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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.