No one knows for sure what makes for great viral marketing. And those who claim to know are usually wrong.

One thing’s for sure, the message and the technique not only have to shock or surprise they have to glide along on top of the current wave and capture the moment just like any great surfboard champion.

Well, with the wave of concern over the soap opera that’s become the U.S. presidential race –dramatized in extemis by the Vice Presidental choice of John McCain– the climate is ripe for the "concerned", the "interventionists" and the plain "off the wall."

I’ll leave it to you to decide what category the following falls in to. Whatever your choice, please be aware that my mailbox alone this weekend received more than 120 copies of this –about 5 times the normal traffic on this sort of thing.

All the emails arrived in my box with the same Subject line: "Taking Matters Into Our Own Hands." Followed by a short and simple message: "Check this out, new movement to elect a different kind of president."

That brief text is followed by this link:

http://www.tsgnet.com/pres.php?id=46832&altf=Upn&altl=Cfmgpse

Regardless of your own view of the presidential and vice-presidential races, I can guarantee you that tens of thousands, or maybe even hundreds of thousands of folks are shooting this off to friends and family even as I write this.

I only regret that this ingenious piece doesn’t lead to some action like voter registration or even an offer of asylum to all of us from the Canadian government. But then, we do know that if you "tell them what to do" that probably won’t work.

Roger

P.S. The truth is if he weren’t so old and could also shed his unfortunate habit of undiplomatic candor and speaking the truth, Tom would make a great candidate.

P.P.S. Don’t be modest. Click on the link and enter yourself –or even your dog or cat – into the race. Ain’t democracy fun? More importantly engage in some analogies and think how you could use this in campaigns and other special donor involvement events.

WEEK OF SEPTEMBER 29, 2008

MONDAY: Direct Response TV Lessons. Tom’s often wondered why animal welfare and protection agencies don’t also follow the most consistently successful nonprofit fundraisers using DRTV — the child sponsor agencies like Save the Children, Worldvision, and Christian Children’s Fund. In the online era, DRTV can offer multiple impulse response options, not just 1-800 numbers, and Tom sets forth reasons why “online DRTV” offers perhaps limitless opportunities. He notes a recent DMNews article reviewing the status of DRTV, with a very informative focus on the ASPCA and its masterful use of the medium. Well worth a read.

TUESDAY: Latest Fundraising Stats: Read ‘Em and Weep! This week Target Analytics released its Index of Fundraising Performance for the first half of 2008. Fewer than one third (31%) of the organizations in the index had positive donor growth in the first half of 2008 – a continuation of the declining trend over the past 2.5 years. Revenue per donor continued to increase with 68% of the organizations in the index showing an increase. AND… despite the increase in per donor revenue, when adjusted for inflation, real revenue has actually declined a cumulative -5.8% in the past three years. The economic uncertainties of 2008 aren’t helping, but these trends have been occurring for the past three years. Whatever sector your organization operates in, take a moment to read Target Analytics summary of acquisition and retention trends in your sector.

WEDNESDAY: Online Fundraising – Prez Candidate Style. Candidates McCain and Obama are aggressively using paid search word buys to court prospective supporters. As Tom reports, the concept is pretty straightforward, but execution can be complex. This Ad Age article describes the process in some detail as employed by the McCain campaign, which gets the nod for being more ambitious and sophisticated. The same techniques are available — and apply — to online prospecting (and persuasion messaging) by nonprofits. Note that these "paid search" tactics represent proactive, affirmative outreach (going where the fish are), as compared to "search engine optimization" which is all about crafting your website so as to attract search traffic passively (hoping the fish will swim to you). How many nonprofit online fundraisers are up to this level of sophistication? Please send some examples to share.

THURSDAY: Is Email Dead? Or Just Dying? Just when online fundraisers are beginning to get a handle on email fundraising (testing customization, subject lines, etc), a new challenge is raising its head. Large numbers of netizens are abandoning their traditional email and choosing instead to message directly via their social networking sites. It’s like having cell phone users disappearing from your outbound telemarketing lists! Says Nicholas Einstein of Datran Media, writing in DMNews and citing new data from Jupiter Research: "… the rapid adoption of social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace has transformed the way many consumers interact on the Web. Some customer segments, especially younger ones, now spend an increasingly large percentage of their online time on these sites and primarily use them to communicate with their peers. These same consumers, according to a recent report from JupiterResearch, are apparently spending less time in their e-mail inbox and may be paying less attention to the messages they receive there. This shift is causing some to question, perhaps prematurely, the future of e-mail as the dominant social networking tool.

