The charity and fundraising foughts of Ian Atkinson


Tuesday 23 November 2010

Less is more



Cheltenham is posh. Certainly posher than Posh (who’s from Essex).


In fact, Cheltenham’s so posh, it’s surprising it’s taken upmarket kitchen nik nak seller Lakeland so long to set up shop here. But they just have – and the other day I had a browse in the forlorn hope of finding Christmas present inspiration.


I didn’t get any presents. But I did get myself a folding chopping board.


It’s made of some kind of tough plastic that has sides which can fold up. So when you’ve chopped your organic, specially-selected, ethically-sourced, sun-dried, on-the-vine apricots (it is Cheltenham), you can just pour them straight into your Le Creuset tagine.


No more holding the chopping board with one hand, sweeping across it with your £150 Tojiro chef’s knife in the other and watching half the apricots go in the tagine and half all over the Aga.


Genius. In fact, it’s one of those things that make you say, “Why has no-one thought of it before?”


I heard another of those “genius / why hasn’t it been done before” moments last week.


Liz, our Data Intelligence Manager (DIM seems a cruel acronym), was demonstrating a rather brilliant new Tangible innovation. In as unpromising an area as charity doordrop targeting.


Basically, it’s a clever way of getting more income and a higher response rate from your doordrop campaigns.


By... wait for it... asking people for less.


Ok, not always less, sometimes more. It depends. Let me explain.


As we all know, doordrop targeting is usually done on the basis of finding areas that have a high proportion of ‘lookalikes’. People whose profile – according to ACORN or Mosaic – is like that of your existing supporters.


So you find those areas, and give them a doordrop with a cash ask. Prompt values of £15, £20 and £25 for example.


What we’ve done is take it a stage further, with an innovation called RAISER.


I know, catchy. Stands for ‘Right Ask In, See Enhanced Returns’.


In essence, RAISER overlays the giving history of the charity’s existing supporters in that doordrop area. Which might tell you, for instance, that existing supporters in a certain area give an average of £11.


So with hindsight, it seems a bit silly to send them a doordrop where the minimum prompt value is higher than the average gift of existing supporters in that area.


Thanks to a heads up from RAISER, we can correct that.


For example, a recent campaign Tangible ran did have areas where the average donation was £11.


To recruit new supporters in that area, we tested the standard doordrop (with the £15, £20 and £25 prompts) against the RAISER-inspired version (with lower prompts of £10, £15 and £20).


The RAISER version got 50% better response. Giving us many more donors who we can now contact again and begin a tailored stewardship programme that maximises their engagement, loyalty and value.


And even though those donors were giving a lower average amount, the RAISER version got 20% more income too. What’s more, as well as doordrops, you can use the same technique on cold mailings and even on regionalised inserts.


So: 20% more income and 50% more supporters. Like I said: genius. And why hasn’t anyone done it before?


And there you have it. A folding chopping board and RAISER. No wonder Madonna sent her child to Cheltenham to learn.


Right, I’m off to check on the tagine. Spills are a bugger to scrape off the cast iron of an Aga Rangemaster.



Thursday 28 October 2010

Bloody students


“I don’t like any of your ideas,” I told a roomful of advertising students on Monday.


“And I certainly wouldn’t show any of them to a client.”


Oh yes, I’m a tough macho no-nonsense badass from the planet Tellitlikeitis.


Didn’t manage to make any of them cry though. Just sulk. Which, since they were teenagers, was hardly much of an achievement.


Let me explain: agency founder Nick Thomas and I, in our role as creative gurus, help out with the local university’s advertising degree (him more than me).


And we’d given the new batch of students a charity brief to crack – a live brief we’re working on for an integrated campaign across TV, press and online.


It was a tough brief, in truth. And the students had made a good attempt at it, with some interesting, imaginative stuff that was nicely integrated, neatly scamped and very confidently presented (though often really badly spelled).


But I didn’t think any of their ideas were right because they’d all gone down the route of ‘borrowed interest’.


Which means that instead of work featuring human beings in need of support from the charity, I got storyboards featuring squirrels. Rugby players. Magic bottles of cure-all medicine. Coin-operated satnavs. Flocks of birds in synchronised flight. And Monopoly.


Not one of them had portrayed the world, the cause or the people as they really were.


Borrowed interest can work well, of course – when your audience has no idea what your product or service is, or its benefits, an analogy can be a useful way to show them "Our X which you don’t know is like this Y which you do know".


But clumsily done (as it so often is), borrowed interest suggests that, “We couldn’t find anything interesting to say about our own product / service, so we thought we’d show you this instead.”


For an example of borrowed interest in action, there’s the new Kronenbourg TV ad.


They’ve got ol’ Lemmy Motorhead at the bar singing The Ace of Spades in a slow, ballady re-imagining. With the endline ‘Slow the pace’.


Seems more like a concept for Guinness (who’ve made a virtue of the slowness it takes to pour their pint). Maybe Guinness turned the idea down, so they sold it to Kronenbourg instead.


Also seems like a strange shift in positioning for French fizzy lager. Are the French known for ‘slowing the pace’? Apart from when they’re on strike, obviously?


But, regardless of whether it’s good brand positioning, this kind of borrowed interest seems to work ok for a lager. There’s only so much you can go on about its ingredients after all. And very little else you can say, what with the alcohol advertising rules being what they are.


But generally, if someone shows you a concept that’s based on borrowed interest, ask yourself if that’s really the best way to bring the proposition to life. Or if actually, we should just dig a bit deeper and find what’s compelling in your actual product / service.


