What We’re Reading, Week of 7/27

From Frogloop…
Taking Advantage of Wikipedia
Millions of people look to www.wikipedia.org as a starting point when they are searching for information about specific topics. Allyson Kapin of Frogloop encourages nonprofits to bear this in mind, and to create or update their organizations’ Wikipedia entries. She writes that Wikipedia can be a powerful promotional and educational outlet. As Wikipedia becomes ever more fixed in the internet culture, nonprofits should be aware of its potential uses.

From the Nonprofit Communications Blog…
The First 100 Hours: Turning Media Spikes Into Fundraising Leads
Kivi Leroux Miller’s post discusses the importance of turning media coverage into fundraising leads. According to Kivi, media coverage of an organization will lead to a window of roughly 100 hours of increased traffic and search engine hits. This time frame represents an opportunity to raise funds and increase interest. Kivi recommends using customized search ads, a strong landing page devoted to the issue that brought media attention in the first place, and social media. It is important for nonprofits to strike while the iron is hot, and media attention represents a prime opportunity to generate awareness and bring in revenue.

From AFP: Nonprofit Technology Blog…
Twittering for a cause: Web 2.0 and its philanthropic impact
Linking to a post from The Daily Tell, the AFP Blog discusses the impact that Web 2.0 has had on philanthropy. In particular, the post discusses how Twitter has become a fundraising avenue. Through campaigns such as “Tweetsgiving” and “tweet4good”, Twitter users have proven that they are generous to charitable causes. As the use of social media for charitable causes spreads, nonprofits that are not currently taking advantage of social media ought to find ways to get into the game soon.

Fundraising horror stories

Today’s post comes to us from Anne Gentle, one of ASI’s senior technical writers. We’ve been corresponding via email about “fundraising horror stories,” and thought it might be illuminating to open up this discussion to iOn’s readers…

I’m reading Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace…One School at a Time which is the story of Greg Mortenson, a mountain climber who is building schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He’s an ordinary person (well, besides the extraordinary mountain climbing feats) who has gone from night nurse who would type fundraising letters at a rental typewriter to an international hero who has helped build and establish more than sixty schools, according to this recent CNN article, American mountaineer fights Taliban with books, not bombs.

Just last night I read a fundraising horror story in this book. Even though he had become more advanced in his efforts than the hand-typed letters to random celebrities and mountain climbing companions, Greg Mortenson was convinced by a potential donor to go visit her, with the promise of a possible large donation. He was being “entertained” by this potential donor with dinners and tours around town, nothing out of the ordinary, but the worst scene was her having a professional massage therapist give him a massage in her home (small towel on a large man, you get the idea, yipes!). This 70+ year old woman in reality had no intentions of donating to his cause, but was lonely and wanted someone to talk to and entertain – and never did give him any donations. I’m quite “green” and inexperienced about fundraising though, but I was truly taken aback by such a terrible story of the best intentions and faith in people going so badly.

It also got me thinking, how does this type of time-wasting story translate to online fundraising efforts? I was envisioning a Facebook fundraising effort where one of the Facebookers begins harassing you, or was there a time when you crafted a perfectly honed message to your entire email list only to leave out the URL to the donation site. The horror!

Another horror story I found with a Google search was on the Donor Power blog – where an organization decided to stop chasing low-contributing donors. Jeff Brooks writes in The danger of a little knowledge, “Sweetness and Light eventually became aware of the disaster that was happening under their feet. But it took a while, because they were dazzled by the rising performance numbers they saw. It took about two years to realize what the problem was. And it took longer than that to recover. The overall impact was devastating to their mission.” Lesson learned? Don’t go after your donor list with a chainsaw.

With Halloween around the corner in the States, I thought I’d see if anyone else has horror stories to share. What’s your worst fundraising horror story?

News about the ASI/GoLightly partnership

Earlier this week, ASI officially announced a partnership with GoLightly, a Web 2.0 leader whose technology will power a brand new iMIS module: Social Networking for iMIS. Using “SNfi,” organizations can build online communities to support activities and relationships between members, donors, and other constituents. This type of platform was discussed at length in the Chronicle of Philanthropy article we linked to last week. Needless to say, it is very exciting to be making these capabilities a reality.

David Sims has profiled the partnership in TMCnet’s Contact Center:
GoLightly, ASI Combine for Non-Profit Social Networking

Here at iOn, we’re looking forward to the ongoing contributions and commentary from our new partners at GoLightly!

Un-”lock”ing vendor relationships

Allen Benamer has a great post up right now about open platforms, APIs, and free fundraising software – and how all of the above are changing the relationships vendors have with the organizations they serve. Allen was thoughtful enough to include a note from an iMIS user expressing confusion over the big deal about MPower. “Why re-invent the wheel when sophisticated software already is in use?” asks our user. Allen remarks:

We don’t accept vendor lock-in in many aspects of our daily life and we shouldn’t accept it at the very heart of nonprofit line of business applications, fundraising tools. It’s a fundamental obligation on the part of IT directors to constantly push for openness of architecture in both hardware and software purchases. This doesn’t necessarily mean you stop buying Microsoft. Instead, you help foster a marketplace where Microsoft feels COMPELLED to compete with open source vendors to provide you with the best bang for your buck. Notice the quick number of revisions to Internet Explorer the minute Firefox hit 15% of browser market share. And in the same way, this doesn’t mean you move from iMIS or Blackbaud or Convio tomorrow. Hey, over 70% of computers still use IE to browse the Web. However, it’s clear that the changing marketplace and concerted action by nonprofits have engendered a new environment where there is now more choice than ever before. And our choices shouldn’t be dictated to us by vendors who say that their application can’t do what we want it to do.

