See What’s Out There

I was quoted a bunch in the latest issue of the Chronicle of Philanthropy. The article is about the decline of direct mail and the rise of online prospecting. Four — count ‘em, 4 — of our clients are mentioned in the article. Amnesty International, American Jewish World Service, AVODAH: The Jewish Service Corp and ISIS.

They even linked to the microsite we did for AVODAH, Jews4NewOrleans.org. If you haven’t seen it, go there and donate.

Here’s the article:

From the issue dated April 3, 2008

New Rules of Attraction

As traditional fund-raising methods falter, charities look for new ways to appeal to online donors

By Holly Hall

This week the Nature Conservancy will kick off a campaign to ask online donors to give $1 apiece to help the charity plant a billion trees in Brazil’s rain forest. But conservancy officials have no idea if the electronic drive will meet its goal of raising $1-million.

The Plant a Billion campaign is designed to attract people who have never previously given to the environmental organization. But it could “go gangbusters or be a flop,” says Sue Citro, the charity’s senior manager for digital membership.

For an organization that raises more money than all but a handful of charities, such uncertainty is unusual. But at big charities across the country, fund raisers face that same queasy feeling as they try to figure out a solution to an unsettling reality. Traditional approaches to seeking new donors by mail or telephone are growing less effective and more expensive every year, yet online appeals are not raising enough to replace them.

“Direct mail is on life support,” says Michael Hoffman, chief executive of See3, a Chicago consulting firm that specializes in nonprofit fund raising and communications. “Charities that have relied on direct mail to get new donors have to start thinking about what’s next, or they will wake up one day and find that an aggressive start-up has taken their place.”

Mailings Lose Ground

Plenty of charities still raise most of their contributions with direct mail, but mass mailings are losing their power to attract new supporters. In 2007, the number of new donors who responded to charity mailings dropped by a median of 6.2 percent in a study of 72 of the nation’s biggest charities, on top of another 10.4-percent median drop in 2006.

Online fund raising offers a promising alternative, especially since people who make their first gift to charity online give one and a half times as much as those whose first gift was made by mail, according to Target Analytics, a Boston company that conducted the studies of both online and direct-mail results. Repeat gifts by online donors also tend to be larger.

But persuading donors to give online for the first time is not easy, says Ettore Rossetti, associate director of Internet marketing at Save the Children. The charity has solicited donations from people who signed an online petition to help needy children, but that approach has achieved only “mixed success,” he says.

“Advocacy people tend to be engaged in lending their voice, not necessarily opening their wallet.”

To figure out what approaches will attract first-time donors, many charities are hiring extra staff members to devise and test new ideas, and are upgrading software to analyze the results. Until such solicitations become more lucrative, however, most charities are still spending about as much as they did on direct mail, telemarketing, and other traditional ways of finding new donors.

“I get executive directors all the time who want to abandon direct-mail acquisition completely,” says Jeff Patrick, president of Common Knowledge, a San Francisco company that advises charities on online fund raising and marketing. “Online fund raising will continue to grow, but it will not replace direct mail in five years,” Mr. Patrick predicts. The movement from offline to online giving, he adds, “is an evolution, not a revolution.”

Other fund-raising experts agree that online fund raising has a long way to go before it becomes a successful way to attract new donors.

“This is an extremely confusing period,” says Mark Rovner, president of Sea Change Strategies, a Takoma Park, Md., fund-raising consulting company. “The old ways aren’t working, and the new ways are not clear.”

Still, fund raisers have found some new approaches in recent months that are helping them better attract donors who can eventually become the lifeblood of an organization. Among them:

Make pitches in person. World Vision, the international relief group, asks people who make monthly gifts to “sponsor” a needy child overseas to volunteer to seek donations from other people.

Two and a half years ago, the charity started recruiting people to give presentations about monthly giving to their colleagues at work or church. People who give at least eight presentations a year are named “Child Ambassadors.” Members of the ambassador group, which has grown to 255 people, must apply for the volunteer position and agree to a background check.

Last year, volunteers recruited more than 4,000 new monthly donors.