Anyway, students: not all of them are sulky of course. In fact, we’ve just taken on a graduate team from the university as trainee copywriter and art director. I’ll be giving them the ‘borrowed interest’ sermon on day one.


In my macho badass way, obviously.


Friday 8 October 2010

What I Did On My Holidays


 

“I’ve just been on a once-in-a-lifetime holiday. Never again.”

That joke courtesy of Tim Vine. The photo, however, is all mine – taken during my recent holiday in Mexico, where, taking my role as The Brit Abroad seriously, I managed to badly burn myself on the first day.

To the point where some of the American tourists would see me and exclaim “Ooh, red!” out loud. (This actually happened several times.) And now, back at home, I’m now peeling so much it’s like waking up in a bed of desiccated coconut.

Great place, mind – beaches (as you can see), history, weather, hotel and people all fabulous.

In fact I can only find two things to gripe about. Both of which I can (just about) contrive to link with fundraising.

Firstly: copy that over-promises. I remember liking Tesco’s ‘Every little helps’ line when I first saw it because it was nicely humble, not falsely grandiose.

Unlike the menu of my in-flight meal. Which described the roast potatoes as ‘homemade’. Come on. Aeroplane food that’s been made in somebody’s home? Reeeeeeeally? Next you’ll be claiming that the ‘Champagne’ is… Champagne.

I get stuff like that from charities all the time: I donate a fiver and they tell me what a superhero I am, saving thousands of lives. No. I’m really not. A fiver? I’m a miser.

Second: Nonstop pleas for ‘feedback’. I swear, the world has gone feedback mad. Some days it’s hard to do anything without being asked to comprehensively survey your experience afterwards.

At the resort, whichever of the 10 restaurants you went to, your after-dinner coffee was accompanied by a portable touchscreen computer housed in a wooden box.

And you were asked to use it to rate your meal. About 50 multiple choice questions. No exaggeration: 50. Covering things like the crockery, the lighting, the choice of wines, the waiter’s knowledge of the wines, the cut of his trousers, the width of his smile.

The first night it was a bit surreal. By the third night it was a bloody chore. By the fourth we were just leaving the tip on the table and running for it when no-one was looking, before the feedback computer arrived.

Being a proper curmudgeon, I can subdivide this feedback gripe:

1. Why should I? I’ve paid for the service, with money. I shouldn’t have to pay you with my time too, filling out a questionnaire of bizarrely-chosen, strangely-phrased questions. Not unless you’re giving me a 20% discount.

2. What are you really going to do with my feedback? Sod all, I’m guessing. If I rate the lighting as ‘poor’, are you really going to buy bigger table candles?

In fundraising there’s the same challenge: it’s all very well running a survey and asking lots of questions, but I can’t remember the last time a charity told me the results afterwards, or what they were going to do as a consequence of the feedback they’d gathered.

Yet if they did, I’d feel a lot closer to the cause. A lot more like I really was part of the charity, rather than just a cash machine.

3. Strange as it may sound, you can’t always discover what customers want by asking them. They often don’t know. For example, do you think that’s how Apple came up with the iPhone? They asked – and thousands of people said, “What I want is a phone without any buttons, so it’s harder to type. One that looks good, even if it’s at the expense of phone signal. Preferably one I can play ‘Angry Birds’ on”?

No, of course not. People didn’t know that was what they wanted until Apple came up with it. But now, every phone manufacturer in the world has a touchscreen phone.

Similarly in fundraising – you won’t come up with anything properly game-changing by simply asking your audience to feedback on what’s gone before. As the saying goes, “You can’t leap a chasm in two jumps”.

Anyway: Mexico ­– if you’ve never been, I recommend it. In fact, I’d give it an ‘excellent’ on the feedback form.

Sunday 12 September 2010

The Balinese Guide To Marketing


This time next week I’ll be in Mehico. Can’t wait.

Last time I went long haul was to Bali – which as well as great surf and sun had a diving shop called ‘Scuba Dooby Doo’. (That’s the kind of copy genius I aspire to.)

Bali has great salesmen too. Hundreds of them. You can’t go more than twenty seconds – thirty if you dawdle – without someone trying to sell you something.

And they’re bloody good at it. Hardly surprising, I suppose – after all, they’re all selling the same tat to the same people, so they need to be brilliant to survive. Plus, since they try their sales technique on about 200 people a day, they’ve plenty of opportunity to hone their skills.

So, you want to be a results-driven marketeer? Follow the Bali shopkeepers’ lead:

1. Smile. That’s how, in ‘AIDA’ terms, they get your attention. With a 100 megawatt megasmile using teeth unstained by Costa extra shot cappuccinos.

In fact, everyone’s so smiley, it’s a culture shock when you arrive back in a grey and drizzling Heathrow several weeks later. In Bali you get so used to smiling at strangers, you forget that’s the kind of behaviour that gets you arrested / assaulted in England.

Anyway: smiling. Very effective. Does your marketing begin by making your prospect smile? Now that I think of it, some of my favourite ads of recent months (like the Old Spice ‘The man your man could smell like’) do exactly that.

2. Relationship building. You walk past the same place more than once and they’ll recognise you. Say hello. Ask you where you’re from, how long you’re here for, where you’re planning on going. There’s no hard sell either, it’s always just, ‘Oh please, just have a look around, take your time, no problem’.

They put more effort into establishing a little rapport with their customers in five minutes than many brands do in five years.

3. Exclusivity. Like I said, everyone’s selling the same stuff. Yet the number of times I showed interest in something, only for it to turn out I’d made a very astute choice, picking something particularly fine and rare (therefore costing a little bit more) was extraordinary.

