Social Frog

Welcome! Oh, are you still here?

I’ve been working on/obsessing over donor (and sometimes client) journeys lately. You can lose everything because your path to bringing people in and keeping them in isn’t thoughtful – thoughtful in both the clever and the sentimental sense.  So it’s not a bad thing to obsess over, really.

My gym recently changed hands. I was emotionally connected to the old one for various reasons, but the various reasons probably all stemmed from it being a nice place to be. Good people who were talented in their jobs and who remembered you. I realized at some point that I’d showered more in that gym than in any house I’d lived in this town. (Disclaimer: I swear that’s down to a lot of time in the gym and not a lack of cleanliness.)

I tell you all this so that you have some picture of me, the individual, in the process of joining a new gym, rather than some cog, joining any old reasonably-sized organization…

I bought a pack of personal trainer sessions with my joining fee offer and Stephen, the membership guy, went on to ask me a series of questions by email about what I was looking for in a trainer. Good start, I thought, as I answered them. Paying for training is a fairly personal investment of time and money and is often quite an intimate relationship: You go sweat and shake in front of someone who you also have to admit to when you can’t do things to and celebrate with when you get them right. That’s more open than a lot of people get with most of their friends.

This conversation with Stephen carried on for a few more emails before he had the gist of what would work for me. He told me about the trainer he was matching me with and why. All sounds good. Reasons for the actions you take? Lovely, yes please I’ll have some of that.

A little while later the chap I’ve been matched to sends me a generic email talking about how I’ve taken the first step to something along the lines of “the fitness of my dreams”, or something as cliché and, clearly, forgettable. He asks me similar questions to those Stephen had asked me, scans my answers and matches me with someone else. I like yoga and the new match likes yoga, too. Bingo, let’s get married!

Oh, wait, no, it’s not that simple…I'd been turned into a cog. When did I get turned into a cog?! Who stole the genuine conversation I’d had with Stephen? Did somebody lock Stephen in a cupboard without his phone, making him unable to pass on my info? Where did all my fitness history and personal preferences get lost?

One waste-of-time PT session and one better-match later and I think I have a new standard question for myself and for my clients: We’re all busy, but when our donors or our clients bring us data that we’d pay top dollar for if we wanted to seek it out, where do we put that data?

It's a good thing to know, because it's crap being a cog and not something people stick at.

Fundraiser walks into a bar...

There are two parts to this story. I will tell you one and, if you are lucky, my friend Richard might tell you the other, funnier, part one day. This bit is interesting though.

 

So me and my friend Richard walk into a bar (no, this bit isn’t the joke part, I promise). We walk into the bar with the specific intent of booking some space that Friday for his leaving drinks. 

The chap behind the bar is both very nice and very helpful. He reserves us an area and explains that it won’t be him, but one of the other bar managers, who looks after us that night. He won’t be in work because he’ll be doing some fundraising. Just mentions it in passing like that...clearly not realizing that he’s let slip to two fundraisers. Immediately, we must know everything. 

“Oh right?”

“What sort of fundraising are you doing?”

“Oh just driving some stuff around.”

“What stuff?”

“Where driving? Why driving?”

“I’m just helping out picking up some old clothes.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah, just picking them up and dropping them off.”

Now we just look at him until he carries on.

“Well, just some jumble sale stuff, for fundraising.”

More looking.

"I'm collecting clothes from different places up north, for jumble, to sell for a charity."

“That’s brilliant!”

“Which charity for?”

“It’s for kids with cancer.”

Okay so we weren’t quite so myopic and belligerent as that, but the bar manager’s bit is accurate. It took more than a minute of extra, gentle prodding (not actively wanting to sound like charity maniacs, by this point) to discover that “kids with cancer” was Cancer Research UK.

It’s not every day that I get to look straight through a donor’s eyes so I always love taking advantage of it when I do get to. There are numerous things about this conversation that were interesting, but there is one that resonates a lot with me.

We can be a tiny charity brand or a huge charity brand. Doesn't matter. Donors give to their own causes.

(And of course we should know this when we talk to them.)

 

"Sorry" can be hard. But don't underestimate that sneak "thank-you".

Saying thank you is hard sometimes. Personally or professionally. Some people find it easy. Some don't. And I think the latter is actually pretty common.

I've just started working with a local DC charity called City at Peace (Did you say "innovative conflict resolution for young people"? Okay, I'm in...) and I think they just produced, on the fly, one my favourite thank-yous that I've seen in ages - from a non-profit or anyone, really. I've lots more to say on this topic and on how this lovely letter came about, but for now I'm posting these pics and running - and I'll try to follow up tomorrow.

If you're in the DC area, we're going to be at a happy hour tonight, celebrating the end of a massively successful summer programme this year for the kids involved at City at Peace DC. You are more than welcome to join!

 

If the Caps ever got anywhere, then maybe they’d play dirty like the Flyers…

It’s bad practice to be snide about your competition or opposition. The worst way I think that you can do this is to point to someone else’s problems or failings to deflect from your own. I take that back – it’s worse if you do that and are actively fabricating as you go. But none of the above makes you look good, let’s be honest...

