Fundraising Copywriter George Crankovic

Tag: marketing

  • One of the real lessons from Obama fundraising

    By now the fundraising tips to be gleaned from Obama’s 2012 fundraising strategy have been picked over by just about everyone.

    You know — the casual tone in emails, unconventional subject lines like “hey” and “wow,” the low-dollar asks, the testing, and more. That’s all very interesting. But it’s not the good stuff. This is.

    The Obama fundraising team in 2012 segmented their files based on their donors’ interests. They amassed mountains of data from every conceivable source – donors’ zip codes, surveys, event attendance, Facebook, responses given to canvassers, and more. Even better, this data, after it was compiled and analyzed, was made available in one place for the fundraising team. Even better still, the whole endeavor was imperceptible to the donor. So when a donor interested in, say, climate change got an email about green technologies, she simply thought Obama was singing her song. Not a bad way to engage donors, and it obviously worked.

    This was done through a complex data and analytics methodology, of course — something that would be beyond the reach of many nonprofits.

    But let’s blue-sky just for a moment about what it would be like.

    Instead of using tactics to reach Millennials, Baby Boomers, or whatever the next generational cohort is … and instead of approaching donors based on a numerical score indicating when they gave last and how much, we could go a lot deeper. We could engage donors on their own terms on the basis of what moves them personally and what they’re passionate about.

    Let’s say we have a donor, Sally, who decides to attend a walk-a-thon for heart disease.

    Does it really matter whether she’s 20, 30, or 60 years old? Why should her generational label determine how we communicate with her in subsequent appeals? And really, how important is it to know that she gave $10 five weeks ago?

    Wouldn’t it be far more useful to know that Sally took part in this event because her husband has heart disease and she wants to know about research and treatment for arteriosclerosis?

    When Sally starts getting appeals talking about breakthroughs in unclogging arteries  — an interest that goes right to her core — would she see them as an intrusion? Or would those appeals seem intensely relevant, immediate, and significant? You know the answer. When we can directly address donors’ personal interests and values, that’ll be a song they listen to.

  • Profiting from nonprofits?

    You might think that tough-minded, profit-motivated, practical business people wouldn’t have much to learn from a bunch of granola-crunchers working in nonprofits. You’d be wrong. The nonprofit sector is a huge enterprise. Think of The Salvation Army. Think of the Red Cross. They’re multinational organizations with billion-dollar budgets. You don’t get there by being ineffectual.

    So what can we learn from them? Here are three examples.

    1. Find and use stories. Ask just about anyone working in a nonprofit and just about any fundraiser, and they’ll tell you it’s critical to have a collection of stories describing what the nonprofit does. If it’s the APSCA, they have stories about abused animals that have been rescued. If it’s World Relief, they have stories about feeding people in Africa who are starving. Nonprofits are constantly on the lookout for compelling stories that illustrate what they do.

    Why the emphasis on stories? Because nonprofits know that statistics don’t engage people. Facts don’t engage people. Even celebrity endorsements often don’t engage people. But stories do.

    Stories create an immediate emotional bond with donors and encourage them to open their wallets. That’s because a specific story about one person being helped is something that donors can relate to. They can’t relate to 100,000 people suffering from malnutrition – that doesn’t connect. But a story about a person who’s starving to death – that will.

    Think about your product and your customers. Is there a story about how your product solved a tough problem or improved a customer’s life in some way? There has to be. All you have to do is find it, and a good place to start looking is your sales people, since they talk to customers all the time.

    Once you have your story – or better yet, several stories – think about how you can use it … how you can incorporate it into brochures and other marcom materials, press releases, sales presentation, even your 30-second elevator speech.

    2. Rediscover the passion. People in nonprofits look at their jobs differently from people in private-sector businesses. They have a goal – a big goal. Not to get a raise or to increase profits over last quarter (although nonprofit people like raises, and they’re always trying to generate more revenue through fundraising). Their goal is to make the world a better place. And no, that’s not just cockeyed idealism. It’s a way to get their staff focused and fired up.

    A charity like World Relief, for example, is dedicated to protecting vulnerable people around the world who are suffering in poverty and hunger. Everyone on staff – from the administrative assistants to the fundraising staff to the Executive Director – knows that each individual job is contributing to that larger goal. They know what they’re doing and why. And that inspires passion.

    Think about how you can link what your company does to a larger goal and so give people something to be passionate about beyond their next paycheck. It’s not as farfetched as it might seem. Apple doesn’t just make computers. They help people become more creative – a noble goal. Your company has a larger goal too. To find it, just think about all the ways your product or service makes people’s lives better. Not just product features – think big. Go for the big benefit. In fact, go for the biggest.

