Whisper those three little letters…R.F.M.

Last month, I was fortunate enough to visit Melbourne, Australia, and meet with a number of JCA’s clients there. I spent one afternoon with some of the staff of the Australian Ballet, perhaps Australia’s most renowned dance company. One of the meeting participants was Judy Turner, an accomplished fundraiser who is relatively new to the organization. Given her organization’s great popularity, Judy immediately recognized that her fundraising opportunity was a huge base of prospects in the form of ticket buyers. She also saw her challenge was finding a manageable number of well-qualified donors out of this sea of possibilities. If you only have time to call 500 donors out of a pool of 30,000, don’t you want to spend your time on the best 500?

Judy’s immediate, no-nonsense idea for zeroing in on her top prospects was encapsulated in those three letters she said to me: R.F.M. RFM stands for Recency, Frequency, Monetary, and refers to a segmentation concept that has been around the direct marketing world for years. The idea is to take a pool of prospects and categorize them based on those three attributes. How recently have they interacted with your organization? How often do they interact? How much do they spend/donate when they interact?

Does the Raiser’s Edge Help Raise Money?

Does any fundraising software really help raise money? Should it?

Perhaps it would help to put these questions in context; how would you defend the expense of purchasing, maintaining and managing your fundraising software to your Board?

Consider the typical organization that decides to buy The Raiser’s Edge from Blackbaud.  The investment can be significant. The organization needs to purchase software licenses for all of its users (usually paid up-front) and face recurring annual fees of roughly 22.5% for technical support and software updates. However, before using the software they must incur the expense and disruption to their business of converting data, documenting policies, training users and re-writing reports. And let’s not forget that The Raiser’s Edge is a sophisticated product, requiring many organizations to hire dedicated staff to manage the system.

So where is the ROI?

A Changing Conversation on Nonprofit Website Transactions

We’ve been working with nonprofit technology for more than twenty years, and nonprofit websites have been a part of our client conversations for at least the last decade.  It has been interesting to me to note how those conversations have changed over time and their impact on technology projects.

 

Our website must tell our story effectively.

These were the words we heard years ago, as nonprofit websites became an important part of substantiating and communicating to prospective supporters.  The idea was to tell a story, with web visitors being an inactive audience.  And for a time, that was a good goal to have.

Our website should take donations / sell a ticket.

Ah, now we are interacting! No longer static web brochures, websites for nonprofits starting as early as a decade ago needed to be able to handle a transaction. The bar for a long while was low: can a fairly determined and motivated supporter or patron complete a transaction with us? If a nonprofit could answer yes, that was a good achievement.  “We can sell a membership online” was, for a time, a boast that could make other nonprofit colleagues take note. 

Working Without a Net

Another four-color, 50-page, glossy brochure thudded onto my doorstep this afternoon. Of course it got me thinking about business intelligence.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Long before I came to work at JCA, I was an annual fund fundraiser. Back then, I lived and died by my monthly fundraising goals. It was my primary measure of success. I was all about the monthly goal. So guess what? I was looking at the wrong number. The gross fundraising dollars my department brought in were important, sure, but what kept the lights on at my nonprofit wasn’t my gross, it was my net. That is, after expenses, how much actual money did I bring in? Anyone can raise a million dollars, but if it costs a million dollars to do it, what’s the point?

I know a lot of fundraisers, and there is much talk at parties about goals, but seldom do I hear about nets. 

The Smarter Way to Convert Your Fundraising Data

Over the past 20 years JCA has seen the fundraising software industry evolve; from DOS to Windows, from client/server to ASP to SaaS, from data silos to enterprise solutions that connect directly to constituents over the Internet.  At JCA, we understand that no matter how well a software package functions and no matter how sophisticated the features, a bad data conversion will render the system useless and undermine user confidence.  From our experience in managing implementations, we have seen that the same vendors who have built best-of-breed software products often have unsophisticated data conversion procedures.  This need in the market inspired us to develop internal conversion software with the sole purpose of converting fundraising data.

When I started at JCA more than 10 years ago, there were four consultants responsible for all aspects of data integration projects, from meetings with clients to conversion programming, training and report writing.  As you might guess, we each had our own methods and preferred tools for completing the conversions. It was especially difficult for us to help each other on data conversion programming since we each maintained our own script libraries and frequently used different programming applications – a couple of us used FoxPro, others used MS Access, and occasionally various command line applications were thrown into the mix (remember this was a long time ago).

As the company started to grow, we decided it would be useful to consolidate all of our conversion programming and devise a methodology that would provide a common language and tool set. We had several goals for this project:

• Encourage more collaboration via software and methodology
• Enable less technically experienced consultants to assist with the conversions
• Establish a library of database and table structures for fundraising and ticketing applications that we encountered frequently

The result of this endeavor was an application we call FIDO.

