Social disease

A digital guy I know was showing me some really clever new stuff online the other day.

But then we got to talking about money – about making it.

He admitted that for charities, making money online remains incredibly difficult.

He agreed that online media were undoubtedly a great way to enrich a supporters’ experience, and so perhaps increase their lifetime value.

In fact, at the agency I work at we do quite a lot of work in this area, creating online opportunities for donors to develop a stronger relationship with the cause they’re supporting.

But we’ve a long heritage in fundraising. We know how it works, we know how to engage and motivate our audiences. And we’re ‘media neutral’, so we can recommend the media mix that’s going to work best.

But there are a lot of start-up digital agencies (with a vested interest in online) who are pushing digital as the main channel that charities should be putting their time and and money into.

And social media – how they love to bang on about that. I’ve just read another hyperbolic article from a digital agency saying ‘any company that doesn’t have a Twitter strategy will get left behind’.

Really? Two small points:

1: Here today...

ITV bought Friends Reunited for £175 million. Then sold it less than four years later.

For £25 million.

In other words, a one-way ticket on that particular bandwagon cost them £150,000,000.

Ok, that was a soft target. Everyone knows Friends Reunited is old news. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube – they’re the big successes. Aren’t they?

Well, for their founders, perhaps – Facebook’s co-founder is the youngest-ever self-made billionaire.

But the phenomenon he created actually loses money. Big buckets of it. Its electricity bill alone is estimated at around £600,000. A month.



Twitter loses millions too. Only rivers of cash from venture capitalists keep it flowing. Though for how long is anyone’s guess.

And YouTube is apparently going to lose about 300 million quid this year.

Now, I’m not a genius economist (actually, there don’t seem to be any genius economists right now). But I do know that no business can lose that kind of money forever. Either they’ll have to close one day, or they’ll have to drastically change their business model in order to make money.

And who knows what effect that will have. MySpace plastered itself with ads to become profitable – and has been shedding users at a frightening rate ever since.

2: The culture of free.

One thing all the users of these sites have in common is that they like getting it for free. More than that: they expect it to be free.

That’s why most Spotify users choose the free version rather than the (very reasonably priced) paid-for service. And why Spotify is yet another popular online service that loses money.

So what happens when you try and get that audience to pay for something? Or, in the case of a charity, ask them for a donation?

The answer is, it’s really hard.

Like I said, despite the huge audiences on those sites, the digital guy I spoke to didn’t know of a single example of where social media was proving a significant way of recruiting people who go on to become genuine, valuable donors.

But I’ve lots of examples of how that’s still being done – very, very successfully – using so-called ‘traditional’ media.

Sabre-tooth fundraising

(Or: A logical argument for being less logical.)


Everything we see goes from the optic nerve to a part of the brain called the amygdala before it goes anywhere else.

The amygdala deals with emotional responses. It’s one of the oldest parts of the human brain and developed thousands of years before the prefrontal cortex (which deals with rational thought).

Oh dear, here comes a sabre-tooth tiger…

Our brains work this way because, back in olden times, we often needed to make an immediate ‘fight or flight’ decision. Our brains had to decided whether or not to flood the body with adrenalin and endorphins in order to survive from whatever was trying to eat us.



Nowadays not much is trying to eat us. But our brains still work in the same way. Which means we process information emotionally first, and rationally second.

Powerful emotions

Not only do we process information emotionally and sub-consciously first, it can actually be more sophisticated and powerful than rational, conscious processing.

That’s because emotional thinking comes to a decision based on all of our past experiences – thousands upon thousands of moments that make up our life’s wisdom, expressed as a single, near-instant feeling.

Whereas rational thinking can only hold 5 - 9 different pieces of information at any one time.

It’s why, in an area that we’re fairly expert in, our gut instinct can be so powerful – and so often right.

So when, as professional fundraising marketing advertising brand charity experts, we’re considering a fundraising idea or piece of creative, we should trust our ‘gut feel’ more often.

In other words, to be good... takes guts.

Same old same old

I was re-re-re-reading George Smith’s book the other day. ‘Asking Properly: The Art of Creative Fundraising.’

Written in 1996, he spends a fair chunk of it decrying the shabby state of fundraising.

The unconvincing, hackneyed copy. The tired techniques. The insular thinking.

He even deplored the fact that he and other fundraising luminaries were being lauded as gurus. Because it meant their every musing was slavishly followed and infinitely repeated. Without anyone bothering to do any thinking of their own.

Mind you. That was then. Surely, all these years later, things have moved on considerably?

Ha.

In fact, when you read the book, it’s depressingly clear that all the stuff he considered old hat back in 1996 is still being trotted out today.

There’s just an awful lot more of it. And a lot of it is awful.

But. There are some bright beacons of hope. There’s some really wonderful, exciting, captivating stuff being done too. Stuff that the fundraising sector can be very proud of. Stuff that shows us the way to a brave, bold, brilliant future.

Perhaps together, you and I could look at today's fundraising and sort the fertile from the feckless.

The fab from the flab.

The feisty from the fusty.

It won’t, I promise, always be this alliterative.

But it will, I hope, always be a fecund experience for the both of us.