Archive for December 2011
You are browsing the archives of 2011 December.
Why the movement needs mystics
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about where I fit into the Occupy movement - what kind of role I should play. Unlike some of my housemates, who have gotten arrested, and have been presences at Oscar Grant/Frank Ogawa Plaza, I’ve been pretty much on the sidelines. I helped start Occupy Technology (which is sort of moribund at the moment.) I’ve been to a few of the marches and actions, but otherwise not really involved.
For a long time now (since 2003) protest in its traditional form hasn’t felt like the right thing for me, even though I had spent all of my adult life as an activist in a number of causes, including anti-nuclear, environmental, pro-choice, health issues, anti-death penalty, and others. In 2003, when the Iraq war started, I joined a group of folks who promised to fast for one day a week until the war ended. Of course even then, we didn’t think the war would go on for 8 years! My personal fast ended late in 2004, when it seemed then that the war would go on for a very long time.
In general, I feel great resonance with the Occupy movement, particularly the strains of the movement (which are not especially mainstream, but they are definitely present and known) that talk about the need for the creation of a new society based on love, compassion, equality, and meaning. And getting from point A (where we are now) to point B (that new society) seems completely unrealistic, perhaps even impossible.
I was reminded in a conversation I had this afternoon with a friend (who I must give the credit for the title of this blog post) about the importance of what I’m calling now “holding the door open to hope.” Many people would use different language for it. The basic idea is that although we can’t necessarily see how to get from point A to point B, we need to remember that there is available to us a vast source of possibility - the possibility to live into the best of what it means to be human. Some people might language this vast source of possibility as God. Others might language it quite differently. But in the end, it’s the same.
We can see evidence everywhere of how messed up things have gotten. And it is so easy to get weighted down by the despair and hopelessness of the world. I fall into that all the time (just ask my housemates.) We can see how many people are suffering, and how the planet is suffering, and how the systems in place are failing us at every turn. We can see how divided this country is, and the world is, and not see how it would ever be possible for it to be different.
But there is, along side it, evidence of how things could look, and be different. We miss these, because the media doesn’t cover this, and for many of us, our brains are more wired to dwell on the negative than on the positive. People are already creating the alternatives, right now.
So maybe that’s my role. Holding the door open to hope. Reminding myself (especially) and others, of Divine possibilities.
Oh, and food. I’ll cook for the revolution. 
Blog Category:
Ask if you want to receive
A fascinating new study of 17,000 people passing the Salvation Army’s holiday bell-ringers has some very important findings for you and me.*
Here’s how it went. Red Kettle solicitors stood at one or both of two main entrances to a supermarket in suburban Boston, making it easy or difficult for them to be avoided. The other variable was how the solicitors behaved. In some cases, they were silent. In others, they said to passersby, “Hi, how are you? Merry Christmas. Please give today.”
The researchers - James Andreoni, Justin M. Rao and Hannah Trachtman - found the following.
1. Shoppers didn’t avoid bell ringers who said nothing - and a tiny fraction appeared to seek out the solicitor by walking a few paces in order to give.
2. When the solicitors greeted shoppers and asked for a gift, over 30 percent of shoppers avoided the ask, BUT the average donations per giver rose a staggering 75%!
The researchers ask why the “ask” is so powerful, and they raise the possibility of some pressure that comes from within the donor:
The main psychological feature implicated here is empathy. Just as the smell of freshly baked bread can make it hard for a dieter to resist eating, stimulating one’s empathy through a direct and vocal ask can create a temptation to be generous that is difficult for humans to resist… We feel our results usefully shift the discussion of altruism, fundraising, and charitable giving to focus on the act of asking itself as the linchpin to understanding both the costs and benefits of the giving interaction.
It’s all about the ask, folks. It’s hard for people to resist their generous impulses, and that is something to celebrate about our humanity.
*Thanks to Roger Dooley, who pointed me to this study and blogged about it here.
Good habits and the groove of recurring giving
What if 10% of your donors gave every month? That would be pretty amazing, right?
That’s what we find through Network for Good’s platform:
Are you getting those results? If not, when you’re asking for support this week, consider asking donors to make their donation a recurring gift.
More than 100 experiments have shown the power of habit. Once consumers start purchasing a product, they are primed to stick with it. Lots of competitor messaging may get their attention but it’s harder to budge their behavior. Changing a habit takes huge effort.
Make giving a habit for your donors. They will get in the groove - and stay there.
Social CodeCamp - Coding for Good Causes (Education, Health Care, Environment) for Mobile / Cloud Solutions
Social CodeCamp Call to Action with Fiscal Sponsor WhoMentors.com, Inc.-Introduction to Social CodeCamp
*Invite people to view submit stories, enter contest and donate to local causes.
YouTube - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LqMexfpPo8
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/SocialCodeCamp
Enter competition, add short films. Tell us your story here…also add your long movies to one of sponsor pages.
