kevin baughen's blog

It’s a simple enough premise. If your customers, supporters or volunteers ‘speak’ with you about their needs, wants or a complaint, pay attention! It’s about having good internal communications and this means putting in place both the means for your people to communicate as well as nurturing the will for your colleagues to communicate with each other for everyone’s benefit.

There are hundreds if not thousands of people online offering technical and content advice on email marketing for business as well as for fundraising or campaigning. I'm not a technical expert so can't pretend to understand detailed coding or firewall issues but I do know a thing or two about content and about engaging readers.

Why do we want to engage readers? Because engaged readers are much more likely to do what you're asking them to do! Note the implication in that last sentence... you have to have a clear and compelling 'ASK' in every email whether it's for funds, to buy something, to sign-up to a campaign, to share with a friend or just to get further information - include an action.

I received a well-intentioned and polite email earlier this week from someone telling me about a schools reading project in Wales. Here's how it broke down:

By this time each year I’m usually on the verge of blowing one minor resolution (this year’s was to do with avoiding Curly Wurlies, but that’s a different blog).  This minor failure on my part has made me determined to achieve the more important professional resolutions that I believe will help charities, civil sector organisations and social enterprises get more value from their activities in 2012.

Here’s my top six. Let me know what you think and what’s made it into your marketing and fundraising resolutions:

1. Engage more organisations with the approach that their brand should be an asset which needs to be leveraged wherever possible to meet objectives and UNDERPIN activities.  Does your brand support what you do day to day?  If not, it’s not working as an asset should and is likely occupying too much time and effort for little return.

What a week of message contradictions we've noted at Bottom Line Ideas...

First there was research from Charities Aid Foundation (CAF) which showed Britain to be the fifth most charitable country in the world (up from eighth last year apparently). The same research also reported that nearly 80% of us give regularly to charity, second only to the Thais. Then we saw the British Government veto any further support to the IMF in support of specific Euro-zone bailouts - our European cousins perhaps not feeling our generosity quite so much.

Any regular readers will know how I often lament the lack of great marketing and fundraising ideas making it to fruition.  All too often, decisions are made to bin new ideas because there is no proven track record of success or because it’s simply ‘different to the way things are always done around here...’

This week, I’ve had my faith restored by two approaches to fundraising that in one case is working and in the other, I hope works.  But both are trying something different to stand out from the plethora of charity messages we all receive at this time of the year.

No effective charity or business wants to waste time and money or deliberately upset customers or supporters.  That’s why targeting has long been a mainstay of the marketer’s and the fundraiser’s toolkit.  In my simple world, it helps us to achieve two things:

1. Communicate only with the people most likely to act upon our messages in the way we want them to (assuming we match the target group’s wants and needs to our messages)
2. Save time and money by not communicating with audiences who are least likely to act in the way we want them to.

I appreciate that there are further subtleties here, like recognising that our organisations will have different messages which will appeal to different or the same audiences at different times, so one general rule of targeting simply won’t fit all situations. But in the last week alone I’ve observed three examples of the consequences of all this targeting being done independently by multiple, well-meaning organisations:

Targeting postcodes for charity bag collection Several contributors to the LinkedIn Group, Charity UK, have been sharing their experiences of receiving multiple collection bags – from several every week to 3 every day!

I was reading the tweets from the very useful @marketingdonut team and was pleased to see them share  renowned marketing expert Drayton Bird’s “35 things I have found to be almost always true”.  I was pleased to see it again as I didn’t get the chance to add to the list from a not-for-profit perspective... something I aim to put right below for the most impactful of Mr Bird’s points:

1. Relevance matters more than originality – 100% agree but originality tends to get more cut-through than cliché
2. The most important element in any creative endeavour is the brief – ie; the robust thinking that went into it and how the organisation can articulate that to an outsider
3. The urgent takes precedence over the important – but a mixture of both is likely to be the right thing to do (if your plans are robust, that is)
4. The customer you want is like the customer you’ve got – so true... but as well as the new types of donor, volunteer or supporter, not instead of!
5. The internet is just accelerated direct marketing – I think it's more than DM these days.  Perhaps it’s just a hugely powerful means to achieving a whole raft of objectives (including traditional direct marketing)?
   

Bit of a longer blog this week but I hope you’ll bear with me as I’ve come across an interesting issue that more and more charities, small businesses, community groups etc. are going to need to think about in relation to their web presence.

It stems from the increasing popularity of multiple browsers now being used by many of us to access the web.  I should admit right now that I use a PC and a Blackberry but I’ve asked the views of colleagues with Android phones and Apple products and they experience the same issue (albeit in different ways).

Put simply, I’m baffled by how different the same thing can look on different browsers and the fact that some things don’t work at all in some browsers whilst everything is tickety-boo in others!

How important this is depends on how we are trying to deliver our core messages.  Consider these examples;

I was looking at the RSPCA’s website and had cause to try and find some information about their rescue teams.  The charity chooses to use videos to show footage of their teams in action and I think this is a great tool to support both campaigning and fundraising.

I watched the video in my preferred browser, Firefox but the delay in the film starting irritated me sufficiently to switch to Google Chrome, which is usually a faster browser.  The video did indeed start more quickly (well, it actually started!) and I watched the team in action, hanging over the edge of a very high cliff to rescue a ram.

There's been some coverage in the last week around the launch of the new Health Lottery launched by Channel 5 and Daily Express owner Northern and Shell. The £50m lottery will be drawn and aired on ITV1 on Saturday evenings. Aside from the obvious fact that this is a competitor to the National Lottery for TV ratings, it raises the question as to whether health charities (and charities in general) will suffer as more competition arrives for the public's hard-earned cash.

I was helping out at some District Council focus groups this week and watched a couple of facilitators in action who made me think that consultation in our ‘Big Society’ is changing.

For a start, no Council, public body, charity or commercial enterprise, for that matter, can afford to become embroiled in pointless talking shops where no tangible and relevant progress is made.

I believe this means organisations that make decisions by vast committees simply won’t make them often enough or with sufficient focus for their implementation to be effective.

But organisations still need to consult with stakeholders, particularly if those stakeholders are also constituents, beneficiaries or customers.  If Big Society means all of us taking a little more responsibility for ourselves and our immediate environments then the process of consultation needs to change as well to ensure that it moves swiftly enough to meet the timescales of the non-governmental world but still makes sure people are given sufficient opportunity to contribute.

I think the facilitators I watched engaged their audiences well in this regard and I’ve tried to distil below the most effective things they did, which may help others: