I’ve been a bit slow off the mark at getting business cards done. They seemed the lesser exciting of things happening right now. But they are, of course, important.
So I finally sat myself down to tick this task off the list and they arrived this week and they are lovely. More than that though, the process of getting them was kind of exciting. Not the putting them together, I won’t lie, that was lousy boring, but them arriving was thoroughly enjoyable.
I used MOO cards to make them and what was so great (apart from the price and the product, which would have been enough in all honesty), was that they reminded me to celebrate that I was getting business cards. No, I am not affiliate marketing for MOO, I am thinking about how important celebration is - and how much of a pull people and organizations who know how to celebrate have...because they make life, and work, fun for us.
When I train fundraisers I will pretty much always hammer home the need to remember to actually tell people that your cause is awesome. Never to get too bogged down in the detail that you forget to celebrate – something easily done.
As charities are in the business of changing the world, the work is naturally hard. This has two implications. Firstly, that it's tiring for everyone involved in making it happen. Secondly, that understanding how hard the work is comes from understanding the context of the work. Sense is always an easy example for me, but the fact that 10-year-old Kira (fake name) went waterskiing on her Sense holiday is only more than nicey-nice when you understand that she was scared of being out in the rain before that day, because she's deafblind, so her other senses are ramped right up and can be hyper-sensitive in comparison to, say, mine.
Your “average” donor (sorry, that's a horrifically lazy term, I know. But stay with me, I'm experimenting with getting better at shorter posts!) isn’t going to have a clue about what constitutes an incredible breakthrough in, say, rehabilitation for young people caught up conflict in Kenya unless we make the context visible and accessible. Because why on earth would they? That’s kind of one of the roles of the fundraiser, to signpost these stories and point out the bits that we should be doing the dance of joy around. And by "kind of" really I mean "is"...
Even putting aside that celebrating helps communicate a cause more accurately, it's hard to maintain motivation or inspire it in a potential donor if we weren’t celebrating the successes or doing the occasional dance around the brilliance of the aforementioned really hard work. Its knocks any plans you might have for longevity of fundraiser or donor on their ass if you don't do the dance.
Anyway, we were talking about my fabulous business cards.
So they arrived. And they asked me if I was excited...They assured me that they were excited.
Cute, I thought.
Then I went to open my cardholder and it positively yelped with joy at me:
I opened the cardholder and there were little cards inside that wanted to have an excited little conversation about sharing with me.
I may have actually been giggling by the time I was done with all of the opening. (It's not impossible that I did a little dance too, but I had just got out of a yoga class, so was probably a bit happy-go-lucky in the first place.)
My favourite bit of this process was that I believed that MOO are excited about their service and sharing their product with me and, like pretty much everyone else, I enjoy going to people who believe in what they do and who do the little dance about it. I will spend money with them again and I know that other people have on my recommendation already.
(If I've got it totally wrong and it's not obvious how the last paragraph is relevant to not-for-profits, please tell me and I’ll add another paragraph!)
D’offed cap to @ajleon for the recommendation in the first instance. And click here for dancing inspiration if your day is short of it.
Please note: When this blog was written, the links were not affiliate links. As of March 2011, they are. Thanks!
