We know that people want to be talked to by charities that understand them as one person who cares about their cause, not a donor, a campaigner and someone who does events for them as three different people.  They want to understand what it is that you do that allows them to engage with them in different ways (as they choose) rather than have three different messages being sent to them.  And they want to feel engaged with you in away that makes them feel needed and valued across the organisation rather than three different numbers on three different databases.

With this in mind we created the ‘Integration Afternoon’ at the recent Institute of Fundraising Convention.  I’m not aware of anything like it having been done before – a session where fundraisers and campaigners were encouraged to come together, learn together and debate together to help everyone, not least the supporters.

If the level of interaction and debate was anything to go by it was a great success (and the feedback forms certainly said this).  And now the slides are all available for you to download / view / distribute as you see fit.

I should state here that we don’t see integration as being about the integration of fundraising and campaigning – more that it is about how you can engage supporters with your mission, your brand, your successes and your campaigns in a way that speaks with one powerful voice.  But integrating Fundraising and Campaigning is as good a starting point as any and the most pressing issue for many people.

Matthew Sherrington kicked us all off by inspiring us all with the opportunity that good intergration offers and challenges us to talk about some of the issues that we all face when trying to develop more integrated supporter experiences.  We all know that Fundraisers are only interested in creating emotional engagement and plan everything months (sometimes years) in advance and that Campaigners are always right, have enough stats to win twenty arguments but couldn’t plan what they are having for lunch.  As Jonathan Smith, Head of Campaigns for Save the Children put it, “Fundraisers need to lighten up, Campaigners need to tighten up.”  Matthew discussed some of the issues in his introduction.

My role was to provide the consumer insight.  Those of you who know me know that I could talk endlessly about these areas, but I restrained myself to three brief introductions to three relevant thoughts.

Firstly I discussed the changing needs that people are looking to satisfy – particularly how the growing experience economy is showing that people are willing to pay a premium to have an experience rather than simply consume a product.  Given that we only offer experiences, I believe this way of thinking to be vital.

A bit later on I picked up on the theme of what people want again, by looking at our experience on motivations for support and the values that drive all our attitudes and behaviours.  This was followed by a quick introduction to the idea that we all make emotional decisions first, and so we need to engage people emotionally with our causes.  Did you know that we all have three brains?  Read this and you’ll see the impact this has.

For me the highlight of the afternoon was listening to Cathy Anderson from Greenpeace, Karen Rothwell from RSPB and Jonathon Smith from Save the Children talking about their experiences.

Firstly, Karen talked about the RSPB’s learning from the Letter to the Future campaign.  This fantastic campaign (which I’m proud to say The Good Agency worked with the RSPB to develop) was full of emotion, has so far engaged around a quarter of a million people, has provided an effective advocacy platform and is helping recruit and develop members.  Does anything get more integrated than that?  Karen’s brutally honest presentation shared both the campaign’s successes and the learnings that it has generated.

By the way, if you’re not yet one of the ¼ million people who have signed the Letter to the Future, please do so now.

Cathy talked about how Greenpeace use a social psychology model to engage people.  This is about understanding the social pressures that influence our opinions and attitudes.  She talked about the 90:9:1 model that I have blogged about recently.  This was all brought to life with the most fantastic Greenpeace stories showing BP, Nestle and Heathrow campaigns that left us all wishing that we had the guts to do what they do.

Matthew then followed this up by giving us some planning tools and using his Oxfam experience and how he applied it to Greenpeace USA’s campaign plans.  Useful stuff.

Finally Jonathon talked about his experience at Save the Children.  He showed us how campaigning is being combined into a more traditional fundraising organisation with tremendous results.  I particularly liked the way that the campaigns have been developed to meet the profile of the audience that they are talking to giving the examples of the Knit One, Save One campaign (asking older members of the Save the Children supporter file ot knit a hat for a child in Africa) and the Gaza campaign from early 2009 which engaged an entirely new audience for Save the Children.

Looking back, it’s always important to look at what we learnt.  I hope that we managed the right mix of educating, challenging, inspiring and giving tips.  As ever, we had a lot of content to cover and didn’t allow enough time for the discussion / break-out sections.  So maybe we’ll run something similar again and address this – watch this space!

By the way, this is only my view – if you attended please do feel free to add your thoughts in the comments section below.

Matthew joined The Good Agency in January as a Strategy Director after 20 years in the voluntary sector in fundraising and communications roles. Other significant additions to the leadership team are Louisa McGinn, appointed into a new Client Services Director role, and Reuben Turner, who now heads up an integrated Creative and Digital team. They join Strategy and Planning Director Roger Lawson, Strategy Director Chris Norman, and PR Director Maggie Young.

