Meet the i On Nonprofits Team

Meet the i On Nonprofits contributors, leaders in the association and non-profit software industry.

Robin Fisk
Robin is an expert on the role and use of technology in fundraising. He founded Fisk Brett in the 1990’s, launching the successful ProgressCRM database software.

With over 20 years’ experience bringing technology solutions to more than 250 non-profits, Robin is now the Global Fundraising Product Manager at Advanced Solutions International.

Robin lives with his family, mostly in West Sussex in the UK, and sometimes in the Loire region of France.

Anne Gentle
Anne Gentle works as a senior technical writer at Advanced Solutions International, embedded on an Agile software development team in Austin Texas.

At ASI, she coordinates volunteer outings such as sorting food at the Capital Area Food Bank and assembling Personal Energy Transports. She’s an active member of the Society for Technical Communication, serving as the chair of the Editorial Advisory Panel for their Intercom magazine as well as on a special Social Media Task Force.

She writes a blog at justwriteclick.com and just finished a book about using social publishing techniques for technical documentation titled Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation. As the mom of two young boys, she loves to be busy and on-the-go.

Jay McCormack
Jay is the Solution Architect for Advanced Solutions International. He helps not-for-profit organizations match technology to their needs so that they can run more efficiently, communicate to their members more effectively, raise more funds and do more good.

Jay is not just a man who immerses himself in cutting edge technology and concepts; he actively seeks it out and tries to make it work better for ASI’s customers. Want to know if an iPhone application is appropriate for your business? Need someone to explain the benefits of Twittering for your membership? Jay’s your man.

“My clients are working 12 hour days for a reason. They believe in what they do and I find that inspiring,” says Mr. McCormack.

Jay came to ASI from a background of corporate web development projects as diverse as a Chinese horse racing website and helping build Harvey Norman’s first e-commerce website.

Twitter – fundraising’s magic bullet?

By Robin Fisk

You might be forgiven for thinking that Twitter is more hot air than substance.  Hailed as one of the key developments in recent times, confusion reigns: I’ve heard everything from “Twitter could eventually replace websites as we know them” to the kind of bewilderment shown by a grandparent on Christmas day when the grandchild asks them how their new computer game works.

It’s a fantastically direct communication channel. Whether you’re keeping in touch with the largely mundane lifestyle of celebrities or keeping tabs on friends, you do get it straight from the horse’s mouth so to speak.  But there is definitely a case of those who tweet, and the rest who just can’t see why on earth you’d waste your time doing it.

Fundraisers – caught between hoping it will just go away and feeling they ought to engage just in case it’s the future of fundraising – are just as confused.  So is Twitter more than just an online gathering of IT and media types, or can it make a real differece to fundraising?

Twitter’s fundraising poster-boy – ‘Twestival’ – ran in February 2009.  It took the form of parties (‘Tweet-ups’) in major cities across the planet, to which Tweeters were encouraged to attend and put some money in a bucket.  The target was USD $500,000, the charity was New York-based Carity: Water.

So, was it a success?  On a financial level you could say not:  projected income at time of writing is $250,000 (although other reports place actual income at half that) - it didn’t meet its target, but then no-one had run that kind of event before so maybe we can give some latitude on that one.  How about the donors – does Charity: Water get the chance to cultivate the those donor relationships for future support?  Not if it was cash-in-a-bucket fundraising that’s for sure.  But those donors may well have tweeted in Charity: Water’s favour, so that their followers would see the cause.  Awareness?  Certainly – I for one would not have been aware of this organisation’s work without the press coverage that Twestival received.

Let remind ourselves of some facts….

Donor relationships are key to long-term loyalty and repeat donations.  Thanking them for their gift, seeking their commitment, inviting them back to see the effect of their donation, asking them to ask their friends to become your donors too – this builds long-term relationships.  One-time cash-in-a-bucket gifts are fine if you just need some cash, but you might be denying yourself the opportunity of a lot more.

Twitter is just a channel.  It needs to be understood and used appropriately: it’s going to be part of your fundraising mix, not all of it.  If it’s iPhone toting media and IT types you’re after, then Twitter might be where you find them.  But sober reality is descending upon the Twitterati: lessons are being learned – the next Twestival is asking for attenders to register and pay up front and targets are more realistic.  Sound familiar?  Of course – it’s fundraising, subject to the laws of ROI like anything else!

90-9-1

No, it’s not a variation on The Numbers… it’s a principle of social community engagement made popular by Jakob Nielsen, and commonly referred to as “Participation Inequality.” The idea here is that in any community, 90% of members contribute little if at all, 9% contribute regularly, and 1% contribute enough to really influence the community. From the website, 90-9-1.com, this handy graphic:

What does this mean for online communities in the nonprofit space? Simply put, it suggests that you’re going to need a lot more people than you think. If we interpret the 9% in this case to mean “donors” and the 1% to mean “fundraisers/cause champions,” your online community is going to need one hundred times as many total members as your target number of cause champions. This can be a daunting surprise. In Nielsen’s full discussion of the principle, there are some examples of what this effect looks like in action and how a community designer might go about dampening it.

All of this came up in a discussion we had recently with Robin Fisk, Senior Executive at ASI Europe. Robin is a delight to speak with and a consummate expert on technology in the charity sector. He writes a contributed column on IT intelligence for The Third Sector (a list of recent pieces can be found here). We’re looking forward to working with Robin here at iOn, and expect to feature more discussions, ideas and advice from him in the coming months!