Social Frog

Who the hell is this Joanna person?

I used to live in the U.S., about four years ago, and I am still on one of the Oxfam America email lists. 

I opened an email from them today. As I was doing so, it occurred to me that this isn’t something I do very often. And it then occurred to me that this was a potentially interesting fact.

I’m an ad hoc Oxfam donor and just generally a big fan. I’m lucky enough to get the inside track on their work because I know some truly amazing people who work and have worked there. So I get the download on programmes over a glass of wine, random celebratory emails or I get to look at the photos uploaded onto Facebook from the field (I’ll ask if I can post one up with this, actually – watch this space). So I regularly stand in absolutely nothing short of awe. Though apparently not of their emails…

I had a hunch about the why-fors of this. I use Gmail, so can run a reliable search of all of my emails momentarily; which, in this case, pulled up reams and reams of unopened campaign updates and calls to action, along with the odd how-to, going back about five years. Then there was one that just asked me, “Will you help Joanna?” That one was open.

What? This is new?! Who the hell is Joanna? What's all this? Are you implying that I can help an individual, real actual person..? Sweet.

There was no click through from the email, that I could see, to find out more about this woman (really? Yes, really), so I Googled her a bit. Her name’s Joanna Manu and she and Oxfam are doing some inspiring, inspiring things in Ghana. You can read about her here if you want. It’s basically just some woman’s story...Thus it is, of course, very cool. 

If you don’t have the time to go read, here’s my favourite bit:

"After this training, I can see how important education is, so I am enrolled in school," she said. "I want to be a political leader, maybe a member of parliament."

Manu's motivations and sense of responsibility go well beyond her village. "I see fellow human beings as I see myself, and if they can't defend their rights, then I have to help them," she said. 

I will try to crystalize what I'm getting at here by stealing some other people's well made points of view:

Stolen from theLaCproject: Tell the stories of those served.

Stolen from Mother Teresa, frequently via @markyphillips: If you can't feed a hundred people, then feed just one.

Even as a fundraiser of many years, I can feel disempowered by the abstract stats. Just tell me someone's story and give me something I can get my head around enough to inspire my heart to give.

You can donate here if you like. (Or here, if you'd prefer the UK branch - or are an online fundraising nerd just want to compare the two!)

 

Very exciting update (22/05/10): 

My friend was brilliant enough to give the go ahead to post some of her photos from Haiti up here. Obviously they are NOT official Oxfam, they are from her personal Facebook. Some snapshots of what Oxfam is working on in Haiti, post-earth quake, right now...

 
You can see the Haitian flag still standing where not much else is. 

   

Kids in Oxfam's ad hoc canteen. One on the left clearly knows how to strike a pose.

The kitchen at the Oxfam canteen - cost of a meal? 20p/30¢.

 

More kids who are working with the Oxfam programmes there. 

 

I'm failing here and don't know this woman's name off the top of my head, but I do know she worked with Oxfam's Livelihoods programme to restock her store after the quake - which is what you can see in the shot there. Will try to update again with her name...

 

And some gorgeous Haitian paintings, about which I probably don't know enough and so am no doubt missing a zillion cultural references.

 

Big thanks to Clare for letting me share these. Oh, and for doing all the life-saving stuff in Haiti, that too...

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!

Do we actually like second chances?

I tend to tell fewer jokes either when I’m very tired or if I have my head firmly lodged into a project. So if you ever meet me and I'm quiet, it's likely down to one of those things.

What happens at these times is that my comic timing simply leaves the building. Being from Liverpool, probably 85% of the jokes I tell are (lovingly) at the expense of the listener. Extract the comic nuance out of that and I just sound like a git. Thus, sometimes I tell fewer jokes because 30ish years’ experience has taught me this is the right thing to do. For all concerned.

I like to think of this as an area that I keep in check, but on occasion I need a little reminder and usually this comes in the form of a reaction from someone that I had not expected, which sits somewhere (anywhere) along the spectrum of unpleasant.

A couple of nights ago I left the corner of my room that is currently an ad hoc study, on the backend of about 5 hours of looking, I suspect without much blinking, at my screen, whilst assimilating different bits of research into coherency for the project that I’m working on right now. Without a doubt, I would have been somewhat bear-coming-out-of-cave as I went downstairs to a small group of people and the wonderful smell of tacos. Now let’s take for granted that, in this instance, I did not allow for the transition between lone, intense working and interacting with other humans whilst in the same confined space as them: My little reminder came along in the shape of someone staring at me in reaction to a joking aside I'd made, with a look that could have comfortably been interpreted as any of the following:

1. Your accent is difficult for me and I did not understand any of the words that you just used. Please repeat, with clarification.
2. I’m not sure that I quite like your tone, missy.
3. I’m sorry, but WHAT did you just say about my mother?

