Bright Ideas

How content strategy builds relationships and grows revenue

June 20, 2023 by Ted Fickes

We’re looking at how organizations undervalue the first, and often only, thing people coming to them experience – their content. The articles, stories, blog posts, photos, videos, emails, and social posts are all opportunities for connection, not just attention. Here’s why that is and how to think strategically about content for connection.

Every website visit is an opportunity for real connection.

If we start from that point then we want to assume that people are coming to us for a reason. We are answering a question, solving a problem, or providing a service. We assume this person will return (or is coming back to us).

We want to know who this person is so we can ask them to join us or support us. And we also want to better meet their needs.

Our content is the terrain on which people discover and interact with us: blog posts, resources, news articles, case studies, action alerts, social media posts, photos, emails and even podcasts and videos.

Content strategy is has two key parts. First is understanding how to meet people’s needs with your content by making sure people can find and use content. Most content strategy work really focuses on things like search optimization. Too often it ends there.

The second piece of content strategy is relationship and community building. When you know about the person using your content you can meet their needs over time and help them help you by joining, donating, contributing, purchasing, volunteering or any of the other actions people can take.

A drawing of people standing in front of a purple building. The people are passing stars to each other. The person at the end of the line is putting stars on a blue easel.

What if we built for connection first?

Most organizations know how many people visit their site and which pages get the most visits (I bet you two of the top three include the home page, about page, and the careers or team bios page).

Meanwhile, groups spend time and money creating content with few tools for knowing who is reading and using it, the value it provides, and what people are really able to do when it comes to supporting, acting on and engaging with groups.

It’s inexplicable. And there’s a better way.

We can rethink web design, content and even emails and social media to optimize for direct connection. This would mean that we expect every visitor to tell us who they are and, at least implicitly, show us what they’re doing with our content, how they’re using it and what they can do to support its creation and our work.

I don’t actually expect every organization to get contact info for every visitor or be able to track every visitor with personally identifiable data.

But if we want to create content that’s useful to people then we need to know who people are and what they really think. And if we want people to support our group for the long haul then they need the best content, experience and relationship we can provide.

Data is not insight

Today’s organizations don’t have a clear idea who is using, visiting, reading or viewing any of the content on their sites, emails or socials. Most organizations have subscribers (an email address and maybe a name and physical address) or donors (email, name, address). And they have visitors who, unless they graduate to one of the above, are little more than electronic ghosts. Bits of aggregated data.

But wait, we have Google Analytics installed. We know which search terms people use to find our site. We know how many times a form is submitted. And we can see who clicks links in email, comes to our site and

True. But most site analytics are vague and general. They tell you how many people come to a page and, if you’re tracking an ad or email campaign, how they got there.

You don’t know who’s there. You don’t know why they’re there (though perhaps you can guess). And you certainly don’t know what they thought or if they’ll be back. A report saying that visits go up or down offers a data point. But it’s not necessarily actionable.

Content strategy vs the void

Organizations often have an engagement process that looks like:

Many visitors to one or more websites and/or social media accounts.
People click and read or view a second page or click from social to web.
Someone fills out a form (subscribe, action, volunteer, event RSVP, survey). It’s only at this point we discover who the visitor is and we still don’t know if/when they revisit our content.
A visitor becomes a supporter by donating or becoming a member.
A person who attends an online event or training.
Someone you meet at an in-person event.
And the smallest group: sustaining donors, members and/or activists.

A lot of people hit the top of the list once, twice or multiple times. Most never advance past that point. And many that do move on won’t be able to tell us if or how the content is useful to them.

We build content with low expectations if we assume that a nameless visit and click is OK for 95% or more of visits.

We don’t have to approach content – be it web, social, email or audio/video – with the the presumption that “views” are what matter while actions and donations are a separate channel or group of people.

Make connection normal (if not required)

Here’s another look at that engagement process with direct connection as the goal:

Visitors => Frequent visitors => Multi-page visitors => subscribers or registered users => members (and/or donors and/or volunteers)

A connection emphasis could start by optimizing for form completion. Subscribing to an email newsletter is often the only form option.

