Flight of the Flyers: Social media and real-world action

Flight of the Flyers, produced by Nazareth College in Rochester, NY, was developed to be an amusing and engaging way for the college to connect its reunion alumni—and for them to connect with each other.

Nazareth also hoped to reconnect with inactive alumni; increase attendance at reunion (yes, its face-to-face reunion!); and improve the information it had on alumni. And to build pride in the Nazareth—one goal that has been surely furthered by the two CASE awards the site has already earned.

The judges’ report for the 2009 CASE Awards of Excellence for websites, in which Flight of the Flyers won a Gold, noted:

One judge remarked, “This is the coolest thing I’ve seen in this judging. A smart use of the web that promotes engagement and prompts action in the real world.” The site definitely exhibits a sense of humor-and appeal-given that 47 percent of visitors came back for two or more visits and pre-registration for Reunion is up 22 percent. Nevertheless, this is one of the sites that generated a lot of discussion among the judges. Some of the judges argued that the site deserved an award because of the way it linked the real world with the virtual one; others noted that it seemed a bit childish and its design is uninspiring. But, as one judge put it, “You can’t argue with success. That’s increased engagement in a time when perhaps people can’t afford to travel to reunions, or perhaps older people can’t travel to reunions but this is a way they can engage.”

The current Flight of the Flyers site represents the second generation of the project. According to Kerry Gotham, Nazareth College’s director of alumni relations, the program actually began in 2007 as a way to encourage participation in the college’s 2008 reunion—the second year in which reunion was to be held in spring, rather than fall.

“At that point, we wanted to grow our program. We had 450 people at our 2007 reunion and wanted to do better in 2008. I was intrigued by the Travelocity commercials featuring the roaming gnome and wanted to see if we could find a way to do something like that to build interest in our reunions. We wanted to go beyond the norm, do something different with the potential go have a peer-to-peer component.”

Thus was born Flight of the Flyers. The college decided to send stuffed “Golden Flyer” mascots to alumni in reunion classes and invite them to forward the birds to other reunion alumni. [That’s a total of 3,000 potential alumni who are registered members of reunion classes and can receive a (stuffed) Golden Flyer mascot by mail. Nazareth has 23,997 addressable alumni.] They set up a simple forwarding system using the U.S. Postal Service’s Click-N-Ship program.

Despite comments by naysayers-one of whom said, “Alumni will never pay to send these things to other alumni”the program took off. During that first year, Nazareth staff logged in the travels of the Golden Flyers and added alumni comments to their website-by hand. “It was a lot of work,” Gotham said.

Planning a web-enabled Golden Flyers program

Believing that the campaign would be more engaging if it was web-enabled-and that the college could save a lot of staff time-the alumni staff began focusing on integrating the 2009 edition of Flight of the Flyers with some innovative social media tools.

The Flight of the Flyers website that Nazareth launched last year took the “Golden Flyer Challenge” to a new level. People who receive a Golden Flyer could take a photo of it in location, check in on a Google Map on the site, and send the Golden Flyer to another reunion classmate. Members of reunion classes can request a bird through a form on the site.

And alumni in other classes can participate by printing out a Golden Flyer and taking a photo of it, then checking it in on the Google map.

The site incorporates a lot of features that encourage alumni to engage with each other:

• Alumni could post their own updates and read info that others posted via the map and a profile generated by visitors to the site;


• Alumni could invite less-active classmates to participate;


• “Lost” alumni could request a Flyer and reconnect with the college, sharing their contact info through a form on the site;


• The College collected the updates and data in a database, rather than hand-entering the information as in the previous year.

All told, the site took about 310 hours of staff time to plan, build, and manage. Wall to Wall Studios provided strategy, design and development for the project. Gotham said that Nazareth was planning to use the same basic site for five years, allowing them to amortize staff time and direct costs and resulting in a very cost-effective campaign for Nazareth.
The Flight of the Flyers site was very much a team effort, Gotham said. “I have great partners here—it wouldn’t have been possible to do this without everyone pitching in.” In particular, he credits Mimi Wright,
Kerry VanMalderghem, Colleen Brennan-Barry, and Fran Zablocki.

Results

Nazareth is delighted with the results of the Flight of the Flyers—indeed, it’s successful by any measure of engagement for a small college.

“Demographically, we have a good range of participation pretty through the years, with as many as 60 participants in one class; we had 10-15 participants in the the classes with the lowest numbers. We had more than 260 people participate in all. We had 600 people at reunion this year.”

