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? 

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

For goodness sake

About 10 years ago, the second agency* I nearly worked for was a small independent in Bristol.

They were founded by a copywriter and art director team. The interesting thing was, the copywriter was colour-blind and the art director was dyslexic.

So they really did rely on each other. The perfect complementary team. They offered me a job but I declined – the fact that the guy interviewing me smoked throughout put me off.

But I always wished I’d had chance to see the two of them in action – and nowhere since have I found a dyslexic art director / colour-blind copywriter team (though I’ve seen it the other way around – copywriters who can’t distinguish between “its” and “it’s” and art directors with all the colour sense of a footballer’s decorator).

Anyway. At the agency I chose over theirs, I worked with a talented, very funny art director whose motto was, “I like it... cos it’s done.”

I’m a big fan of maxims, slogans, aphorisms, mottos and motivational quotes.

You remember those Athena posters from the 80s? The ones with a picture of a mountaineer smiling with perfect American teeth and the line, “If your ship doesn’t come in, swim to it”. There’s one at my gym in fact. A poster of a woman doing a pole vault I think.

The line is, “You don’t ask for respect, you earn it”.

Awesome. I’d paper my whole house with such wise and pretty posters if I could.

And I use these great pearls of wisdom all the time. “It’s easier to destroy than create,” for example, is the one I use whenever someone wants to amend my concepts.

“If you feel in complete control, you’re not going fast enough,” is the line I use whenever people complain about my driving.

And I’m always humming, “A mars a day helps you work, rest and play” at 11:30 when the sandwich lady arrives, dishing out chocolate bars with more relish than the Child Catcher. 

But as I say, the art director I worked with, his favourite line was, “I like it cos it’s done.”

In other words, if something we’d done was good enough... then it was good enough. We could stop and move on to the next thing.

The next thing usually being a game of table football.

I mention it because it seems like he must be doing half the charity communications out there right now. So many of them seem to have been created with a “I like it cos it’s done” attitude.

I got a mailing from UNICEF the other day that was a prime example: extremely bland, utterly formulaic. My shopping lists are better written. My timesheets are more creative. And if an agency can’t create compelling work for a cause as powerful as UNICEF’s then they should be delivering the mail rather than creating it.

That art director’s favourite saying must have really stuck with me. Because the contrary line I sometimes use when looking at a piece of creative we’re doing at the agency is, “Good is a good start.”

And yes, of course people roll their eyes and shake their heads like I’m a cliche-spouting cheese-ball. They’re absolutely right, of course. I am. But I don’t mind at all, as long as it means better work.

Talking of which, I should get back to polishing these pitches.

After all, as Henry Ford (may have) said of his success, “Yes, I am lucky. And I find the harder I work, the luckier I get.”




*You’re right, I don’t look old enough.

Well heeled

I mentioned last week that I’m walking everywhere, since my girlfriend’s icecapades ended with her crashing my car into a police car.

At the weekend, I was walking around town with her. And she was complaining about it.

Complaining about walking. Even though it’s her fault (or the policewoman’s fault – the insurers are yet to decide) we had no car.

Trying to give her a sense of perspective, I recanted the Oxfam case study I read last week about a woman who has to walk 22 miles every day, just to collect water.

“Yes,” replied my girlfriend, “but I bet she doesn’t have to do it in high heels.”

Anyway, as I also said last time, we’re in the middle of two pitches at the moment. So I’m working on them every waking moment. Rather than writing a longer, more interesting blog.

Maybe next time I should recount the experience of working on a pitch in an agency.

At the moment, I can describe it for you in two words.

Exciting.

Knackering.

Snow joke

I’m not very good at analogies.

Or metaphors. Or similes. Or, as I discovered over Christmas, yo-yos (I haven’t yet mastered ‘the sleeping dog’, which is the core move behind most tricks, according to a You Tube yo-yo master).

Anyway: analogies. I can’t do them. Unlike Jeremy Clarkson, whose writing is usually more laden with analogies than a... a... well, there you go.

But the incredible blanket of snow that stretches out before me at the moment feels, for all the world, like a metaphor for this fresh, new, unblemished year that’s stretching out before us. 

I really think it’s going to be an exciting year for anyone in fundraising – there’s just so much clever stuff going on right now, to reach audiences that are simultaneously growing both larger and more sophisticated.

And at Tangible, we’re in the middle of two big pitches, which is definitely very exciting.

There’s nothing like the adrenalin rush of a big pitch to keep you warm on a cold winter’s day. And working on not one but two... well, that’ll keep you warmer than the too-tight Christmas jumper your nan knitted you (sorry, another poor analogy).

Especially as, in this case, both pitches are for very switched-on clients who really know their stuff and have ambitious goals for 2010. So, fingers crossed.  

However. My fondness for snow came to an abrupt end this weekend.

 

When my girlfriend skidded on ice and crashed into an oncoming police car. You can probably find it on You Tube – lots of people with camera phones found the idea of smashing into a police car pretty entertaining.

I should say, no-one was hurt – just my no-claims discount. While the car is now languishing in the intensive care wing of the nearest auto repair garage.

But it does mean I’ve gone from walking through the snow as a novelty to walking through at as a necessity.

In theory, the footsteps are the same. Yet now, it doesn’t feel like I’m crunching through powdery white fairy dust in Narnia. It feels like I’m pulling my snow-laden boots through a scene from ‘Alive’. That film where they crash in the Andes and eat each other.

Anyway. Here’s to a happy new year in fundraising, with charities coming through the recession like the first snowdrops pushing through this long-lasting snow.

Oh look. Another poor analogy.