Desk Jumpers and Annual Reports

I love words. You might have guessed that. I look up words every day in the dictionary📕. Merriam-Webster is my favorite, but only because it’s a quick m-w.com…so easy to type! I also have a dictionary app because I am just that nerdy. I believe that words have power. In my great room I have the word “Family” and the fruits of the spirit hung up for all to see. In the kitchen you’ll find “Dream Big!” and “Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily.” 🛶 But my favorite is above the door that leads to the garage. It says “Carpe Diem.”  It means seize the day. I love to read those words before I step out into the real world to do just that. Professor John Keating, played by Robin Williams, whispered those very same words in Dead Poets Society, because “No matter what anybody tells you, words and ideas can change the world.” 

Dead Poets Society is one of my favorites. That scene where Keating jumps up on his desk and says, “Why do I stand up here? I stand upon my desk to remind myself that we must constantly look at things in a different way. You see, the world looks very different from up here.”  Classic! 

This week’s lineup:

• Left Brain Marketing Methods:  Let me impart some knowledge shared by Ben Franklin that, I hope, will finally convince you to make a major change in your Annual Reports. 
• Right Brain Marketing Moxie:  Learn how I break my own rule when it comes to Annual Reports and how metaphors can easily make the unknown known, the abstract concrete, and the dry stuff more fascinating.

Are you ready? Let’s go!

Left Brain Marketing Methods: Ben Franklin was a Renaissance man. If he were alive today, he’d probably have a hipster beard and drink craft beer 🍺. Alas, we’ll never know. Instead, he was a known printer, writer, inventor, diplomat, and philanthropist.

In Penelope Burke’s book, Donor Centered Fundraising, she tells the story of Ben Franklin and his pastor when highlighting one of the barriers to fundraising success. Oddly enough, out of all the stories that people tell about Franklin and Fundraising, this one isn’t repeated often, which is strange. But it’s one of my favorites and, I believe, worth repeating.

As the story goes, Reverend Gilbert Tennent went to Franklin to ask for help in raising money for a new meeting house. He declined the Reverend’s request because he didn’t want to be known as someone who went back to his donors too frequently. He respected them too much for that.

When the Reverend learned the Franklin wouldn’t ask his donors for money for the new church building, he made a second, bold request. Just one tiny favor. He asked Ben for his list of generous donors. He wanted him to name names! Franklin said, “I thought it would be unbecoming of me, after their kind compliance with my solicitations, to mark them out to be worried by other beggars, and therefore refused to give such a list.” Instead, he advised his Pastor to do three things: (1) to ask those he knew would give, (2) to ask those that he was uncertain whether they will give or not, and (3) to ask those he was sure would give nothing because, as Franklin said, the Reverend might end up surprised.

That’s just what the Reverend did and how he was able to build his new meeting house on Arch Street. You see, Franklin respected his donors so much he didn’t want them to be over-solicited and he wanted to respect their privacy. Doing so is a major tenant of fundraising today. The focus should be on the gift 🎁 and what the gift can accomplish and place the donor’s role as the means to an end.

I say all this to tell you why we decided long ago never to print the list of our donor names in our Annual Report. I know, I know—but you’ve always done it that way. I’ve heard it a million times and I’m not buying it. I’ll lean on the wisdom of Ben Franklin on this one. I want to respect my donors’ privacy. I don’t want their names published in a way that others could add them to their database and all the sudden they begin receiving unwarranted solicitations from others simply because we listed their name in a public document.

The first year we stopped printing donor names in our Annual Report, we got ZERO calls. No one complained. No one cared. They don’t give to have their name published. They give because they are generous and want to see the impact their donation can bring. That’s what it’s all about!

Right Brain Marketing Moxie:  It’s one of my favorite times of the year. Our Annual Report just came out last weekend and we always keep the theme super-secret 🔐until it’s published. This year’s theme…<<drum roll, please>>:  Space, A Philanthropic Frontier. 🚀

Now I know I’ve gone on and on about serving your minimum viable audience—and trust me, I firmly believe in this strategy. However, our Annual Report is the one marketing item where we don’t follow this rule. We write this report (yes, we do all the writing) every year in a way that our past board members who know us well can read it and learn about what was accomplished last year. But we also write it in a way that someone who has never heard about us, a layperson, could pick it up, read it, and learn more. Of course, it does the job of an Annual Report, and highlights the biggest impact that was made last year. And it also tells the story of what a CoFo is and does in a way that any novice could comprehend.

That’s why we use the Annual Report each year to announce our theme for the year. We use themes because they allow us to tell stories using metaphors and similes that anyone can relate to. I used to call this a hook to hang something on. Everyone has the hooks or the basic knowledge of a simple theme. Then we fill the report with content about the Foundation that they can easily hang on those hooks.

Metaphors are a great way to make the unknown known, the abstract concrete, and the dry stuff more fascinating. In fact, one year I had a donor that said he’d never in his life read an entire Annual Report—they’re too boring, he said. But before he knew it, he kept flipping the pages and had completed reading our entire report in one sitting. He had to email us just to tell us how good the report was and how he’d just done something he’d never done in the first 75 years of his life! Wow! What an accomplishment! We’re making Annual Reports readable again!

I’d love for you to look at our Annual Report this year and check out how we utilize theme and metaphor to make the complicated story of a CoFo very simple. So simple that we publish around 20,000 of them. I know, it’s insane. But we discovered years ago that our local newspaper 📰 had the capacity to both print our reports and distribute them to their newspaper subscribers. So, we work with them each year to do those two things—and it’s soooo affordable! And just last Saturday, in the daily news, our Annual Reports landed in the mailboxes 📫 of many donors who know and love us and many citizens who had never heard of us—until now.

We hope that each group appreciated our stories and the work that we do. And better yet, we hope that those that read the report could see the valuable role that each donor plays in making a positive impact in this place we call home. 🌍

Feel free to enjoy our Annual Report yourself. This was the post our awesome Development Manager, Shelly, made to ‘launch’ our newest theme:And please remember this, my Nonprofit Marketing friends, “No matter what anybody tells you, words and ideas can change the world.”  A theme can be your way of standing on top of your desk to remind yourself that we must constantly look at things in a different way. 🌌

All My Best,

dawn
[email protected]