kevin baughen's blog

I was interested this week by a Harvard Business Review 'tip of the day' article which raised what I thought was an interesting question. How do you say 'no' when someone asks you for an introduction that you're just not comfortable making? The author, Jodi Glickman, talked about her experience of being asked by a colleague for an introduction to her literary agent. For a number of reasons, it wasn't appropriate as it would have reflected poorly on both the friend and Jodi and so she suggested a policy we can all adopt if faced with the same dilemma:

Commissioner Gordon says : I never said thank you.

Batman replies : ... and you'll never have to.

- Batman Begins

But human nature doesn't generally work this way, right. We like being thanked for our efforts and there's no shame in that. And its been empirically established that charities and social enterprises alike are more likely to be successful when they thank supporters and customers (see the blogroll for numerous examples).

After the latest round of Christmas donations, however, I am starting to think that we need to find a better way of doing it. I keep my thank you letters and emails to learn from professionally, and in 2010 I've received nearly 50.

I recently attended a seminar given by a very knowledgeable chap called Marc Munier from pure360marketing.co.uk.  His 20,000 hours of working with email marketing and campaigning was distilled into a hugely enlightening session which, because it wasn't an open event, I can't share with you.  However, I thought his 10 tips to getting the most out of email marketing were worth tailoring and sharing.  I don't know Marc personally but I'm sure if you want to follow up his ideas, the team at pure360 would be glad to hear from you.

1. Data Capture.  When people visit your website capture email addresses.  use social media, newsletters etc wherever possible to ask for the right amount of information.  What's the right amount?  Basically it's the amount they are prepared to happily give in exchange for the value they think they will receive as a result.

One of the first marketing and communications lessons I learned was to make what you say to a target audience directly relevant to them.  The more emotion that relevance incorporated, the more powerful the message was likely to be and therefore drive the action you wanted.

It's been argued that some charities have taken this approach too far, attracting the accusation of 'guilting' people into donating or supporting.  That is, incorporating too much negative emotion alongside relevance into their messages. 

It has been too long since my last blog and I have no excuses other than that things have been incredibly busy helping charities and community groups meet some very tough objectives - apologies to regular readers. This week I've been part of a team delivering marketing and communications workshops to non-marketing people and its been a hugely informative few days for me, let alone the delegates (who, incidentally agreed via their feedback sheets that they valued the sessions). We've run into some interesting issues working with groups from a mixture of business, charity and public sector backgrounds and I thought I'd be open and share some of our learning to see if it resonates with others. Having taken a quick straw poll amongst the team, and in pursuit of improvement, here are the things we will be thinking differently about for future workshops. It would be great to hear your thoughts too.

• In the words of Dr. Gregory House, people lie! No matter how many times it is covered in pre-workshop materials, if you ask people whether they know anything about marketing, they say yes. I expect it's because we don't want to feel daft amongst our peers and other groups but asking people to self-select workshops based on their own level of knowledge coming into the event does not guarantee a base-level of knowledge on which you can build.

Are you a schmoozer?  Do you use schmoozing to work a room full of potential donors or partners or just when attending an even or conference?  According to an article I saw recently, schmoozing is a vital networking skill and is not in fact a load of old cobblers!  The art of schmoozing is defined as:

“To converse informally, to chat, or to chat in a friendly and persuasive manner especially so as to gain favour, business, or connections.”

Steve Bridger is a well-respected (rightfully so) and experienced online community builder. His blog this week was interesting and challenged pervading views that social media isn't successful for organisations.

"The so-called failures of social media to deliver are misplaced; rather they are the result of our own failure to commit – to sustain an online presence for more than a fleeting, one-night stand."

Personally, I think this makes sense. If we all gave up learning to swim after the first uncomfortable width, we'd never appreciate the benefits of being able to snorkel or scuba dive in the future. Experience of hindsight tells us that some things will be worth persevering with.

A few weeks ago I wrote a blog about some of the most useful things I'd learnt from attending the NFPTweetup meetings held in London. The eighth event was held on 15th September and, having had a couple of days to reflect on what we saw and discussed, I'd like to add the following three things to that list of useful learnings.

The news that the Royal British Legion has accepted a (likely multi-million pound) donation from Tony Blair raises an interesting question.  At what point does charitable purpose outweigh ethical considerations when trying to do good?

We've just completed a significant research project and it served as a timely reminder of the pitfalls of reading too much into research findings. I write a guest blog for Ask Charity, the specialist PR and communications service for charities, and in doing some background research was surprised to see just how much research is shoe-horned into communications or used to create eye-catching 'headlines'.