Thankfully I was in the room for long enough after the look to demonstrate through my subsequent behaviour that I was not a total bastard, but in fact friendly and generally well meaning.

This got me to thinking about second chances and if we are actually in the habit of either grabbing or making the most out of them. Second chances are awesome. This was a second chance – the opportunity, by addressing it directly or not, to remedy a slightly awkward social breach. I had the second chance because I was in a conversation and the nature of conversation is that it is ongoing and a process*.

As more of our interactions with donors/customers/each other become conversational, i.e. more social, more digital*, it makes sense that we should look to get more aware of these opportunities how best to handle them.

There was some discussion at the #140conf in NYC last month, which I honestly feel privileged to have attended, about the extent to which you can reflect on or retract the things that you say on Twitter after the fact. Should you have to stand by your every word, because you did write it after all? Or can you take advantage of Twitter's innate conversational nature and retract or clarify things if they are misinterpreted or as you change your mind? Generally views were strong and all were interesting. (You can check out one of my favourite discussions about it here, in a conversation on Twitter and the discussion of race, at 10min in - but I really recommend watching it all if you have time.)

For the record, I don’t think we should allow ourselves to be totally flip in our first line on something. After all, first impressions remain important, so that would just be stupid. But the glory of the humanweb is that we can show off our humanity. We rethink; we retract; we crystallize and get wiser. But I actually think that we tend to be lousy at taking these second chances in non-virtual life a lot of the time. It’s common for an amazingly solutionizing**, self-aware internal monologue to go unshared. (Is this a more British symptom? I suspect it may be...) 

There wasn’t consensus reached at the #140conf, but it was obvious that we don’t take advantage of our Twitter second chances as much as we could be doing and that we often don’t realize that the opportunity is there. This is reflected in our other forms of conversation, virtual and non-virtual. Elon James White talks eloquently in the above video on how he tries to engage with doing this on Twitter, at 19min 10secs in.

So what’s my point, other than we probably aren’t great at this right now?

This can stand for any organization that has any form of client-facing aspect to it, but I want to speak to the problem that I see charities face specifically: 

We need to get excited about the fact that e are having ongoing conversations with our donors – whether that’s on Twitter, through a website, on the phone, whatever. Our donors can really get to know our mission if we do. And we can build our tribe and keep changing the world. All good things.

How do we do this?

We’re going to have to get better at equipping our people and giving them the freedom to work effectively.

In (very) short, anyone who fields contact from a donor or member of the public needs to:

1. Have enough training and support to be able to answer off-script and from their heart
2. Be given enough freedom and trust to be able to answer off-script and from their heart

I’m sure I’ve written about the benefits of not being precious about cut-and-paste branded answers before, so some of this might sound in a familiar vein.

Our choice is between carrying on taking requests from unhappy donors and just cancelling their donation without them getting to know us any better, or we can give everyone who is an ambassador for the organization the tools to say, “Yes, people sometimes do find my accent difficult to follow, but I assure you that I did not say anything rude about your mother and I’d love to explain to you why it is we work in the particular area that you’re not happy about.”

Run an audit of all types of incoming communication to your organization. Are you using your second chances?

If any of this seems like an insurmountable task, it’s a huge passion of mine, so get in touch if you'd like to chat about it.

And, to finish, I would like to say something which hopefully needs no explanation (shame on you if it does):

 

_________ 

*I could get totally nerdy on you here and bust out some Harold Garfinkel breaching experiments, but I'd be overdoing it – I snuck a couple of links in though. Hee hee.

**Which they are, have I blogged on no-going-back yet? Will do this week…

***Yes, I made that word up but I like it and think it adds value.

Thoughts about the Internet from when my Internet was down.

