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.
One of the jobs I had while at university in Manchester was at a shop called Schuh. We sold shoes, if that wasn’t immediately obvious.
One of the motivational team speeches I was a party to regularly was based around how stupid people are. It goes a little like this:
People are stupid.
They come in here and say things like, “Do you sell trainers?”*
And there is a WALL of trainers.
People are stupid.
There is some basic social identity theory and some really lazy community-building at play here. The manager’s goal is twofold:
To demonstrate that my manager understands my crappy job
To arm me against the more trying elements of my crappy job
Let’s not even engage with the stupidity of telling your team that their job sucks. Instead, let’s take that for granted and have a look at the nature of the us-and-them mentality. The subtext of this example is so straightforward that it can barely be classed as "sub-", but I'd outline it as follows…
It’s us against them. We, thankfully, are right and they, the stupid/terrible/insert as appropriate people, are wrong. We must, therefore, band together in hope of surviving a whole day, despite the awful people who keep talking to us.
I would expect you’ve seen this coping strategy if you’ve ever set foot in a work place. It also makes choice appearances in our personal lives. It’s really used in roles that have people-facing elements. It’s the short route to motivating us to stick at the task for a bit. Granted, “You’re one of us” is really quite nice. But “You’re one of us and they are terrible,” can be more damaging.
I’ve stumbled on us-and-them consistently in my working life: Working in the shoe shop where the customers are idiots by default; Working in the office where departmental silos are easier to fuel than to dissolve (Programmes has never been supportive of Fundraising/Fundraising doesn’t care what’s involved in Programmes’ work); Working with the face-to-face team leader who doesn’t know how to equip their team to get through the morning, so they cope by creating private signals for the team to use to share a potential donor’s rudeness. It goes on, but these are plenty enough examples for us to look at.
The us-and-them approach tends to give us easy, sound bite answers:
Q: Why do the customers keep asking me questions?
A: Because they are idiots.
Q: Why won’t the person in that department give me what I need?
A: Because they are unhelpful.
Q: Why did that member of the public just snap at me?
A: Because they are a horrible, snappy person.
It’s easier to see, I think, the inherent negativity of this us-and-them worldview when you line these up next to each other. But when they are littered through our day-to-days, it’s much easier to fail to spot the negativity or the fact that not one of these answers the question posed. They just restate our opinion of what has happened. Why isn’t that person being helpful? Because they are unhelpful.
It’s a very 2-D worldview, that.
A more interesting worldview is to be curious about people’s drivers. Why are they doing that? Rather than repeating what they are doing with different words. It’s more time-consuming, sure, but is ultimately more rewarding, too. And we all like rewards, let’s be honest.
Thinking about people’s drivers when asking questions is a little less definitive than us-and-them answers, but could look a bit like this:
Q: Why do the customers keep asking me questions?
A: Maybe they are out of their comfort zone, so are not firing on all cylinders. And whereas I stare at the wall of trainers all day, maybe they beelined for assistence and haven't seen them...so maybe they would really appreciate being looked after in the store they are trying to shop in.
Q: Why won’t the person in that department give me what I need?
A: Maybe they don’t really understand why I’m asking. Maybe I’ve failed to demonstrate why it’s important. Did I explain this project to them and why their help was relevant?
Q: Why did that member of the public just snap at me?
A: It's possible they are having a much worse day than me. Maybe I can assert more control over this situation, where there is great potential for me to feel powerless, by smiling and wishing them well.
Something-more-interesting sells more shoes, seeps through more silos, signs up more supporters. Something-more-interesting gives us leverage to affect our environments in a way that us-and-them never will and, don't underestimate the importance of this, gives us more control over whether our jobs are crappy or not.
In a knowing misinterpretation of the proverb: May we live in interesting times.
________
*Trainers is sneakers for anyone who needs a translation.
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!
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:
Your
accent is difficult for me and I did not understand any of the words that
you just used. Please repeat, with clarification.
I’m
not sure that I quite like your tone, missy.
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:
Have
enough training and support to be able to answer off-script and from their
heart
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.