Vicki Casper, a flight attendant at Southwest Airlines, is World Vision’s most successful recruiter. She has single-handedly persuaded 400 people in the past two years to become monthly donors, including a passenger on a recent flight to Indianapolis. He offered to sponsor a dozen children for at least a year and, as he got off the plane, handed Ms. Casper checks for each child totaling more than $5,000.

If her results don’t attest to Ms. Casper’s dedication, the recorded greeting on her cell phone does: “Hi, this is Vicki Casper, World Vision Child Ambassador, standing as a link between you and the poor and needy of this world.”

With the ambassadors, “we’ve seen big potential,” says Miyon Kautz, World Vision’s national director of volunteers. In fact, she says, the charity has just finished training three new staff members who will recruit ambassadors regionally. The goal for each region: obtaining 1,000 new monthly donors over the next 12 months.

Tap existing online donors. Charities can take a lesson from the “member-get-a-member” drives held by professional societies, says Kevin Whorley, a Bethesda, Md., consultant. After running direct-mail fund raising at Catholic Relief Services for several years, Mr. Whorley now advises associations.

Holding contests and offering prizes or other rewards can improve charities’ ability to get donors engaged in finding new supporters, he says.

As an example, he points to the National Association of Home Builders’ annual membership day, in which local branches compete during the year to see which one can sign up the most new members.

Winners receive modest prizes, such as an upgrade to a better hotel at the association’s annual conference or a fleece jacket, notes Mr. Whorley. The most recent membership day yielded more than 12,000 new members.

“It is fascinating to me how the member-get-a-member thing, which is an old-school technique, gets new traction in this new world of online relationships,” says Mr. Hoffman, the consultant. He is now working with American Jewish World Service, an international relief group, to design an online campaign to persuade the charity’s donors to get involved in finding new supporters.

Mr. Hoffman suggests, based on his research into what makes such campaigns successful for associations, that charities include in their pitches to existing supporters incentives such as the chance to win a trip, a clear description of what difference donors’ participation will make, easy-to-use online tools, and concrete goals for enlisting new donors.

“You can’t just say, ‘Tell your friends about this great organization,’” Mr. Hoffman says. “It is far better to say, ‘Help us recruit 500 new members by June 1 so we can send 5,000 mosquito nets to Africa at the beginning of mosquito season to fight malaria.’”

Couple advocacy projects with online fund raising. The Planned Parenthood Federation of America knew that anti-abortion protesters planned to show up at 10 of the charity’s clinics over 40 days in the fall, so it used the occasion to start “I am Emily X,” an online video diary and blog.

The site featured videotaped statements from Planned Parenthood clinic workers who described the effects of the demonstration on both themselves and patients, some of whom were harassed by the protesters.

Visitors to the site were invited to post comments and messages to the clinics throughout the protest, and they were asked to pledge a small amount of money, anywhere from 5 cents to $10, for each of the 511 protesters Planned Parenthood counted in front of its clinics.

The site, coupled with e-mail appeals about the project, raised $96,531, and more than half of those who gave were new donors, says Tom Subak, Planned Parenthood’s vice president for online services. “We got a phenomenal response.”

Test fund-raising elements of Web sites. Amnesty International is using new software to randomly send online visitors to slightly different versions of a single Web page so it can see which online elements do the most to persuade people to make a donation or visit other parts of the organization’s site.

After two months, Amnesty found a version of its donation page that increased the number of people who made a gift from 35 to 55 percent, says Steve Daigneault, managing director of Internet communications. In the month of December alone, he says, Amnesty raised $128,000 more with the improved donation page; than it would have otherwise. Those returns, he adds, are many times greater than the cost of the software.

Mr. Daigneault is now conducting additional tests to improve the organization’s online action center, where visitors can sign petitions and engage in other forms of advocacy; that part of the site is the main way in which Amnesty collects e-mail addresses of potential donors.

“I don’t think many nonprofits realize how important this is,” he says of the tests. “Once people catch on, it will be huge.”

Get a celebrity to talk up an online appeal. Save the Children recruited 1,800 new donors and generated more than $50,000 with an online campaign that enabled visitors to its Web site to download or send electronic Valentine’s Day cards in exchange for a donation of $1 or more.