    3. Ramp up the dedication. People working in nonprofits are often highly dedicated in their work, and a large part of the reason is the big goal mentioned earlier. When people rally around a common purpose, they tend to find their own sense of personal dedication inside themselves. And if it’s a goal they personally believe in, they’ll work harder than they will for any other external reward, including more money.

    Consider a charity like The Salvation Army. The people working there make far less than they would in the private sector, yet they’re overwhelmingly committed to the organization. They love their work. And they love the organization and what it stands for. Because of it, they have a personal stake in what they do, and that’s something no pep talk, motivational speech, or HR initiative could ever accomplish.

    Think about your shared purpose and your big goal. Those are the keys to real dedication. As marketing guru Seth Godin has said again and again, people desperately want to do work that matters. It’s something that workers in nonprofits already know. Make your work matter too.

  • What makes people do what they do?

    They’re inscrutable. Insufferable. Illogical. And unpredictable. What makes people do what they do, react the way they do, buy the things they buy, or make the decisions they make?

    It’s maddening. Just ask anybody in marketing or fundraising, and you’ll hear war stories of counterintuitive results and just plain weird reactions on the part of the people we try to persuade.

    Luckily, there’s hope. As psychologists and cognitive scientists delve deeper into human behavior, we’re learning more. And much of this research is on the web — one example is the site by psychologist Susan Weinstein. It’s an ongoing list of “100 things you should know about people,” with each entry revealing a priceless plum about human behavior.

    One such insight is this — anecdotes persuade more than data. Despite everything that common sense might tell you, when it comes to whether people base their decisions on emotion or reason, it’s not even close. Decision-making is almost entirely emotion based. That’s why stories sell. They evoke empathy, which triggers emotional reactions, which motivate people to act. In fact, in most selling situations — and especially in fundraising — rational arguments will discourage response. Emotion sells because emotion is what informs people’s decisions, regardless of how much they may protest otherwise.

    Here’s another example. Groups are swayed by a dominant personality. Whenever people gather in a group, there’s a subtle jockeying for position that takes place until an unspoken org chart emerges. People subconsciously elect someone to be the leader of the group. And often that leadership role is granted to the person who speaks first.

    Think about the groups you’ve participated in — from your kid’s cub scout meetings, to strategy sessions, to serving on a jury. Isn’t it true that there’s always someone who takes the lead and influences others? And often, that someone isn’t the official, designated leader. Think about what that means for focus groups. Just one dominate personality can skew the results, often canceling the validity of the research and wasting thousands of dollars and countless hours of time.

    And yet another example. The more difficult something is to attain, the more people want it. This is all about exclusivity and scarcity. The nightclub that keeps people waiting to get in, the wildly expensive new restaurant, the hazing that college students go through to get into a fraternity, and on and on. Instead of turning people off, exclusivity and scarcity motivate us all the more. Until …

    Sometimes, the nightclub doesn’t seem to be all that exciting once you’re inside, or the fraternity not all that cool. Now here’s the interesting part. When that happens, instead of admitting they were wrong, most people fall back on their original assessment and convince themselves that the group or activity really is worthwhile after all. They reinforce their original decision.

    So, does that mean making products and services appear more exclusive or scarce will entice customers to want them more and cause them to persuade themselves that they’re good even if the actual performance is less than stellar? Trying to cloak a brand in exclusivity it doesn’t merit would probably be a risky strategy if you know the product is poor. But it does seem that people will overlook faults if a brand has cache. Jaguar remains a status brand despite a dismal record of service and reliability. And not so long ago, Harley Davidson motorcycles were almost falling apart on the road because quality had sunk so low, and their customers got the company logo tattooed on their arms.

    The website is www.whatmakesthemclick.net . Well worth a look.

  • When marketing dollars are wasted

    Acme Industries has a created a new product. It’s the result of a big investment in R&D — for them, anyway. It’s been field-tested and focus-grouped. Acme is convinced it has a winner. “It’s so good people don’t even know how much they’re going to want it,” their president has said. Now that they’ve created this new wonder, it’s time to call in marketing and instruct them to tell everyone in the industry about it.

    The obvious response might be full agreement — “Yes, tell everyone!” After all, that’s the role of marketing, right? Mass communication. So Acme’s marketing department — three guys, but hey — starts churning out ads for the trade pubs and press releases for the media. But, wait — that’s probably not the best approach, because …

    The reality is that not everyone in your industry is a prospect for your product or service, nor is everyone who uses the kind of product you sell a prospect for your particular model, no matter how good it is. That’s often tough for companies to accept when they’re not marketing driven. It’s even tougher for the president of the company to accept when he or she has invested blood, sweat, and tears into a project. Fact is, unless the new product has a niche — and increasingly, a very specific niche — it’s not going anywhere.