The new leadership team will focus the agency on its ethos of connecting people to issues and causes, and on delivering excellent supporter (and client) experience, integrated strategic thinking, and creative communications. 

So far this year, The Good Agency has won major new accounts such as Save the Children and Cancer Research UK Race for Life, and helped cancer charity AICR win the 2010 Institute of Fundraising Award for ‘Best Use of Legacy Fundraising’.

Matthew Sherrington, Managing Director, The Good Agency says:

“This is a really exciting time for us.  Despite a recession, the talent, commitment and passion of our people has helped both the business and our reputation grow.  This restructure will help us go from good to great, whilst staying true to our values.”

Roger Lawson, Strategy and Planning Director, who has been with the agency since it was established says:

‘Since joining us in January, Matthew has proved popular with both clients and staff.  His vision and leadership, along with the strengthened Leadership Team will help us remain well placed to respond to our clients’ changing needs during this challenging and exciting time for the sector.”

The Good Agency remains independently-owned.

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These days lots of charities are nice and responsive on social networks. Most of the of the 16 responded almost immediately with a thank you and some with a bit of chat during the tournament.

Social media campaigns (as I have written before) need to be as strategically planned as any other. For this to have been anything other than a very last minute idea, I needed a site, a story and a plan. As well as someone to update it when I was sick.

Sometimes people are unresponsive. This causes social media managers to become sad and delay your donation.

You have to be in it to win it. My personal charity of choice is not actually on Twitter. Perhaps if they had been I would have fixed it so they won. As the array of tweeting charities shows, even if Twitter can’t help the people/research/sufferer/animal your charity supports, it doesn’t mean it can’t help you interact with supporters.

Charities have different tones of voice on Twitter. Some are very personal. Some a little less so. Whatever works for you, but I prefer the former. It makes me feel good about giving you money.

What do you know; it is pretty damn easy to give money online. But the process of doing so varies in its integration with the messaging of the charity, and ease of social media sharing.

Charities don’t have social media specific donation landing pages. This can make you feel like you’ve been transported from a warm friendly chat wih your aunt, to a dentist’s waiting room.

And finally, sometimes you feel a little relief when your clients don’t make money. I somehow thought it might seem like a fix when a client I work with directly pulled out two of the tournament favorites. But it really was the luck of the draw.

 The first one is from NSPCC and is their latest newsletter.  Introduced by Eliza, you can be treated to a really interactive and engaging tour of the work you have supported and other news from the NSPCC.  And the tone of voice is spot on.

The second was done by the school where two of my children go to.  My wife, as well as being a Governor, sometimes helps out in the classes and everyone who has helped throughout the year was treated to a strawberries and cream tea picnic on the school field – waited on by several of the Year 6 boys and girls. 

Two brilliant ways to say thank you – some people just get it, don’t they?

There were lots of thoughts that chimed with what others had to say – we all talked about the value of experiences over information, for instance, and of real-time feedback. (It won’t be long before we’re skyping the children we sponsor.) And people with iPhones and iPads talked about how they were going to change our world forever, as evangelists do.

One thing that no-one else seemed to pick up on was the idea of the Permission Society, something that our Head of Technology Dave Gurney came up with and I shamelessly repurposed.

I signed up to my first regular gift via PayPal recently (it was to 10:10).

But while I was only too pleased to I give 10:10 my money, I didn’t pass on my details. No, PayPal has those, and guards them jealously. So how can 10:10 build a relationship with me? Or even know who I am?

Soon charities won’t be having relationships with supporters. They’ll be having them with their PayPal and eBay accounts and their mobile phone providers.

And where does that leave the data and supporter profiling we rely on?

Text donations have the ability to reach huge volumes of people and get them giving. But how will you know whether the £5 that comes to you is from a 14-year old schoolboy or a retired millionaire with no dependents who has an appointment with their Solicitor next month? You won’t know their name, their gender, how old they are or where they live.

In addition, people are becoming smarter and smarter about protecting their data – ironically because there’s so much of it. People whose every move is tracked relentlessly by Google and Facebook won’t want you to know their postcode.

Where does that leave charities and other direct marketers? Scrabbling around for data, I’d say.

So going forward our challenge is to create content and experiences that people will be prepared to swap their data for. We have to make people want to get to know us, rather than relying on payment methods to tell us about our supporters.

We won’t be able to assume anything. Permission will be everything.

Sounds like hard work. Sounds like fun, too.

The AICR ‘Your Cancer Story’ campaign, developed with The Good Agency, clearly demonstrated innovation and success in legacy fundraising, pipping Barnados and St Dunstan’s to the prize.