But the holiday alone was not enough to make the online greeting cards work for the children’s charity. The key to success, Mr. Rossetti says, was the actress Julianne Moore, who agreed to lend her support to the effort. To that end, she promoted the online cards when she appeared on The View, a popular daytime current-events show aimed at women. The actress has agreed to promote the e-cards again next year.

Do a year-end campaign online. Planned Parenthood has recruited thousands of new donors by sending a series of e-mail messages during the final month of the year. In December, before asking for any money, the charity sent 50,000 people a survey via e-mail to assess their interest in Planned Parenthood programs. That was followed by two other e-mail messages: a holiday greeting and a link to a YouTube video slide show highlighting the charity’s work over the past year. A fourth message asked for a donation.

The monthlong online campaign raised $1.6-million, including more than $500,000 in a single day, December 31. Out of the 8,957 donors, more than 1,200 contributors who gave a total of $246,000 last year were new to the organization.

The online year-end campaign has proven to be “one of our primary recruitment methods,” says Mr. Subak, the charity’s vice president for online services.

Promote online projects in social networks. Internet Sexuality Information Services, an Oakland, Calif., group, initially drew few entries when it asked people age 15 to 30 to enter an online video contest to express their views on sex education.

That began to change after two staff members began combing through social-networking sites, commenting on blogs, searching online news outlets, writing to reporters, and sharing the group’s own news — that it had received the first 10 entries, for example. By the time the deadline for entries passed three months later, the charity had received 70 entries.

While the video contest was not designed to raise money, the publicity efforts are helping the group attract contributions from new donors, says Deb Levine, executive director of the organization.

Three foundations have asked the group to submit proposals, two for six-figure grants. “This is a result of the visibility we generated through the contest and our positioning ourselves as thought leaders online,” she says.

Build a dedicated Web site. Some charities are creating stand-alone Web sites for specific projects, rather than just sending people to find information on one big site. The separate sites can be promoted to potential donors with related interests.

Avodah: the Jewish Service Corps, which involves young people in yearlong public-service projects in Chicago, New York, and Washington, has a new Web site that promotes its plan to start working in New Orleans in September. The charity tested the new site in December, using it to raise $15,000 to match a grant of the same amount contributed by an anonymous donor.

“People went to this site who we wouldn’t have contact with normally,” says Ilanit Gerblich Kalir, Avodah’s associate executive director. She says that the charity is seeking another challenge grant and plans to promote the site more aggressively online in coming months to people who have an interest in New Orleans and relief work.

“This is a low-cost way to get the word out to an audience you would otherwise not reach,” says Ms. Kalir. “We are a very small organization. We don’t have the money to do acquisition with direct mail.”

In the most recent issue of the Chronicle of Philanthropy I am quoted in an article titled “Telling Moving Stories.” The article features the case study of our client the American Jewish World Service. (Click here to view the front page of the issue.)

You need to subscribe to see the whole thing, but here’s an except:

When the American Jewish World Service used to talk about using video to illustrate its overseas aid projects, it usually meant gathering enough footage for a seven-minute spot to be shown to the people who would attend its annual fund-raising dinners.

But the Internet has changed all that.

The New York organization last year collected more than 60 hours of footage of the organization’s workers and volunteers helping AIDS patients in Uganda, tsunami victims in India, and poor residents of El Salvador, and it soon plans to use that extra footage for an extensive online video campaign. The collection of two- to three-minute spots will run on the group’s Web site, and the charity will also post video clips of interviews with volunteers on the popular online video site YouTube. The organization is also creating DVD’s of some of the videos to send to prospective donors.

What’s more, the charity has trained some of its staff members to shoot video using inexpensive cameras, with the goal of creating a library of footage that it can use to create fresh online videos for years to come. The cost for this effort — which included the purchase of four cameras and video-editing equipment — was about $2,000.