The broad response was a surprise to Brennan-Barry, the person in marketing responsible for oversight of the Nazareth website. “We had some initial concerns that our “older” alumni might not be as comfortable and engage with the site as much as new alumni. That was happily proven incorrect when we realized that the classes that were placing in the top three for Flyer miles traveled included the classes of ‘59, ‘64 and ‘74!”

This is an important reminder, she points out, “that we can certainly reach different segments of our core population via different media, and that the preferred media of those segments is changing and evolving all the time.”

Plus, Gotham added, “We’ve had a lot of great anecdotal and written comments about Flight of the Flyers. People said how how much fun it was to take the picture of their Flyer—they enjoyed being creative with the photo and showcasing where they live or where they were traveling.”

Also, the site worked in helping people to connect with each other. “People did make connections, they followed up, and we know that in addition to boosting attendance at our reunion, the site sparked informal reunions. People used a Flyer as a rallying point to get together in their area.

Brennan-Barry noted that visitors appreciated the absence of a direct “ask” on the Flight of the Flyers site. “I am glad that we made the decided choice not to use this site as a vehicle for direct fundraising, but more as a vehicle for connection. We did include a “Donate to Nazareth” link on every page, but we listened to users when they told us that they have solicitiation fatigue from ‘constantly’ getting asked for money from every organization to which they belong. Our choice to make this more of a place for us to connect with alumni and raise excitement for Reunion 09 was, in retrospect, a good one.”

As far as metrics are concerned, here’s some data from this year’s effort, from 1 June 2008 to 30 June 2009:

• 3127 unique site visits.


• 1867 visitors viewed 5.91 pages/visit and spent an average of 3.56 minutes on the site.


• 47% of visitors return for two or more visits.


• 180 alumni checked a Flyer in via the site (note: only four Flyers per each of 10 classes have been circulating since 6/08).


• 123 alumni used the form on the site to request that a Flyer be sent to them.

And of course, the CASE awards don’t hurt: the entire program won the Grand Gold in Alumni Relations in addition to the Gold for the Flight of the Flyers site.

Lessons and advice

When asked what surprised him about the Golden Flyers program, Gotham replied, “To be honest, I was surprised at how well it did take off, both years. I thought it was kind of a harebrained idea. We wanted to have some fun—I had no idea how much people would like it.”

One ancillary benefit of the Golden Flyers program is that it’s brought the Golden Flyer mascot to the attention of people on- and off-campus, Gotham said. “We’ve only had an athletics program for about 30 years, and many people just didn’t connect with our mascot. So this was a clever, visual, and direct way for them to make that connection. And they have.”

Gotham noted that there were a few skeptics when the idea was originally floated. “But I did have the support of my boss, our vice president. Without that, it wouldn’t have been possible.” In the two years of the program, only one complaint has surfaced about the cost of shipping the Flyer to the next recipient (it costs about $5 and it’s easy to print the Click-N-Ship label from a computer).

As far as the site production is concerned, Colleen Brennan-Barry noted, “We did some light usability testing about 2/3 of the way through the project and I cannot stress how important and useful this was! I know that testing is almost always the first thing to be cut if a project is short on time or resources, but never discount the value of user feedback as you’re creating this kind of interactive site. For a handful of $5 Starbucks giftcards, we received back a great deal of helpful information that saved us time and user confusion in the end.”

Speaking to the need for monitoring how people use it, Gotham noted that next year, Nazareth is planning to simplify the Flight of the Flyers site. “Even though the website is cool, we are going to make some changes in it. Alumni weren’t as interested in the individual birds as they were with connecting with other people in their class. We’ll make it easier to find who in your class has already received the birds, and who wants them.”

Brennan Barry noted, “As we look at revising and reestablishing Flight of the Flyers for the Reunion 2010 classes, we will be looking more closely at the communications by which we publicize the site and the program with the world. This year, the site received strong traffic and interaction with minimal communication; I’m excited to think about how we might be able to connect with our alumni if our communications are stronger.”

And next year, Gotham noted, they’ll work out a definitive solution for the fact that the site worked too well, disappointing some alumni: not everyone who requested a bird actually received them. That will change next year, he asserted.

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The Blue Pig Campaign: FTF + Facebook + Twitter + More = Annual Fund Increases

An integrated campaign focused on improving undergraduate donations to Emory University’s Annual Fund relied on social media (Facebook and Twitter) for outreach to Emory students and a boost in undergraduate giving to the Class Gift Campaign.

This year was the second year for Emory’s Blue Pig campaign. When the Class of 2011 entered the university, they were given a blue plastic piggy bank, with messages about the importance of giving even small amounts to Emory. The Class of 2012 received their own pigs when they arrived on campus. And this year, Emory’s Annual Fund staff created an integrated campaign to reinforce the value of giving—and having fun while doing it.