Donating is another option. Organizations and consultants understandably test and optimize donation forms.

But there are countless other possibilities to present people with forms or even register as site users (a vastly stronger option for long term engagement).

The trick is in creating content that people need and value. And providing a user experience that makes forms simple.

About requiring connection

What if we valued our content enough to require payment for it? For most organizations this is a preposterous thought experiment. “We serve the community. Why would we limit access?” Fact is, most organizations have premium content for high level donors, board members, or task oriented folks like volunteers. We see those people as valuable so we create valuable content for them (and often only for them).

The point is not to restrict content to members or registered users or to set up paywall types of experiences. These are tools in the toolbox, of course.

What does matter, however, is the connection powerful content creates between people and organizations. Too often we invest a lot of time and money in content with little clear strategy. And less clarity about its relationship to revenue, membership or programmatic results.

Great content brings people in and keeps them there. It connects people. Invest in content strategy, not just content, and create systems for measuring the value of that content to your visitors and your organization.

Top image by Ivonne Navarro at The Greats and used via a Creative Commons-Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (CC-BY-NC-SA).

What’s trauma got to do with it?

May 11, 2023 by Ted Fickes

Last week Jordan Neely was killed on a New York City subway when a bystander “approached Mr. Neely, put him in a chokehold, and held him until he became limp.” [New York Times]

In Kansas City (Ralph Yarl), New York (Kaylin Gillis), and Atlanta (Heather Roth and Payton Washington) people (notably young people in these examples) have been shot for ringing the wrong doorbell, using the wrong driveway or getting into the wrong car.

There are countless little and big reasons for these events. But in many ways they’re the product of systemic fear and trauma that dehumanizes the people around us.

We’re also living through a pandemic that has killed over a million Americans and continues to have long-term impacts. Climate change is scaling up the reach of natural disasters.

And we live with distraction. Stories about all this. Debates over cause and motive leave little time to focus and little energy with which to be well.

An aside: I write this knowing I’m not mentioning incidents to what happened in the past 10 days in Allen, Texas or Cleveland, Texas or Brownsville, Texas. Those are tragedies. Perhaps greater ones. It’s doubly tragic that we need a language to convey value or gauge impact of these events. How do we write of any of this when there is so much of it?

Recognize the Impact of Trauma

Does it make sense for communities and organizations to better recognize and address the role trauma is playing and will play in lives of their supporters, staff and broader community?

Like it or not, our donors, members and email lists are made up of people constantly struggling with climate disaster, gun violence, inequality and pandemics. There’s a lot of talk about drops in individual giving. Falls (and rises) in giving are most always associated with “the economy.” Perhaps trauma, fear and dehumanization drive people to withdraw from community engagement and membership.

Tying fundraising results and strategies to economic indicators makes sense. But it limits our view of what’s happening and what’s possible.

We can’t only optimize our recruitment, fundraising and testing for those with financial and other forms of security. These audiences will lead us towards policies and politics that favor the fortunate, preserve power and aren’t interested in systemic problems. These are also audiences that may continue to shrink. One can only evade the sources of trauma for so long.

Organizations should also question their role in creating instead of healing trauma. Crisis-driven messaging dominates advocacy and fundraising communications of groups doing wonderful environmental, human rights and social justice work, including those organizing and working alongside communities.

Community Resilience

Our communities, supporters and staff need us to both recognize, solve for and support trauma. That’s a big ask. One far greater than the remit of many (most) nonprofits.

Fortunately, there are models, partners and opportunities to do more of this work and do it better.

The pandemic taught us that organizations can engage in community support beyond our mission.

A team of researchers from the University of California at San Diego and the city of Los Angeles looked at developing trauma resilient communities through community capacity-building in 2021. The team recognized the impact weather disasters and the pandemic had on the ability of communities to feed and shelter people. Over time, these and other events wear down community resiliency.

They found correlation between trauma informed community practices and community health.

