complaints

I love the coverage generated by Ken Burnett's comments at the Institute of Fundraising Conference about how we should be generating more complaints!

The point is not, of course, to generate complaints for the sake of it. The point is that our marketing, campaigning and fundraising messages need to be sufficiently challenging, compelling and, when appropriate, hard-hitting to attract the attention of the people they're aimed at! And more often than not they aren't. Check out a few of the masterclasses on the SOFII website and you'll see that the seminal campaigns did not usually mince their words.

I earn my living helping charities and small businesses get better returns from their marketing and communications ideas.  That means I spend a lot of time encouraging people to try and think and feel what their target audiences think and feel.  Put themselves in their audiences' shoes, if you will.  Sometimes we can do this intuitively or based on experience and sometimes we have to use research or some other means of gathering feedback.