Here’s a brief explanation of the Blue Pig, from an Annual Giving FAQ:

Since the mid-1500’s, the piggy bank has been used throughout the world as a tool to teach the value of saving and mindful spending. The Blue Pig is starting a new tradition and serves as a symbol that a little change can make a world of difference. We are presenting each member of the entering Freshman Class with a special edition piggy bank to highlight the importance of giving back, while each sophomore will receive a blue pig t-shirt at our events, you’ll receive a special thank you gift in return. We ask that you keep the piggy bank in a prominent place so you can remember to fill it with your spare change, which will count as a gift to your Class Gift Campaign. We will have periodic “Piggy Round-Up” events on campus throughout the year where you will have the opportunity to drop off your piggy bank savings.

An integrated campaign begins

This year, sophomores received bright-blue t-shirts with a pig emblazoned on the front and the slogan “Feed Me. Love, the Blue Pig” on the back. “This works incredibly effectively as free advertising, and by only offering it to the sophomore class, these highly popular shirts have created a quasi-black market among the upperclassmen, which in turn, has created a student-driven hype that is its own form of fantastic publicity,” said said Cassandra Young, who, as program development coordinator at the Emory Annual Fund, coordinated the Blue Pig campaign.

Initially, the Blue Pig campaign relied on email for monthly communications, but staff members wanted more of a dialog with students. So they turned their attention to social media and other online forums where they could interact directly with undergraduates.

For his year’s Blue Pig campaign, Cassie Young created a Facebook page for the Blue Pig—and it turned out to be a little bit too successful. “I created a profile page for The Blue Pig, treating him as if he were a person. After I got about 1,000 followers, Facebook closed the page down because there were too many updates,” Young said. She recently joined Emory’s Alumni Association, leaving the Blue Pig temporarily without a human spokesperson to Facebook or tweet on his behalf.

Once the Blue Pig had a lot of friends on Facebook (and on campus), Young and her colleagues staged a “pignapping,” buying an ad in the student newspaper, publishing a ransom note on Facebook, and postering the campus. They “demanded” a ransom of $3,500 by the end of the semester for the Blue Pig’s release. The money raised would bring back the pig and provide students with stipends for textbooks.

Young also created a Twitter ID (@thebluepig), which has 62 followers and 44 updates and was one of the early Twitter accounts at Emory.

More engagement

As part of her commitment to online engagement, Young also monitored other public online forums. “I responded to a lot of comments.” Part of the challenge, she pointed out, is educating Emory undergraduates about why their gift is important. “We’re trying to be as transparent as possible and use language that students understand and relate to.” Indeed, the language on the Class Gift Piggy Bank web page is clear and straightforward.

“Engagement,” for Young, meant a lot more than social media. “Opening up a dialog meant that we wanted to be approachable, so I went to every single event and talked to students. I was able to have face-to-face conversations with them and answer their questions directly.”

Young manages the campaign herself—and it’s a lot of work. She ran a photo contest for students, inviting them to photograph their blue pig piggy banks on campus and offering a prize for the best photo. She didn’t put together a Flickr gallery from the results just because she didn’t have the time.

And the results?

Young said, “The students love the pig.”

OK, but how has the campaign worked? “The giving rate has jumped enormously; in the first two months of the fiscal year, we’ve doubled what we’d done before,” she added. According to The Chronicle of Philanthropy,

Since adopting the pig as the class campaign mascot, the annual fund has attracted a 157-percent increase in the number of gifts from undergraduates. And the total amount from undergraduates collected for first seven months of this fiscal year has reached $12,915, compared with $682 raised during the same period last year.

Giving for the Class Gift Advisory Board reached 100 percent participation in one month. And here’s some more data:

As of 31 May 2009, the total undergraduate giving rate more than doubled over 2008. First-years had a 9 percent participation rate and there was a 579.42 percent increase in total dollars raised and a 734.88 percent increase in the average gift. Sophomores were in the second year of the Blue Pig campaign, there was a 1300 percent increase in dollars raised and a 518 percent increase in participation rate; gifts increased by 424 percent.

Update: The Chronicle of Higher Education reported on the Blue Pig campaign in April, 2010.

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Trends and Judges’ Report, CASE Awards of Excellence for Websites

This year, I chaired the judging panel for the CASE Awards of Excellence Judging for websites. The judging was hosted by Roosevelt University, Chicago—a shoutout to Lisa Encarnacion, director of university outreach, who made all the arrangements for us, and to Lesley Slavitt, vice president, government relations and university outreach.

