Book Review: The 11 Questions Every Donor Asks

Occasionally I will get a new philanthropy book or report from a publisher to review. The most recent was The 11 Questions Every Donor Asks and the Answers all Donors Crave by Harvey McKinnon. The book covers questions like:
*Why me?
*How much do you want?
*Will my gift make a difference?
*How will I be treated?
*How will you measure results?

For those of you that fundraise professionally or as a volunteer know intuitively that you should know the answers to these questions but knowing you should know something and actually preparing to answer the questions is a completely different thing. From the standpoint of being “professional donor” these are the same questions that I want answers to during site visits.

*Why me? Does our foundation provide an added benefit of name recognition or leverage if we fund this project?
*How much do you want? Is the ask size appropriate and match our foundation’s giving capacity?
*Will my gift make a difference? Will you do this project with or without our foundation’s funding? How would our gift increase your nonprofit’s ability to do good work in the community?
*How will I be treated? I pride myself on not being the program officer that tries to leverage their power to get all star treatment but it is important to treat individual donors and foundation representative with courtesy.
*How will you measure results? Will this program positively impact the community and how will you measure that impact?

11 Questions Every Donor Asks is a back to basics fundraising approach but sometimes the most simple techniques are the most effective.

Branding Yourself with your Resume

Your resume can be a key branding tool. Below are some tips from my Do Good Guide on Branding Yourself for Personal and Professional Success.

1. Contact information is easy to find—many ways of contact provided including home phone, cell phone, professional email (not something like partyon@aol.com), and address.
2. Work history descriptions are concise, precise, thorough, and do not over-use modifiers like very, extremely, really, etc. Descriptions are written in active voice. –Prepared monthly marketing reports, rather than –Monthly marketing reports were prepared.
3. Resume does not contain any typos, misspellings, or grammar mistakes.
4. Focus is on accomplishments rather than responsibilities. Example: planned and implemented three large fundraising events, completed three direct mail campaigns each year and oversaw membership renewal mailings. Instead of: responsible for fundraising.
5. Contains juicy, descriptive words that relate to your specific field of work.

Your resume or work history on LinkedIn is a key place to highlight your accomplishments. So make sure you make the most out of those opportunities.

connect+ipedia

Sean at Tactical Philanthropy has a great post today about knowledge management at Foundations. The cataloging and sharing of knowledge at Foundations has long been a problem but the folks at Meyer Memorial Trust have been tackling this head on. From Sean:

For some time now I’ve been talking about the need for large foundations to share their knowledge base with the general public. While some people have made this argument from the standpoint of obligations that foundations have to the public, I’ve thought that foundations will find that they are able to more effectively further their own mission by sharing their knowledge base. Since individuals give seven time more money each year than all the foundations in the country combined, it stands to reason that foundations who share their knowledge with the public might influence some of these vast flows of funding to support the mission of the foundations.

Recently the Meyer Memorial Trust, a $700 million+ foundation that has proven innovative in a number of ways, launched an attempt to share their knowledge base with anyone who is interested. The project is called connect+ipedia. Rather than explain the project myself, I asked Amy Sample Ward - Communications and Learning Associate at MMT and author of the foundation’s New Media Blog - to share her thoughts with Tactical Philanthropy. Read the rest here.

Myths of Flatness

"The anger that comes with a sense of injustice, that life is deeply unfair, is powerful and dangerous."
-Katherine Marshall

The Push Conference is over but the posts will continue. I think the best types of conferences are ones where you have new ideas to chew on indefinitely. The session on Flatness was an interesting contrast between the rest of the world's view of U.S. consumerism and how some U.S. companies are working to develop ethical brands. Chandran Nair started the session with an overview of how the exportation of U.S. culture is an unsustainable global nightmare and yet it would be unfair for the U.S. to tell the rest of the world that they can't enjoy the same level of consumerism that we take for granted everyday. If every person in China began driving and eating the amount of seafood that U.S. citizens do, the air would be unbreathable and the oceans would be emptied of fish (or at least the delicious ones). His suggestion was an increase of environmental planning worldwide.

Other speakers on this topic included Jonathan Greenblatt and Katherine Marshall. Jonathan talked about how corporations are trying to buy authenticity through their social responsibility efforts. He gave some examples of when this has worked well (Ethos Water, Good Magazine, Tesla sportscar, and Living Homes) but it can also go bad like the Red Campaign. My favorite quote from Jonathan was "moving people from consumer to advocate is the best way to engage people." This is evidenced by the organic movement and consumer's push to get store to stop using plastic bags. Jonathan is now working for Good Magazine, who's YouTube videos have been extremely popular (they have been described as Sesame Street for grownups) so I have shared one below.

Opening of Push Conference

Tonight was the opening reception for the 6th annual Push conference that I will be covering on this blog. Push's founder described the conference atmosphere as a "zone of discovery" and said that she hoped through our experiences here that we will develop connections to new visions of what is possible and invent a future where we can all contribute.

Push has a history of staring the conference with performance art and this year was no exception. Jenni Wolfson presented the first segment of her one woman show "Rash" about her experience in Rwanda documenting human rights abuses for the UN. A video of one of her performances is above. She had a very powerful message how about the randomness of your place of birth can have such an impact on your destiny. The show was painful to watch because it laid in front of the audience the bare truth about how ugly humans can become, when teachers can murder students and nuns can slaughter church members simply because of ethnicity.

Following Jenni was Dan Wilson, a songwriter and artist, who performed a variety of his songs including his hit "Closing Time", which was written to celebrate the impending birth of his daughter. Dan also wrote "Not Ready to Make Nice" for the Dixie Chicks. His beautiful messages of hope and possibility were a startling juxtaposition to Jenni's show.

The opening was an important reminder to me that art can expose the ugly side of human existence that we would rather ignore and can also show us our greatest possibilities. Both of those viewpoints are important as we look at how we can shape the future. Look for more posts this week as the conference progresses.