Who are we missing at fundraising conferences?

I read a great piece this morning in the latest edition of Canadian Fundraising & Philanthropy's e-newsletter about Canadian fundraising stars missing from conference stage.

Hot on the heels of my post about endeavoring to make conferences really useful, this caught my eye.

The author, John Webster Hochstadt goes into some detail about some of the inherent problems of fundraising conferences, like the domination of consultants speaking and lack of senior staff attending. Both true.

I talked about something similar last year when I called for sole fundraisers to start flying the flag, to come out from under their desks, beat their chest a little and start sharing.

As someone who does the conference rounds a lot, I too am constantly frustrated and let down at the lack of charity representation, particularly from 'small shops' (I love that term and my Aussie colleagues think it's hilarious).

I can sort of understand their absence. I'd ask myself if I was a fundraiser, from a small or big shop, why should I present, how can I possibly do it and when will I find the time?

Now each of these has a quick rebuttal, but the purpose of this blog is simply to put this back on the agenda and challenge fundraisers to knock us agency folks off our perch.

Frankly, I get sick of people whingeing to me about lack of charity speakers. My answer to anything like this is if you want to make change, create your own destiny and don't sit on your hands waiting for someone else to do it.

Thanks for brining this up John, I hear you wholeheartedly.

Let's share your story fundraising folks - you have something to tell, and we're waiting to hear it.

Jonathon

9 steps to doubling your Christmas appeal income

I ran a workshop recently focused entirely on raising more, in fact doubling, income from upcoming Christmas appeals.

I know most of you are thinking: come on Jonathon it's only August! Alas, it's time to start preparing folks, it ain't that far away...

So with that, I thought I'd replay those 9 key ingredients for you. Put simply, they are:

1 Targeting the right people
2 Asking for the right thing
3 Getting the message right
4 Getting the letter right
5 Getting personal
6 Getting the execution right
7 Making it easy to respond
8 Getting the follow up right
9 Test, test and test again

But rather than do this a disservice, here is the presentation.

Feel free to drop me a line if you want clarification on any of the slides.

Oh, and don't forget Christmas doesn't end in December!

Jonathon

Time to make conferences genuinely useful

Now, that may sound a tad harsh and that I'm just taking aim at all conferences or the people that organize them.

I am not.

This is not a personal dig at anyone, and if you read on you will see that I'm even prepared to back up my words with action.

I have to say I am critical in general at the value that conferences deliver and the lack of takeaways that delegates actually put into practice, as I talked about last year.

But what gets to me even more than what we actually do with the learning's we get is how fundraising conferences around the world are crafted. I got thinking about this over the last few days whilst attending and speaking at the DMAW Bridge Conference in Washington, DC.

Some of you may have read Sean Triner's article some time ago where he was (rightly) critical of the flawed scoring system at conferences. If you haven't read it, it's worth a look here.

I agree with Sean on this one, but I also believe we need to change the way we run these (very expensive) events to do the following:

1 Make the sessions longer.

As a speaker and delegate its nigh on impossible to learn anything in a 60 minute session. Many speakers travel internationally to present for an hour, or less, like I did this week. Crazy stuff.

But I'm not talking about making sessions 90 minutes or even 2 hours, but all day, even 2-3 day streams.

Sean recently ran a session at the IWRM conference in India where they phsyically helped delegates produce a direct mail over the course of 2 days. Brilliant stuff. Rather than just dazzle delegates with countless PowerPoint slides, the small group actually walked through the key ingredients of a direct marketing pack and then step by step were shown how to actually produce the pack.

And then they did it. Each developed a great pack ready to post. Fantastic. Now that's what I call real learning.

2 Don't just do what you did last year and the year before.

It's easy for conferences to rollout stuff that was done last year and every year since 1998. In other words, bringing back the same speakers 8 years in a row, using the same (useless) speaker evaluation forms - refer Sean's article on this - or having 2 hour 'networking' breaks that delegates end up using to check their emails.

We should do what we do because it's right, not because it's easy.

As a side note: conference evaluation forms are absolutely critical for the future success of a conference. Not making them do what they should do (accurately evaluate a speakers value and impact) means that we aren't using real data to drive the future direction of upcoming conferences.

I digress.

3 Ensure the speakers make the sessions 'sticky' to maximize learning.

If you don't know what I mean then go and get a copy of Made to Stick, one of the best books you can read, regardless what profession you work in. It will show you how to make your ideas stick so they resonate with your audience, whether that is donors, your colleagues or even your clients (for us agencies) etc.

There are some great tips in here that speakers should follow to ensure that their ideas stick with their audience. 'Stickier' ideas means better learning and more chance the ideas will actually result in change.

That's it for a Friday afternoon. The challenge is out to all conference organizers to ensure we deliver the most value for the investment (in time and $) that our delegates make.

Oh, and I've just been dobbed in to help on one of the conference committees next year, so I won't just rant, I'll be doing my best to make some of these ideas a reality.

Jonathon

The power of data: using information on your donors to fuel growth in your program

Check out my latest article on using personal data which talks about focusing on past behaviour and finding emotional triggers to raise more money.

Jonathon