This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

I smiled and thought to myself “Camels aren’t so bad are they? They are even quite attractive – if you are a camel – and they can certainly last longer with no water than a horse can…. but, then again… no one aspires to own one or to ride one and you can bet your bottom dollar that one will never win the Grand National for you!”

So, if there is a danger of your Brand being designed by a committee, or for that matter anything of value, think again about what you really want at the finish line.

Danny MacAskill – “Way Back Home”

David Eustace – Finding Eustace (showing just a few highlights – the full, breathtaking journey can be seen on David’s website CLICK HERE

Several of my clients are embarking on significant fundraising projects so I thought I would add some highlights (actually most of it) from his Nonprofit Fund-Raising Demystified post which features the critical, basic principles that impressed me so much.

Tony Ponderis:

When it comes to fund-raising, there are truths and myths. The truths illuminate the path to success. The myths speak of what can’t be done and won’t work. Throughout my career I have had to overcome three myths of fund-raising that would have me give up before I start. My tools have been The Nine Basic Truths of Fund-Raising.

Myth 1: Face it, fund-raising is impossible and the process is a mystery.

Myth 2: Everybody knows you need a proven track record if you are to raise money.

Myth 3: It’s common knowledge that corporations and foundations give most of the money.

Those three “beliefs” have helped doom many a fund-raising campaign. On the other hand, there are some insights about fund-raising that successful fund-raisers have gained. They offer no shortcuts. They promise no instant results. However, they are not hard to understand, and nearly anyone can profit from them. They are The Nine Basic Truths Of Fund-Raising.

Sometimes in this world that showers us with new technology on what seems like an almost daily basis I think we can lose sight of the basics. It’s easy to get caught up in the newest tools and the hottest theories.

But the basics remain. Some things do not change. They are the bedrock upon which all fundraising efforts are anchored.

They are time-tested approaches. They are the basic truths that define successful fund-raising. And they are basic, not simply because they work, but because their absence yields failure.

When I talk to groups, the most important things I have to share from my more than three decades of fund-raising experience are The Nine Basic Truths of Fund-Raising. They come from hard-earned knowledge shared freely and enthusiastically with me by countless, gifted development professionals and volunteers over these many years.

 

Basic Truth 1: Organizations are not entitled to support; they must earn it.

No matter what an organization’s good works, it must prove to those who support it the value of those works to the community and the efficiency with which the organization delivers them. The primary key to fund-raising success is to have a first-class organization in every sense. There are no entitlements in the nonprofit world.

Basic Truth 2: Successful fund-raising is not magic; it is simply hard work on the part of people who are thoroughly prepared.

There are no magic wands, spells, or incantations. Whenever you hear that someone has the magic fund-raising touch, laugh. Otherwise, the joke is likely to be on you. No one pulls a rabbit—complete with its own lettuce farm—out of the fund-raising hat. No one!

Fund raising is simple in design and concept, but it is very hard work! It is planning, executing, and assessing. It is paying attention to detail. It is knowing your organization and what it needs. It is knowing who has the money, and how much they can give.

Basic Truth 3: Fund-raising is not raising money; it is raising friends.

People who don’t like you don’t give to you. People who know little about your organization give little at best. Only those people who know and like you will support you. Raise friends and you will raise money.

Basic Truth 4: You do not raise money by begging for it; you raise it by selling people on your organization.

No matter how good your organization, how valuable its services, how efficiently it delivers them, people will not give money unless they are convinced to do so. Fund-raisers function much as sales and marketing people do in the commercial world. So, be ready, willing, and able to “sell” your organization and the programs for which you are raising money.

Basic Truth 5: People do not just reach for their checkbooks and give money to an organization; they have to be asked to give.

No matter how well you sell people on your organization, no matter how much money they have, no matter how capable they are of giving it, they have to be asked to give. There comes a point when you have to ask for the money. And by the way, make sure that you are asking for a specific amount. Don’t leave it up to the donor to recommend how much to give. People with money to give are accustomed to being asked for it. The worst thing that will happen is that they will say no, and even then, they’re likely to be supportive, even apologetic.

Basic Truth 6: You don’t wait for the “right” moment to ask; you ask now.

If you are always looking for the right moment—the “perfect” time—to ask for the money, you will never find it. You have to be ready, willing, and able to close the solicitation at any time. You have to take the risk of hearing no.

If that happens, don’t take the rejection personally. They are saying no to the organization, not you. Once you have presented your case, ask for the money. Don’t wait. Either close the solicitation, find out what the objection to giving is and overcome it if possible, or get your turndown, and move on.

Basic Truth 7: Successful fund-raising officers do not ask for the money; they get others to ask for it.

The professional fund-raising officer is the last person who should ask prospects for money. The request should come from someone within the prospect’s peer group. It is the job of the professional development officer to design, put together, and manage the campaign. Volunteers who are themselves business executives, well-off individuals, community leaders, or board members, are the ones who should ask their counterparts for donations.