Indeed, no organization should continue working with a vendor who insists that a product “can’t do what we want it to do.” And certainly, the trend toward open development must be largely responsibile for this shift in mentality among those making buying decisions. ASI, for one, has always worked with a network of solution providers to develop specialized applications that integrate with iMIS – and has always offered their customers a software development kit for building upon iMIS’ capabilities themselves. The surge in open platform and open source offerings for the nonprofit community have made this flexibility a requirement, rather than a differentiating factor. This can only be to the entire community’s benefit, and should be applauded.

It is important, however, not to confuse software’s degree of ”openness” with how well it actually accomplishes the objectives of the organization using it. Allen’s observations about the way the landscape is changing are spot on. What is exciting to consider is how nonprofits and vendors will relate to each other once being “open” is just par for the course. Organizations will consider: What does a mature API look like? Do we have the infrastructure and IT resources in place to wrangle raw code? What are our objectives at this moment, and how does working with an open API get us significantly closer to achieving those? Realistic answers to those questions will be key to making technology decisions long after the spectre of vendor lock-in has disappeared.

ASI Acquires Fisk Brett

ASI Acquires Fisk Brett, Creating the UK’s No. 1 Specialist Software Provider for the Not-for-Profit Sector

This is incredibly exciting news for ASI, as the company will now step into the position of leading nonprofit software vendor in the UK – serving organizations that now include Amnesty International, Sight Savers International, The British Heart Foundation and The Alzheimer’s Society.

The executive management team for ASI in Europe will be led by managing director Niroo Rad, with Fisk Brett co-founder and managing director Robin Fisk taking on responsibility for business development and Fisk Brett co-founder and technical director Ben Brett taking on a role in product development. For more details on the acquisition, see:

Computer Business Review
UK Fundraising
Texas Tech Pulse

Fundraising Success Q&A with Gary Green

Fundraising Success has posted a follow-up article to address some extra content from our recent webinar, Choosing and Using Fundraising Software: Tips and Tricks to Demystify the Process.

In the article, Gary Green, VP for Technology at the National Kidney Foundation, takes some time out to answer additional questions from the participant Q&A.

It all comes down to knowing what problem(s) you want to solve, finding a solution that you can afford that meets your needs, and then operating that solution with active monitoring and evaluation,” says Green.

The article is well worth checking out – for additional information, and insight from Second Baptist’s David Drinnon and ASI’s Dan Germain, you can view the recorded webinar.

What we’re reading, week of 5/12

From Don’t Tell The Donor…
Will the ticking credit card time bomb impact donations?
DTTD examines the impact of the current credit crisis on online fundraising. Does this create ethical concerns for fundraisers who encourage donors to use credit cards for their contributions? Some interesting discussion going on in the comments – one point nobody has mentioned yet is that in the online world, “credit cards” could also refer to debit and cheque cards, and perhaps encouraging “credit card” donations has more to do with embracing technological advances and less to do with promoting unwise spending.

From Step-by-Step Fundraising…
5 Ways to Show You Appreciate Your Donors
Sandra Sims discusses five ways to appreciate donors. We have been having a lot of discussion around how to appreciate “super-donors” – that is, sneezers. Are there different tactics you would recommend to show appreciation to these powerhouses of donor generation?

From A Small Change…
Choosing Donor Software: Things to Remember
Chris Logan from NPower Seattle is guest-blogging a series of posts on choosing donor software; this is the final installment of the series.

From The Raiser’s Razor…
Chronicle hosts Live Discussions on Charity Marketing with Seth Godin
This is a great example of how authors, gurus and thought leaders are partnering with the nonprofit media and getting tons of attention from organizations.

Shane Davis and Sarah Hoddinott to be featured on A Small Change

Our own Sarah Hoddinott and Artez’s Shane Davis will be making an appearance in two articles on A Small Change. Sarah and Shane participated in a conference call last week with the blogger, Jason Dick, who will be drawing on their expertise for a series of articles on peer-to-peer fundraising, including:

-       “The Seven Deadly Sins” of peer-to-peer fundraising – Jason will share Sarah and Shane’s advice for avoiding common mistakes in social fundraising and designing campaigns that work.

-       “The Fourth Leg of the Donor Pyramid” – Jason will explore an idea Sarah brought up (based on a presentation by Nicci Noble) about how social fundraising is changing the entire structure of fundraising strategy for organizations, adding a completely new leg to the pyramid.

 

Jason expects to publish these piece on A Small Change next week, so keep an eye out for them.

 

Thanks again to Shane and Sarah for participating!