We found that capacity-building among community-based partnerships is effective at disseminating trauma-informed education and training, conducting outreach and engagement, linking community members with resources, and increasing help-seeking and social connectedness by community members.

Community capacity to recognize and address trauma will build stronger communities. It may also address fear and our ability to address inequality and justice.

…is community capacity-building a foundational competency that can mitigate the impact of natural disasters such as earthquakes, fires and flooding or future acts of social injustice?

So why don’t more organizations speak openly about trauma? I think it has such a systemic presence that no group, assuming they acknowledge it at all, sees how they can address it.

Prioritize Novel Community Collaboration

We can debate the causes of inflation and a turn towards austerity-based policies by both parties. But the situation on the ground is that housing, food and job insecurity (or the loss of all three) affects Americans everywhere. Tim Garvin, director of the United Way of Central Massachusetts, recently wrote about the situation in Worcester and the need to remember lessons in community collaboration learned during COVID. The community formed a working group called Worcester Together in March, 2020, and it continues to collaborate:

Worcester Together continues to meet, 1,148 days and counting. It has evolved into a place where observations, news and data are shared, all focused on working together for the good of the community.

Look, I’m no expert on trauma-informed practices. But I do know that offering people resources, support and training to meet their needs best done through community, not individual, practices. And a resilient community, one whose members can rely on and trust one another, is not just able to weather crisis but is also more likely to engage in and support democratic processes.

The rush to community-level innovation we saw in 2020-21 was driven by radical uncertainty. Suddenly, everyone was working remotely. Suddenly, everyone sought ways to provide food and housing assistance. Scott Warren, former CEO of Generation Citizen, wrote about creative collaboration and groups sharing resources for the first time.

But crises wane even if the underlying structures are weakened. Typically, there is little incentive for organizations (or their funders) to invest in or test new collaborations and community building.

I recently spoke to a colleague who spent 18 months piloting sustainable engagement with rural and small community residents who have a social media presence. The goal is to support climate-positive conversation in places that typically only hear and see climate stories from right-leaning TV, radio and social media sources. It’s sensible, not radical, work. But it takes time and isn’t a project that fits neatly into the boxes and sectors into which funders and organizations operate.

Perhaps we’re seeing a shift towards trauma-informed community capacity building. There are efforts to measure community stress and address trauma in educational settings.

But I wonder how (even if) we can prioritize new models of collaboration across disciplines and issues. Can donors, funders and organizations share learning, skills and resources to build community capacity, resilience and relationships to address trauma and instill trust, hope and love instead of fear? If so it may be one way to protect not just our communities but democracy itself.

We all stay. Except maybe the donors. Where are they going?

April 27, 2023 by Ted Fickes

The other day I had a conversation with a colleague who works on building and implementing community software. He asked about my take on community in nonprofits. It was a “why is this interesting to you?” sort of question.

I thought I’d take a minute to share a bit about why this intersection of community, membership and organizations is so important now.

We live alongside trauma, uncertainty and a fraying fabric of norms and expectations. We’ll skip the litany of what’s going on. You all work in it every day.

A wall mural in A mural in Kotti, Berlin, that shows people marching and protesting. One is carrying a sign saying "Wir Bleiben Alle" which translates in English to "We All Stay." — A mural in Kotti, Berlin. “Wir Bleiben Alle” translates to “We All Stay.”

All this change and pain is sometimes good. You want to topple white nationalists and abolish poverty? Fuck yes. Let’s do it. But it’s often painful and, when constant, this work through change is exhausting, isolating and maddening.

Most people have a sense of all that’s going on – and going wrong – and want to address it. But they don’t want to wade into that exhaustion. They give their $50 to charity and sign a petition. But even that can be frustrating. What happens next, they ask? Does anyone else care?

I believe that campaigns, local groups, nonprofits and certainly businesses engaged in building audiences and communities have a much bigger role to play in how people engage in civics, politics and systems change.