Basic Truth 8: You don’t decide today to raise money and then ask for it tomorrow; It takes time, patience, and planning to raise money.

Make the decision to initiate a fund-raising campaign before the need becomes dominant. It takes time to develop a campaign and its leadership. With each prospective donor the chances are you will get only one chance to present your case. Be prepared. If you present a poorly prepared case, you will be told no.

Basic Truth 9: Prospects and donors are not cash crops waiting to be harvested; treat them as you would customers in a business.

No successful businessperson deals with customers as if they had a responsibility to buy. Prospects and donors have to be courted as you would court a customer. They must be told how important they are, treated with courtesy and respect, and if you expect to do business with them again, thanked.

There are, of course, exceptions to each Basic Truth, but if you rely on the exceptions to support your organization, you will find them to be few and far between and dollars in short supply.

In the end, we raise money from people who:

• Have it

• Can afford to give

• Are sold on the benefit of what we are doing

• Wouldn’t have given it to us unless we had asked

• Receive appreciation and respect for their gifts

It doesn’t take a genius to raise money. The process is a combination of common sense, hard work, preparation and planning, courtesy, commitment, enthusiasm, understanding, and a belief in what you are asking others to support.

My next post on Fundraising will be about how design integrates and provides necessary tools for implementing a fundraising campaign. How communications underpin everything and why marketing has nothing to do with fundraising.

But what if crowd sourcing design isn’t all it seems to be. What if a small group of designers who were either very shrewd or couldn’t get work by conventional means or both, got together and programmed a website to appear to crowd source design… the 150 odd options you are sent to choose from are in fact computer generated, perhaps peppered with one or two designs that they input directly perhaps with a little more logic.

The vast number of choices is very impressive to some. Why look at only three options when you can chose from 150? Surely the odds of finding the perfect solution are increased with volume. If you know about odds you know that’s not the case. If you know about design you also know its not the case.

Anyway, back to my hypothesis, imagine that the bulk of the options are simply preset, programmed with pre-determined fonts, colors, dingbats, clip art and or shapes that just change with the new name. Everyone coming to the site gets the same variants with only the name changing according to the company name they submit. Their ultimate choice – whichever that might be, is charged for–a nominal fee. Each time the owners of the site make the money. Each time the customer gets the big range to chose from–but is completely unaware that it is identical to everyone else’s…

What if this is true? How would you know that it’s not?

If you are curious about what else I might write, but perhaps don’t always have tine to visit the website, you can …
Subscribe to my occasional newsletter

On a Scottish research project that I am working on with Culture Sparks, called The Source, for the Performing Arts and Venues of Scotland, I learned just how much you can be profiled by the six to seven numbers and letters that identify where you live – your zipcode (postcode if you are in the UK).

The population profiling, called MOSAIC, is provided by Experion and is surprisingly accurate. Who would have thought this was possible!

The audience intelligence part of the project combines readily available data with box office ticketing data and combines everything to inform the performing arts venues and organisations about their reach, their audience profile, their audience likes and dislikes, where they live how far they will travel, what revenue they generate, what potential revenue remains untapped, what performances generate the highest income relative to their frequency, and more…

The project will be published shorty, when it is, I can discuss the findings in much more detail.

For now this is a work in progress – just like the three-part, 400 odd page research report.

• • •

Meanwhile, click to watch a fascinating Webinar on MINING BIG DATA by the Harvard Business Review

How do humans respond?

What do they react to?

What makes them engage?

Being a visually expressive person, I have always believed that we humans respond to the visual first and foremost. We take in visual information, literally at the speed of light, then we assess, make judgements, assumptions and jump to conclusions on an almost instant, unconscious level. Dangererous / Safe  Friend / Foe  Familiar / unfamiliar  Trust/ don’t trust  Right / wrong  Like / don’t like  Pay attention / Ignore

A few weeks ago, when I was at the airport travelling back from Scotland, I picked up a fantasic book by Daniel Kahneman entitled Thinking, Fast and Slow. The Nobel Prize winning author shares a lifetime’s worth of research and findings on the subject of how the brain works and in turn how we as humans behave. The book provides the evidence that I had been looking for – taking my wee theory beyond “I believe this to be true” to “here’s the proof!” He divides the brain into two parts – two systems – called system 1 and system 2. He then explains how we make judgements, “educated guesses” assumptions and decisions. He explains how much of this is actually outside of our control because it happens on an unconscious level that we are completely unaware of. We only become aware of the process when system 2 is awakened. Depending on which response your instinctive brain takes, your conscious, logical thinking brain either kicks in to action or stays in the background.

CLICK HERE for a brilliant review by  William Easterly for the Financial Times (FT.com)

“System Two likes to think it’s in charge, but it’s the irrepressible System 1 that runs the show.”

(from the above mentioned article)

This puts significantly more importance on creating a first impression and the first split-seconds it takes your customer to conclude theirs.