San Francisco Chapter, Films For Action - http://Sf.FilmsForAction.org
It is my intent to introduce myself. My name is Kenneth Fax. I am the founder of Social CodeCamp. In collaboration with fiscal sponsor WhoMentors.com, Inc. I ‘m raising awareness and $50,000 before the end of the year. The money will support projects for collaborative events for projects supporting education,community health care development and environmental solutions.
Social CodeCamp are a series of events to assemble, educate and share opportunities for talented persons as technologists, mobile developers, web developers, etc…
Help us tell others by supporting Coding For Good Causes.A few examples are mobile and cloud solutions for education,biotech, technology, health and data research. We have been testing the theory in small instances for effectiveness around the San Francisco Bay area.
There is much excitement, growing interest and recognition. A few themes for Social CodeCamp events are as follows, which you may have an interest.:- Fashion, Music and Tech for the Arts- Brazilians in Biotech- Latinos in Education, Lifestyle and Entertainment- Code For Education
Merry Christmas and happy fundraising this week!
I hope you’re enjoying your holiday - and that you know the coming days are not a time to take a vacation from fundraising. Sorry, but it’s true!
Late December is the season of philanthropic procrastinators who want to get in their donations by the end of the tax year. A third of giving online happens in December, and 10-20% of all the giving in the year happens the last two days of the month.
Ask for donations 2-3 times in the coming days. It works. Repetition drives top-of-mind awareness, and you want that visibility when people are making their year-end gifts online.
And on December 31, send that email first thing in the morning. Giving peaks midday and early afternoon!
Day 12: Let’s Help Send Some Cambodian Kids To College – #12days of giving
I’ve been participating in the #12DaysofGiving , a 12-day bonanza of giving, sharing, and promoting social good from 12/13 to 12/24. Each day a different blogger champions a cause. Today is the last day and it is finally my turn! I’m fundraising for the Sharing Foundation, that supports children and young people in Cambodia. HELP [...]
The top 5 struggles for marketers this year
I just read some reports from the CMO Council, which is a professional think tank for marketing executives (CMOs=chief marketing officers) in the private sector. The striking thing was the areas in which CMOs struggle are so like our own in nonprofit marketing. It might make you feel better to know that the CMO at a Fortune 500 company often feels she doesn’t have her marketing act together on customer experience or social media or data management! We are not alone in our challenges.
In fact, a survey of CMOs found most companies still lack a “seamless multi-channel journey for the customer.” Translate this jargon to us and the story is the same. We don’t have one view into our donors across channels, and their experience is doubtless far from seamless. CMOs feel under enormous pressure to do better with engagement and social - and to measure those efforts in a far more sophisticated way. Sound familiar?
Since we apparently share struggles - and priorities - I thought I’d share the top five areas CMOs are seeking to master. This makes for a good to-do list for our own sector:
1. Making over digital marketing
2. Aligning marketing and sales (read: marketing and fundraising or communications and fundraising)
3. Integrate social media channels
4. Better analyze customer data
5. Better measure performance
It’s a tall order but there is some comfort in knowing everyone else finds it a challenge, too.
Six Books About Skills You Need To Succeed in A Networked World
Earlier this week, I wrote a guest post over at FrogLoop blog about Five Social Media Books, although not everyone liked the post. I admit that I mostly read non-fiction, but if I only read social media or geeky books that would be too narrow. It is less about the tools and more about [...]
My new year’s resolution: Deal with my data
An interesting thing is happening in data. More and more companies (and nonprofits) have more and more data on their customers (and donors). Thanks to technology and systems for tracking consumer behavior, we have loads of information. This could make us incredibly effective. But it’s not yet.
One reason is our data is in disorder. We may have data in siloes or different platforms, which makes it hard to get a clear view into individual consumers so we can actually use the data to work smarter. Another reason is we have so much data, it’s hard to handle. There’s a lot of talk of “big data” these days—data sets so massive that they can’t be handled by the same old tools. It’s hard to capture, store, search, share, analyze and visualize that much information. Too bad because there’s so much to gain - a view into key trends and patterns and insights that can do everything from increase sales to prevent disease to defeat crime. (Source for big data definition: Wikipedia. It was there that I learned every day, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created and 90% of the data in the world today was created within the past two years. That last fact is mind-blowing.)
The good news is there are tools to deal with this. I’m going to spend 2012 dealing with my data, and I encourage you to do the same. You can’t do a great job as a marketer if you don’t have a clear grasp of your audience. And you can’t have that without data that gives you one view into people: when they’re giving, how they’re giving, how much they’re giving. Having a database of online donors vs. direct mail donors vs. major donors doesn’t give us the view we need. We need our information in one place, with the tools that can help us analyze the information. It’s like investing in glasses when your vision is blurry: it’s a wise investment to allow yourself to see.
