Blue Sky Collaborative is a privately held Boston-based company committed to building the best web-based software products available in order to help non-profit organizations live their mission, achieve their goals and make the world a better place. Blue Sky Collaborative has been in business since 2003, and was started by people who understand the non-profit world. Our clients are our partners and we begin everyday excited about the work we are doing together.
who uses our products & services
We've worked with non-profits of all sizes, from start-up all volunteer grassroot efforts to global non-profits, and for a variety of causes, from political to humanitarian to disease related charities. What unites our clients is that they are looking for an easy, effective and affordable partner to help them understand and solve the technology challenges they face. No where is this more clear than with our clients that use SWEET, our online pledge event and viral fundriasing software.
Direct mail still works. It generates a lot more money than email/online donations despite the fact that email fundraising continues to grow quickly.
My biggest problem with direct mail is the lack of information that it provides. You really don't know who has read it, if they've put it on their fridge, if they threw it away, or anything really. Your postcards go out into the world and the only feedback you get is the amount of money raised.
Email campaigns on the other hand can yield a wealth of information including read rates, click-throughs, unsubscribes, donations and more.
The other advantage with emails is that they don't have to be "asks." You can use email for awareness building or testing without worrying so much about the return on investment because the costs are so low. When you send out a postcard there can be significant costs associated with it so you want to be sure that an "ask" is a major component of a direct mail campaign.
Still, people are used to getting solicitations in the mail and until the return rates are next to nothing I would suggest keeping direct mailings in your fundraising portfolio. But give it a short leash and work hard to collect emails so that when you are ready to switch to emails only you don't lose people. Till then, use both.
The Jewish Federation of Greater Atlanta recently launched Community Campaign 2010, a viral fundraising campaign that hopes to use the dollars raised to aid the most vulnerable among us, ensure that Jewish culture and traditions live on, and strengthen the critical link between our local community and Jews around the world.
Although many Jewish charities are still grappling with the notion that their message will be in the hands of e-philanthropists on fundraising platforms like SWEET Viral and Pledge Fundraising Software, they are coming to terms with the fact that "in five years online giving would dwarf the returns now" and "if they (bigger charities) don't embrace the newer technology, the smaller organizations will come in and we'll reap the benefits."
At Habitat for Humanity, volunteerism runs through their veins. They've extended this culture of volunteerism into their fundraising. In the build-a-thon program, Habitat has asked its volunteers to build homes AND raise the money to finance it. It's a great model and has been successful so far.
Another "building" campaign, The Darling Home in Canada has put the fate of its renovation projects in the hands of its members by asking them to raise money to help finance the renovations. Their goals are explicit. The need exists, http://www.darlinghomeforkids.ca/index.cfm?id=9587, and the viral fundraising campaign is the vehicle that they have chosen.
If you are thinking of adding a viral fundraising campaign, walkathon, or any a-thon, you should ask orgs that have done so successfully. You should reach out to the folks at Habitat and Darling Home to see how they pulled it off. You'll probably learn that a successful viral fundraising campaign is an attainable goal.
In a Bain & Co. study 20% 0f 451 senior executives polled said the their CRM (customer relationship management) initiatives had failed to deliver profitable growth and had damaged customer relationships
Shift gears now to the nonprofit sector. If this study were done with nonprofit executives in 2008, the results would be the same. Nonprofit executives polled about their Convios or Raiser's Edges would tell you that they are not working out as planned and certainly have not returned on investment. I've yet to see any definitive, statistically rigorous data pointing in one direction or the other. This is probably because people are afraid of what they will find and ignorance, we all know, is bliss.
Nevertheless, marketing experts warn against the problems associated with having one large data repository, which is what Convio and Blackbaud tout.
The danger is that the nonprofit director is presented with an "average donor profile" and is not given a more in-depth picture about individual donors and how and why they act. This average donor profile may not even fit a single donor in the database, yet an org may base its strategic decisions on the aggregated data point. They will try to build a relationship with this fictional average that does not exist.
In fact, it may be better to forget about integrating data. GASP! Separate data sets may give you a more well-rounded, holistic picture of your donors. And if orgs look at their data in a broader context, meaning - how does the info we glean from our data sets fit into our donor knowledge management objectives - then orgs would get a more accurate picture of their donors AND spend less time with imports, exports and other data- corrupting practices.
Fortune 500 companies have long since abandoned the idea that a single, monolithic CRM system is the answer to their marketing challenges. They have diversified their approaches to get a more customer-centric view of their patrons. I think it's time that nonprofits followed suit.
The event participants raised over $600 each on average. That's fantastic. Anything over $250 is great.
The results have the Foundation already thinking about next year
This was a well thought out event - everything from the event day acitivites to their choice of fundraising software. It's further proof that first year Walkathons can be very successful. Especially if you have the right partner to guide you through the process.
About The Peter C. Alderman Foundation
The Peter C. Alderman Foundation heals the emotional wounds of victims of terrorism and mass violence by training doctors and establishing clinics in post-conflict countries around the globe. To date, the Foundation has trained 196 indigenous mental health workers from 19 countries on four continents and has opened nine Peter Alderman Mental Health Clinics.
Peter Alderman was attending a conference at the World Trade Center when he was murdered by terrorists. Pete was 25 years old when he died.
Assuming that this trend will continue, are we going to see a day when a nonprofit will not need to know a consituent's street address?
Yawn. Does that sound trivial? Think again. Right now, nonprofits spend thousands a year supporting large, bulky donor management systems like Blackbaud and Convio. In them, they store every bit of info about a constituent. Lot of it is absolutely unnecessary.
That includes the street address. If direct mail goes the way of the dodo, then why does a nonprofit need a street address? What's the point? Email campaigns and online donations have replaced direct mail and checks, right?
Nonprofits who have a Facebook group or Cause really have all the information they need (and more!) about a constituent. Sure, they may not have their street address, but they know how many friends they have and what other groups they belong to, where they vacation, if they have kids, if they are married, if they like to post pictures, if they post videos, what they subscribe to, and SO MUCH MORE. And all the information is entered voluntarily and happily by the constituent. A donor management system that is essentially managed and updated by the constituents!
Today volunteers enter data "collected" from unaware constituents into a ghastly old CRM system. The software itself is very very expensive, the service from the companies is terrible, and entire donor management system model is very antiquated.
What we need is a lightweight app of some sort that can extract info about the members of a Cause and present it in a usable, platform independent format for nonprofit managers. Donor management may be the next killer app for Facebook. I think the success of their Causes program is evidence of this. The Causes technology is disruptive enough to make the donor management systems of yesterday obsolete.
An article from 2001(why is this second in the search results?) explains why Sept, 11 2000 was a watershed moment for online fundraising.
Kelly O'Neal shares some data about giving in '08 and urges orgs to stay positive and have BIG, colorful donate buttons. http://www.frogloop.com/donations. Frogloop is a good blog for usable advice.
Other respected bloggers talked about the use of tags, feeds, and the typical Web 2.0 gadgets.
To me this is all old news. There is nothing disruptive here.
Online fundraising is still gaining acceptance in the nonprofit sector. I've thrown my hands to the heavens and can't explain the turtle-like adoption rates. It's mind boggling. After all, we are talking about 10-year old technologies.
BUT, what's next? What's beyond the "donate now" button and the hulking donor mangement systems that weigh organizations down?
Where are the next revenue streams and how will technology light the way?
If you ask Eric Schmidt and the folks at Google, they will tell you that the next version of online apps will be lightweight, platform independent, very fast, very customizable, distributed virally, and the data and machinery will be held and secured in the cloud.
For nonprofits, I would add that solicitations ("the ask") for online donations will also become predominately viral.
So what does this mean for the future of online fundraising? If Schmidt is right, and I think he is, nonprofits can expect a day where they can quickly and easily acquire any type of online fundraising tool that they desire. Whether it is for an event or any other viral fundraising program.
Nonprofits will not have to compromise on features and design because the app will be thorughly customizable.
Getting started with an online fundraising app should be instantaneous. Since the data and infrasctructure will be in the cloud, orgs will not have to worry about buying expensive servers or hiring IT people. All of the machinery of today's bulky apps (I'm talking to you Blackbaud) will be tucked away behind the scenes. No more 600 degree server closets.
To me, the most intriguing part of the future of online fundraising is platform independence. Orgs will no longer be shackled by the web browser. Your online fundraising application should work just as well on an iPhone, or any phone, on a Television, on a Wii, or any other connected device.
This future is not that far away either. There are already some iPhone Apps for fundraising. I know that platform independence is on Blue Sky Collaborative's radar.
For nonprofit managers everywhere - EVERYTHING YOU KNOW WILL CHANGE. The orgs that figure out the new approaches will be the most successful. Let's start thinking beyond Firefox, IE, and Safari to find the next big thing in online fundraising.