This year, 15 judges convened for two days in March for the judging. The judges represented American and Canadian colleges, schools, and universities, public and private. The panel included people with experience in design, web strategy, web content development, admissions, student recruitment, web technology, and marketing. We also had a number of consultants on the panel, one of whom spent years working as a high school counselor. More than half of the judges have won national CASE Awards of Excellence for their websites. (Typical panels that judge other categories in the Awards of Excellence competition number about six to eight.)

There were 56 complete institutional sites entered in Category 10A [Complete Institutional Websites] this year and 94 sites entered in Category 10B [Individual Sub-Websites]. This year we awarded a Grand Gold and two Golds. In Category 10A, George School won a Gold for its redesigned site. And in Category 10B, Xavier University won the Grand Gold for Road to Xavier and Nazareth College took a Gold for FlightoftheFlyers.com.

Short list of Award winners for 2009; more details about each in the Judges’ Report for 2009.

What makes an award-winning institutional website? Here were some of the important elements we identified this year:

• a sound strategy


• sound information architecture, navigability, usability and search


• good content, effectively deployed across the site


• effective management of the site


• appropriate look and feel, distinctive to the purpose of the site and consistent within the site


• appropriate use of technology and adherence to standards


• evaluation plan; appropriate results

We also ask whether the site does something particularly interesting or unusual. We’re not very interested in sites that merely look good. It’s easy to make a site look good, but is the site great at what it’s designed to do? If a site looks good but isn’t well-organized or lacks coherent messaging, it won’t get an award. Competition in this category is very rigorous, and winning is difficult.

Managing Conflicts of Interest
Judging panels for other CASE Awards of Excellence categories top out at about six people. There are a number of reasons why we invite such a large number of people to participate in judging this category. First, building websites is a complicated undertaking and we want people with different kinds of expertise in the room to comment on issues such as audience appropriateness, usability, design, and other issues as they came up. Second, we have a lot of sites to review and having a large group of people makes this process go faster. Third, having a large group of experienced people with strong opinions ensures that a broad range of opinions is heard. Finally, the large group ensures that conflicts of interest do not emerge in this judging.

We take conflicts of interest extremely seriously. Several of the judges represented institutions that had websites entered in Category 10, and several mStoner clients entered sites in this category. Judges with a relationship to a site being judged do not participate in viewing the site during the first “elimination” round; if the site survives this round, judges are expected to recuse themselves from judging the site, are not allowed to comment on it, and are asked to leave the room when the site is being discussed during the final round when awards are given.

Trends
I’m sorry to report that the judges were underwhelmed at what we saw this year. One remarked, “I felt as if I was looking at websites from 1997. I was disappointed and surprised at how bad they were.”

Some sites we explored are clearly reaching for “wow,” but wow in and of itself isn’t enough. Without functionality, wow quickly becomes annoying. We noticed a lot of gratuitous elements that had no purpose and/or were not useful; examples of bad design; and many generic websites. One judge remarked, “I don’t see many best practices emerging this year.”

It was particularly galling to see sites that completely lacked any sense of branding or even a sense of place: the institutions could have been anywhere. For example, we looked at one site from an institution on the California coast and couldn’t find a single image that showed us where it was located.

And as important as authenticity is today, many of the sites we looked at seemed to lack authenticity. Authenticity was one of the elements that people liked about George School’s site, as well as Northland’s and Nazareth College’s Flight of the Flyers.

Another shortcoming overall was a decided lack of great content-we saw very little excellent writing or video on any of the sites we viewed. Too much of the writing was characterized by the usual university-language clichs. Sites need to be edited-and not just for misspellings (we observed far too many). And, often, excellent content was buried deep inside the site: this is good content used poorly, where one had to stumble upon it in many cases. This is not only a waste of time (and/or money), but also attention: visitors want good content!

One judge observed, “When I’m looking at your site, all I have is what is on the page. Don’t assume I know who you are; or where you are.” [Note: one of the strengths of the award-winning site for the George School is that the site provides a sense of what George School is, in words, images, and video.]

There were a number of sites that did a nice job in tying real-world experiences into the web—particularly Nazareth University’s Flight of the Flyers site. This site, McGill’s Six Word Stories site, IUPUI’s Events Calendar, and The Road to Xavier were particularly good at engaging visitors with the sites and encouraging them to share information in a variety of different ways and on different platforms, including social networking sites.

Some final comments:

• One judge noted, “What’s with the small fonts?” It wasn’t just older judges who complained about the lack of readability of small type on websites.


• We noted that a lot of sites used Flash and provided no alternatives, so they were inaccessible.


