Nolo’s Fundraising Tips for Busy Nonprofits

Some interesting news tidbits recently:

First off, did you notice the FTC warning consumers about scam charities supposedly fundraising for people affected by the earthquake in China and cyclone in Myanmar? (It was written up by Dan Thanh Dang in the June 15th Baltimore Sun.) Potential donors are being warned to double-check that any phone calls really came from the charity, ask what percentage of the donation will go toward services, and more. Of course, this affects every nonprofit as donors’ level of suspicion goes up. No sense fighting it — just be ready to provide every possible tidbit to reassure donors that you’re for real.

Another interesting story came from the June 12th edition of Conde Nast’s Portfolio, written by Dalia Fahmy and titled “Charity Prize Fight”. The story discusses how nonprofit foundations are using contests — for example, to create the best, most commercially viable solution to global warming — as a way to simultaneously address a problem, get publicity, and stimulate more giving. (The global warming contest is, by the way, from Richard Branson’s Virgin Unite foundation.)

How is this news important to smaller, non-foundation charities? Aside from staying alert for a contest you can enter (been keeping a solution to global warming up your sleeve?), creating contests among your donors and members might make for an interesting change of pace. The simplest would be an online contest — say, to raise the most money through grassroots efforts, suggest the best name for an animal under your care, or the like. Instead of cash prizes, offer a personal tour of your facility or a meeting with the E.D.. And be sure to call the media!

Finally, on the lighter side of fundraising, it’s interesting to watch overseas trends. As far as I can tell, the British are maniacs for stunt-based fundraising — like this bungee-jumping priest, or this skydiving grandmother. And then there were the two store managers who (voluntarily, it appears) were locked in their shop window, given a phone, and told to raise 1,000 British pounds for charity before they’d be let out. Is there a lesson to be taken from these? I await your comments.

Recession or not, reports of empty storefronts are popping up nationwide — signs advertising “Free Rent” have actually been spotted in Las Vegas. That’s bad news for the economy, but could actually be good news for some nonprofits.

Landlords hate to have an empty storefront. It’s a potential target for thieves and vandals, and reduces traffic to other stores in the same strip or complex. But finding another tenant and negotiating a new lease can take weeks or months to complete.

Some nonprofits have been finding ways to fill the gap. For no or very low rent, they’ve used empty retail space for such temporary purposes as animal adoptions, a soup kitchen, a depot to collect and contribute clothes to the poor, and more. It’s a win-win situation: The nonprofits get higher visibility and a way to reach more people (both clients and potential donors); the landlord gets the benefits mentioned above, plus possible increased foot traffic to other stores; and both might get some good media coverage from the partnership.

If your nonprofit could benefit from such an arrangement, look around your area for empty storefronts and get in touch with the landlords. They might have already heard of your idea — particularly if they read the “Commercial Lease Law Insider,” a respected publication that featured an article called “Protect Yourself When Temporarily Filling Retail Space with Nonprofits” in its September 2007 issue.

The “protection” part of the article simply referred to the fact that the landlord needs to sign some sort of agreement with any nonprofit to which it lends or rents space. Signing such an agreement is in your interest, too, to make sure everyone has the same understanding of price and other terms.

Instead of a standard lease, the landlord is most likely to want a license agreement, which is appropriate for situations where the arrangement is so temporary that the landlord shouldn’t have to evict you if you refuse to leave by the agreed-upon date. If, however, your organization turns into a long-term tenant, you’ll want to sign a standard commercial lease. For help with this, see Negotiate the Best Lease for Your Business, by Janet Portman and Fred S. Steingold (Nolo).

Tired of the printed word? Check out Nolo’s new series of podcasts about fundraising, where I interview experienced fundraisers about hot topics and their organization’s success stories.

The first three interviewees are Pat Joseph, talking about his experience blogging for The Sierra Club; Lynn Eve Komaromi, sharing insights from ten years at Berkeley Repertory Theatre; and Elizabeth Stampe, discussing strategies for attracting new members to Greenbelt Alliance.

Enjoy — and let me know your suggestions for future interviewees!

