Zombie fundraising techniques

Howard Lake | 10 May 2013 | Blogs

Have you noticed how dead-on-their-feet zombie fundraising techniques lurch on from year to year their income falling, their costs often rising and their ROI heading south; but for some inexplicable reason they will neither die nor wander off and cease to trouble the professional fundraiser.

I once tried to kill an events programme that had got completely out of hand, growing till it was so huge there was no chance of the events even repeating the profit it made several years before. The staff loved attending, the Director loved the limelight and the Board liked the prestige all of which made the events stagger on with the ‘fail’ light wildly flashing.

Whilst any technique still returns a semblance of a profit it is often hard to get Directors and Boards to agree its demise. If the event has a budget line all to itself you may be expected to increase its profit each year, and often to provide a detailed description of how this will be done. Sounds familiar? I practised saying “No” and tried it out quite a few times at all stages of the process, explaining exactly why this was not a good idea; and I found to my horror that people who keep zombie techniques going often really do not understand fundraising or indeed how business works – when is a loss not a loss? When it is written up in the evening paper apparently…

Sometimes the power of well-expressed reasons can change minds, but this often requires both persistence and the belief that persuasion is an effective tool in the face of great odds, and I have found that the inertia of many civil society organisations combined with sheer ignorance means the dice are stacked against you.

All of which begins to show how zombie techniques get the illusion of life. Such zombies may require a huge amount of maintenance on your part taking time and energy from techniques whose performance could actually be improved – the dead gnawing at the living. Often I have found that the maths behind zombies is suspect and the real ROI hidden in ‘off budget line’ costs such as meeting times, other parts of the organisation providing support and agencies cross-charging for work to maintain their percentage on supplies. Doing the maths seriously, and very carefully, can really help in burying zombies.

We all know direct mail is not quite in the land of the living dead, indeed it provides much of the core income and new prospects for a large part of the sector, and will I suspect for years to come; but it has progressively staggered closer and closer to the border giving everybody the heebie jeebies. This type of proto-zombie requires very careful observation too as huge parts of it may become unprofitable and need to be axed, so increasing unit costs and thereby increasing the pressure on the remaining parts. At some stage the astrologers take over and your estimates of its flat-lining tendencies become dependent on the arcane rituals of lifetime value, legacy potential and volunteering value. The moment you detect you are no longer listening to comprehensible, if complex, pure maths but to the entrails being read sharpen the axe. You may only need to cut the programme down to size to see the ROI spring up out of the ground.  

New media tools too have a special inclination to flip over into sudden death syndrome: remember Friends Reunited (where are they now), MySpace, Compuserve (half the internet still thinks that’s my email address), Ask Jeeves (boy was he good until he was Googled), the Flip video camera (mine is still stunning but where is the attached mobile), your website as a portal, CDs etc which all staggered around unprofitable for a few years as if they were still alive. Because this often happens when they look at their most healthy, having grown rapidly from year to year, it is with some disbelief that threats to their existence are met. Everyone enjoys them, your boss signs up her husband, communications extolls them in the media and membership fondly believes they make a difference; but these zombies typically reach a point where the next big thing really is bigger and better. Then people migrate or change their behaviour overnight, led by the fickle boomers and early adopters in Gen X and Y often leaving the more loyal older generations marooned, but obliging organisations to continue ‘looking after’ them or to lose touch at a time when legacies might be dusted off and updated. 

Personally, I blame zombie management that just slaps a percentage increase on each income stream and will not listen to reason in the budget process. This unsustainable, if incremental, growth will eventually kill any fundraising technique, it will even kill organisations; though I have noticed that events are particularly prone to grow rapidly and then collapse apparently without warning.

On the other hand, heroic management will ascertain which techniques are going to become key income streams in a few years’ time and invest financially in nurturing their growth – oh yes there will be a few mistakes but that is part of the price of survival. For the past few years this has been increasing in mobile based techniques, though the smash and grab techniques of direct marketing have proved remarkably unsuitable to the social media elements of this package; instead all eyes are on Avaaz.org, 38 Degrees and similar extraordinary start-ups which ignore conventional wisdom, giving a zombie like feeling to many of the sector’s websites.

As Andy Grove the boss of Intel said “Only the paranoid survive” and that to survive an organisation has to innovate faster than the rate of change of its external environment.

Spotting a zombie technique:

1. It loses money but staggers on from budget to budget.

2. It persists but the time and money to start new techniques never emerges.

3. It swaggers around being praised by everyone but has bandages wrapped around its clay feet, often as the expectation of the numbers of participants becomes completely unrealistic.

4. It calls itself "old fashioned" you call it dead on its feet.

5. Its ‘likes’ hang around from year to year, growing in number but never giving money.

Indeed, zombie watchers worldwide can see a tipping point coming when the undead online outnumber the living and that is when you may need to clone Buffy to survive.

John Baguley

CEO

International Fundraising Consultancy

www.ifc.tc

About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale. He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.