• We noted that many of the people who entered sites this year hadn’t spent much time thinking about how to evaluate the results of the all the work that went into their site. There were some clear exceptions, two of them being George School and Xavier University. At Xavier, a robust analytics toolset allows people on campus to monitor how the site is being used and respond to groups or individuals appropriately. Bravo to these award winners—and to others who thought through this key step to making a site “effective.”


• Many of the entries were a bit cagey about the use of consultants in the redesign process. Some of the winning sites were designed by on-campus teams; others were designed by consultants. We’re not particularly focused on how much a site costs, but on how good it is and what kind of results it gets. Please credit consultants for their work and be transparent about the share of the costs allocated to consultant fees when you prepare your entries. We’ll recommend that, next year, entries that reference consultants but don’t break out their costs be eliminated.

Additional Resources

Short list of Award Winners for 2009

Judges’ Report for 2009

Judges’ Report for 2008

Posted by Michael Stoner
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Integrated Fundraising Communications More Effective Than Email Alone

I posted about Vinay Bhagat’s keynote during the conference and I wanted to come back and focus a bit on several slides from his presentation because they are so compelling.

During the conference, several people, including Ken Kipps, made similar points, but only Vinay provided some data to back them up the value of integrated, multi-channel marketing.

Part of the “why” to do multi-channel marketing is generational. Many boomers will respond to direct mail and telemarketing, while those channels leave Gen X cold. For them, it’s email, the web, and some social networks. For younger Xers and millennials, the channels to pay attention to are IM, text messaging, and social media.

During his presentation, Vinay showed the online and direct mail appeals for a World Wildlife Fund Tiger Emergency fundraiser. The integrated appeal-when offline and online appeals were coordinated-showed a 40 percent better response rate. And Convio’s research shows that online engagement helps to grow annual donor value.

What does an integrated, multi-channel campaign look like? Vinay showed in his presentation that included web appeals, emails, direct (paper) mail, videos, text messages, and web content all delivered over a three-month campaign cycle.

And for more ideas of online multi-channel strategies, here’s a report of a presentation by Ken Kipps from UVA; while this is from the recent AMA conference in Chicago, it’s similar to the one he did in Seattle at the CASE conference.

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Advancement 2.0

He began his presentation with five key messages:

*Efficient fund generation is ever more critical in hard economic times, with competition from many causes

*Must build strong constituent relationships

*Online marketing can be a foundation for overall advancement strategy

*Shift from broadcast, appeal to strategic engagement and empowerment

*Integrated, multi-channel approach

In fact, Convio reports that Despite Difficult Economy US Online Holiday Giving to Exceed $3 Billion and that more than 89 million online adults plan to give, so developing an effective, long-term strategy to communicate with and to engage donors through online channels is essential, even in economic hard times.

Direct mail-and even email-is no longer enough as the broader Internet (think Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn) and other technologies (texting, IM) gain marketshare from email.

While some donors (especially older donors) may prefer direct mail solicitations, the fact is that they are also using the web and email. Moreover, revenue from direct mail is now declining. And, even as online fundraising is growing, email files are shrinking and email alone is no longer as effective as it once was in raising awareness or soliciting donations. Time and information overload are significant issues for everyone: segmentation and relevance grow ever more important. Half of donors say they unsubscribe from email offers when the offers/types of content don’t interest them and 37 percent unsubscribe from email offers from senders who email them too often.

So personalization, conditional content within emails, and respecting preferences for such things as types of content and frequency of communication become even more important in the context of a campaign. And while email needs to be an important part of the online giving scene, it is still only a part. The most compelling and effective online campaigns will utilize an integrated strategy, linking email, social networks, and various online engagement and conversion strategies.

More and more, successful campaigns develop a multi-phase, multi-channel strategy. One simple example is the appeal by Defenders of Wildlife for feedback about the cover for their 2009 calendar. Email to 400,000 supporters resulted in nearly 60,000 responses, and an opportunity to re-email everyone to announce the winner and solicit them for a calendar purchase—and membership.

Another example is an ASPCA Adopt-a-Pet program that relies on a Facebook app that alerts your network about actions you’ve taken for the ASPCA and posts a suitably adorable picture of the pet you adopt on your Facebook page.

The most important result of an integrated communications approach-one that utilizes a variety of channels-is that this kind of approach really maximizes results and enhnances engagement. That’s really the key: engagement, over the long-term, on the donor’s own terms, which will result in life-time value for your organization.

Some examples Vinay cited:

*World Wildlife Fund achieved a 40% better response rate via multi-channel campaign.

*At the University of Texas, Annual Fund donors were sent an email with Flash video before they were called about their contriubitions; this approach improved the receptiveness to the telemarketing phone call and increased giving.

