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Read the January Charity & NFP Law Update from Carters Professional Corporation here.
As part of #AFPCongress2018, we stayed true to our theme of disRupTing philanthropy by disrupting the way we deliver some of our unique, one-of-a-kind Congress content. For the first-time ever in Congress history, we recorded sessions live for a special AFP Congress podcast series that you can listen to on-the-go to gain inspiration & motivation as you move through your workday, on your commute to and from the office, and even as you enjoy your weekend…with podcasts, the choice of when and where to listen is yours!
What you’ll hear in each of these episodes is Congress come to life – the real sounds and conversations that our talented presenters and audience members had during the three days of Congress (November 19-21, 2018). Read more »
By Kayleigh Alexandra
Charities have a harder job than most when it comes to their marketing. While most brands offer their customers something in return for their custom, charities have to appeal to their donors’ generosity to see donations — easier said than done.
Charities need to up their game to see results. As a consequence, their marketing campaigns are often creative, innovative, and truly inspiring. Here are four of the best (and what you can learn from them).
Recommended reading: Developing Your Nonprofit Narrative
Save The Children (UK)
Back in 2014, the UK-based charity Save The Children partnered with creative agency Don’t Panic to arguably create the most hard-hitting marketing campaign on this list. Titled If London Were Syria (or Most Shocking Second a Day on YouTube), the first ad followed the life of a London schoolgirl whose life is turned upside-down when a civil war erupts in the UK. Created to bring the plight of Syrian child refugees to an otherwise distant audience, the ad was followed up two years later by another video following the same girl as she continues to survive in a war-torn UK.
This ad campaign is powerful, heart-wrenching and, above all, relatable. It is this empathetic quality that makes the ads so effective by placing the viewer painfully in the little girl’s shoes.
What you can learn from it: charities often work with terrible events or situations that seem unimaginable to western audiences.
War, genocide, and even domestic issues such as homelessness are incomprehensible to most donors. But by making these things relatable to your audience, even by forcing them to painfully confront these issues as Save The Children did, you’ll create an effective and impactful marketing campaign. Read more »
By Donna Moores
Content marketing has evolved drastically over the years and a new trend of the future has made its entrance in the arena – podcasting. Podcasting is now working its way towards becoming an essential part of the marketing mix and if you are looking for ways to improve your business’ reach and visibility, it is certainly a method worth exploring.
Although beneficial in numerous ways, podcasting is not as simple as it sounds. While some would prefer to prepare podcasts solo, others choose to benefit from the professional services of specialists such as Handmadewriting for expert editing to ensure the best quality of the podcast’s content.
But how can podcasting truly add value to your business? Let’s see what the six main reasons for considering podcasting in 2019 are!
- Story Telling Engages Customers Better
One of the most difficult tasks of a marketer is to engage customers in a non-intrusive way. According to research, 57% of consumers end up avoiding a brand if it bombards users with marketing content across channels. Podcasting tackles this problem effectively by providing an alternative to communicating with users in a more delicate manner.
Storytelling is among the most vital elements of consumer engagement and should not be underestimated in digital marketing. Podcasting offers a clever way of engaging with consumers by creating valuable stories.
- Mobile Friendly
The immense popularity of smartphones in the era we live in opens a door of opportunities for podcasts as part of content marketing and smartphones certainly drive podcast usage. The most convenient way of listening to a podcast is from a mobile device while consumers are stuck in traffic, working out in the gym or enjoying a walk in the park. In other words, podcasting sets the scene for targeting consumers at times when they are in their natural behaviors, relaxing or spending time off social media.
- Easy and Cost-Effective
When comparing podcasting to other marketing methods we can see that its turnaround time is quicker, the investments required are smaller and it is relatively easy to create. Of course, marketers will need some level of preparation in terms of necessary devices and technology for higher quality recordings but the investment is nothing compared to TV or radio advertising in the old days. Once you have recorded the discussion and have provided interesting information about your company’s products or services, you have set the perfect theme music and edited, you are ready to review the final podcast product in an instance.
Happy 2019! And welcome to a new year of Advancing Philanthropy reporting that documents our strong belief in Fundraising…The Impact Profession.
We christened the January 2019 issue “Hard Scrabble” for the specific stories it tells and the difficult challenges our members are tackling across the board. “Unending hard work and struggle”— hard scrabble’s dictionary meaning — are common to the articles you will find here, but so are the words “transformation”, “triumph”, and “success.”
ICON Highlights: Take a sneak peek inside ICON 2019 by reading “An AFP Insider’s Look at Mission City,” as told by former AFP San Antonio chapter leader Lynne Dean. Get to know our terrific 2019 plenary speakers, Spencer West and Soledad O’Brien, in Q & As that dig deep into their remarkable “Life Stories.” And obtain the most for your time and money with productivity guru Chad Barger’s guide to the biggest fundraising conference on earth.
Back to the day-in, day-out nitty gritty, settle down with the special section on “Rethinking Capital Campaigns.” Its twelve pages are packed with insights into the future of capital campaigns, trends you need to know, the new role of campaign consultants, and data-driven fundraising as well as inspiring case studies from Alaska to Delaware to New York City.