Ah … relevance! How many times do fundraisers need to hear this word?! Whatever the medium, relevance is what makes the world go round. This is why the adage is right: A poorly crafted message sent to right audience might work. But the perfectly crafted message to the wrong audience doesn’t stand a chance.

FRIDAY: Online Fundraising on MySpace. With 120 million users, MySpace has teamed up with PayPal to introduce a fundraising widget for individual and nonprofit members to use on their MySpace sites. They seem to be promoting it to celebrities to create some buzz. Here’s an example of the widget singer Hilary Duff is using to raise funds for St. Jude Childrens Research Hospital. Her MySpace widget has raised $8,885 so far. Nothing released yet as to how much money overall is actually being raised via the MySpace platform. But with the sheer user scale of MySpace, Facebook and others, the use of personal fundraising widgets will certainly proliferate. Our own DonorTrends survey indicates that while fully 58% of "Newbies" (those born after 1964) have personal web pages, only 3% so far use personal fundraising "badges" or widgets on their sites. To the degree these tools are adopted by younger folks, apart from any immediate $$ results, they are helping to "train" a new generation of donors. That’s terrific in itself.

Your Weekend Bonus. It’s no coincidence that this week’s Agitator content focuses on new media/online innovation and experimentation. For the eighth consecutive time in nearly three years the Index of Fundraising Performance makes clear that ‘business-as-usual’ approaches in traditional direct response fundraising are producing declining results. Alternatives have to be found. And some of those alternatives are likely to spring from the world of online fundraising and communications. In the near future we will release our DonorTrends “Status of Online Giving in America”. A lot of change has occurred since our first study in 2006. Here are just 5 reasons why we’re paying close attention to the emerging trends in online giving:

1. The pace of online giving has significantly increased – an estimated 31% in the past two years alone. In 24 months giving has moved from the hundreds of millions to well above a billion, no matter what source is doing the estimating.
2. Donors giving more than $100 per year are disproportionately online donors, and this propensity increases sharply as giving amounts increase. 82% of those giving more than $1000 a year to charities, causes or campaign give online.
3. In our current study we found intriguing racial and ethnic signals about online giving. For example 59% of Hispanic respondents are online donors; 92% of African-American respondents contributed online, topped by 92% of Asian-American respondents. NOTE: We will conduct additional inquires on racial and ethnic trends to confirm these findings. But if these early signals are correct the future of online giving is bright indeed because these groups will soon represent the majority of Americans.
4. The sharp growth in online giving has occurred across all age groups and non-profit categories. Despite a tendency of some to write Seniors out of the online fundraising equation the most impressive growth has occurred among older donors.
5. We found that the existence of a thriving interpersonal online fundraising network is hugely important for the future. With nearly 60% of donors born after 1964, with 25% of donors born between 1946 and 1964, and at least 25% of those born before 1946 visiting such sites, the platform is taking shape for a far more online distributed form of grassroots fundraising — the coming Web 3.0 of fundraising.

True, Postage and Telephone still dominate, but The Mouse is gaining.

Have a great weekend.

Roger

Target Analytics has just issued the results for its Index of National Fundraising Performance for the first half of 2008. Read ‘em and weep!

· Fewer than one third (31%) of the organizations in the index had positive donor growth in the first half of 2008 –a continuation of the declining trend over the past 2.5 years.

· Revenue per donor continued to increase with 68% of the organizations in the index showing an increase.

· BUT…the authors note that despite the increase in per donor revenue, when adjusted for inflation, real revenue has actually declined a cululative -5.8% in the past three years.

For the twelve months ending Q2 2008, Target Analytics evaluated transactions from 74 organizations, including over 37 million donors and more than 69 million gifts totaling over $2 billion in revenue.

Especially hard hit sectors include “societal benefit” organizations –advocacy, civil rights, human rights, voter education, etc. – and health and human services. The only sector to experience increases in the number of new donors was the “animal welfare” sector.

What continues to worry me as I look at these numbers are the continuing declines in new donor acquisition and also in donor retention. Sure, the economic uncertainties of 2008 aren’t helping, but these trends have been occurring for three years. Whatever sector your organization operates in take a moment to read the authors’ summary of acquisition and retention trends in your sector.

Here at The Agitator we’re working overtime on a new Donor Loyalty white paper using the results from our 2008 DonorTrends survey. We hope our findings and recommendations will provide some much needed shelter in this storm. Stay tuned for a release date.

Roger

P.S. As the presidential elections near many organizations are concerned about the effect political fundraising has on their results. While some advocacy and issue groups may feel the effect, I agree with the Target Analysis authors who cite Giving USA 2007 and note “individuals gave a total of $229 billion to charity in 2007, which was 390 times the total raised by all candidates running for president that same year. While 70% of the U.S. population gives to charity every year, only 1% to 2% of the population gives to presidential candidates or campaigns.”

The Agitator’s Week In Review.  This was a week for politics, beginning with the Washington, D.C. soap opera over the on-again-off-again bailout of the  U.S. financial system and ending with the on-again Presidential Debates in Oxford, Mississippi.

Regardless of where you stand on the bailout you have to feel a sense of pride last night at how far the U.S. has come in the realm of social change when one of the two men on stage at Ole Miss was the nation’s first black nominee.

WEEK OF SEPTEMBER 22^nd

MONDAY –Tom kicked off the political week with a summary of a recent survey by the Pew Hispanic Center indicating Hispanics are becoming more pessimistic about the outlook for Latinos in America, with some of this discontent rubbing off on the Republicans.

50% of Hispanic adults say the situation for Hispanics in this country has worsened in the past year, compared to 33% with that view a year ago.

TUESDAY—Another Pew study.  This recent survey by the Pew Research Center has found that of the 44% of the public that goes online regularly at work, 70% check the news through the day.

But what news are they following?

Observes Pew:

"The quest for news at work might come as a surprise in the face of findings about the public’s news knowledge. The same Pew Research survey asked Americans to name which party controls the U.S. House of Representatives (the Democratic Party), to identify the U.S. secretary of state (Condoleezza Rice) and name the prime minister of Great Britain (Gordon Brown). Only 18% of the public is able to correctly answer all three political knowledge questions, while a third (33%) could not answer any."

So much for issue politics!

And we wonder why it’s so hard to raise money for issue advocacy groups! In our latest DonorTrends 08 survey, only one in five respondents say they have given to an issue advocacy group.

WEDNESDAY—We continued down the polling path with  another fascinating report from Pew Research Center indicating the bias of cell phone-only respondents to political polls.

Pew has conducted three surveys on presidential candidate preferences since the primaries ended. In each case, they isolated the responses of individuals who reported using cell phones only.

Amongst these respondents, Obama holds a significant advantage (10-15 percentage points), whereas among respondents who use landlines, or landlines and cellphones, Obama and McCain are running a dead heat.

But politics aside, if your nonprofit does survey research by phone (we at The Agitator, via DonorTrends, do all our research online), you need to consider the Pew findings carefully from a methodological standpoint. Particularly if you’re trying to probe the post-Boomer generations, the choice of contact medium appears now to make a significant difference. Cell-only users are a unique tribe. You’ll need to get to know them.

THURSDAY — It used to be that "good government" advocates like the League of Women Voters and high school civics teachers were thrilled if anyone merely watched political debates!

With the advent of the web’s online engagement, viewing and social networking options, however, the "good citizen" bar has been raised substantially.  Now you can vote instantly on the winner, register to host official viewing parties, and of course watch the debate online while you multi-task.

Here’s what the Obama and McCain campaigns wanted their supporters to do around the first debate. For Obama   For McCain

And, as we noted, your nonprofit’s CEO isn’t likely to have access to prime time TV on a scheduled basis anytime soon, but were he or she to do a webcast to the faithful, these campaign tools would apply.

FRIDAY— We wrapped up our political week with a visit to the folks over on Convio’s blog, Connection Cafe, where their staff has been comparing the websites of Obama and McCain on key attributes like accessibility, ease and clarity of navigation, and — of most interest to me — engagement features and pathways.

These sites, as they push the engagement envelope and perhaps overload on bells & whistles, are offering more involvement than we’d ever care to have with a campaign! But that’s a key point … offer different strokes for different folks. Just make it very easy for your supporter to find their own level of engagement.

By the way, the analyses offered at Convio Connection are terrific.

Your Weekend Bonus.  There’s just never enough time to see first hand what’s good, what’s bad and what’s just plain mediocre in the fast-changing world of new media.  Some of the most innovative and effective developments occur in world of political campaigning.

So, we recommend you spend some time reviewing the insights of the folks at  TechPresident, who do a brilliant job of reporting and critiquing from numerous perspectives the online strategies and tactics of the presidential campaigns.

In recent months  and for good reason they’ve been gushing about the scope and creativity of presidential campaign efforts to engage and empower supporters via the web.

TechPresident is a project of the Personal Democracy Forum.  So, if it’s a rainy weekend in your part of the woods as it is in mine it’s well worth a tour.  Chances are you’ll discover at least 7 techniques you can put to work for your cause tomorrow. 

Enjoy your weekend,

Roger