And here are his “Five Things to Plan for In 2009”:

*Create preference center, tiered email options [for your email list]; result: More targeted messages to supporters, increase % read

*Evaluate usability, overhaul donor information on website; result: Stronger case for giving on your website

*Psychographic profile donors; result: better understand donor dynamics and needs

*Expand options for relationship seekers, especially video; result: Increase engagement with most engaging group

*Create a permanent feedback loop with donors, including advisory panel; result: More touchpoints = more engagement = better relationship.

Finally, he remarked that Convio’s research underscores how important a good website is for major donors. Even though they will not give online, and don’t visit the website frequently, they do use it to confirm their giving decision.

Posted by Michael Stoner
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Online Fundraising War Stories

I’m on tap to do three sessions at CASE’s “Online Strategies” conference this week in Seattle. As part of my preparations, I’ve had the chance to chat with online fundraisers on five campuses—east, west, and points in between. Here are some of the interesting things I heard:

• University of Washington has worked with 110 campus units to “skin” online giving pages with the unit’s own branding (an example). The underlying technology is managed by the university’s development office. Dartmouth also offers customized branding options to units on campus.
• Dartmouth is considering an e-campaign to promote major campaign giving opportunities, which are cataloged in a searchable “Gift Browser” the college launched last year.
• Ohio State, where the online giving program grew by 45 percent between 2006 and 2007, added a search function to its online giving site in March. Donors can now make contributions to more than 3,000 funds. Previously, OSU offered only the primary dean’s discretionary funds as online giving options.
• The University of Iowa’s Flood Relief Fund received contributions from 2,605 donors this summer, and 82 percent of those contributors made their gifts online. Online gifts comprised about half of the total dollars raised for the flood fund.
• Dartmouth recently raised its maximum for online gifts to $100,000, after a donor’s attempted to make a $72,000 gift and hit the college’s $50,000 ceiling.
• Cal-Berkeley recently redesigned its giving site to reflect the branding of its separate campaign site. The new giving site focuses exclusively on transactions, rather than making the case for private support because at that point, people “have already been sold on the need.” The folks at Berkeley based their assumptions for the site on 22 interviews (90 minutes each!) with donors.

If you’ll be at this CASE conference, be sure and say hi. With Mizzou’s Lori Croy serving as conference chair, you know it’s going to be both informative and FUN!

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“Different People Need to Hear Different Stories”

Seth Godin-marketer extraordinaire of Meatball Sundae, The Dip, and Purple Cow fame-was the featured speaker during a Chronicle of Philanthropy live discussion earlier this week.

I didn’t participate in the live version, but the transcript is online. There you’ll find this exchange:

Question: How do you think emotional marketing by non-profits compares to campaigns that are more focused on performance capabilities and demonstrable impact?

Seth’s answer: Marketing is about storytelling. And the thing is, different people need to hear different stories. Some people respond to a cold hard number. Others want to see the happy kid with braces. The challenge is in telling the right story to the right people in the right way at the right time.

The “different strokes for different folks” comment reminded me of a higher-ed site I recently visited, one that tells the many stories of an annual fund. Annual giving sites often can be dry and a little stale. Not this one.

Start your journey there by visiting Brown University’s homepage. Right now, you’ll find the “Million Dollar Month Participation Challenge” highlighted on the “Giving to Brown” tab.

That leads you into the Brown Annual Fund site, which is full of bells and whistles. Currently those include:

• Participation challenge—they’re seeking 4,000 donors and $1 million in the month before commencement … and they’re almost there.


• Thank-you gifts for donors—this year, a photograph of Carrie Tower.


• A flickr contest—they’ve finished accepting entries and now are judging the 388 photos submitted. One of those will become the next donor thank-you print.


• A game, Brown Grad Libs—fill in the blanks and the site generates your own Brown story. This is the first game I’ve seen on a higher-ed fundraising site.


• Annual fund impact, by the numbers—what difference does a $50 make?


• Annual fund impact, as told by students and faculty.


• Quite a bit of Annual Fund-related news and headlines, along with a handful of special initiatives (giving programs for reunions, parents, etc.) and the requisite details on giving methods, recognition, and whatnot.

Brown also is a good place to observe how “Web 2.0”-type content can be created and integrated into fundraising sites.

Ever since they launched the “Boldly Brown” campaign, they’ve highlighted video and podcasts on the campaign homepage. They do a nice job of presenting campaign outreach and dedication events online (available on the “News” page), and take the time to post photo galleries from those events. Currently the campaign site features an online survey, asking students how they’d like to get involved in “Boldly Brown.” And don’t forget the previously mentioned flickr photo contest for the Annual Fund.