Using a two-phased approach of creating conversations followed by persuasion, the campaign first asked supporters to share their experience of cancer and then these were shared with other supporters to inspire them to consider a gift. Real stories were used to inspire supporters to consider leaving AICR a gift in their will. This resulted in 118 pledges, eight responses indicating intent to leave a legacy and 61 requests for further information.  With the average legacy gift being £20,000, the campaign reaped pledges worth over £2.2m for the charity.

Roger Lawson, Director, The Good Agency says:

“We are delighted to have won this award but, most importantly to have produced such a successful legacy fundraising campaign for the AICR. We wanted to encourage people who support the charity to really think about why they give and the difference it makes. It was a challenge to speak to this audience about such a sensitive issue but this campaign shows that real people and real stories are a strong motivator for others.”

Geraldine Long, Donor Development Manager, AICR says:

“When The Good Agency presented the idea that my story would inspire supporters, it felt right. I’ll always remember the day I sat down to read our supporters letters, their openness and honesty was touching. This was not only a successful campaign but it was really rewarding to read supporters connecting with my story by sharing their own. I’m looking forward to working with The Good Agency on the next stage of this campaign in 2010 and developing a closer relationship with our supporter base.”

- Ends -

We should always be looking to move people up the model.  We talk too often about how getting more people in the bottom is a challenge, but just imagine the difference if the model was 85%, 13%, 2%.  Small changes in the numbers but a massive increase in impact.

We must remember which level we are talking to.  For the 90% we must make it easy, for the 9% we can ask them to be more pro-active whilst for the 1% we need to give them tools.  A couple of examples came to mind the other day.  RSPB’s Letter to the Future makes it easy for people to sign a letter to MPs – it is clearly aimed at the 90% and is extremely effective.  Greenpeace’s Love Letter to the Future asked people to write their own letter – clearly aimed at the 9%.  Similar ideas doing different things.  Both new innovative and, I hope, successful.                                                                                                                                                                        

And we must remember the 1%.  This is a new group for many of us and we’re all having fun experimenting with how to talk to them.  Seth Godin summed it up perfectly when he said that every organisation has 1% of customers are your advocates  – we don’t need to market to them, we need to give them loud hailers.

It involves a whole new way of speaking to these people – but what opportunities await those who get it right.

Angela sourced the tree stumps in Ghana, which over the last 50 years has lost 90 per cent of its primary rainforests.  Ghana is now determined to preserve what is left, and is at the vanguard of responsible and sustainable forestry.  Its remaining forestry concessions are selectively logged under strict regulations, ensuring the retention of the forest canopy, the natural regeneration of the forest, and a viable and sustainable timber industry for local people.  To reflect this, only three of the Ghost Forest trees have been logged, the rest fell in adverse weather. 

‘This is not yet another message about climate change “doom and gloom”‘, says the artist. ‘Ghost Forest carries a message of hope and optimism for the future’.

We seem to be talking about the 90:9:1 model a lot at the moment.  I believe it started with YouTube, who noticed that 90% of their users just looked, 9% commented and 1% post videos.  Like the Pareto Model (my previous favourite) the rule seems to apply everywhere I look.

When campaigning, 90% of people will take an action for the issue, 9% will understand the brand behind the campaign and 1% will shout about the brand.

Or 90% of people will sign a campaign letter, 9% will personalise the letter before sending it and 1% will tell everyone they know about it.

In the past we have grouped everyone together and offer them the lowest common denominator.  But the tools exist today to talk to the 1% and enable them to talk to everyone they know.  Exciting times!

• I’m allergic to lanyards
• I don’t like eating standing up while trying to hold a plate, a glass and a fork in one hand
• There’s too much Literature on offer (and none of it’s Dickens if you know what I mean)

This year will be different. For a start I’m speaking – on a subject that, by definition I can’t know anything about (‘what direct marketing will look like in 2015’). That sounds like fun.

Second, Twitter and Facebook are buzzing and I’m looking forward to putting a few names to faces, faces to names. We just need to agree on a hashtag, folks.

Finally, having read the session titles, I’m looking forward to completely transforming my outlook on life, my career prospects, my effectiveness, my efficiency and my professional standing.

For a start, I’ll finally be able to access some Strategy Tools that Work!

I’ll learn how to get out of that Silo at last!

I’ll be able to access the Power of Collaboration!

And I’ll learn how to Stay Strong in Times of Change – something that we never needed during all those years when nothing changed, but that now we really do.

Why have these sessions never been covered before? What have we been doing all these years, folks? Why have we never come up with Ten Easy Ways to Triple Your Fundraising Income Overnight before? Why have we never Changed Our Lives Forever In Fifteen Minutes?

No, this year’s definitely going to be different. It’s going to be amazing.

See you there!