So I’m flattered to have made a good decision. And I don’t want to miss out on something exclusive.

4. Action. Nothing has a price on it. Because no price is fixed. Bartering is part of the whole experience. Again, there’s headology at work. Once you’ve started haggling, you don’t want to miss out (like people who are determined to win an eBay bidding war, and end up paying over the odds).

Plus, when you do agree a price, you feel like you got a bargain. Even though the price was simply inflated in the first place so they could then discount it (a bit like a DFS sofa sale).

5. Recommendation. Shopkeepers recommend restaurants, restaurants recommend shops or trip organisers. And it’s amazing how a testimonial of any kind – even one from a stranger who you suspect is getting a back-hander from the place they send you to – still convinces.

Then you get a free aperitif with your meal when you mention the shopkeeper’s name and you really do feel special and like you’ve found a really good place. So you spend twice as much.

6. Perseverance. Oh. My. God. Sit on the wrong part of the beach and you’ll be mobbed by people selling sunglasses or slices of melon or massages. They don’t give up easily. And if you’re seen showing interest in a pair of ‘Ray Bun’ sunglasses, every seller within 200 yards will descend to show you their Prarda, Guchi or Ohkley sunglasses.

Always polite, always smiley: but when it comes to the crunch they do push for that sale.

So there you go: six simple selling tips from the streets of Bali.

Of course, the final lesson I learned was that while bead bracelets might look ok on a man when you’ve got a tan and you’re on a beach in Bali, those same bracelets make you look like a right dick if you keep them on when you’re back in England.

Although I’m sure that won’t be the case with the ‘I love Cancun’ sombrero I’m bound to pick up in Mexico.

Thursday 12 August 2010

Fundraising's big drips




 

Couple of lunchtimes ago, I got soaked. My thin summer shirt clinging to me like an orphaned monkey.

In the morning I’d had a look at Metcheck, the online weather forecast. No rain for the whole week it said. Stupid thing.

When I got back to my computer, water dripping off the end of my nose and onto the keyboard, I had another look at Metcheck.


Cheltenham 2pm: 0.0mm rain. Stupid thing.


Not only couldn’t it get the future weather right, it couldn’t even get the current weather right. My shirt was a more accurate barometer than all the sophisticated trickery of Metcheck.


So you can’t always rely on computer expertise. How about human expertise?


Well, to choose a subject even more miserable than the weather, look at the global recession. Before, during and after, we turned to the brightest and best economists to tell us what was going on.


And they told us. Wrongly. In fact they made woefully inaccurate predictions over and over again. A child playing with alphabetti spaghetti would have made more sense.


Not that their blunders stopped the economists. They didn’t throw their hands up in the air and say, ‘To be honest, we haven’t a scooby’.


No, they just carried on getting it wrong. Job losses, economy shrinkage, size of debt, speed of recovery, interest rates, changes in stock markets ­– everything they could put a number to, they did. The wrong number.


In fact, there’s plenty of hard scientific evidence showing that experts in any field can make bad decisions precisely because they’re experts. Or rather, because being expert makes them over-confident in their own judgement.


You’ve probably seen it yourself: people who get to a level of experience and expertise, they really believe they know it all.


They stop learning. They stop questioning. Because they’ve seen it all, done it all.


But in rapidly-changing areas like marketing, communications and fundraising, that’s a big mistake.


Of course, the benefit of calling upon an expert ­– someone who’s spent many years specialising in their field ­– should be that they know more than you about that subject.


I, for example, probably know more about charity copywriting than you do. Because I’ve spent the last 15 years working at it, learning as much as I can about it, striving to get better and better at it.


Whereas you, presumably, have done something far more interesting with your time.


But the best experts are those who know they don’t know everything.


People who are willing to take a leap of faith and try something new. To challenge conventional wisdom once in a while. Because they’re the people who make the big breakthroughs and, once in a while, create new wisdom.


Don’t rely on the ones who always think they know best, whose views are utterly entrenched and who aren’t willing to try something new.


Or you’re likely to get drenched.

Monday 26 July 2010

donor insight



I gave a talk at the IOF Convention a couple of weeks ago. 

‘Using Supporter Insights Creatively’ was the topic.

And all the work in putting the show together made something apparent. Namely, that many of the best insights often come from a very different process to the one so many organisations pour time, effort, money and hope into.
 

Because we’re all obsessed with deriving insight from data analysis, research, focus groups and co-creation.

And of course, those routes can provide fantastic insights.

But. There. Is. Another. Way.

You won’t like it though.

Because it doesn’t sound very scientific. It doesn’t sound very safe. And it’s difficult to justify to the board as to why you think you should ‘put some spend’ behind it.

It’s called intuition. Or a hunch. Or a flash of inspiration.

You’re appalled aren’t you? What a heretical thing to say, that audience research and data analysis and co-creation aren’t the Holy Grails of audience insight.

Well, maybe they are.


But do you know that saying, ‘You can’t leap a chasm in two jumps’?

I think insights can be like that. If you just rely on insights you can prove before you try them, then maybe you’re not making a big enough leap forward.

Because you can get an insight into donor behaviour by looking back. But you might only get an insight into donor motivation (which can be much more powerful) by looking forward.

Here are three examples, from outside the fundraising sphere, of intuited insights:

1. New York copywriter Alec Brownstein was looking for a job. He wanted to get the attention of New York’s five most prominent creative directors.

What did he know about them? Not much. But he intuited that they were probably rather vain and self-important (unlike creative directors in Cheltenham, who are very modest).