This is the first time I’ve seen podcasts on a planned giving site. Like many other schools, Brown is using syndicated material from Stelter for much of their information, but they’ve done a lot of customizing and incorporated quite a few videos into the standard content. Right now, a video with a 1988 grad explaining why she established a bequest is the lead item on their “What it Means to Give” page.

Posted by Hilery Livengood
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One More Look: Making the Case Online for Scholarship Donations

A follow-up to my post from last week, Offline Fundraising Priorities Online:

An article in today’s Wall Street Journal, “Colleges Turn to Donors to Meet Aid Pledge,” opens by mentioning a $300 million scholarship fundraising endeavor that’s underway at the University of Chicago. Scholarship support is one of three “Human Capital” priorities in “The Chicago Initiative,” a $2 billion campaign.

Chicago’s campaign page outlining student aid goals is rather dry and ordinary. The content looks it could have been pulled directly from printed resources.

However, if you follow the link on the campaign homepage that directs you to the Odyssey Scholarship Challenge (which oddly isn’t a link on the scholarship priority page), you’ll find a micro-site with some really good content, including a video where a student explains the challenge. He does a great job of making the case for why more funds are needed even after Chicago received the $100 million Odyssey contribution.

Speaking of missing links … I didn’t find a link on the Odyssey site back to the main campaign site. As Michael says, links are free. It’d be nice to see more of them here.

On the whole, the Odyssey site makes a compelling argument for investing in scholarships, as well as gathering and presenting quite a bit of information about the Odyssey program. Beginning this fall, more than 1,200 UC students will benefit from these scholarships. Over the next few years, it’ll be interesting to see how the Odyssey site shares those students’ stories and evolves as it seeks to engage alumni, donors, and would-be donors in support of the Odyssey challenge.

Dartmouth had a similar opportunity about four years ago with a Kresge challenge grant that supported Kemeny Hall. Check out that micro-site to see all the content Dartmouth ended up posting, including a full honor roll.

Posted by Hilery Livengood
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Offline Fundraising Priorities Online

An article in the May 2 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education, “Colleges Step Up Fund-Raising Efforts to Support Student Aid,” focuses on scholarship fundraising initiatives at six institutions.

Three-Franklin & Marshall College, St. Olaf College, and Loyola University Chicago-are in the planning stages for campaigns that will have significant student aid components.

The article cites another trio-University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Purdue University, and Grinnell College-as schools that have significant endowments, but still “have pumped up their fund raising for student aid.”

The article made me wonder: How would this acknowledged fundraising priority be presented on the schools’ development websites? Would the sites reflect the institutional commitment to raising private support for scholarships? Here’s what I found.

The site that best “talked the talk” is University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. On the development homepage and throughout that site, Michigan staffers have added numerous references to two scholarship-related endeavors: the President’s Donor Challenge and M-PACT, a program to increase financial aid for in-state undergraduate students. On the giving site, “Need-Based Support for Undergraduates” is the second fund listed and two scholarship funds are available in the separate Schools and College Funds list. Michigan did such a good job of including the scholarship priorities throughout its development site, I wondered if the presidential challenge had made its way to the president’s website. Alas, I wasn’t able to find a link or mention there.

Notes on the other schools’ sites:

Franklin & Marshall College

Scholarships are mentioned on the annual fund page and donors may earmark “Scholarships and Financial Aid” for any online gift made to the Franklin & Marshall Fund.

Grinnell College

The Grinnell site focuses primarily on annual gifts to the Pioneer Fund. That page promotes class gifts and “Grinnell’s current green decisions,” but oddly does not include any mention of scholarships. The FAQ for the fund does explain that the fund helps pay for financial aid. The giving form accepts Pioneer Fund gifts, as well as “special” gifts, where the donor could write in a scholarship designation.

Loyola University Chicago

“Students and Faculty” is one of nine “Giving Opportunities” on the development homepage. On the actual “Giving Opportunities” page, it’s the first priority mentioned. Once you’ve landed on the giving form, the “Magis Scholarship Program’ is the seventh designation option in the drop-down box, while “Student Scholarships” is the 19th.

Purdue University

From the University Development homepage, scholarships are included in the “Where Your Gift is Needed” page. That includes a link to a 20 meg (20 meg!) case statement for “Student Scholarships and Fellowships” that’s from the comprehensive campaign that wrapped in mid 2007. The old campaign site did feature the “President’s Scholarship Campaign,” although the content on that page is quite lean now. On the giving form, scholarships designations are available as the 19th, 20th, and 21st options on the drop-down menu. The Chronicle article mentions a $300 million campaign for student aid that was announced in April, but information about that hadn’t made its way to Purdue’s development site.

St. Olaf College

On the “Giving to St. Olaf” homepage, “Endowed funds and scholarships” is the 26th link in the navigation bar. Also, the annual giving page explains that 22 cents of every dollar donated to the Annual Fund go toward financial aid and scholarships. The gift form doesn’t specifically mention scholarships, but they do provide an “other” field for gift designations.

The takeaway here? If you’re in the quiet or even active phase of raising funds for specific initiatives, especially something as broadly reaching as student scholarships, make sure your site is telling the stories of how private support for that endeavor would make a difference on campus. Even if you’re not ready to share specifics about the campaign’s aspirations, your site should pave the way for upcoming solicitations by making the case for how that support would change lives.

Here, Michigan’s done a good job of integrating that kind of message throughout its development site. Theirs is a site to watch and emulate.

Posted by Hilery Livengood
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How Donors Use the Internet

Wondering how donors use websites when they give? Here are some key references that provide insights into their thinking and behavior:

“Every nonprofit must learn to regard the Internet as its most powerful direct marketing medium. Why? Because the Internet allows an organization to engage in a kind of dialog marketing that creates opportunities to develop conversations with prospects and donors. Engaging in conversations with people, over time, gives nonprofits the ability to make more and better friends, turn those friends into donors, and grow those donors into loyal donors.”—“Nonprofit Websites: Cutting Through the Emaze,” Grizzard Communications Group, Inc., 2001 (emphasis added)

That early prognostication might have seemed a bit grandiose in 2001. The Internet? A nonprofit’s most powerful direct marketing medium? Back in 2001, the power of the web to engage donors hadn’t been proven nor experienced.

Research conducted during the intervening years, though, has validated that assessment.

Consider the following collection of research findings, all of which point to the power of engaging donors and would-be donors online.

2003:

58 percent of Internet users have engaged with nonprofits online. Three-quarters of those visiting charity-oriented sites take action.

39 percent – Donated offline 37 percent – Signed a petition online 37 percent – Referred friend 23 percent – Signed a petition offline 20 percent – Donated online—“Toward E-engagement: Non-profits and Individuals Engaging Online,” Network for Good, The Bridgespan Group, and GuideStar

2004:

Online givers are better givers than regular givers. Median lifetime giving for online givers is 50 percent higher than regular givers.—“Getting to Know Your Online Donors Can Pay Off,” Peter B. Wylie

2005:

More than 75 percent of donors who go online before making a donation noted that their web visit had some impact on their decision whether or not to give, whether online or offline. More than 25 percent said the impact was significant.—Kintera/Luth Nonprofit Trend Report

2006:

Many fundraisers [from the 60 participating colleges and universities] cited ePhilanthropy as a factor causing higher revenue per donor. Average online gifts tend to be higher than those given in the mail or on the phone, and the economics of email and widespread web access facilitated more communication and cultivation with donors.—“Index of University Fundraising Performance,” Target Analysis Group

Treat your online donors as your most valuable members. Your online donors, if they follow the pattern we see in the data, probably already make larger and more frequent contributions than your mail/phone donors, and they hold the most promise in terms of loyalty and retention.—“Keep Your Postage Meter: The Status of Online Giving in America,” Craver, Matthews, Smith & Co. and The Prime Group

2007:

There is an untapped pool of donors who are influenced by a charity’s online presence, and charities could benefit by proactively reaching out to them.—American Express Charitable Gift Survey

2008:

The wired wealthy represent the future of middle and major donor giving. These donors, most of whom are in their early 50s, are comfortable online. Clearly there is a major shift from the mail to the web, and any major gifts program that fails to account for this transition has quite a bit of catching up to do.—“The Wired Wealthy: Using the Internet to Connect with Your Middle and Major Donors,” Convio, Sea Change Strategies, and Edge Research

The Digital Future Report found that the Internet is perceived by users to be a more important source of information for them—this over all other principal media, including television, radio, newspapers, and books. —“2008 Digital Future Project,” USC Center for the Digital Future

The takeaways from these research findings?

• The Internet has become a top source for information, and that extends to donors seeking information about nonprofits.
  
• Online gifts aren’t the best way to judge a website. After donors visit your site, they’re more likely to make an offline donation or contact a development officer than an online gift.
  
• The act of having made a gift online will help identify a donor as a future major gift prospect.
  
• Donors’ use of the Internet to make philanthropic decisions is significant and will continue to grow.
  

Request a copy of mStoner’s white paper, “Developing an Internet Strategy for Your Capital Campaign,” by contacting .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

Posted by Hilery Livengood
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