Above all, please send your comments and suggestions to me at Susan.Swift@afpglobal.org or call me at 703 519 8489 to engage with AP regarding future issues of your membership magazine and web-only content now under construction. We look forward to hearing from you.
Read the latest issue here.
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By Tricia Johnson
AFP Toronto’s Congress was an empowering and highly personal experience that is changing my outlook towards the fundraising sector. But it didn’t start off that way.
It started with my arms crossed against my chest and my mouth drawn tightly into a straight line. It was a frown to be honest, but it could have been mistaken for concentration.
Hadiya Roderique was giving the first plenary speech at Congress, Canada’s premiere educational forum for fundraisers. Ms. Roderique’s experience as a black lawyer on Bay Street made front page news of the Globe and Mail last fall, and here, her powerful and informed speech tackled the racism and exclusion present in Canada’s corporate culture. Her observations, statistics and personal experience brought the conference’s theme, “Disrupt Philanthropy” sharply into focus. It showed that philanthropic culture in Canada was not immune to the “-isms” that affect other sectors. For me it touched a nerve that I was used to covering up.
“Why is she talking about this?” I thought. “We already know this! Just deal with it and move on!”
Well, that’s exactly what she was doing. Head on. I too am a black woman. I am a fundraiser working in Ottawa since 2005. I know what it feels like to be the only person of colour in a crowded room. But I don’t talk about it. Instead I’ve gotten used to the discomfort and moved on. But am I moving? Really?
By John Paul de Silva – originally published on the Social Focus Consulting blog.
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| Vanity A La Mode, in front of podium, disrupting philanthropy in all the right ways |
In my previous article on AFP Congress 2018, we explored how charities can reverse declining revenues by delighting donors, more specifically, by personalizing communications, running experiential events, and designing frictionless webpages. Ultimately, it’s people that drive and nurture such decisions, but how do we facilitate this kind of innovation and disruption? We do it through transformational leadership which requires introspection followed by extrospection.
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| Kishshana Palmer, presenting on transformational leadership and emotional intelligence |
In Kishshana Palmer‘s session, she focused on emotional intelligence (EI) and its ability to help us motivate, inspire, boost, and push others, in turn, helping us become transformational leaders. According to Ms. Palmer, EI can be broken down into four domains or competencies: self awareness, self management, social awareness, and relationship management. Although the framework is centred around emotions, I believe it’s a good general framework for all contributing aspects of transformational fundraising leadership. Read more »
By Mo Waja
AFP Congress has come and gone but Fundraising Day 2019 seems just around the corner and there are many other conferences on the horizon. Conferences, broadly, are an exciting opportunity to learn and grow through the shared wisdom and thought leadership of speakers, to discover new opportunities through networking, to make new friends with other professionals in the space, and to grow your personal brand as a professional and thought leader within your field.
But conferences can also be challenging, and a lot of that comes down to scale. Yes, you are in this focused microcosm of your industry filled with people of, presumably, like mind and like interest, yet you are also one of perhaps over 1,000 delegates, all of whom are looking for new opportunities and new connections. With that being the case, it can seem a daunting task to cut through the noise and have your voice heard amid the many others all pushing for airtime. Tools like social media have made this interesting because, now, most conferences will have a #hashtag of some kind along with a twitter handle, and so for the days of the conference you’ll see a flood of tweets as people capture images, quotes, and key messages that simultaneously express their interest and broadcast their presence at the conference. The thing is, if your goal is to stand out from the crowd, tweeting along in the same way as everyone else still leaves you lost in the crowd. What you need is a way to differentiate yourself so that, whether delegate or speaker, people can tune out a bit of the noise and tune in to you, specifically.
To do this well, I would suggest a 5-step process:
- Choose a theme for your conference
- Start talking about it early (2-3 weeks before it happens)
- Produce conference content
- Make friends and be places
- Keep talking about it (1-2 weeks after it happens)
- Choose a Theme for Your Conference
Throughout a conference you will have many conversations. These conversations can take place in person, during workshops, or through the posts you put out via social media. Choosing a theme for your conference means choosing the subject matter that you want to focus on during those conversations, workshops, and posts. This process is very intentional, and the easiest way to understand why is to consider Twitter.
Over the course of the conference, there will be a lot of tweets flying around. The challenge is that if everyone is tweeting scattershot and talking about everything, simultaneously, it’s very easy for your voice to get drowned out. One way to cut through the noise is to have a few focused subjects that you choose to talk about. For example, if you, like me, are fascinated by nonprofit storytelling, attend sessions that speak to that and then tweet about them. Doing this consistently positions you as someone who cares about storytelling (or, otherwise, marketing, donor relations, planned giving, etc., depending on your chosen theme) to the conference at large. This makes it easier to connect with people both within and beyond conference attendees who are either of like mind or looking to learn more about your chosen subject. Taking this outside social media, your chosen theme should echo through all your conversations so that every interaction you have at the conference intentionally positions you as a person who cares about a certain relevant subject and knows things about that subject.
The beauty of choosing a theme for your conference is that, even if you aren’t a speaker, you can still position yourself as an authority on a subject by adding in your own thoughts and opinions and producing related content.
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