Charity Begins At Home

Mike Maguire pointed me towards some of the things in this blog post. I promised I wouldn't write it until he'd done his own, but since he's now crossed to the for-profit dark side...here we go...

As someone who fundraises for international humanitarian organisations, one of my least favourite phrases in the world is 'Charity begins at home'.

Whether or not it is explicitly racist, I hate the notion that there might be a mathematical relationship between how far away someone is standing from you and how much their life is worth. As someone put it to me: When a person says charity begins at home what they really mean is that it ends at home.

I especially hate it when Irish people say it, forgetting how recently it was that we depended on international aid and relied on other countries to welcome our emigrants (We still do).

The Sun in 1989

There are some truly beautiful stories of how people around the world step up to help the Irish - in particular during our most desperate time: the Great Famine.

There was the Choctaw tribe in Oklahoma who, despite having so little and suffering so much, donated $170 (worth tens of thousands today) to help the Irish. And the Islamic Ottoman Empire sent us a fortune.

And why are we so happy to ignore the fact that our economy is propped up by customers 'over there' and foreign visitors. It is sad to see some of the xenophobic comments that float around Irish news stories and charity social media posts, knowing that their authors may not even have existed if it weren't for the compassion and generosity of others.

I hope my country and my generation will be remembered as charitable.

And I hope we will see the phrase 'charity begins at home' disappear, or at least revert back to it's original meaning. You see, it doesn't mean help yourself (and people who look like you). Quite the opposite. Instead it means that by being charitable and kind to all, others will follow.

Lead by example. And dismissing the most vulnerable in our world flippantly with some meaningless catch phrase - well, that's not the example I want to set.

Some Dates For Your Fundraising Diary

Here are some great events coming up, if you're in to charities and fundraising:

Fundraising Essentials
On 24th September Fundraising Ireland are running a really cool 'introduction to fundraising'. There are some really good speakers lined up - some of the best fundraisers in Ireland...and me.

Fundraising Ireland's DM Series
This looks really good - 4 separate seminars run by some of the most experienced DM fundraisers around. It's not too late to book for the sessions on the 18th and 25th of September.

International Fundraising Congress
The IFC in Holland is always a great event. From 14th to 17th October fundraisers from around the world get together to learn, develop and gossip. It's pretty epic. I'll be running a session on Telephone Fundraising.

Launch of #GoodCharity
The GoodCharity.ie website has been live for a while now, and the response so far has been great. We're trying to run an official launch next month, and get the media involved. At the moment we're pencilled in for 30th October.

Increase Your Fundraising By 85% - Event In The Wesht Of Ireland
I'm running a really special morning seminar with The Southern Branch of Fundraising Ireland in Cork on November 11th.

IoF Northern Ireland
On the 13th of November the annual NI fundraising conference takes place in Belfast. It's always good and really reasonably priced.

Toastmasters For Good
I'm still getting this set up, but working towards a series of early evening meetings in October/November. These will be free opportunities to help improve your public speaking if you work in the non-profit sector.

Recommended Fundraising Reading

Blogs

• Change Fundraising (Mine!)
• Jeff Brooks' Future Fundraising Now
• 101fundraising Crowdblog
• Pamela Grow's blog
• Charity Chicks
• tobinaldrich | A few thoughts on fundraising
• Sean Triner's blog
• FundraiserBeth
• Denisa Casement's "Opinionated. I know."
• Kevin Delaney's Blog
• The Agitator
• Jonathon Grapsas' Blog
• Beate thinks out loud
• Lisa Sargent's sporadic newsletter
• Clairification Philanthropy
• Fundraising Detective's Reading Round-Up
• SOFII
• Rogare's Critical Fundraising

Books

• Simone Joyaux's Keep Your Donors (And I imagine her other books too)
• Anything by Jeff Brooks
• Anything by Tom Ahern
• Dan Pallotta's Uncharitable
• Adrian Sargeant and Jen Shang's Fundraising Principles & Practice
• George Smith's Asking Properly
• Ken Burnett's Storytelling Can Change The World (Haven't finished it yet)
• Roger Craver's Retention Fundraising (Haven't finished it yet)

Articles & Videos

• What we can learn from one of the worst charities in the world
• Dan Pallotta: The way we think about charity is dead wrong

