Money Trail

Ever wonder where your donated money goes once you given to your favorite organization?

Kol Hakavod to the creative minds at the Jewish Federation of Silicon Valley for producing this fun cartoon about where your donation to their organization goes.

Their slogan is "No gift touches more lives. Including your own."

Yoav Kaufman

Finding the Best Jewish Lists

1. Take a look at all the Jewish lists on the market at Negev Direct and search by category. If your organization is a social service organization try checking out all of the social service/ humanitarian related lists here. If you are looking for people to buy your product or service, take a look at the consumer’s lists here, etc, etc.

2. Check out Nextmark and take advantage of their free, easy and powerful list search tool. You can search postal, email or telemarketing lists with your own keywords. Nextmark has many Jewish lists plus thousands of other general lists.

3. Google is the most powerful search engine on the market. Google a list idea or a list broker to find Google's top suggestions for your next direct mail campaign!

Yoav Kaufman

Complex Solutions to Simple Problems

How do you open a can?

Do you use a can opener or do you convene a family meeting to discuss the issue?

I’m guessing you just reach for the can opener because it is the simplest, easiest, quickest way to open the can. You don’t have to involve lots of other people who have better things to do and it gets the job done.

Does anyone else share my impression that many Jewish fundraising organizations like to take the complex route when solving simple fundraising problems?

We’ve all seen this sort of thing, and I speak from experience, having worked in Jewish fundraising for the past 22 years.

Some real examples (names omitted to protect the guilty):

The CEO who insists on personally editing every fundraising letter for punctuation. Project time lost: 1 week.

The Director of Development who needs to do a mailing but can’t find the time to give you any details. Project time lost: 2 months.

The Assistant Director who chooses the lists for each mailing based on an arcane formula which cannot be explained to anyone else. Project time lost: 10 days.

Endless, pointless meetings. Project time lost: incalculable.

Can these problems be solved? Yes.

If you hire a professional fundraising consultant or a list broker, just let us do our jobs. Don’t do our jobs for us.

Think of us as your can opener.

We’re quick, efficient and we get the job done.

Project time lost: none.

David Rubin

Successful Email Campaigns

Email campaigns can be faster and less expensive than full on direct mail campaigns, but with that in mind there are many potential pitfalls to avoid. Seth Godin says:

"It's super easy to ignore a direct (e)mail solicitation when all you have to do is hit delete and no one notices."

So you ask...

What can I do do to give my organizations email campaign the best opportunity to sell a product or acquire new donors?

From my experience a successful email campaign will include these Six essential elements:

• First Impressions. Give the reader a clear and meaningful reason to donate in the first glance or at least first sentence or two. Email campaigns need to be much more to the point than direct mail letters. With an email you have around 9 seconds or less to compel the reader to read on or take the next step.


• Easy and Secure Donations. Make it as easy and secure to donate as possible. Pay close attention to what a donors experience feels like. If you were to donate to your organization online today would you be inclined to donate again and if no, why not? I have seen online donation pages that required me to read and agree to a whole page of small print before I could donate... now that was not an organization I would want to donate to!


• Three, Two, One action! Include a short video about your organization that is well produced. Your movie doesn't need to be on par with Steven Spielberg's latest movie production... just something that will say in images what it is you do, why a donor should give and show in images what past donations have been used for. Sites like YouTube make it very easy to post videos online easing the time and production costs of making our own video.
  

*See the Jewish Federation of Silicon Valley's well produced YouTube.com video above if you need some inspiration!

• Target Your Audience. Choosing the best fitting email lists can help you narrow down that vast field of potential donors and don't forget to test, test and test to find the right lists! Here is a compilation of most of the Jewish email lists on the market toady: Jewish Email Lists
  
• Be Professional. Have a professional, well designed and action friendly web-page. While this might not be the focus of your online marketing campaign, if interested, most web savvy donors will take a peek at your website to find out more about your organization and how they can get involved. Check out this wonderful Jewish Web Site Design firm if your organization is thinking about redesigning it's web site. The Negev Design web site folks did an excellent job with Negev Direct's web site and we are very satisfied customers.
  
• Opt In. Invite he potential donor or buyer to opt-in to your email list to receive periodic updates from you. You can assure your new member that they will not be receiving spam from you, only offers that you think they would be interested in. If you don't ask you can't grow your list
  

And this just in from Denny Hatch...

“Confuse ‘em, ya lose ‘em.” Paul Goldberg

“Short words, short sentences, short paragraphs.” Andrew J. Byrne

"Notice how in those e-mails where the campaign wants action, it sprinkles live hyperlinks throughout the message. Thus the moment a prospect decides to act, the click-on mechanism is right there. Force a person to hunt for a hyperlink and chances are you have lost the response.*

“Make it easy to order (or donate).” Elsworth Howell, Founder Grolier Enterprises and Howell Book House

Yoav Kaufman

Buy High, Sell Low

It’s not what you should do, but if you are like most people, it probably is what you will do.

As I write this, stock markets around the world are crashing.

Now that prices are falling fast, many people want to sell their stocks and mutual funds as quickly as possible. These are the same people who bought when prices were high. They follow the herd.

Right over the cliff.

Being in a herd has its advantages. You keep your head down. You follow someone else’s lead. You can blame someone else when something goes wrong. And when you run off the cliff you have plenty of company.

A few smart people will see the bigger picture, think for the long term and will view this as a buying opportunity.

Call them contrarians, loners or visionaries; they are definitely not part of the herd.

What does this have to do with fundraising or marketing?

Everything.

Past experience has taught me that when there is a big stock market pullback or an economic recession, most organizations respond by following the herd: they cut back.

They cut back on expenses. Which means cutting back on mailings. Which means less contact with their contributors.

Their thinking is: if people are losing money and the economy is in shambles, people will contribute less money. So why even bother asking. Let’s just stop now and save the bother and expense.

The person who gave you $20,000 last year because his hedge fund investment paid off handsomely may not contribute anything this year because the fund has just gone broke.

On the other hand, the person who has been loyally sending $36 twice a year for the past five years is still going to contribute. And may even increase his donation.

Why?

Because he understands that when times are tough, people need even more help. And your organization is the one doing the helping.

But there’s a catch. You have to ask.

If you lower your head, run with the herd and cut back on your mailings, he’ll just give his donation to someone else.

The contrarian has the smarts to continue mailing when others pull back. The visionary sees opportunity when others see disaster. He will be the one who profits in the long run.

Will you be one of them?

David Rubin