In fact, Alec thought that New York creative directors were probably so vain that they regularly googled their own name.

So he placed an adwords banner which would appear above the search results when one of those five creative director’s names was googled. An ad saying ‘Googling your own name is fun. Hiring me is fun too’ with a web link.

Four of those creative directors interviewed him. Two of them offered him a job. He accepted one of them.

The ad had cost him $6.

2. James Dyson did research his first Dyson vacuum. He ran focus group after focus group to get people’s views. And they all told him the same thing, again and again:

We hate the clear drum. Get rid of it. No-one wants to see the dust and fluff they’ve picked up.

But James disagreed. In his gut, he felt that people would like seeing just how powerful and effective their Dyson vacuum was. So he kept faith with the clear drum and launched it like that. And became phenomenally, market-leadingly successful.

3. Finally, an example from the men’s toilets. The men’s toilets at Schipol airport in Holland.

Where apparently, poor aim at the urinals was a problem.

So: an insight into how to get men to aim better was needed. 


But they had no useful data to analyse. It would be difficult to get people to take part in a survey or focus group. And you couldn’t exactly stand in the toilets with a clipboard, observing men’s behaviour. 

They had to come up with an intuitive, flash-of-inspiration insight into the way men’s minds work.

So they did.

Which led them to engrave the image of a fly on the urinal bowl.

And men, being men, aimed for the fly. And ‘Poor Aim Syndrome’ went down by 80%.

Resulting in less cleaning, which meant less cost, which meant more profit.

And nicer toilets.

So, insight: it’s really important and it can make a massive difference.

But sometimes we don’t need to be researchers or analysts to get the best insights.

We just need to be experts in the human condition.

Psychologists, sociologists and – above all – people brave enough to, occasionally, try something without needing a giant research paper full of charts to back it up.

Not only can it lead to bigger leaps, it’s usually quicker and cheaper too.

Monday 28 June 2010

Throw in the towel


Are you proud of yourself?


Proud of what you do for a living?


Not me. I’m feeling pretty ashamed of myself today. Let me tell you why.


Firstly, what do I do for a living? Well, it depends who’s asking.


An art director I used to work with would just tell people, “I work in an office.” He couldn’t be bothered trying to explain the ephemeral nature of how he earned his moolah.


And I can understand that: I was born in North Yorkshire, son of a farmer’s son. From a background of people who worked for a living, basically. And fought in wars.


One of their nieces is a policewoman. They’re very proud of her, understandably. But me? I could no more make them proud of what I do for a living than I could explain traffic jams to a Maldivian. It just doesn’t make any sense to them.


So, if I’m feeling self-deprecating, I might tell people “I write junk mail”. Which, since I don’t do that much writing any more, and we work in a much wider range of media than mail, isn’t particularly true. In fact the ‘junk’ bit isn’t true at all. Everything we create is excellent. I’m sure the people I write to put velvet cushions under their letterboxes, to cosset my falling post.


If I want to seem arty / pretentious I might say, “I’m the creative director of an advertising and marketing agency”.


And if I’m trying to impress a chickpea warrior, I might say “I help raise thousands of pounds for some of the UK’s biggest and best-known charities”.


So, three different things I can say to feel proud of what I do for a living. With “I work in an office” as a useful back-up if I get a blank stare.


However. Sometimes other people make it impossible for me to feel proud of what I do. By association, they make me feel grubby and shameful.


The people behind the ‘Feed my people’ junk mail for example. Which really is junk.


A copywriter at our place has received, in subsequent mailpacks of exploitative, manipulative, haranguing copy: a pair of socks, two rosary bracelets, a travel clock, a tea towel, and a pricey rollerball with her name printed on it.


What’s the reason for these gifts, which deduct god knows how much from the money raised?


Well, the tea towel pictured is enclosed “as a sign of hope and a point of contact for you and the struggling people of Africa”.


Yes, nothing says “hope” like a tea towel. Nothing makes me feel closer to the people of Africa than a tea towel.


Actually, the deluge of tat that Lizzie (the copywriter) has been getting purports to come from several different charities. None of which we’ve heard of. And all of which seem have the same Crawley PO Box as a return address.


So I’m not telling people I write direct mail for charities at the moment. If they’d seen the ‘Feed my people’ stuff they might tar me with the same disgusting brush.


No, for a week or two I’ll pretend to be something slightly less shameful. Like an England footballer, perhaps.

Thursday 27 May 2010

Pitch (im)perfect



What’s the best part of your day?

For people in the right job, it’s when they hear that something they’ve been part of has done really, really well.

For people in the wrong job, it’s Friday afternoon, when they're in weekend mode.

And for people far more shallow than you or I, it’s those sunny days when Claudia the receptionist (pictured) turns up to work dressed more for the beach than the office.

The top five best parts of my day are:

5. Having a great creative idea.

4. Doing something that does really, really well.

3. Getting great feedback from a client.

2. Winning an award.

1. Winning a pitch.

So: yes, I do love those precious brainwave moments when, staring at a tough brief and a blank screen, a moment of inspiration strikes and I have The Big Idea.

It’s also great discovering that something you worked on has just smashed a long-standing control.

Being a precious, emotional creative type, a pat on the back or a couple of words of praise are like manna from heaven to me.

And walking onstage to pick up an award while fellow creatives clap sourly is a particularly sweet moment.

But as I say, winning a pitch tops them all.

Why? Well, three reasons:

i. You have to put an incredible amount of work in to a pitch. So if you discover you haven’t won, you know the agency has spent thousands of pounds that it’s never going to recover. And that if you have won, it was all worthwhile.

ii. Pitches are very competitive. So when you win, it feels like a real achievement.

iii. Winning a pitch means you’re going to be working with a new client, often one you’ve always wanted to work with for ages.

As the agency’s creative director, I’m involved with the creative planning / creative strategy, I’m probably involved with coming up with some of the ‘big ideas’, I’m involved with directing the other creative teams working on the pitch, and I’m going to be presenting the creative ideas at the pitch.

That’s quite a lot of work to do for something you’re not being paid for. 


And it’s a lot of hours to find when you already have a busy day job.

So pitch work is often done in the evenings, working til midnight or even beyond. A diet of cold takeaway pizza. Coming in on Sundays.

Realising what you’ve got isn’t quite right and starting again.

Getting tetchy with the rest of the pitch team as you all succumb to stress and fatigue.

Worrying about whether your presentation on the day will do justice to the quality of thinking you’ve put in.

I’m not sure how many hours we spend on a typical pitch. I’m scared to look at our timesheets and find out. Thousands of pounds worth, that’s for sure.

Plus sometimes you need to call in freelancers to help visualise or mock-up the pitch work.

Hundreds of colour printouts, refining the work each time, at 40p a sheet or whatever our fancy printer costs.

And then the travel costs for the whole pitch team to rock up at the client.

Put it all together, and you could be talking about £10,000 worth of presentation. Which you’ve done for free.

We’ve had a couple of pitches recently.

One we won (I won’t be coy, it was for Macmillan). Brilliant cause, great brand and we put a tremendous amount of work into it. And since winning, we’ve discovered that the team there are really smart and ambitious, so the pitch win really has been one of the highlights of the agency year so far.

The other pitch… vanished. As in, every agency pitched, we got really, really great feedback… but then the charity had a change of heart and decided not to do the activity at all.

So in the end, every agency had gone through the enormously time-consuming and expensive pitch process I’ve just described for nothing.

Perhaps that’s why winning a pitch is my number one.

Because losing one like that sure feels number two. 

Tuesday 4 May 2010

Be a bit Buddhist, bro




 

Have you ever thought, about a Christian, “Well that’s not very Christian,” about something they did?

No? Just me then.


When I know someone is a proper Christian who believes in God and everything, I expect them to always turn the other cheek / be a good Samaritan / not covet their neighbour’s ox. And I’m disappointed when they turn out to be as craven, selfish and flawed as the rest of us.


I mention this apropos of nothing, except: I work in an agency that specialises in fundraising. For people who work for charities.


And yet it never (particularly) occurs to me to expect everyone around me to be charitable types. Which is rather a shame really – that I don’t expect us to practice what we preach.


Yes, I have a few direct debits to various good causes. But is that being charitable?


Yes, one of the ‘begging letters’ I write will raise many more times the money than most people will donate in their lifetime. But that’s not being charitable either. It’s just being amazingly brilliant at my job.


Sadly I’m not building up to much of an epiphany here.


But I do know this. I shouldn’t do my job as if it’s pure fluke that it happens to be for charities. As if I might just as easily been working for companies flogging fags / booze / child labour-made trainers.


It isn’t, quite literally, good enough.


I’m not saying people who work for charities don’t care about the cause they work for – many do, passionately.


But are we charitable / humanitarian in the wider sense? Are we kind and giving and charitable to one another?


I’m not advocating some happy clappy kibbutz where everyone’s super-nice at the expense of getting things done.


But maybe it’s possible for us to be top-notch gifted professionals without behaving like we’re just working in an office the same as every other. Without treating each other with less thought and consideration than those we’re supporting.


Maybe we can remember that charity begins at home.


Maybe we can remember to be charitable to each other. More than you'd expect from people, say, who work for an insurance company. (They can just concentrate on behaving in a very risk averse way.)


I bet if everyone involved in working for charities was a bit more Dalai Lama about the way they interacted with each other, it’d mean better work.


And you’d get great people, from dozens of other sectors, desperate to join something where they really felt part of something gooood. 


Rather than, as can be the case, part of something bad that just happens to do good.

Monday 12 April 2010

A little commitment


When my mum was a girl, not many young people had watches.

So they were a bit of a status symbol.


So in the summer, she and her friends would stick a watch paper template around their wrists.


Which would give them a watch tan line – so it looked like you had a watch, you just didn’t happen to be wearing it.


Then watches became more common. Mechanical wind-up watches were replaced by more reliable, less hasslesome quartz watches. Digital watches made the time easier to read and added new functions. Swatch made Swiss movements inexpensive and created fashion watches.


Soon, everyone had a watch.


Now things are going the other way again. Fewer and fewer young people bother with watches. Because all most watches do is tell the time.


And what’s the point of that? Having something that only does one thing? Especially when you’re using your mobile every other second, and that’s got the time on it. As well as the date, stopwatch, alarm clock, calculator, voice recorder, MP3 player, weather, your exact location, photo album, Twitter account, internet access and 50 games on it.


Makes a watch look pretty lame. Like walking around with a separate watch, compass, stopwatch, calculator, dictaphone, GPS tracker, notepad, travel scrabble and so on.


So, things have come full circle in behaviour (young people not wearing watches). But the motivation behind each is completely different.


Looking only at behaviour doesn’t give you the full picture. Yet it’s often all we bother with, since motivation can be harder to work out.


For example, a charity is unlikely to classify someone who gives £10 as ‘high value’. To us, their behaviour has a fairly low value.


Yet they may be a pensioner on a low, fixed income. For whom £10 is a significant sum.