I recently changed my Facebook status to say something like, “A good cup of coffee and stable wifi and I’m unstoppable.” It made me smile to see that a surprising number of people connected with the sentiment. Today I find myself workshifting in one of my favourite places to work in public, Tryst in Washington, DC, suddenly with only one of  those things. It seems unreasonable to go from unstoppable to useless just because my Internet connection has ground to a halt and, having felt thoroughly told off by a great recent post from Copyblogger on Blogcrastination in the last couple of days, I thought I should pull together a post that’s been bouncing around in my head for a bit. So…

This blog was sparked by a colleague leaving me something snipped form the Guardian on my desk recently. It was an opinion piece called Face to Faith from Julia Neuberger on social networking and, very basically, how it is threatening our ability to connect in person. (Do read it, it’s short and is food for thought.)

It generally got my back up and I’ve been mulling it over to try and crystallize exactly why it did that, even apart from the wild conjecture on religion making us happy, balanced people – too big a concept to bandy about unsubstantiated. Anyway I worked it out and the answer is that I struggle with personification of things we use in our lives – especially when it means demonizing whatever it is you’re talking about. Struggle is probably inaccurate, even. I can actually find it almost unbearable. And that’s what this bit of writing did for social networking, forwarding that any web-based connections are not real and therefore mean we don’t make real friends.

The article reminded me of a similar argument made a little while back by a couple of musicians (shame on you Nick Mason) who had rallied to take pot shots at Guitar Hero*,complaining that the game was stopping young people learn to play real musical instruments. They were looking at the hours people (young people, especially) put into the game and seeing their passions and livelihoods as being under threat – and so, kind of naturally, they were irate.

I almost don’t even know where to start with how flawed and unhelpful this thinking is, but the ethnomethodologist in me wants me to start with the premise that it is useless to see technology as something that happens to us, as opposed to something we create by interacting with it.  It’s particularly useless because it washes our hands of power to change what we’re complaining about and of any responsibility to do so. I mean…. argh.

Let’s be clear: we do not, as far as we know, in fact have A.I. yet, so we can put to rest the notion that Guitar Hero is trying to distract our youth from becoming meaningful musicians or that Web 2.0 is making us sit in dark rooms with no real friends, okay?

Good then. Next...

I could say a heck of a lot on either of these positions but, for brevity’s sake, I’ll stick with the most important thing to me. (I’ll try to not even go near how offensive it could be to state the relationships I have built via any medium aren’t real. Come now…)

What is key to me is that these arguments both seem to have jarred part-way through – at the bit where they could get useful – and bedded in right there for a good old complain. Which is just, well, boring.

I am incredibly taken by Seth Godin’s writing on the resistance and the lizard brain just now and both of these reactions reek of archetypal lizard brain knee-jerking to me: We fear change, so how far can we push out the things that are changing please..?

How’s about this instead: Could a more interesting, more positive reaction be to use the things that are changing to leverage the change that we are after? This is no doubt the wrong place for a full tirade on, for instance, how easy and how much fun it would be to use online social networking to drive the local community action, volunteering, your congregation, whatever it is that you want, so I’ll just suggest that it could be a better place to start than a disconnected, dystopian denunciation of it. (Sorry if that’s just too much alliteration there. I can get excited about words. Back to the point...)

If people seem more interested in a game about playing instruments than actually factually playing them, then surely that can tell us loads about what might be missing in the way we teach or try to inspire people to want to learn an instrument. Instead of stamping out a passion because it doesn’t fit with how you are used to looking at things, isn’t it a bit more strategic to look at ways to transfer that passion across and take advantage of the fact that people are engaging?

If interacting with new tech is helping highlight some issues, in any industry, then it’s unreasonable for the first response to be to complain about it. I feel like I’ve been saying this a lot this week, but it has fitted a lot – usually the solution is to engage and be clever, not to grumble and try to maintain the status quo. The former ups your chances of removing the thing you want to grumble about, too.

____________  

*Shameless plug for a friend’s band.

Can I have your attention please!

I got what I thought was a very cute piece of direct mail through the door the other day.

A new Indian restaurant around the corner was flyering all of the local houses with menus. The cute bit (and what made me open it and look at it) was that someone had taken the time to stick the menu in a plain DL envelope and write "Hi!" on the front in biro.

Obviously a large number of hours at Bluefrog get spent on cracking the problem of making sure the envelope gets opened, so I really liked this; Different enough to indeed get opened, not psuedo-personalized enough that I felt hoodwinked when I did open it, cheap enough to be endearing. If I'm honest, I think it probably got my attention because I liked the enthusiasm of the exclamation mark and wanted to know who was so pleased to be saying hello (forever the street fundraiser by heart) - and of course, lest we forget, the powerful tool that actual handwriting is in the 21st century.