For any fundraiser, the idea that your hard-won grant and donation money might be eaten away by employee theft is, if not unthinkable, demoralizing at many levels. And, if discovered, it will make future fundraising a lot harder.

But if we’re to believe a recent analysis in the Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly (December 2007 issue), around 13% of the roughly $300 billion given to charity in 2006 was stolen by organization insiders. (I confess upfront, I didn’t pay to read the actual report, but read an excellent analysis of it by Stephanie Strom in the March 29 issue of The New York Times).

My first reaction is disbelief — which may be justified since, as Strom notes, they arrived at that figure by simply applying the same assumption to nonprofits as to government and for-profit organizations, namely that they lose 6% of revenue to fraud each year.

That’s a pretty broad assumption. And I’d like to believe that nonprofit employees are “above” the rest, since most of them are working for a cause they believe in.

But the most disturbing part of the report may be the finding — which does appear to have been nonprofit-specific — that the typical thief was an employee, usually female, who earned less than $50,000 a year and had worked for the nonprofit at least three years. She wasn’t going for million-dollar temptations, but took less than $40,000.

I’m projecting here, but doesn’t that sound like someone who’s frustrated by how little she’s earning for a lot of hard work? Who perhaps doesn’t even think of what she’s doing as stealing, but just getting back a little of what she deserves?

If that’s true, then this is a classic “no free lunch” illustration: Underpaying nonprofit employees will come back to hurt the group eventually. So my concluding pitch would be, in every grant proposal or other project budget, to try and give the hardworking employees a raise. Even a small amount can go a long way toward showing appreciation and preventing employee disgruntlement.

I’m trying to get back to my self-appointed task of reading academic papers on fundraising so that you don’t have to, and summarizing any of interest. So, here’s the first, starting with the conclusions:

Those stickers, return address stamps, or other goodies you’ve been tucking into your direct mail enclosures? They might catch some people’s eyes, but turn others off. And the colorful stories that we’re all schooled to start off appeal letters with? They help only a little.

Now, for a few details.

The study was laid out in the Journal of Nonprofit & Public Sector Marketing’s Fall 2007 edition (Volume 18), in an article called “Creating Effective Direct Mail Charitable Solicitations: The Effects of Enclosures and Different Appeals,” by William D. Diamond and Easwar S. Iyer.

What the authors did was to send different versions of a wildlife-related appeal letters to different lists of donors. One list contained people who already donate to wildlife causes and another list contained people who donate to medical causes. Some letters started with a colorful vignette, and some included a sticker saying “Save the Buffalo.”

Essentially, the sticker seems to have served as a clue to the readers about whether this was a cause they were interested in and should read any further. Many of the wildlife-donor types kept reading, while the medical-donor types tended to say, “Nope, not for me.”

As for the story that opened some of the appeal letters, I wish we could have read it to judge for ourselves whether it should have raised the readers’ interest significantly. But the authors’ conclusion (which I’m paraphrasing hugely) seems pretty logical: That, for people already interested in a topic, hard information is also quite important, especially given that they’re savvy consumers who’ve probably read a million of these stories.

There’s just no getting around the fact that direct-mail recipients are, more and more, looking for an excuse to drop nonprofit appeal letters into the circular file. The study’s authors also pulled together some telling statistics, namely that Americans receive around 14 billion direct-mail solicitations per year, and a substantial number of people receive over 1,000 solicitations per year. Gulp.

The bigger conclusion here seems to be that people are either going to donate to your cause or not, for reasons that have little to do with the appeal letter’s contents. (Not a reason to do a bad letter, but nor is it a reason to sweat the small stuff.) I’m not ready to get on the “direct mail is dead” bandwagon — it’s obviously still a way to let donors know you’re there, working hard — but the stats also suggest that finding other ways to raise that awareness would be wise, too.

There’s been a lot of buzz in the blogosphere about the importance of bringing powerful, colorful stories to your potential donors. For a rundown of articles and other commentary, see the February 22, 2008 entry in Kivi Leroux’s Nonprofit Communications Blog.