To them £10 is high value, and they’re giving it because they’re very engaged with the cause (and might even leave a legacy if we treat them properly).


Yet because we don’t judge their behaviour to be ‘high value’, there’s a good chance we won’t treat them properly.


Similarly, regular givers – people who give a monthly gift by direct debit – are often referred to in fundraising as ‘committed givers’. We judge their behaviour – this regular, dependable gift, as showing real commitment.


Yet, again, the reverse can be true.


People who sign up to a direct debit never have to make a conscious decision to support you ever again. Their bank automatically sends on the money without involving the donor.


So the donor may be a regular-but-not-very-committed giver.Which might mean we have to worker harder to keep them engaged than someone who makes a cash gift three times a year.


It’s why understanding motivation, not just measuring behaviour, can be so important.


And why people no longer buy watches to tell the time. But to tell you something about them.

Monday 29 March 2010

Don't go changing


 

Want to know how to win the first round of a game of paper, scissors stone?

Hold a clenched fist out in front of you before the game starts, then put it behind your back as you begin counting. On 3, reveal your hand… still in a fist shape (ie stone).


Most people will be showing scissors. Rock blunts scissors, you win.


Although I have a degree in psychology, I can’t really claim to know why this works more often than not.


My theory, however, is that when you show your opponent your starting position of a fist, they do the same, because they follow your lead as to how the game should start.


Then, of course, they have a clenched fist behind their back, the count goes on and they feel the need to do something. And the most action you can take when your hand is in a fist shape is to change it to scissors.


Which means by ‘doing nothing’ and keeping your hand in a fist, you win.


This need to take action – and by doing so, lose – pervades many areas of life, including fundraising marketing and charity advertising.


Marketing directors change jobs every couple of years, and when they start somewhere new, feel the need to show they’re doing something – taking action – by changing the campaign that’s been running, regardless of how well it’s performed. Rosser Reeves (advertising pioneer and inventor of the TV ad) was once asked by a client what the 47 people working on his account were doing when the campaign hadn’t changed for 12 years.


“Keeping you from changing the ad,” was Rosser’s instant reply.


Nowadays, needless change can occur because of the way some big organisations work. Namely, that some of them insist that about 20 different people across 8 different departments have to approve every piece creative work.


And if you’re given some creative work to sign-off, how do you show that a) you’ve seen it and b) you’re adding value?


By changing something. You literally ‘make your mark’. And 19 other people do exactly the same, creating a ‘designed by committee’ nightmare.


Maybe we should champion the idea that sometimes, the best contribution you can make is to look at something, not find every detail to your own personal taste and still be strong enough to not change it. To leave it as it was intended, so it retains a single, strong voice.


The funny thing is, if you do refrain from making changes the creative team will work harder on your account, knowing more of what they put in will get out.


In 1962, Avis gave DDB their ad account.


The CEO of Avis wanted (and needed) great work to compete with Hertz, but they only had a small budget. Bill Bernbach, creative head of DDB, told him that if he wanted the creative team to work nights and weekends coming up with great work, all he had to do was to run the ads as they were submitted. No changes.


Avis agreed. The creative team worked like buggery, knowing what they created wasn’t going to have the life amended out of it.


And the ‘We try harder’ campaign became one of the longest-running, best-known and most successful of all time.

Sunday 21 March 2010

New is so old





Heard of ‘crowdsourcing’?

It’s one of those shiny new things. People are like magpies: we love shiny new things. Even if the new things aren’t as good as the old things. We just get infatuated with their newness.

Sometimes I think that’s why marketing isn’t advancing as quickly as it should. Because someone comes along with something new that doesn’t bother building on what we’ve already learned. It just starts again.

We reinvent the wheel. And this time we try it with sharp pointy bits.

Crowdsourcing is a new way to do creative work.

You put your brief online, you invite anyone and everyone to come up with ideas to answer it, and the best idea wins a prize.

Brilliant. Instead of seeing just three concepts, you see hundreds or even thousands.

Admittedly, most of them will be appallingly bad, and you’ll go mad having to sift through the piles of bad puns, borrowed interest, plagiarised, off brief, brand illiterate, old or just plain terrible ideas.

But on the plus side, you’re getting lots of people, including your target audience, to submit ideas, so you’re bound to get infinitely more surprising and original ideas than you’d get from an agency.

Aren’t you?

Peperami is one of the biggest names to have tried this new gimmick recently. They offered a first prize of $10,000 and a second of $5,000 for a TV and print campaign idea.

They sent out the brief, they judged the entries, they chose the winning work.

And then discovered that the winning entry had been submitted by a professional copywriter. And that the runner up was from an ex-creative director.

Who’d have thought that?

That highly-trained, highly-experienced, highly-skilled professionals are better than a random collection of amateurs?

That creatives are better at thinking like the target audience than the target audience is at thinking like creatives?

That the Emperor isn’t wearing incredible new clothes, but is in fact naked? 

Monday 8 March 2010

Bolluxtorkium


I bring news of three incredible breakthroughs.

Bolluxtorkium, Madeupium and Sudosyencium.

What do you mean, never heard of them?

Our nation’s best scientific brains – bored of minor challenges like finding a cure for cancer or cheap renewable energy – have been working tirelessly to unearth these modern miracles.

Inspired by nature, these incredible discoveries... make your hair shiny. Really shiny.

So shiny it looks healthy (even though it can't be, since hair is dead).

So shiny you wake up not with bedhead, but looking as if Cheryl Cole’s team of stylists have been attending to your follicles throughout the night.

