, I have mixed feelings about this post.

    On the one-hand, I find the “Chicken Little” approach a bit over-the-top. For decades, I’ve heard other “Chicken Little” pronouncements such as:

    “The telephone as a fundraising tool will be dead in five years.” (I heard that one from an “expert” in the 1980s.)

    “Direct mail is dead!” (I’ve heard that one a lot over the years, and still do.)

    Well, guess what? The phone and snail-mail are still alive and well. Done effectively, they continue to be powerful fundraising tools.

    So, pardon my skepticism when I hear yet another “Chicken Little” pronouncement.

    Now, having said all that, let me add that I actually don’t disagree with the actual content of your message. If the nonprofit sector is going to dramatically grow philanthropy, or even maintain it at current rates, we must constantly strive for improvement.

    But, let’s try to remain a bit rational and grounded in reality.

    While the UK seeks to limit communications from charities to donors, they’re able to freely do so because they don’t have to deal with something pesky like the Freedom of Speech. In the US, our government is more limited thanks to the First Amendment.

    Nevertheless, we as a sector need to remain vigilant and remind over-reaching government officials about our fundamental freedoms. I did exactly that years ago when I testified before the Federal Trade Commission to urge that nonprofits be exempted from the core Do-Not-Call regulations. I, along with others who voiced similar concerns, were successful. The regulations that were adopted simply require charities to maintain their own Do-Not-Call list and honor all requests folks make to be placed on the list. Smart charities were already doing that.

    Yes, there’s more we can and should do as a sector in order to more effectively raise money. Yes, we need to adapt to changing times and technologies. Yes, we need to engage people how, when, and where THEY want.

    But, let’s take a breath. The sky is not falling…at least not in 2017.

  2. Kevin Schulman says:
    May 13, 2016 at 7:59 am

    Michael,

    I’d say the better analogy is the sky is slowly sinking. No growth in ‘traditional’ charity sector money raised (as % of GDP) since 70’s and yet a relative explosion in the number of charities. Mature, big charities are shrinking or standing still and certainly not growing year over year and the only answer -volume – no longer works.

    Happening in a parallel universe, seemingly with a rising sky, is the huge growth (on percentage basis) of money flowing to people in need that diverts entirely (social bonds) or skims off the top (3rd party aggregators) from the “traditional” charities.

    Add to it rising cost, lousy and getting worse yields (not just DM but open rates on email, etc..) and an opt-out rate of 7 out of 10 for newly acquired and I’d say it is way past time to panic.

    But, as you point, no immediate or perhaps even likely legislative threat (in the US) makes it all seem ok or at least tolerable. Why?

    The slowly sinking vs. falling sky may be a curse, not a blessing. As Roger notes, nothing crystallizes the mind like having a gun to your head (or a hangman’s noose).

    This doesn’t require turning the battleship overnight, nor does it require abandoning channels like mail or phone or whatever. This has nothing to do with channel and that we equate channel with strategy or a part of this discussion at all is part of the problem.

    How do you get someone to opt-in and stick around? What, under our control, would cause someone to do this? Why would they support us? Why would they leave? What are their needs and preferences?

    There are very, very few charities that know the answer to these questions. And in another parallel universe, the commercial sector, the best actors (not all to be sure) build their entire business around knowing these answers.

    This isn’t because commercial sector has more money. It is because of a different mindset, one that assigns value to understanding the customer, not as a nice-to-have but as a business imperative. All the empty rhetoric in our sector around “donor-centric” quickly turns to volume or use of pronouns or being relevant (as if anyone is argued to be not relevant..), which misses the point entirely (though volume is a broken model).

    I’d suggest that what Roger and Richard Turner are suggesting is that this is now (and frankly always should have been) the business imperative – the organizing principle if you will – for charities too. In the UK they may in fact be blessed by having this forced upon as a falling sky while in the US we have the whistling past the graveyard luxury of choosing to ignore the sinking sky.

  3. Pamela Grow says:
    May 13, 2016 at 3:36 pm

    Nothing really to add to the conversation, except thank you, Roger and Tom, for making us think this week. And thanks for the shout-out to one of my favorite fundraising minds, Richard Turner.

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