Susan Rosenberg, American Jewish World Service’s director of communications, says these projects are important to the organization because video, more than any other medium, can tell powerful, emotional stories that move supporters and donors to take action. Instead of simply telling potential donors about the organization’s overseas outreach work, it can show them the people it helps and allow them to hear volunteers and those they help in their own words.
“Increasingly, audio and video on the Web are critical tools [for nonprofit groups] for communicating to people about the work they’re doing, and I only see that intensifying,” Ms. Rosenberg says.

With YouTube’s announcement in September that it plans to dedicate a portion of its video-sharing site exclusively to charities, experts say many nonprofit groups are likely to follow American Jewish World Service’s lead.
…
Because of these factors, groups that attempt to use their internal, benefit-dinner videos for an online audience will find their efforts largely ignored, says Michael Hoffman, president of See3 Communications Company, a Chicago consulting group that helps charities produce online video campaigns. See3, for example, helped the American Jewish World Service create its documentary-style videos for YouTube and other Web sites, including the company’s own video portal, DoGooderTV.

“You can’t produce that dinner video over and over, three or four times a year, because most organizations don’t have the budget to do that,” Mr. Hoffman says of those richly produced videos, which typically cost between $20,000 and $75,000.

Instead, he encourages nonprofit groups to produce documentary-style videos that show their work and cast their workers as real people. Such videos can be done inexpensively — requiring only the investment in a digital video camera, video-editing software, and staff time.
Because many digital cameras and editing software are inexpensive, that investment can be less than $1,000.

“The model of continuous documentation is so important,” Mr. Hoffman says.

“If you’re shooting on a regular basis and capturing your work on a regular basis, there are great opportunities to show the kid who walks into your program timidly on the first day and three years later is the leader of a group,”he says. “To have the documentation of the transformation gives you material for powerful stories.”

My name is Michael Hoffman and this blog post is part of my effort to get Google and the other search engines to put this Michael Hoffman above those other Michael Hoffmans. You see, Michael Hoffman is actually a pretty common name. And one of these Michael Hoffman’s is a director — so he is in the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) and that helps his Google rankings. In fact, there are several Michael Hoffman’s in IMDb, including a sound and costume designer.

The thing that kills me, and got me writing here, is that the top ranking Michael Hoffman is an anti-Semite which is terribly ironic, and of course I will not link to him or even mention his name — may it be blotted out forever, amen — but he has all kinds of friends and foes linking to him and that raises his stock on Google.

If you don’t know this, one of Google’s main ingredients is links — links are like votes and the more folks that link to you, and the more significant they are, the higher your rankings. (It’s actually a lot more complicated than this, but if you get this much you are OK.) And so this post is another link connecting the search term Michael Hoffman to this website.

This Michael Hoffman was born in Baltimore, Maryland and is the son of Barbara and Donald Hoffman, brother of Alan and Carolyn Hoffman, and husband of Jessica Kaz and father to a bunch of kids. This Michael Hoffman is the CEO of See3 Communications, the founder of DoGooderTV and a member of the Board of Directors of AVODAH: The Jewish Service Corps. This Michael Hoffman lives in Chicagoland, and does not write fake history books or act in movies, unless you count this one. I am not an auctioneer, nor am I a professor of mathematics at the U.S. Naval Academy. Oy.

I am not a corporal in the Marine Corp. I am not a Partner at Skadden working on securities and financial matters, though I would trade salaries with him any day. I am not on the anthropology faculty of the University of Arkansas. I have never even been to Arkansas. I don’t sell real estate in Ocean City New Jersey, though I used to spend my summers in Ocean City, Maryland. I have never written an article in The Japan Times, though I have written articles on politics, fundraising and web marketing.

I recently learned about a documentary film called The Grace Lee Project. Grace Lee did a film about all the people named Grace Lee. From what I heard, it turned out to be a nice film about diversity, identity and stereotypes. I suppose many of us could make such a film. My kids won’t. Dorianna, Meital, Asher and Gili. They will totally dominate their Google search eventually. I hope they appreciate the gift.

I was with my wife Jessica in a baby store a few years ago and they had a list of the most popular baby names. Michael was the one on top for boys at the time and Jessica was the one on top for the girls. So I figure I have a lifetime of trying to be the #1 Michael Hoffman around. If you want to help me all you have to do is link here.