So shiny that an Amazonian tribe will begin worshipping your ’do as a new god.

It’s amazing what you can pick up from a TV ad for shampoo.

Mainly, that the laboratories of Garnier (Paris) seem to discover new elements on the Periodic Table on a near-weekly basis. They take great delight in describing a mythical new molecule (‘Nutrilium’ for example), while showing you a model with perfect hair that isn’t even hers – she’s got hair extensions.

I’m not sure how it came to be that one sector is allowed to stretch the truth so rapaciously.

In fundraising comms, we take the truth a bit more seriously. Because a charity has to have trust and credibility with its audience. 

There's a caveat, of course (there's always a caveat).

Us scribblers and scampers in the creative department rarely have the ideal raw materials to create the most powerful, compelling work.

So personally, for example, I’m in favour of using composite case studies. (Which means cutting and pasting several real case studies together, to get one really strong story - which also protects the identity of who you're talking about.) I’m in favour of using model photography and recreations where necessary. And I’m in favour of talking about a specific area of work even though the donation is for unrestricted funds.

We point out that some names and details have been changed, but that the feelings are real, and we say that their donation will go wherever the need is greatest.

So, is there a difference? 

Different charities have different views, but I certainly think so. With fundraising comms, you’re simply compensating for a lack of raw materials to illustrate a genuine, truthful need. You’re often talking about distressing events that no-one took a picture of at the time. So you have to recreate it.

Shampoo salesmen don’t have that problem. They can show the effects of their product on someone with real hair any time they like.

But they don’t. Instead they choose to show Cheryl as she carefully enunciates why they pay her millions to have fake hair of a gleaming glossiness no shampoo had a hand in creating.

“Beecuz ahm wurth it, leik. Pet.”

Monday 1 March 2010

Hirsute fundraising


Have you ever tried to grow a moustache? 


If you're a woman, probably not. I grew one for Movember a couple of years ago (a really charming, £30 million idea in aid of prostate cancer). It was bloody itchy though.

But in the 80s, moustaches had a resurgence in popularity. Because blokes wanted to be like Tom Selleck.

If you can’t remember (or are too young to know) why, just look at the TV title sequence for his famous Ferrari 308GTS-driving detective : http://bit.ly/HK7cw



Awesome.

Now: fundraising. 15 years ago, few charities had brand managers. Now, they all do. They recognise that in a crowded market, with every good cause petitioning every good soul with good reasons to support them, their brand is an important differentiator.

It’s an important way to codify their values, so a potential donor can see if the brand resonates with their own values, and if so, to support them.

Yet, weirdly, we don’t see that much well-branded stuff in the third sector.

Oh, most charities communications look the part, right enough. But that’s just following the visual identity guidelines. The font, the logo, the colours, the layout.

Following the visual identity doesn’t mean the work is ‘on brand’. Any more than having a bushy moustache makes you Magnum PI.

A brand has got to be about the experience. The feeling it gives you. The values it portrays. The way it connects with you. Its personality. Its tone of voice.

I think some of the agencies working with charities have too narrow an experience. They’ve only ever done hard-working, technique-driven stuff, or only worked in a narrow range of media, or they haven’t got enough commercial experience to know how to really get under the skin of a brand.

So they end up doing the same stuff they’ve done many times before.

With a comedy moustache stuck on it.

Monday 22 February 2010

Puppy love



My phone rang, showing a number it didn’t know.

“I hear you’re interested in having one of our puppies,” said a female voice.

“Err… no,” I replied. “I don’t know anything about that. I think you must have the wrong number.”

“Well, this is the number I’ve been given,” she replied in uppity tones.

It was difficult to know what to say.

I got the feeling she was expecting me to answer, “Oh, in that case I’d better take the dog then.”

And I was left feeling rather discombobulated for the rest of the day.

Because her ‘stop wasting my time you silly little man’ tone was rather at odds with the content of our conversation.

I’ve started getting a few fundraising communications like that.

Where the tone is at odds with the message. From some little-known American charities that seem to have been targeting innocent old Blighty recently.

The content is that of... well, a good cause.

But the tone, oh my life. The most awful, exploitative stuff you’ll ever come across: copy that gives emotional blackmail a bad name.

Allied to stacks of tacky incentives (badly illustrated greetings cards, key rings, blankets, umbrellas etc) which are positioned almost as goods you need to pay for.

But the worst thing about some of these ‘charities’ is how much money they spend on admin charges.

In the UK, reputable charities typically spend less than 15% on admin charges – a very modest amount.

Yet the worst I’ve heard of from these unknown, underhand US mass-mailers was a charity from Tennessee called ‘Youth Development Fund’. Where apparently – wait for it – 91% of all money raised went on ‘fundraising and administrative expenses’.

And that’s more shocking than anything they write in any of their appeals.

PS If you're interested in adopting a puppy (not in any way house-trained), let me know.

Monday 15 February 2010

Name calling


It’s not trendy to say ‘trendy’. Saying ‘fashionable’ hasn’t been for some time.

‘On trend’. That’s what you say now. Amazing what you can pick up reading old copies of Heat magazine in a doctor’s surgery.

My background is as a copywriter. But I’m still impressed – stunned, sometimes – by the power words can have on the perception of a thing. They can change its value utterly. Even though the thing itself hasn’t changed at all.

Asking your donors to come up with the ideas for you, that used to be called ‘being lazy’.

Now, depending on whether you do it by focus group or by putting a prize-incentivised brief online, the on trend phrase to use is either ‘co-creation’ or ‘crowd-sourcing’.



