Couperfs

I often wonder if every family is as quirky as mine…probably not. I just ran across an old Facebook memory where my oldest son, Griffin, got embarrassed at school by using a word that he thought was a real word. It was, in fact, just a word we made up and used all the time at home. Couperfs is one of those words. My husband made that one up when we lived in Texas. As you’d expect, the Sunday edition of the Dallas Morning News was chock-full of what Hoosiers would call money-saving coupons. But, in Dallas, at the time, these coupons were actually perforated. This eliminated the need for scissors or, if you were a Neanderthal, crooked ripping. It was quite lovely. Find a deal, tear along the perforation, and ta-da, the world couperf was invented.

After decades of marriage and couperf clipping, I thought my husband had our money-saving strategy down to a science. So, one Saturday afternoon when we were in a bit of a hurry, we divided up the couperfs and the shopping between food and non-food items. I grabbed all the food couperfs and he grabbed all the non-food couperfs and we met back at the car after checking out.  It wasn’t until we got home and began to unload the car that I realized the error of my ways. You see, I thought everyone knew how to use couperfs. I was wrong. Boy, was I wrong! I had clipped ten couperfs for laundry detergent. My learned experience was that you clip all the couperfs, take them all to the store, and then calculate which one will get you the best deal based on the actual price of each item when you get there. That wasn’t my husband’s experience. He grabbed every laundry item he had a couperf for and placed it into the cart. Yes, all ten. He spent some Benjamins that day, solely just on laundry supplies. We literally had enough to last us for nearly a year!  And, needless to say, we didn’t ‘save’ any money that week at the grocery store. Even more needless to say, we never divided up the couperfs and the shopping again—we couldn’t afford it!

I tell you these stories because they prove just how hard it is to communicate, especially perhaps when we think it’s easy. And when you’re a nonprofit on a budget, communicating well is the key to meeting mission-centric needs and making impact, so you have to get it right.

Although our left brain marketing methods tell us that we need to be factual and use our lingo, that can often be detrimental. Using words like endowment, required minimum distribution, IRA rollover, or charitable remainder trust might be words that are part of our industry acumen, but they aren’t part of the daily vernacular for most people. Just because we used the word couperf at home didn’t mean anyone else understood it. Some words just take a little more explanation. Simply using business vocabulary, as professional as it may be, doesn’t mean communication happens. In fact, your message might go completely over their head or worse, make them feel dumb. That’s no way to treat a generous donor—you can do better.

That’s where your right brain marketing moxie comes in. No matter how complicated a concept is, you can usually explain something complex by comparing it to something simple or, better yet, something they are already familiar with. If you think about it, this is what teachers do all the time. The best teachers take complicated ideas and make them easy to understand using strategies just like this. As someone who does nonprofit marketing, stewardship, and fundraising, you literally have one job—communication.  And the bottom line when it comes to communication is that you must have both a sender and a receiver. No matter how many times you’ve sent a message to the receiver, if they didn’t get it or ‘get it’, then communication didn’t happen. It’s like calling someone that never picks up. So, yes, you might need to get creative for the receiver to comprehend the message you’re sending.

For example, many generous people contribute to nonprofit organizations all the time. While you do want to communicate with generous people who have an affinity for what you do and the capacity to fulfill your requests, those same donors might not understand what an endowment is. It’s your job to help them understand. So, for one of our direct mail pieces, we used this right brain example.

Since we know that our donors have 401k retirement plans for their future, comparing something they do know with something they might not—an endowment—made perfect sense. Using similes and metaphors can often help when explaining complex ideas that you need your donors act on. Don’t be afraid to get creative when it comes to explaining complex ideas—that’s how many new concepts are learned.

Clearly, I should have explained how couperfs worked before I sent my hubs off to buy a Gucci bag worth of laundry supplies. I made a rookie mistake and just assumed he already understood. Luckily, the result was foregoing the purchase of additional laundry supplies the rest of the year and a funny story. However, if you don’t learn from this mistake, you could lose a donor. That kind of miscommunication will cost you far more than a year’s supply of Tide!

All My Best,

Dawn
[email protected]
dawn brown creative, llc.