Don’t miss the priceless parody of The Wizard of Oz as written in nonprofit jargon, by Andy Goodman (in his October 2003 newsletter). He starts out, “An at-risk youth from a blended family in the farm belt is rendered unconscious by an extreme weather event.”

Andy follows his parody with a list of seven questions to help sharpen your stories — things like “Who is the protagonist?” and “What keeps it interesting?” All good stuff. But it occurs to me that someone could answer these questions and still churn out lifeless prose like his parody. Very few people write great copy the first time through.

That’s why I want to put in a plug for editing. As both a writer and and editor, I’ve had to learn that there’s nothing precious about my words when I first put them on the page. In some cases, they’re just plain awful — but hey (I tell myself), they’re mere placeholders, awaiting the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th drafts.

It’s often not until I see my early, botched attempts at expressing an idea that my brain starts to kick into gear and think of a better way of getting the point across. From what I’ve read, I’m not the only writer who works this way. And even without such flashes of inspiration, good editing means looking at each and every word on the page and asking, “Is that one boring — can I substitute it with a better one?” or “Is that word necessary — can I cut it out?”

With solid editing, in which you build a story from the ground up, any writer can turn that “at-risk youth” into Dorothy with her ruby slippers.

Having recently written about how nonprofits can make a media hook out of nearly every event on the calendar year, I have to point out this story, “Foreclosures Lead to Abandoned Animals,” by Evelyn Nieves of Associated Press.

Right up there in paragraph 3, it quotes Traci Jennings, president of the Humane Society of Stanislaus County of northern California. She’s explaining how when homeowners abandon their homes to foreclosure, they sometimes leave the pets behind, even locked up and starving.

The human cruelty and irresponsibility involved in these actions are plenty newsworthy (I hear starvation is a rough way to die). But I bet the story would not have gotten the same media play without the tie-in to the foreclosure crisis, which is high on every media outlet’s “hot news, must cover” list.

I have no idea whether the Stanislaus County Humane Society initiated this particular story, but if so, kudos to them. And even if they didn’t, they must have done something right for the reporter to find them. Now let’s hope they get the help they deserve in dealing with these forgotten animals.

President’s Day, Chinese New Year, Earth Day, Cinco de Mayo, Mother’s Day — so many entries on that new calendar, before it’s scribbled full of appointments and events. And for anyone whose nonprofit is vying for media coverage, all of these offer great “hooks,” or opportunities to highlight a newsworthy aspect of your work.

I discussed the importance of media hooks in my book, Effective Fundraising for Nonprofits, but I was recently reminded of it while listening to a recorded teleconference with three radio producers — Rusty Lutz from ABC Radio Networks, Chad Wilkinson from Westwood One Radio Network, and Charles Munroe-Kane from Public Radio International (PRI) — discussing how they select guests. (It was sponsored by Bulldog Reporter in late 2006.)

One theme that all three hit on repeatedly was their effort to tie stories to what’s going on in the news or in people’s lives. For example, Chad says that around Christmas, he’s scouting for topics to do with shopping and religiosity; around New Year’s, he’s thinking about resolutions; and he even did a show around the 500th anniversary of the writing of Don Quixote (try finding that one on your calendar).

All of these give you opportunities to place your work in a new light. If I were still working in immigration nonprofits, I’d be pitching Valentine’s Day stories about all the U.S. citizen/immigrant couples who’ll be spending the holiday apart, due to tortuous bureaucratic procedures. Or, I could bring up citizenship trends around the 4th of July.

And, as alluded to in the Don Quixote example, you aren’t limited by what’s on your calendar — in fact, it’s time to expand beyond the classic “homeless person getting a Thanksgiving dinner” story. Events like the U.S. elections, Women’s History Month, anniversaries of important people’s births or deaths, and others can all offer potential tie-ins.

But, speaking of the elections, watch out that you don’t collide with other events that have basically taken over the media, particularly if you’re pitching to a news show. The panelists agreed that sending a fax on the night of a major primary will almost guarantee that it gets lost in the shuffle.