Initially we developed FIDO using MS Access as a front end to MS SQL Server 2000 databases. We recently reinvented FIDO as a .Net windows application written in C# with an SQL Server 2005/2008 back-end.

When working on a data conversion of any complexity, substantial data cleanup is inevitable.  Most fundraising systems have similar high-level functionality (name, address, gift, pledges, etc.) but each software typically stores data very differently from the next.  FIDO was designed to allow every field, code and value within the source system to be reconfigured, recoded, moved or deleted  to feed the target system in a way that fits the needs of fundraisers.  In my experience, simple field-to-field mappings represent only a tiny subset of the work required.  A successful conversion may demand the reconfiguration of nearly every detail in a database, and FIDO helps JCA achieve this objective.  Here are some examples:

Donna Caputo Guest Blog Post at 101Fundraising

I’m excited to announce that I have a guest post on the 101fundraising.org blog today.  This newly formed crowdblog offers fundraisers and other professionals involved in philanthropy an opportunity to blog and connect.  The site serves the international and Dutch fundraising community, publishing posts in both English and Dutch.  I wanted to support the site, so I submitted a blog post about the highly-charged situation in which someone requests the return of a gift.

Please read my blog here, and feel free to leave me a comment.  If you’re interested in blogging yourself, the site includes all the information you’ll need to sign up.

Donna Caputo is the Director of Consulting Services at Jacobson Consulting Applications, Inc. (JCA)
JCA provides strategic consulting to the world’s leading nonprofits.

Arts Funding Crisis in the UK

Greetings from London, where the arts world is bracing for its worst crisis since 1974, when a combination of steep increases in the price of oil and a coal strike paralyzed the UK economy and, by extension, the arts world.  Fast forward to 2011, and we have another potential oil shock coupled with impending government austerity measures of the like never seen in post-war times.  Unlike in the States, where there is a culture of fundraising and private support for the arts, the UK has long subsidized its arts community with free admission to many museums and heavy subsidies for non-profit theatres.  British patrons, especially those of the middle class, feel entitled to free or heavily discounted access – and it appears that is going to change, and change drastically.

Our clients here are scared.  In theatres, where government support can account for 50% or more, there will be huge holes in their budgets should national and local support go to zero – a real possibility given current budget discussions.  And museums face the real – and terrifying – prospect of having to charge admission to cover their anticipated shortfalls.  How will British patrons respond?  Will there be an outpouring of private support?  Will the privileged and cultured middle class pay for something that they’ve taken for granted as their right?

The Hat Never Comes Off

Whatever your political sensibilities, the tape of the NPR Foundation’s former top fundraiser sharing unguarded opinions to build rapport in a lunch with people posing as left-leaning potential major donors is decidedly cringe-worthy.

A mere 12 minutes into their lunch (3:26 on the published video), Ron Shiller, then president of NPR Foundation, says “I’ll talk personally, as opposed to wearing my NPR hat.” And then launches into his opinions on Republicans and anti-intellectualism, among other things. The individual posing as the potential donor is heard on the recording saying “I like it when you take off your NPR hat,” an ironic reference to the fact that the conservative actor is happy to be taping such inflammatory statements but meant on the face of it to indicate the potential donor’s approval of such informal rapport-building conversation.

Theorist Erving Goffman posited that we are creating our selves through social interaction at any given moment in time, what he termed “front stage”  behavior. No one can be witness to another’s “back stage” self, the place where we stop being a social construct. In practice, we routinely issue invitations like Ron Shiller’s – to that supposed back-stage self – by saying things like “this is off the record,” or “I am taking off my organizational hat.” The reality is we are simply signaling that our construct is now going to be different, somehow more genuine, and that it should be perceived without reference to our organization.

Yes, there’s the rub. Ah, how tempting it can be to ask a donor to perceive us without reference to our organization.  Sometimes we really feel a personal connection with a donor we have known a long time.  Other times we are simply searching for a common point upon which to build a relationship between ourselves, individually, and that donor.

I’m Not Your Member

The following is a true story.

In the fall of 2010, I made a gift in memory of a friend’s mother.  My friend and her family requested gifts to one of two charities in lieu of flowers.  I picked one and went to the organization’s website to make my gift.

The website would only accept a membership payment.  The site offered a form you could print and mail in that included places to specify the memorial information and notification name and address.  I printed the form, wrote out a check, and mailed off my gift in December.

On February 4th I received a thank-you letter from the organization.  The letter was dated January 24th and referred to the “membership payment” I made on December 31st.  Apparently I am now a member of this organization, which is halfway across the country from my home, whose benefits I did not request and cannot use.  The acknowledgement envelope contained four pieces:  reply envelope, information about planned giving, a letter/receipt, and a reply form requesting another gift.

So why am I not sending another gift?