How To Fundraise

• Check Your Next Appeal Letter Against This 16-Point List Before Sending
• Your Year-End Fundraising Appeal Letter (Downloadable Template)
• Your 7-Step Donor Retention Data Checklist
• Automation Kills

DM

• OPINION: THE FORGOTTEN MAN OF DIRECT MARKETING FUNDRAISING?
• Agents Of Good's Star Wars series

Telephone Fundraising

• Fundraising By Phone by Adrian Salmon (£)
• Pell & Bales' blog

Major Gifts

• 16 Ways to Get a Meeting With Your Major Gift Prospect

Charity Videos: Good versus Bad

Here are two recent Irish charity videos:

  

One is cheap, poorly acted, with bad sound quality, and looks like it took about half an hour to make. IT IS AMAZING!

The other is slick and fancy, loads of people involved and obviously took a lot of work. I don't like it at all.

The Irish Cancer Society video is so average because:

• It's all "We we we". We launched this, we did this. No you didn't! Your donors did!
• There are so many numbers...so many stats.
• As much as I like their CEO, he shouldn't be in the video. And get rid of the fundraisers too. Give me more nurses! Give me more service users!
• Get rid of words and phrases like 'Strategic plan', 'incognisant', 'collaborative', 'oncologist'.
• Thank you count = 0

 The IMNDA video is so good because:

• It's all thank yous
• So many service users, so many nurses. Not a CEO in sight!
• It's filled with real people with first names. No surnames!
• Real descriptions of how they spend money, spoken like humans.
• It's so cheesy and cute!

When you're making a video for your charity (and you should be...you only need a phone) there is one simple thing to remember. It is a bitter pill to swallow but it is really one of the most important things in fundraising:

Nobody cares about your charity or your CEO. It is all about your donors and the people they help.

How Your Charity Can Replicate The #IceBucketChallenge

Let me just get it out there straight away:

You can't replicate the #IceBucketChallenge,

the #NoMakeUpSelfie

or the next big thing.

(I'm sorry - I kind of tricked you in to opening this blog post. But wait! I will tell you how to increase your chances.)

As I said before you can't replicate these things and instead your fundraising should focus on things that are more scientific and more reliable. You also need to be ready just in case it does happen. I've got some tips here about how to be ready and Zoe Amar did an excellent post here.

So how do you increase the chances of an #IceBucketChallenge kicking off for your charity?

Through good old fashioned fundraising.

You see, ALS didn't really benefit out of nowhere. When the Ice Bucket Challenge started it was vaguely for any charity, until one guy decided to bring ALS in to the mix. Why did he do it? Because one of his relatives had ALS, he had confidence in the charity, he knew they needed money, and he'd probably already donated to them.

So how do you replicate that?

1. Gain people's confidence by running effectively, being transparent, and showing the public how you help.
2. Tell people you need money and what you're going to do with it.
3. Get people to donate to you through traditional fundraising which is proven to work.

If you have all that stuff in place then there's a better chance the next big thing will come your way.

And even if it doesn't? (Which it almost certainly won't)

Well, you'll still be raising money.

Your Donation Page Is Out-Of-Date

Your donation page is probably not as good as it could be. As a result you're losing donations and the people who are giving to you aren't probably giving as much as they could.

You need to overhaul your donation page and there's plenty of great tips out there on what it should look like:

• Beate Sørum posts awesome tips on her blog: "From good intentions to more web donations"
• Both Jeff Brooks and Sean Triner (essential follows) shared this post: "20 Landing Pages Torn Apart"
• And I've blogged about it before: "Raise More Money On-Line Tomorrow"

But even if you follow all that great advice your donation page is going to be out-of-date.

Why?

Well, because you don't know what your next appeal is. You don't know what the next big news story is. When you designed your donation page you might have know why people were visiting it, but you probably don't know why they're going to visit it today or tomorrow.

So how do you deal with that?

Well, the next time you're putting your money in to your website make sure you get an adaptable donation page. You almost certainly don't have an in-house website person and can't afford to pay an agency every time you want to change something, so you need to make sure you can edit your donation page from the back-end at no extra cost.