Finding someone who can visually “cut to the chase” interpret lots of information and put it into a form that a customer can get-it-in-one and yet discover and learn more and more through intelligently layering evocative and logical information to keep curiosity satisfied as long as it persists, is the way to go.

For me it’s a little like building blocks. Each piece I create builds on what came before. Which is why I give such careful thought to the first block. The first block more often than not being the logo – or as it is now referred to as – the brand mark.

When you are highly skilled at anything, a sport, an instrument, physics, mathematics, business, etc.. it is easy to look at and understand a great deal from just a small part. An experienced golfer can watch someone hit a couple of balls and have pretty good understanding of what they are capable of and whether or not they are a pro. An artist can look at a painting and feel the underlying tension and understand what the artist was thinking. In every field your assessments and judgements are informed and expanded by the depth of your experience.

In graphic design if all that mattered was that a piece looked neat and tidy, features the logo, uses the right corporate colors and fonts – anyone could do it. Really – anyone with a little experience in word-processing and a bit of discipline.

But, if you want your website, your presentations, your collateral, your reporting, your newsletters, your advertising, your packaging, your intranet etc etc etc… and all the things that you haven’t thought of yet from business development ideas to corporate responsibility initiatives to connect and build on one another to convey an overall vision of the company… then your design needs to have the same DNA.

The same is taught in Buddhism.

From the essay “Mentors” in Art is Work by Milton Glaser, he tells this story:

“I had another mentor in a friend named Albert Rudolf, sort of self-invented swami. He studied in India, became Rudi, was anointed as a swami, came back and taught what is called Kundalini Yoga, which is a rather esoteric form of yoga based on the idea of releasing the serpent power at the base of the spine. I don’t think I ever released my serpent power, but it was a great privilege to know him.

One day we were sitting in his store, and a shipment of 100 Tibetan bronzes arrived. They were unpacked, and Rudi took ten or twelve and put them in a case. People came in and pointed to one and they’d say, “How much is that?” Rudi answered, “$1400.” They would point to another one and Rudi would say, “$800″ Someone else would come in and point at another and Rudi said, “$1200.” At the end of the day I turned to Rudi and said, “Hey look, where are these prices coming from? You bought 100 pieces. You paid for them collectively. You don’t have any idea how much each piece costs. You don’t even know very much about Tibetan bronzes. You don’t know from what year they are from or how scarce they are. Where are these prices coming from?” “Look stupid,” he explained, “Every work of art is a vehicle for the creator’s energy. That energy lasts forever. I am an expert on energy. I see how much energy is coming out of the piece, multiply it by five and that’s where the price comes from.

At the time I thought that was absurd. But now, I think he was exactly right.There is no other way to ascertain the value of a work of art.

I remember this story well. It stuck with me over the years. At the time I was a little disappointed, because I thought, ahhhh, only if you can read energy can you tell anything about a creative work. But now, I disagree with this interpretation, I suspect we all naturally posess the ability. This explains why some pieces of art have remained masterpieces over centuries. Their energy stays and we as human beings respond to the energy of other human beings (even if we are not aware of it). We are lifted, we are moved, we are enriched by the experience. We feel something.

Why is it not the same seeing a work of art on the TV or in a book as opposed to being in the room or in the building next to it? Possibly the medium dilutes the energy which dilutes the experience. Music is probably one of the easiest art forms to be conscious of the difference. The impact of experiencing a live concert over listening to a recording of the same concert…

But how does all this relate to design? There are very different motivations behind design and fine art. However, the experience of creating something is very similar, I believe.

Another similarity is the energy of the process. In any creative pursuit, the act of making is the exciting / compelling part. It’s not about the finished thing. In fact often artists say a true work of art is never finished. Maybe they don’t want to stop that thrilling feeling of energy charging through them?

My mentor, Milton Glaser, believes that the more energetic the process of making the more satisfying the end result is (To Inform and Delight).

What makes great art?

Could it be that the greatest works of art are so because of the energy they harness? Does that then mean that great artists have a heightened ability to channel energy, to transfer it from themselves into their work?

What makes great design?

Could it be that great designers have a similar ability to channel energy into their work. resulting in graphics, animations, products, interiors whatever…  that have greater, more powerful reach? Are able to connect more deeply with their audiences because of the energy they contain?

What makes bad design?

Maybe it is just superficial, lacking in energy, weak in vitality? Is this what you get when you go online and pay nothing for 100 designs to chose from? Who creates them? How do they go about creating them? Does the end result have any value? Does it have energy. Does it have power to connect to someone other than you? Will the designs do anything more for your business than you paid for them? Can you as a business expect much from them? Does it really matter? Does it matter what font they use, what colors? Is that all there is to it? Or it there more?

• • •

Is Energy something that human brains subconsciously read and respond to?

Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink

Danial Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow

Milton Glaser essay Imitation Influence and Plagerism.

I will have to come back to this post to finish it – consider it a work in progress…