There's an Aesop's Fable-type message in there no doubt, about a little bit more thinking and time getting you good things. Regardless, we have a new takeaway at our house now.

Is anybody listening..?

I've tried to write this post what must nearly be 20 times now. I think that some of it is a bit too close to my heart, so I kept getting wrapped up in the detail, resulting in some really quite boring writing for anyone who isn't me. I'll try and keep it simple this time, I promise...

Now, I'm a sucker for symmetry. I love finding it in things. Recently I refused for several minutes to let my friend Helen move from standing in front of some fishing nets until I felt I had the appropriate amount of symmetry for the photo to the left*. I also recently, and much more relevantly, found some behavioural symmetry that was very interesting to me...

I usually am fortunate enough do some work with the fabulous Sense's holidays team in the summer. Last year was no exception to this rule. The gist of the programme is that you spend a week supporting deafblind people (I've mostly worked with kids to date). And you spend an ordinate amount of time during that week just experimenting with different ways to communicate with people who likely don't have formal, or mainstream, communication styles**, so likely aren't fluent** speakers or hearers. I've no doubt that all of these mini-experiments look utterly bizarre to your average passerby, but if communication is your thing, well then it's fascinating, it's exciting.

My holiday last year found me, amongst other things, spending around 15 hours over the course of the 7 days mirroring a young man who (just for the purpose of privacy) we'll call James. The longest stint we did with me imitating James was the first time I sat down in front of him and had one-to-one time with him. It was about 4 and a half hours simply sitting, imitating him. The rest of the 15 hours was dotted throughout the week. We did a few 2- or 3-ish hour blocks over the next couple of days, until we both took for granted that it was a method now that we used to communicate with each other, and then it whittled down to minutes here and there. This became the foundation of how we got to know each other.

I was mulling over this whole process after the fact - this, sort of random, thing that I had done really instinctively but that had had all of these wonderful ramifications (for James is a wonderful, wonderful guy to get to know) and which had totally cemented our relationship. And I realized that all I'd done was to let him know that I was listening. And then he'd allowed a relationship to start***. So very simple, but it was like a Joycean epiphany to me at the time. (I've learnt a bit more about imitation as a communication style since. Paul Hart of Sense Scotland is the guru right now, as far as I'm concerned.)

Did we lose the symmetry thread, you ask? No, no, here it is...

Probably about as far away from deafblindness as you might go now, I got an email not long ago from the bra company I use. They hadn't heard from me in a while and wanted me to know they were still thinking of me and get on my radar if they'd fallen off. They sent me the below email.

I've always enjoyed the job Bravissimo do at keeping their customers central and paying attention to us. I think they are brilliant at this. This "Bravissimo Girl" concept that they've built is positive enough that I'm more than happy for them to put me in that category.

As I clicked through to tell them to keep writing to me, it occurred to me that the way they had got me and kept me mirrored the way that I had worked to have a relationship with James:

1. A time- and energy-intensive first interaction (Bravissimo will likely spend a few hours with you the first time you go in)
2. Followed by shorter, but still very attentive communication in the next few interactions (while you're still getting to know each other)
3. Less intensive interactions after that, though all regular and thoughtful, once we've gotten to know what to expect from each other (like this lovely email) 

 

Throughout this process, they've behaved like the relationship with me matters and is specific. They, basically, have done a fantastic job of letting me know they are listening to me. 

Getting people to understand that you're listening in the first place always takes time and commitment, that then needs to be followed as well by ongoing commitment. But knowing you're listened to not only means you share the positive things you have to give (James shared his time and attention and sense of humour with me; I share positive feedback with Bravissimo, spend money there and, of course, have been turned into a sneezer), but also means that you don't often feel the need to shout to be heard or to lash out to make your point, even if there's something we're not happy with.

I'd be over the moon to get something like this from a charity I've supported. We all know it's important to listen but sometimes, perhaps because it's hard work, I think we might forget how big the benefits are. And the benefits are brilliant.

By the way, I'm a sneezer for the Sense holidays too, in case that wasn't obvious**.

_____________________

*This of course doubles as a thinly-veiled excuse to put my holiday photos up.

**I'm doing my best to steer clear of jargon, etc. and please take my double asterisks to denote where I've actively tried not to get bogged down in the detail, successfully or unsuccessfully. Drop me a line if you happen to want to know more about any of those bits.