    Ideally, marketing would work closely with R&D at the very beginning of product development. That doesn’t always happen, of course. But if it did, a new product would more likely occupy a defined space in the market and so have a greater chance for success.

    Another reality is that bringing all potential buyers up to speed about a new product — which is what you’d have to do — is generally a very expensive proposition. The amount of time and money you’d have to spend on educating buyers about the product will far outweigh any potential return on investment from marketing. Marketing gains power — and its cost efficiencies — by exploiting a mass desire in the market not by trying to create one.

    And then there’s the strategic view. Once you’ve already done the educating, you’ve laid the groundwork for your competitors to come right in and start communicating with those prospects — and now they’ll be able to do it at lower cost, thanks to your efforts. You’ve done all the work of clearing out the trees and brush simply to create a playing field for your competitors to use.

    So, then, what’s the right play here? Simple — fish where the fish are.

    Marketing should focus on finding those specific prospects who would benefit from the product’s specific advantages. Headlines, email subject lines, white paper titles, and so on, have to zero in on getting the right prospects to raise their hands and say, “Yes, this is something potentially useful to me.” When you communicate aggressively to those prospects and those prospects only, then you’re on the right track to generating more leads faster, winning more sales faster, and creating an installed base faster.

  • Make your webinar sell — 3 traps to avoid

    It seems as if there are more webinars on offer than ever. Just about every topic in marketing and fundraising is covered, along with just about every other conceivable subject in business or commerce. There are even all-day “conference” webinars, complete with virtual coffee breaks. And perhaps not surprisingly, there are webinars on giving webinars.

    The proliferation is understandable. After all, not much beats a webinar for reaching prospects inexpensively. I’ve been on the receiving end of lots of them, and unfortunately they can often fall short of delivering specific, actionable, useful information. That includes paid webinars as well as free ones. If you’ve attended even some of these events on the webinar circuit, you know it’s true.

    What’s also true is that the presenters don’t want people coming away feeling shortchanged for having spent an hour in their busy day. Certainly the audience doesn’t what that either. So, to the folks out there who are putting webinars together, for the sake of all of us who will be watching and listening, please …

    · Don’t serve up some vague aphorisms about strategy, planning, and benchmarking, and think that it’s information people can use. If we come to a webinar on marketing or fundraising, we want specifics we can put to use right now, today – not the airy, hand-waving, 10,000-foot perspective. We get enough of that in meetings. Give us tips, techniques, how-tos. That’s what we’d expect in an in-person seminar. Why should a webinar be any different?

    · Don’t simply repeat what’s on the slide. It’s the curse of the deadly PowerPoint presentation transferred to our computer screens. If the slide is filled with copy and the webinar presenter is simply going to read what we can see for ourselves on our screens, what do we need a presenter for? No, the wording should be simple bullet-pointed phrases, in most cases. And those phrases should just be thought markers, to provide the presenter with a jumping off point for expanding on the ideas presented and offering more specifics and insight – maybe even an anecdote or a war story. That’s what we want.

    · Don’t speak softly or in a monotone. One of the advantages of a webinar is the same as that of attending an in-person conference – hearing someone speak confidently and enthusiastically about a topic. It’s frustrating for people in the audience to have the moderator interrupt the proceedings to say that people are emailing in with the comment that they can’t hear the presenter. It happens all the time. And it’s just as frustrating to sit through a monologue that’s monotone. Instead, we want the presenter’s enthusiasm to come through so we can get excited about the topic too.

    What do you think? How can webinars be more useful?

    Meantime … obviously not all webinars are poorly done. Many are engaging and useful. Webinars given by Seth Godin and Clay Shirky come to mind. The ones that I attended were so interesting that I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who went back the next day to replay them. And neither of these guys hardly even used slides. They let their passion for their topic bring the event to life. And so it did.

  • Why brainstorming sessions often don’t produce good ideas — and what to do about it

    The idea of brainstorming is so ingrained in most businesses today — especially among marketing and fundraising people — that we pretty much know all the “rules” of a brainstorming session by heart. Like … don’t judge, go for quantity of ideas not quality, set a time limit, get people up and out of their chairs, and so on. Some people even go further by wearing funny hats and passing toys around a conference table.

    These various techniques are supposed to produce surprising ideas. But the reality is usually far different. Too many brainstorming sessions are boring and — worse — unproductive time-wasters, with people stifling yawns and glancing at their watches. Be honest — you’ve been there, haven’t you?

