Social Frog

How would you ask me if I was carrying explosives?

Any excuse is always a lousy excuse, but one of the reasons for the gap between posts was a truly, truly glorious wedding in Jerusalem which I had the pleasure to attend in the interim. Leaving aside both the wedding and the glory, I wanted to share something I noticed while I was travelling.

Like most people, I tend not to engage my brain too much in airports. We’ve heard all of the questions before and I just want to get my coffee and get on my plane and try not to feel too petty about the fact that I’ve probably had to take my shoes off.

So the questions just roll over me these days…Did you pack this bag yourself? Do you have anything sharp that could be used as a...Are you carrying anything that…Have your bags been anywhere that someone could have…?

My friend and I were shuffling and yeah-ing our way through this tired conversation in Tel Aviv airport, frankly being more concerned with gauging how long the whole process ahead would take, when the very nice woman that was asking the questions did something that surprised me. 

Without breaking her verbal stride or changing her chatty tone in the slightest, she glanced at us, looked back at the passports and oh-so-casually threw in, “Girls, you know that we ask you these questions because we don’t want someone to use you to smuggle explosives onto the plane, right?” She looked back up and smiled at us.

We paused. We looked at each other. We looked at our bags. We thought. We looked back at the woman. No, no one could have been in our bags. Definitely not.

The woman told me I had the cutest passport cover she’d ever seen, took the maker’s name and waved us through, having transformed us from nodding dogs to responsive passengers in the space of fifteen seconds.

I’ve no doubt it would have caused us more trouble than it was worth for me to start asking about how the airport staff are trained to communicate with travellers about explosives, but I’ve reflected on that interaction a number of times after the fact and I’d really like to know.

Are security staff in some airports being taught how to communicate to actually get the best out of people? Or was this woman just really smart and passionate about the importance of what she does? Did she just see our nodding dogs and think “I can get an honest answer without needing to bore or threaten it out of them”?

I’ll spare you the lengthy analysis of where she used the word “smuggle” in the sentence, or when she chose to smile or look directly at us, but any time I might fall into repetitive cycles in communicating the reasons/causes that I work for, I’m going to try and remember this bizarre interaction and the woman that liked my passport case.

The fact that I’m a fundraiser probably means that I spend most of my life talking about things that I have already been talking about for most of my life. It would be lethal to forget that there is always a way, often simple, to communicate a truly vital idea, no matter how tired its communication has got to date.

The Mr. Bergstrom Effect

One of my favourite Simpsons episodes - and probably still one of my favourite pieces of TV - is called Lisa's Substitute.

For anyone who hasn't had the pleasure, in this episode Lisa Simpson's teacher (Mrs. Hoover) is taken ill and substituted with the weird and wonderful Mr. Bergstrom (a fine, fine performance from Dustin Hoffman). Lisa is all of a sudden exposed to inspiring, tailored teaching, which takes into account her learning style, what she thinks and what she feels. This is a revelation to Lisa and, for possibly the first time, she gets a look at what her potential is and who she'd like to be; a peek at that thing that sits at the top of Maslow's hierarchy - self-actualization.

Not surprisingly, when Mr. Bergstrom's substituting is done, Lisa finds it hard to return to the way she had been working with Mrs. Hoover. She is disillusioned with, and disengaged from, school. Heartbroken, in fact. I'm calling this the Bergstrom Effect.

Of course! you must be thinking at this point (whilst slapping your palm to your forehead, I'm certain), I now see how much substitute teaching has in common with street and door-to-door fundraising! Well, no, you're probably not, but that's where I'm going and you should come too.

These methods of fundraising, at Bluefrog we call them social fundraising, are in fact the Bergstrom Effect for a large group of potential donors that we normally can't access through the more traditional fundraising techniques. I should rephrase that: a large group of potential donors that we can't normally make our causes accessible for via traditional fundraising techniques.

That the methods recruit new demographics is not exactly headline-worthy; How else can you recruit 20-35 year olds? What else recruits men at any sort of volume? No, that's not breaking news - we know it already. But the knowledge could benefit from a little re-framing, I think.

Rising attrition rates, occasionally amongst other things, have pushed us to change some of the ways we go about dealing in and managing social fundraising. But, with the exception of a few interesting in-house operations, we have largely remained reactionary and dealt in things like small changes in costs and non-first-payer guarantees - relevant, sure, but not an actual solution.

If we have found a Bergstrom Effect for this great swathe of donors and possible donors, then surely the answer is to take that learning and have it inform how we look after their subsequent experiences - how we build those relationships (yes, relationships - as this is what was built at the point they were recruited). Social fundraising, when done properly, engages people and makes what could often be a painfully time consuming, over-whelming or just a bit depressing issue accessible, and even empowering, for a LARGE number of people. It's tailored and it's personal. The solution is almost simple when you look at it like that. Why don't we then carry on talking to these donors like that?

We have spent a lot of time in the last 5 or so years (more?) talking about how "this demographic attrits". But what we've not given much consideration to is that it's hard when your Mr. Bergstrom (we've all had one) stops coming to class. It doesn't mean you love the subject any less - you probably love it with a new level of appreciation, actually - but you might not know how, or be inclined, to re-engage with Mrs. Hoover.

That's a very topline description of the problems we're facing with social fundraising, but it's on the mark. Anyone who knows me through work will know I've been hollering on about this for an age. Happily, it is what I am spending a lot of my time working on at Bluefrog right now and we're doing some really, really interesting things. I think we're on the verge of a slow but steady revolution and I'm excited about it.