***You always cry at least once on a Sense holiday, for any of a great swathe of reasons. James was my moment last year. He touched my face when I told him I was leaving and I'd loved meeting him. I believe made a small squeaking noise and then had to leave the room.

Brave New World

This is a post about how excited I am. There probably isn't much that you can put to practical use right now, but it is a forerunner to something so useful you won't know what's hit you. So on we go...

I've had a really good week. It hasn't involved any sleep particularly, but it's been very, very good nonetheless.

A social fundraising project that is the culmination of somewhere between a year's and nine or ten years' (depending on how you view cause and effect) work and learnings comes together in its first fantastic incarnation on Monday.

Because it's been a steady learning curve and hasn't happened over night, you (not you sat there, but the universal "you") might easily not appreciate all that has gone into it. But sitting where I am right now, at my desk on Bluefrog's first floor (metaphorically, that is - it's Saturday and I'm actually sprawled inelegantly enough on the living room rug), I can feel pretty satisfied looking at what I know everyone has fed into this project and over just how long. And, for my own satisfaction, I have found the first project to use what I've worked on and learnt over the last 7-ish years - not just scraps of it here and there, but with an integrated outlook. We've plugged what we know between us into what happens next. (There are many, many more contributors, but I'll save that for later...)

So all of this has been going on in the background, these cogs have been at work behind the scenes, and this was, finally, the week when I got to start talking to social fundraising teams and managers about it. And that is why my week has been great. Because there is nothing (again, no thing) like talking to truly talented fundraisers about a truly amazing campaign. And here's the bit that gives me the skip in my step - By that, I don't only mean the amazing work of the charity whose campaign it is, but I also mean a new thing: actual factual, truly amazing, tailored, targeted, clever and thoughtful strategy, specifically for this social fundraising campaign.

Running workshops this week, I have been genuinely impressed by the fundraisers I've worked with and feel lucky to have them as part of the campaign. I've been left even more inspired than I was before. (Thanks, if any of them are reading!)

That's all I can say right now, but more to follow about the other fantastic people who have worked on the run up to this, who will work on it ongoing and, of course, how it actually goes. Nothing is perfect and there will be more learning, refining, changing, improving (because that's fundraising, as far as I'm concerned), but right now:

I. Am. Excited.

Brave new world V.1 starts Monday, July 20th, 2009 at 10:30am.

At 5:30pm of the same date, you will likely find me tweeting contently from a quiet corner, pint of good beer in hand. Or, if there is any justice in the world, pint of good West Country cider in hand.

I'm your biggest fan!

This post is based on the premise that the power of a person who genuinely believes in your organisation is about as good as it gets in terms of marketing. That idea is of course up for debate if you’d like it to be, but it’s our starting block for today.

It seems that, to create a brand advocate or champion, a lot of what we focus on can be teaching someone about brand guidelines and rules. Or getting colours right, that sort of thing. While I utterly understand the need for strong brand identity to have consistency, and that without it a brand doesn’t really make sense, I think that giving it most of our focus misses key opportunities.

Anyone that you or your organisation interacts with is a potential brand advocate. And if they don’t champion us, then we could do worse than to ask ourselves why that is. In case I need to point at it, I am also saying that all users and donors should be outspoken advocates for their charities. And the same goes for asking ourselves why they aren’t.

I don’t have many brands, but I am about as good a marketing tool as you could get for the ones that have won me over. I’m a huge brand champion for my bank, for instance. And how many people can say that? It certainly is not perfect, but I can hand-on-heart say that I love my bank and frequently find myself telling people. Now how does that come about?

When I first went in to open a new account, disgruntled with my other, they asked where I lived. On hearing that I (at the time) lived in West London, the woman asked if I was sure that I wanted to open an account with them as they would soon only have one branch in London and she didn’t want me to have a difficult time getting to the into the branch when I needed to – So maybe they weren’t the bank for me? I nearly fell off my chair at the thoughtfulness of it.

And so my new bank began to build up my inner brand champion – just with this personal, honest approach. They have never misled me, give me a ring if they are concerned and have consistently managed to treat me with all of the nice bits of banking with a small town branch, regardless of being based smack bang in the centre of Piccadilly Circus.

They show me they care about me. They show me they know me. And so I tell the world.

Now THAT is how to build a brand champion.

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.