But as I flicked through that dog-eared Heat (honestly, I didn't buy it), I was struck by how one of the words they use has had a recent effect on charities.

Because nowadays, according to fashion, old clothes aren't 'second-hand'. 

They're 'vintage'.

Which means they’re suddenly more valuable. So more people are choosing to sell them on eBay or to small ‘boutiques’.

Which may be why so many charities are despairing of a dearth of donated clothes to sell in their shops.

Monday 8 February 2010

To avoid disappointment


Best thing about watching Avatar in 3D?

According to my girlfriend, it’s that behind the dark glasses, no-one can see you cry when the blue people get killed.

I enjoyed it very much – you just have to tell yourself beforehand that being the highest-grossing film ever made doesn’t mean it’s going to be the best film ever made.

Because expectation is everything. If you over-deliver on someone’s expectations, you’ve got a happy audience, cooing at computer-generated hovering mountains.

Under-deliver, and you’ve got a webbed-toed Kevin Costner in Waterworld.

There’s a parallel in fundraising.

When we recruit new supporters, we set their expectations. We usually tell them that when they become a supporter, a) we’ll really appreciate their kindness and b) their kindness will make a real difference.

But do we make good on those expectations? Or do we disappoint them?

I can still remember my first-ever big disappointment. I was about seven.

It was Christmas, and I wanted an electronic organ. Christmas Eve I went to bed, frantic with excitement, unable to sleep, listening for Santa. 


 
What I heard, from downstairs, were the unmistakable reverberations of a full-sized church organ, with those giant pipes filling the air (and presumably literally filling the lounge of our three bed semi). Wow. This was going to be the best Christmas ever.

It was many years later before I realised that I must have just heard Christmas Mass on the TV. As, on Christmas day I unwrapped not a 20 foot high church organ, but a Bontempi keyboard. That couldn’t manage chords, only one note at a time (I can still remember the key numbers for Jingle Bells).

I was dreadfully disappointed, but I think I managed to hide it from my parents.

Charity donors, however, don’t hide their disappointment so readily. They just stop giving. They cancel their direct debits, they stop responding to appeals and they never get round to mentioning you in their will.

So we shouldn’t disappoint them. 


Which means remembering one very important, but often overlooked fact: charity donors don’t give us money for nothing.

They give us money because they expect us to make good on our promises (the ones about appreciating their kindness and their money making a real difference). And to avoid disappointment, we should live up to those expectations.

The charity Action for Children is good at this.

Everyone who responds to one of their direct mail appeals, for example, gets a follow-up letter. It doesn’t ask them for more money. But it says thank you for their gift (quoting the amount they donated), tells them how it might be used, and gives them a positive update on the appeal they responded to. 


Telling them, for example, what the child mentioned in the appeal is doing now, some little slice of life example of what they’ve been up to.

It’s pretty straightforward stuff. But it makes a connection. It creates a rewarding relationship. 


And, just like in Avatar, it shows that even in a tough old world, it’s ok to believe in happy endings.

Monday 1 February 2010

Sky's the limit


I missed the start of the new series of Mad Men.

Well, actually I caught up at the weekend, thanks to the magic of iPlayer. It was as well-written as ever, though I wasn't sure about Don Draper’s ad for London Fog raincoats (A woman flasher with the line ‘Limit your exposure’?)

But I had to watch it on a computer because my Sky+ box broke. I rang them to see if they could fix it, and had an... interesting customer experience.

Now, in fundraising we often think there’s a lot to learn about ‘Customer Relationship Management / Marketing’ from the commercial world.

Well, not from Sky.

In fundraising, CRM is called ‘stewardship’. And it just means that, once you’ve persuaded someone to support you in some way (whether that’s by making a gift, joining a campaign or giving their time), you look after them.

You listen to them. You respond to them. You turn a traditional model of a monologue into a conversation, by finding out what interests them, finding out how they want to be treated, and personalising your communications accordingly.


Sometimes it's just remembering that you don't have to ask them for money every single time you communicate with them.

By treating your audience as individuals, with a bit of respect and consideration, they reciprocate with greater loyalty, more donations and a legacy gift. In other words, you look after them and they look after you. And you maximise their lifetime value. 

And, while few charities would tell you they're completely satisfied with their stewardship programme, most are developing ways of giving their supporters a more authentic, personal experience. 

We're engaged in stewardship programmes with most of our charity clients, and there are some fantastic things you can do online and using dynamic content or digital print.

So, by contrast, Sky. 


Which has 10 million customers and so should have got the hang of how to ‘steward’ them.

My Sky+ box broke so I gave them a call. The guy on the other end said he would talk me through fixing it.

First, he told me to press the button marked ‘TV’ followed by the one marked ‘Sky’. In other words, he told me to turn on the TV and turn on the Sky box. I said ok, I’d done that.

He then asked me, without irony, apology or personality, if it was now working.

Brilliant. Clearly it’s impossible to underestimate the intelligence of your customers in the eyes of Sky.

We then spent a pained few minutes together, pressing buttons, waiting to see if anything happened, pressing more buttons, before he had to admit defeat.

Well, not quite. First he asked me if I wanted to upgrade to the sport and movie packages.

Amazing. Patronise me first. Fail to fix the problem second. Clearly the perfect environment to try and persuade me to spend more with you.

Then the final coup de grace. He told me the Sky box was out of warranty (I’d had it 18 months). So there’d be a charge of £65 to repair it.

£65 to repair a box I have to have in order to be able to use the service I’m paying them £25 a month for. Utter genius.

Unlike me. I’m a mad man.

Cos I paid up.