More than that, you need more than one donation page. You need to have your standard donation page, but you need to be able to quickly set up up a donation page customised to the #IceBucketChallenge, #FreeGaza, #MigrantX or whatever is going to motivate people to want to help you.

The customised pages need to have relevant images, relevant text, relevant stories, a relevant Thank You, and a relevant 'shopping list' - even a relevant URL. Have a look next time and what you'll see is almost all charities have the same generic donation page with no mention of what drove them there.

Remember, your donors aren't donating to you. They're donating to your cause...or more specifically how they interpret your cause. Your donation page needs to match their interpretation.

The Obligatory #IceBucketChallenge Blog Post - Criticism of Criticisms

It was inevitable that I'd do a blog post on the #IceBucketChallenge. As a Fundraising Consultant and Service Provider my business model relies on me piggybacking my thoughts on to the latest trend, attempting to add some insight that you'll associate with my name. As this post is shared it spreads my name and moves me up the search results, which then converts to more business and increased income, allowing me to accumulate more material objects until I die at 64. Anyway...

In case you missed it, the Ice Bucket Challenge is the latest on-line viral sensation which also claims to raise money and awareness for charity (in this case ALS a.k.a. Lou Gehrig's Disease).

It's interesting...but more interesting is that the tide is starting to turn and it's becoming more and more fashionable to criticise these things rather than support or just ignore them. You'll see that - we see it with every positive movement, as we have with charities themselves.

I've seen articles call it a 'damaging fad' and even 'the end of charity fund-raising'.

The criticism's I've read so far are:

• It's not raising extra money for charity...it's just taking money from elsewhere.
  No doubt some people that donate $10 to this challenge will then find themselves having to decline a $10 donation elsewhere. That's unfortunate but it's still a donation. However, the people we're interested in are the ones that donate the $10 and then find themselves having to buy less drink, cigarettes, crap, etc. What the 'for-good' sector has effectively done is stolen some business from the 'for-bad' sector and made an effort at increasing national percentage donation levels that have otherwise remained pretty steady.
   
• People are having too much fun.
  And presumably they're not having more fun...they're just taking fun away from other places?
  I never understand this - even if you work in a morgue or warzone or charity you're allowed to find fun as long as it's not at the expense of others. Jesus, otherwise what's the point of anything?
   
• It doesn't raise any awareness.
  While 'awareness' may well be useless, you can't argue that more people searching for and reading about the disease is in fact raising awareness.
   
• Some people aren't even donating.
  That's right. And these people weren't going to donate anyway. But some people are donating that hadn't before. And some of these 'some people' will go on to donate again.
   
• Some people are donating to the wrong charity!Well they're probably doing so because they have a personal connection to that cause. So, whatever.
    
• We should be donating without these fads. And we should be donating monthly because it's more cost-effective!
  We shooooould...but if you've ever met a human and/or have any self-awareness you'll know that we don't always do what we should.
   
• It's a waste of waterReally? Kind of sounds like you're clutching at straws, like the people who say that electric cars use more energy than normal cars. But if you're really worried about it then use sea water. It's freezing.
    
• It's so annoying!
  The reason the Ice Bucket Challenge is so annoying is because it's working so well. If your Facebook timeline was filled 20 million news stories about a cash collection on Tara Street you'd be annoyed too. Now you know how I feel about GAA and Harry Potter.
  But my buzz with fundraising is always that the results justify a tiny bit of annoyance and inconvenience. I always try to picture a kid who will benefit from these donations and someone telling his parents he shouldn't be helped anymore because their Twitter feed is annoying. You know where you won't hear about the Ice Bucket Challenge? In a book, a park, or a Marx Brothers movie.
   
• Ice bucket purists are annoyed that the charity element is detracting from their first love.
  OK, I made that one up.

You'll notice a lot of these criticisms can be applied to cash collections, challenge events, galas, etc.

For me there is only one valid criticism, and it's not even a criticism of the campaign. It's more of a criticism of consultants, bloggers, Boards, and fundraisers that encourage you to try and replicate these things.

As I said in my #NoMakeUpSelfie post, charities should be prepared and ready to capitalise on these amazing things that crop out of nowhere.

But don't waste time and money trying to replicate it. Forget chasing the viral dragon and instead focus on good old-fashioned, reliable fundraising. And have some fun.

Here's my Ice Bucket Challenge: