Shout Outs: Fundraising E-newsletters

As I promised in last week’s post, Making the Case for E-Newsletters, here are a few higher-ed fundraising e-newsletters I’ve enjoyed and admired:

Donor Link, an e-newsletter for donors to Oklahoma State University Foundation

Just heard about this one, a new quarterly e-publication from Oklahoma State that’s beautiful and well conceived. Very stylized, the first issue shares the stories of a presidential scholar and donor, as well as a financial column written by a professor. The most compelling content is "Abby’s Blog: A Day in the Life of a current OSU Scholar." Well written, with regular posts and lots of photos, the blog is a keeper. The remaining e-newsletter content includes a gift announcement, a contest for tickets to the Big 12 basketball tournament, and mention of an art exhibit at OSU Foundation Gallery. The email that was forwarded to me mentions that this publication was created entirely in-house.

I-Club E-News, an e-newsletter for contributors to and friends of Intercollegiate Athletics at the University of Iowa

Admittedly, I’m a little biased since I helped create this one. In its first year (2005), we received donations totaling $129,032 from people clicking on links in this e-newsletter. After 15 issues, it’s still going strong, growing I-Club memberships and connecting Hawkeye fans with outreach events, personalities, and funding priorities.

The Campaign for Maryland Brief, the e-newsletter for the “Great Expectations” campaign

It’s easy to sign up for this one, with a link on the campaign homepage, as well as forward-to-a-friend functionality. Good content, lots of photos, and they’ve taken the time to add many links to related content.

Campaign UW Newsletter, the e-newsletter for the “Creating Futures” campaign

UW did a great job of incorporating newsletter content throughout their campaign site, a relatively easy way to keep the site fresh. I’m a big fan of "Bill’s Corner," the conversational column from Campaign Chair Bill Gates Sr. If you’d prefer the printed version, they offer a link to the PDF version. UW also encourages people to order a copy or submit comments.

Campaign Update, the e-newsletter for the “There’s only one. Caltech” campaign

Content from this publication is posted in both HTML and PDF formats, plus links to newsletter stories are sprinkled throughout the site, providing updates on specific campaign initiatives. Two things I’d change: (1) Provide a more compelling presentation than a simple text-based table of contents, and (2) Take the time to embed links to related content throughout the stories.

And lastly, a nod to all the planned giving newsletters.

The two leading providers of syndicated planned giving web sites, Stelter and Crescendo Interactive, both provide partnering schools with content for either weekly or monthly planned giving e-newsletters. Schools have the opportunity to customize the content; I think it’s well worth the time when communicators take the time to personalize the message. You can find samples of their e-newsletters on those two sites, or you can find branded versions with a Google search (try “planned giving enewsletter university“ as your search term).

A while back, I signed up for the weekly "Gift Legacy" e-newsletter from Iowa State, which is powered by Crescendo. This week, they had a really nice issue, the first screen of which featured entirely ISU-specific content—an introduction about their "With Pride and Purpose" campaign and links to donor stories, the campaign video, and a "Meet the Staff" page.

At Iowa, we developed a more personalized and less frequently distributed publication. Gift Planning at Iowa was sent five times a year to an audience of more than 25,000 appropriately aged donors and alumni. Each issue focused on a particular giving method—for example, charitable gift annuities, gifts from retirement accounts, charitable bequests, and gifts of real estate. We created original content, and then supplemented that with syndicated articles from our Stelter site. In our experience, the e-publication was an effective tool to plant seeds about estate gifts; inform donors of new legislation affecting planned gifts; steward and recognize donors; and generate leads.

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Making the Case for E-Newsletters

Jakob Nielsen posted an Alertbox yesterday with results from a new study that analyzes online user skills. The research purposely was biased in favor of folks with higher-than-average salaries; one-third of participants have annual incomes of $100,000 and above.

Although Nielsen’s research isn’t focusing on fundraising, the participants they recruited are the ideal audience for a campaign or fundraising website. So I read the lessons learned in this study with an eye toward how those could be adapted for development sites.

Nielsen sends us back to the basics with commentary that confirms:

• The continued need to write for the web


• Ongoing challenges with information architecture


• Why it’s still important to keep it simple, stupid


• Yes, jargon continues to overwhelm


• The primacy of search as a navigation preference

There also are recommendations about how to get folks to visit your site. I paused for a “what’s old is new again” moment when reading this:

“Email newsletters remain the best way to drive users back to websites. It’s incredible how often our study participants say that a newsletter is their main reason for revisiting a site. Most professional users are not very interested in podcasts or newsfeeds (RSS).”

Best way to drive traffic? Sounds like a mandate.

So … is an e-newsletter still part of your communications plan? Do you regularly send emails (HTML and text versions) announcing a new issue to your alumni and friends database? Have you created a dynamic, content-rich version of your printed newsletter on your website? Do you add extra content like slideshows or photo tours or take the time to embed links to other campus web sites? Is it easy for your site visitors to sign up for the newsletter? Or share it with a friend?

In addition to the opportunities to boost site traffic, e-newsletters also are a great stewardship tool for fundraisers. While sharing with contributors and would-be donors stories of how private support impacts your students and campus, you also have opportunities to:

• Educate donors about tools and methods others have used to make gifts, and encourage readers to drill down into your planned giving content for further details


• Reconnect alumni with faces and places on campus


• Recognize generous gifts and givers


• Gather updated contact information, including email addresses


• Ensure that e-solicitations aren’t the only emails your alumni receive from your development office

Next time I’ll post some of my favorite fundraising e-newsletters. Have some of your own? .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) a URL and tell me what you like about the newsletter, and I’ll share here.

PS: My karma must be good today! Just as I was finishing this post, I received an email announcing a new 43-page report, “Dirty Dozen: Email Newsletter Mistakes Nearly Everyone Makes.” It’s free for the download from Marketing Sherpa and shares the top 12 email newsletter mistakes and how to fix them.

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Web First? Here’s Why.

An often-repeated mStoner mantra is that a college or university’s most important marketing and information tool is its website. That’s the foundation of our “web first” philosophy, and the reason why we encourage clients to make long-term investments in web content, architecture, technology, and staff.

A new study by the USC Annenberg School for Communication validates that claim on a broader basis.

According to the new Digital Future Report, released January 17, “the Internet is perceived by users to be a more important source of information than television, radio, newspapers, and books.” (Note: If we had authored the report, Michael would strongly recommend that one word in that sentence be changed, replacing “users” with “visitors.”)

Eighty percent-four out of five!of online visitors age 17 and older consider the Internet to be an important source of information for them, up from 66 percent in 2006. That figure beats all the traditional media-television (68 percent), radio (63 percent), and newspapers (63 percent).

Is your communications shop staffed and equipped with the appropriate technology to meet the online information needs for this “four out of five” trend? If not, this is one more piece of research to help you make your case.

Other interesting (and disheartening, if you’re a newspaper publisher) statistics about the folks in the study who said they use the Internet:

• Forty-one percent post photos online, a fourfold increase in four years. Smaller but growing numbers maintain their own website or blog.


• Half visit sites like YouTube or Facebook once a week; 22 percent at least once a day.


• Forty-five percent said the Internet was important or very important in helping them maintain social relationships.


• Two in 10 have stopped a subscription to a newspaper or magazine because they were accessing the same or related information online.

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Emailing Holiday Cheer

If you subscribe to uwebd, the listserv for college and university webmasters, in December you received the annual slew of emails sharing URLs for holiday email greetings sent by colleges and universities.

Did you send such a missive? Or a year-end ask? How was it received? Did you count opens, click-throughs, email replies, gifts, traffic to the landing page?

One of my favorites this year was from the University of Maryland. It was fun and obviously well planned, featuring sites, sounds, and personalities from around campus. I had to chuckle when the football coach’s wife makes her appearance, snapping her fingers at her husband and telling him to hustle. What I especially liked, though, were the bonus features—video outtakes, a timelapse video of a thousand or so Terps gathering for a group photo, photo galleries, and more. They posted the video on YouTube, too, where it has more than 3,000 views.

Come up with something creative or perhaps a bit odd, and you might have the nice problem of having to spend some money for increased server bandwidth. A New York Times article (link below) shared the story of an ad agency that sent 400 e-cards and ended up with 27,000 views on YouTube, a spot on CBS’s Early Show, and more traffic than its server originally could handle.

As you consider the success of your own campaign (while it’s still fresh in your mind), here are a few articles to read from the corporate world:

• E-Greetings Gain Ground at Businesses This Season
  New York Times, December 24, 2007
• More on Holiday Emails
  emailInsider, January 9, 2008
• Tracking Holiday Cheer from the Politicians
  emailInsider, January 4, 2008
• Holiday Marketing Tip: Don’t Send Pointless Greetings
  AWeber Communications, November 28, 2007

Back in the higher-ed realm, SupportingAdvancement.com is always a good source for higher-ed email samples, including year-end e-greetings and e-solicitations.

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Lessons from the Candidates’ Sites

I write you from my office in Iowa, today a rather frigid political Ground Zero. As you’re likely tired of hearing or reading, tomorrow night we Iowans gather in schools, churches, homes, and even taverns for our first-in-the-nation caucuses.

Me, I’ll be heading to the gymnasium of my alma mater, Grant Wood Elementary School, for my precinct caucus and inevitably childhood memories of kickball, rope-climbing, squaredancing, and that awful, timed bent-arm hang girls had to do for the Presidential Fitness Test (the boys counted pull-ups).

The Hawkeye State is awash with candidates and their surrogates. A former women’s college president was in my living room late last week, sharing her support for a candidate. Yesterday my doorknob was decorated with caucus reminders from three different candidates when I returned home from a two-hour outing. In the last week, I’ve received close to 100 direct mailings. Today, if I were to drive 30 miles or less and could be in many places at once, I’d hear speeches by almost every presidential contender.

Same thing online. Last spring I signed up for many candidates’ e-lists, and therefore I’ve been the recipient of hundreds of asks for online donations and invitations to campaign events. I’ve visited their websites, played around with their widgets, read their blogs and emails, and caught up with them on social networking sites.

It’s been interesting to observe the campaigns as they embrace the new generation of e-strategies. Just like in 2004, when Howard Dean and Joe Trippi (now with the Edwards campaign) changed people’s minds about the significant potential presented by online fundraising, this campaign is something of a referendum on the latest batch of online opportunities.

In a June 2007 article, Vanity Fair dubbed this “The YouTube Election.”

The ‘Vote Different’ anti-Hillary ad, Newt Gingrich’s Spanish apology, Mitt Romney’s trail of flip-flops—this is the mouse-click mayhem of the 2007 campaign, in which anyone can join. It’s the end of the old-fashioned, literary epic, and the dawn of YouTube politics.

An article in Monday’s Washington Post focuses on the Obama campaign’s Internet strategy:

If the Internet is like a big grocery store, Obama’s aides made sure he appeared on every aisle. As some campaign workers built mailing lists and telephone trees according to political, professional and personal interests, others created the first groups and profiles on sites as varied as Eons, the MySpace for baby boomers, and LinkedIn, a site mostly for white-collar professionals.

They also used BlackPlanet.com, MiGente.com, AsianAve.com and GLEE.com—the MySpace and Facebook for, respectively, the African American, Latino, Asian and gay online communities. They have posted more than 350 videos on his YouTube channel, twice as many as Clinton, and his videos have been viewed nearly twice as often as hers. Obama has more MySpace friends than any other Democratic candidate, and he lists more Facebook supporters than all other Democrats combined.

The next five weeks, counting down to Super Tuesday, will be a great time to observe all the candidates’ sites, online asks, and their use of Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr, and whatnot. I’ve scheduled a recurring calendar appointment for my dates with the candidates.

What proves effective in this campaign-in advocacy efforts, communication toolsets, and fundraising-will become ubiquitous items on the to-do lists of college and university webmasters around the country and beyond.

Related resources:

• The Spartan Internet Political Performance Index measures the candidates’ online reach.


• Politics and Technology is the blog of Kari Chisholm, former web guru at Lewis and Clark College and all-around nice guy.


• TechPresident tracks the use of technology by the candidates.


• Search Marketing Gurus is analyzing the online marketing strategies of many candidates.


• Academic research on candidates and their Internet strategies from two poli sci professors at Bentley College.


• A Website Grader report on the campaigns’ use of SEO and social networking.

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Danger in “Blogging for the Hearts of Donors”?

A new study by the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, reports that non-profits are “outpacing the business world in their use of social media.”

Three-quarters of charities participating in the research report that they’re employing social media in their marketing portfolios, and nearly half say that those endeavors are “very important” to fundraising efforts.

Despite being titled, “Blogging for the Hearts of Donors,” the report says video tops the list of social media offered on charity websites:

• Online video—41 percent


• Blogging—34 percent


• Social networking—34 percent


• Podcasting—33 percent


• Message boards—26 percent


• Wikis—13 percent


• None—25 percent

It’s significant to note that the 76 participating charities all appear on Forbes Magazine’s “200 Largest Charities” list, which excludes academic institutions. If higher-ed fundraisers were added to the report’s data, I’d wager that the adoption rates mostly would go down. Other than video and with a few exceptions, we’re just not there yet.

I reviewed this report a day after receiving Jacob Nielsen’s Alertbox, “Web 2.0 Can Be Dangerous.” It’s a good read and a reminder not to get distracted by “flavor-of-the-day” interactive offerings and allow your focus to drift away from proven online communication techniques.

Nielsen states that’s what important here is opportunity cost.

In other words, what content didn’t you post because you invested an inordinate amount of time to develop a Flickr site to complement your online press room? Or did the great Flickr tools enable you to post a larger number of photos/captions than your old, more time-consuming methods? It makes perfect sense to build your college’s presence on Flickr if that technology helped you work smarter while also engaging online visitors in a new way.

Higher-ed web shops are understaffed. That’s why, if you did a survey of the top 200 or even 20 college and university online giving sites, you wouldn’t the preponderance of blogs, videos, or podcasts mentioned above—communication tools our non-profit brethren cite as being integral in their efforts to “increase awareness of their missions and to help connect with their constituencies.”

Absolutely, we’ve got to dip our toes-and sometimes splash-into the 2.0 waters, just like our non-profit colleagues. But as Nielsen reminds us, it can’t happen at the expense of core content and business processes: “Before throwing spending money at ‘2.0’ features, make sure that you have all the ‘1.0’ requirements working to perfection.”

Note: A related study by the same researchers, titled “The Game Has Changed: College Admissions Outpace Corporations in Embracing Social Media,” shows that college admissions sites also lead corporate America in the adoption of social media.

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A December “Top Ten” List for Online Giving Sites

New research about online giving sounds a lot like common sense:

• Ask and you shall receive: One in five online donors said their primary motivation to make an online gift because they were asked or they easily found online giving options.


• Tell them about it: When asked why they didn’t give online, nearly one-third of donors said it was because they were unaware of online contribution opportunities. Another 25 percent cited security concerns.

Earth shattering? No. Likely you’re adding that to the “yep, I already know that” file. But don’t. Instead consider this research report, conducted by American Express and the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University, a call to action.

Now is the time to streamline your development site for year-end givers and to make sure that year-end communications mention online giving, preferably rather prominently.

Why now?

For many sites, 20 to 25 percent of their total annual online donations arrive in the month of December. And this year, Cyber Monday sales were up 21 percent from 2006. If retail trends continue to cross over to the non-profit world, 2007 will be another banner year for year-end giving.

December is the perfect time to make tweaks to your site and communications to help both the first-time visitor and the nick-of-time donor looking to make a gift before the tax year ends.

How? What action items should be on your to-do list? Here are a few (well, more than a few) ideas about how to get started.

“Top Ten” ways to optimize and promote your giving site at year end

Cross-marketing:
1. Mention the URL for your online giving site-preferably in multiple locations-in all solicitations, direct mail or e-mail. Tell them the site is easy and safe to use.
2. Create an email version of your year-end direct mail piece. Send it in the last two weeks of the year. (If your email file has a preponderance of work email addresses, be careful of sending after Friday, December 21, or you’ll be flooded with out-of-office messages and many recipients won’t open your email until 2008.)
3. Add a year-end giving message to your regular e-communications, like monthly collegiate or all-university e-newsletters.

Tweak your website:
4. Add more links to the giving site on your homepage and your top entry pages—yes, they’re there already, but add more. If you have a text link, add an image. If your standing link is an image, then add a text link. Encourage colleges, departments, and programs to do the same.
5. Post a page that provides with details about year-end giving, including deadlines for stock gifts, holiday hours for your advancement staff, etc. Even better, turn it into a press release that’s distributed via your university’s news service and expand its reach.
6. Post a news item on your homepage or other top entry pages aimed at first-time visitors. Explain how your site works and that it’s safe and secure.

Low- or no-tech:
7. Encourage your fundraisers to add a link to your giving site in their signature file.
8. The telephones of your entire advancement staff will be ringing with questions about year-end gifts. Make it easy for them to explain how to make gifts online by providing a “cheat sheet” with answers to FAQs, for example, your URL, what designation options are available, what credit cards are accepted.
9. Update the voicemail message for your general advancement telephone number to include a mention that year-end gifts can be made 24/7 on the your website.
10. Check your general advancement e-mailbox more regularly (every hour?) and especially during the weekend of December 29 and 30. Take time to answer questions and direct people to the appropriate webpage, or refer them directly to a development staffer. Anecdotal evidence proves that those emailers often are great prospects, and a prompt e-response can translate into significant dollars.

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In the News: Fundraising 2.0

The old adage goes that fundraising is all about relationships. Fast forward to today’s eWorld, where building relationships through online interactions is the cornerstone of the Web 2.0 phenomenon.

If you connect those dots, you’d think that development shops would be embracing YouTube, blogs, Facebook, MySpace, flickr, and whatnot … or, if not diving in, at least dipping their toes into those waters.

Not so much. At least not yet. However, three articles published this week focus on how that situation is changing, spotlighting charities that are adding interactive content to their websites and communications strategies.

The stories highlight the glory and pitfalls of incorporating rich media into your site and encouraging a chorus of voices to talk about your organization and what it aspires to accomplish. Below are links, along with a selected quote from the articles.

Online Video and YouTube
“Telling Moving Stories: Charities turn to online video to connect with supporters“
The Chronicle of Philanthropy
(Note: A Chronicle account is required to access the full article)

“It takes a free YouTube account, a $120 camera, and a good idea. With those things, you can put together a good campaign and you can mobilize other people to do the campaign for you. If nonprofits think of ways they can reach out to supporters and donors and citizens, YouTube is a far more easy method than we’ve ever had before.”
—Steve Grove, YouTube’s head of news and politics

Blogs
“In the Fund-Raising Game, Blogs Cut Both Ways”
The New York Times

“I think good blogs, written by honest people with insider access, empower donors to learn more about the groups they’re considering.”
—Trent Stamp, president of Charity Navigator

Facebook
“My Network, My Cause”
The New York Times

“We want to help charities raise money. But at this point we’re focusing on making people realize the power of the tool.”
—Sean Parker, developer of the Causes on Facebook Project

Find something to take home and try? Or at least brainstorm and discuss? Next time I’ll share examples from higher-ed development and campaign sites that are doing just that.

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Smart and Sustainable Campaigning

We just finished working with a client to launch a campaign site, timed to go live directly after the big public announcement of the comprehensive campaign, the largest in the college’s history.

What a pleasure to partner with the school’s communications and development professionals to create a web presence that works hand in hand with every other communications effort planned for the campaign, while also functioning as a relevant and useful stand-alone information source.

We developed a monthly schedule–which runs through December 2009 and even peers into early the early months of 2010 after the campaign’s conclusion–that guarantees two to five fresh pieces of content for the site each month. Those are in addition to the regular news flow of press releases, gift announcements, construction photos, and other content in the communications pipeline.

What’s some of the content included in their scheduled update roster?

• Profiles of students and faculty benefiting from private support


• Spotlights on featured campaign priorities


• Fundraising progress


• Updates from the campaign chair


• Information about upcoming campaign outreach events


• Reports and photos from same events

To quote the mStoner tagline, it’s a smart and sustainable site that acknowledges the college’s limited human resources and the strategy preferences of its fundraisers.

The campus team has quite a few items on its to-do list that will be added to the site in the coming months, content that was outside the scope of the mStoner work. I look forward to watching the site evolve, and I hope that they’ll also explore some of the “blue sky” ideas that we discussed, but which were tabled for the site’s launch. Those will be especially applicable in 2009, when they transition from major gifts fundraising to “all hands on deck.”

I’ll share some of those visions in upcoming posts to this blog. Check back here for content ideas that leverage new web tools, keep users coming back to the site, and – most importantly – help reconnect alumni and friends to the college, its students, and its aspirations, encouraging progression on the friendraising-to-fundraising continuum.

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What’s it like being a student today?

As communicators, we’re constantly trying to think like current and would-be students, wordsmithing our messages so they’re relevant, compelling, and understandable to our intended audiences.

Working on campus means you’re surrounded by students, but it doesn’t mean you’re thinking like them. Here are a couple of resources to help you make that mental leap. The first is an old standby; the other is a new YouTube offering from Kansas State’s Michael Wesch.

1. Each fall I always feel a little old after reading the “Mindset List” that Beloit College produces. It’s intended to “identify a worldview of 18 year olds,” helping you understand the life experiences of incoming freshman. No. 1 on this year’s list for the Class of 2011: “What Berlin wall?” Wow. I was a newly minted college graduate when Checkpoint Charlie started its transformation into a museum and these kids were born.

2. Yesterday I read about and then watched the YouTube video “A Vision of Students Today,” which Professor Michael Wesch created with 200 Kansas State students in his “ANTH 200: Introduction to Cultural Anthropology” class last spring. The video focuses on “the most important characteristics of students today—how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime.” Among the video’s sources is a survey completed by 133 of the 200 students in the class.

The video transports you into today’s classroom, and your seat is one of hundreds in a huge lecture hall. Your neighbor sits beside you with her laptop (which costs more than some people in the world make in a year). Statistically, there’s a good possibility that she’s multitasking (she has to be, to cram 26.5 hours of activities into her day), looking at Facebook profiles (she’ll read 1,281 of them this year) and emailing (she’ll write 500-plus pages of email this semester) instead of actively listening to the lecture.

On his “<a href="http://mediatedcultures.net/ksudigg/" title="Digital Ethnography Kansas State">Digital Ethnography Kansas State” website, Wesch explains that the video “began as a brainstorming exercise, thinking about how students learn, what they need to learn for their future, and how our current educational system fits in.”

I read about the video in one of the daily e-newsletters I receive from the Chronicle of Higher Education. The Chronicle’s headline read, “Kansas State U. Students Read Half of Class Material.” That might grab your attention, but it sure doesn’t do justice to the real message of the video. Wesch since suggested a new headline, “Kansas State Students Produce #1 Video in the Blogosphere.” Indeed, the video has more than 90,000 views in five days. (Wesch’s eight YouTube videos have tallied more than 4 million views to date.)

It’s worth your time to watch the video, plus read through comments posted on both the Chronicle site and YouTube.

As he did last spring with “The Machine is Us/ing Us”—a fabulous take on user-generated content and Web 2.0 that I showed during one of my sessions at the CASE campaign communications conference in May—Wesch is provoking thoughts, asking questions, and starting conversations far beyond Manhattan, Kansas, and ANTH 200.

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