I have a standing Saturday night date when I’m in DC with a girlfriend of mine, Sarah. We go to the Iron Horse in Chinatown and we barfly for the evening, catching up and generally just laughing at things and meeting interesting people.

This Saturday night, two guys came over to talk to us. One of them started to talk about hockey. Sarah’s main game is hockey and she’s inducting me into the sport. What will be useful to know before I go on:

• The DC team is the Capitals
• The Philadelphia team is the Flyers
• The winning goalie of a game gets to keep the puck from said game
• The Flyers goalie, as far as I understand it, has been stealing pucks when they lose

So Sarah and this guy are talking hockey and the second guy and I are talking about I don’t know what. I chime back in when the hockey guy raises his voice. He’s from Philly and Sarah thinks the Flyers are thugs. Sarah usually has some grounding to the things she says, thus, when the guy says that’s not the case, she points at some of the ways in which they have been thuggish.

What’s both funny and interesting is the way this guys reacts. At no point does he begin to dispute any of the content of what Sarah’s saying, but keeps saying they aren’t thugs and getting a little more tense around the eyes - and his voice is picking up each time he speaks. You can see the cogs going as he tries to think of bad things to say about the Capitals, Sarah’s team.

Not knowing enough about hockey, I watch this go back and forth for a bit, like a game of ping-pong, nodding here and there when I understand things. Sarah, not remotely riled, talks about the puck stealing - it seems this is pretty dirty by the honour system of ice hockey - and the reaction she gets is comical. You have to picture this in the sort of combined tone of Harry Enfield’s Kevin, but if he were a stereotypical 1980s’ American jock.

He leans in and near-shouts, “Well MAYBE if the Caps ever made it ANYWHERE then they’d…”

I don't remember what he finished the sentence with because I was distracted by how ludicrous the start of it was. Clearly I don’t know hockey too well, but I can spot bunk logic and I felt an overwhelming desire at this point to call shenanigans on the conversation.

I suggested that “Maybe you’d be nasty, too” wasn’t a valid argument. I said I didn’t know hockey, but that I was a Liverpool Football Club supporter and if my team did something really stupid, I’m going to want them to be held accountable, as that’s no way to represent my town. I said I hold my team high enough in my regard that they need to behave with some level of honour and I won’t just defend them blindly. If you want to take pots shots at them, you need to have some sort of rooting in facts, but bring it on – I’m not going to say, “That team over there are way worse than we are, so shut up,” or “Well maybe if you guys didn’t suck you’d start spitting in people’s eyes, too.”

I acknowledge that he may have received a slightly more impassioned point of view because it was 11pm in a bar. On he other hand, maybe not...Either way, I'm guessing the guy hated us both by this point and no doubt was sorry he’d come to talk to us at all. But why am I telling you about some aggressive guy from my Saturday night in a bar? Read on…

For anyone who hasn’t known me that long, I cut my teeth, pretty much straight out of university, as a street fundraiser. I could write volumes on what you learn if that is the right job for you and you do it for a little while  - and no doubt I will at some point – but most of what you learn is in fact un-learning. You learn not to take a lot of things personally. You learn to say “I’ve no idea what’s going on in that person’s day, so I won’t judge.” You learn the art of reframing a situation that looks initially terrible and using it to try and get the best out of both it and the people around you. And, a more specific example, you learn that saying bad things about someone else in your field or industry doesn’t create genuine gains for your team.

Street fundraisers get asked things regularly like Why is Concern Worldwide better than Oxfam? Why should I give to Save the Children when I give to the Red Cross? It’s an art (really, I’m not kidding) answering these questions and showing the differences, or the complexities of how two organizations might compliment each other when they work together on the ground, whilst still demonstrating how important it is to give to THIS organization – and without taking the shortcut.

The shortcut is, of course, everyone else sucks. But there is no longevity in that position – and, double blow, it’s just not true, so at some point you’re going to show up as a liar. Bummer.

Any fundraiser worth their salt has unlearnt this shortcut and is pretty familiar with the art form so doesn’t dilly-dally with nastiness about other organizations. As soon as you’re doing that, you look like you don’t have enough faith in your own team. If you don’t believe in the charity you work for, then someone else is unlikely to just because you say they should.

I thought this was worth highlighting, because of course there are various routes to learning/unlearning this lesson, but not everybody has done so or has had the right teacher. And it's probably an ongoing lesson, too. Honestly, it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world for everyone to have to go do a week of street fundraising, but that’s by-the-by. My point is we’re stronger when we’re not snidey or taking short cuts.

People like when other people claim their mistakes. We know where we stand with them if someone's honest about where they've made mistakes. Often we actually like you more for it. So we should be sticking our flag in the stuff we do wrong and learning from it. I’m not saying it’s always going to be pretty, but it’s generally our best bet.

As the guy walked away from us on Saturday, Sarah looked at me and said, “I wouldn’t have even cared if he’d just said, ‘Yeah, we do play dirty’.”

Shall we dance?

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!