Connecting or Engagement?

The distinction between engagement and connecting is significant. We have all been to a concert where you liked it but were not wowed.  In contrast have you been to a concert where you couldn't wait to purchase tickets to see the act again? Which one of those connected with you? Each of them technically engaged you.

The idea of engagement has its roots in stewarding our donors on our terms. In many ways is just more of the same type of thinking that brought us the retention rates that our industry experiences today.

Livingston Taylor teaches at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. He has also written a book on the art of building an audience. It is these principles that would serve the nonprofit community well to understand in order to build an emotionally engaged donor base.

Connecting with people in an emotional way that has them wanting more is not achieved through a

statistical number of communications or by a multichannel delivery system. An emotional connection can only be achieved through both the understanding of the individual you're looking to connect with and a delivery that reveals your authentic self.

One of the secrets to dramatically growing your donor retention rates is directly connected to your ability to build an emotionally engaged audience. Take a few moments and enjoy these works of art on how to connect with and build an audience.

Measuring What Can Now Be Measured

In many ways, in the business of raising money, we create based on what we measure. What we measure seems so small in relation to what really matters and what is now possible to measure. Our focus on measuring the quantity and size of transactions, while important, limits our view and ultimately our strategies.

How helpful would be for us to know more about our donors than just an understanding of their recent transactions with us? What industry are they in? What are the current conversations going on within that industry? What do their personal and professional networks looks like? What is being talked about in those different networks? What is the sentiment in each, at this moment!?

Our donors/customers do not live in silos. They exist in a networked world and those networks affect how they think, act and what they believe. In many ways the world that our donors are immersed in creates a lens for their decision making strategies.

The ability today to learn and understand much more about our customers creates extraordinary

opportunity for the nonprofit community to design and deliver donor experiences. If our focus remains solely on the transaction then we will limit our organization's ability to maximize its potential.

Today we must have the capacity to pull data from the structured and unstructured world to inform our decision-making process. What is in store for your donor knowledge system  in the year ahead?

Fosbury Flop Your Culture

I was recently reading a thread inside of the LinkedIn group, it was a group of predominantly young professionals. Their conversation centered around using Instagram  as an annual report platform. At one level it was encouraging to read about such creativity on another it was evidence of the strength of the gravitational pull to keep things the way they have always been.

Limiting creativity to exist in our old structures will be incremental at best in improving the experience our donors appear to be craving. For example when you look at this image what do you see? An old woman?

Most likely you've seen this image 1 million times before. You know that one view is an old woman and another view is young women. Knowing this from your experience your mind can quickly turn off its ability to see something new. For example as you look at that image do see the pixels? Do you see it being displayed on the computer screen that was built somewhere? Do you understand what was going on in the lives of the people who built that screen? Where did it travel from to be in your hands? Experience is an incredibly powerful thing, but the opposite of every truth is another equal truth. Experience can also be very limiting if you aren't able to keep it in check.

In the summer of 1968 Dick Fosbury changed high jumping forever. His unique methodology for jumping the high bar changed the sport and had the Olympic Committee scratching its head. Dick discovered a better way and changed the sport, for the better.

It's possible that your donors are looking for you to create a Fosbury flop experience for them. Not that they are looking for you to jump over them backwards, but they are hopeful that you have the ability to create a new way for them to experience philanthropy. Will you tweak the past or create a completely new experience. Which do you believe will engage your best customers?