    But if we all know how to brainstorm, why are these sessions usually so far removed from the free-wheeling, free-association love fests of brilliance and creativity that they’re supposed to be?

    A few possible reasons …

    • We may know the rules of brainstorming but we often don’t follow them. I’ve attended so-called brainstorming sessions that have gone on for hours, with a “facilitator” standing before the group like a grade school teacher and pointing out the goals and guidelines of the session and subtly showing disapproval when any idea strayed from them.
    • Most of the time, people come to brainstorming sessions cold, with inadequate background information or preparation about the problem or the opportunity.
    • Work is a competitive situation — much as we try to act as though it isn’t. When someone unleashes a really good idea — maybe THE idea — there’s sometimes a tendency to try and top it … not necessarily to build on it but to try and squash it by changing it. Sometimes an idea that has merit will even get ridiculed. Ego gets in the way, and the good idea can get overlooked.
    • You just can’t “operationalize” breakthrough ideas, although many companies try. You can’t say, “We’re brainstorming at 3:30 today!” and expect everybody to just turn it on like they’re flipping a switch. We all try to be so efficient, but ideas often don’t respect our timetables. Naturally, some people may be able to flip a switch and produce some mediocre ideas but probably not the game-changing ones we’re after.
    • Some people just aren’t good brainstormers, just like some aren’t good test-takers. That doesn’t mean these folks don’t have ideas. They just have a different style of working. Some people need time to ruminate. Some people may not feel comfortable shouting out an idea in front of a group. Still others might be more visual and need some images to spark their thinking instead of staring at a blank whiteboard. It just depends.

    So what to do about it?

    It would help simply to acknowledge that the typical brainstorming session isn’t the only way to generate ideas and might not even be the best way.

    Beyond that, what about …

    • Creating a hybrid situation where people work on developing ideas on their own AND attend a brainstorming session at a different time?
    • Having a pre-brainstorming session where you provide background information and allow people some time to digest it? (There’s just no way around doing the homework. It’s essential for creating ideas.)
    • Letting people go off-site or do something to break up the routine?
    • Letting people separate into smaller groups so they can work with fewer people?
    • Making it a contest where the team that generates the most ideas wins a prize?
    • Using google and keying in some terms related to the problem and see what comes up?
    • Going onto a stock photography site and doing the same to see some different kinds of images?
    • Asking for thoughts from a professional network like Linkedin?
    • Having people come up with ideas that they know will fail, just to get that whole fear of failure thing out of the way?

    What do you think? How can brainstorming be better?

  • What should a headline do?

    You’re working. You’re with a group, brainstorming. You’re trying to come up with a concept for an ad. You’re thinking about images and ideas and of course headlines. And inevitably, someone — it could be a designer, the client, or even a creative director — says something like this … “We have to somehow get the whole point across in the headline to catch people who are just leafing through the magazine — because, you know, nobody reads body copy.”

    Is that true? Does the headline have to do all the work of the whole ad? Well, like most things in marketing, the answer is … it depends.

    It depends on the product or service, the state of the market, and the target audience. Say you have a product that’s pretty simple and your audience is fully aware of. In that case, sure, the headline can do all the heavy lifting. In fact, sometimes a headline might be all you need. For example, “Laundry Baskets — 3 for $9.99.” Not a lot else to do there.

    Or even if the product is just slightly more complicated than a laundry basket but your audience is aware of it and its benefits — even then, the headline can do most of the work, like this — “Laugh at the Snow with Goodyear Ultra Ice Winter Tires Thanks to Posi-Lock Traction Tread.” Sure, you could go on in body copy about tread design, rubber compounds, differentiating from competitors, and whatnot, but for the most part — and depending on the audience — the headline says it.

    For the vast majority of cases, though, the purpose of the headline is NOT to convey the entire sales message. Not by a long shot. For most ads, the purpose of the headline is to get your target audience to read the ad. Because if we’re trying to introduce a new product, open up a new market, or reinvigorate a product that’s nearing the end of it’s lifecycle, then our best hope of persuading prospects is by exposing them to a powerful step-by-step sales argument. And you just can’t do that in a headline alone.

    Think of one of the greatest headlines of all time — “Do You Make These Mistakes in English?” This gem was the first step in a blockbuster ad for a correspondence course in grammar. What if someone had imposed the headline-has-to-say-it-all requirement on the writer of that headline, Max Sackheim, one of the true greats of advertising and copywriting? The ad wouldn’t have generated the millions of dollars in business that it did. The key to the success of the headline, of course, is the addition of the unassuming little word “these.” The headline works because — with the help of this one little word — it points the reader’s attention to the body copy, where the ad then takes up the art of persuasion in earnest. Most of the time, that’s the headline’s real job.