As nonprofit leaders – and marketers, community builders, fundraisers and membership directors – we have a responsibility to our organization’s mission and finances.

We also have a responsibility, usually unspoken, to community – those who support our work with money and time as well as the broader community of people who put food on tables, teach us, clean streets, care for children and so many more. Amidst our lists of activists, customers, donors, volunteers, subscribers are people from whom we expect attention and to whom we promise a better world, a happier existence, a cleaner countertop or a healthier pet.

We in fundraising, membership and organizing are the front line of civic engagement, community power and system change. Whether we like it or not we can and should take seriously this space for rebuilding trust, teaching people about their power, and delivering solutions, not just products or promises.

How that’s done – the future of community – is roughly the theme of this blog, newsletter and the work that I do with organizations. Get in touch if this sparks ideas, you have questions or ideas.

Where did they go?

The Chronicle of Philanthropy last week reported that Giving to Nonprofits Fell Nearly 2 Percent in the Last Quarter of 2022. This echoes other reporting on drops in giving to nonprofits.

More important than a small drop in overall giving is the drop in the number of people making donations. Individuals making small gifts saw a sharp decline:

There were fewer donors over all at the end of 2022, but the decline was sharpest for the 83 percent of donors who gave $500 or less. At the end of 2022, 15 percent fewer people gave $100 or less than at the end of 2021. Likewise, the number of people who gave $101 to $500 in the last three months of 2022 declined more than 8 percent from 2021 levels.

Philanthropy News Digest shared the same data in January along with an Independent Sector report that retention was down 4.2% but fundraising overall was up 6.2%.

The reasons for this decline are debatable. Economic pressures loom large. Inflation and corporate profiteering, job loss and pull back on government stimulus has been a shock to the system for people who make those $50, $100 or $250 dollar donations.

Organizations tend to talk about the connection between community and fundraising in either transactional or vague terms. You’re offered access to events, updates or a premium (tote bags, anyone?). You may sign a petition and immediately become a subscriber, member or part of the community.

There’s no doubt that giving rose during COVID. There are a couple reasons for this. One, things were awful. You had more time to look around and what you saw was crisis: death and sickness, businesses closing and jobs lost, and, after a few weeks of coming together, anger about our collective response. Second, people were more engaged in direct aid to their community. In some cases this showed up as giving to mutual aid groups. This was money directed at addressing visible trauma in the community. Other giving went to smaller charities to address hunger, homelessness and disasters.

Donors know that repair isn’t a one-time act

Saying that donors are leaving due to the economy may be correct but it ignores a couple problems:

We often (usually) have no idea why someone gave their first donation.
We don’t acknowledge the emotional investment people are making with their support.

What if a desire to engage in long-term repair of communities was (and is) on people’s mind?

Sociologist Viviana A. Zelizer wrote about the rise of giving in 2021 as a response to collective trauma.

At a time of excruciating social distancing, when quarantine rules separated us from one another, money became a tangible social connector, bridging the physical gap by allowing us to express concern for intimates and strangers. Notice the paradox: cold cash, the ultimate transactional medium, alchemized into a warm social currency, strengthening multiple social bonds and affirming community solidarity.

What Zelizer observed was people’s struggle to cope with the trauma in their community. Our grief heightens our interest in support not just for ourselves but for others who struggle.

But, in a generalized state of isolation (only heightened by COVID), our systems offer few outlets for materializing our empathy and support. We might volunteer or knock on doors. But for many money is easier to come by than time so we donate.

The longreads on grief that filled my feeds in 2020 and 2021 have moved to the background as we seek to normalize living with collective, society-level trauma. Perhaps nothing is more traumatic to society than living through it without acknowledgment.

Organizations who talk about community are missing is the language to talk of community trauma, solidarity and, more productively, the collective work of repair.

This is where community and membership appear. Charity is an act and an entity. But our modern messaging and the structure of our organizations is highly individualized. Giving is a singular act. You are asked to donate. You have given $100. You can have an impact. Organizations position themselves in competition to one another. They brand themselves to set them apart. They speak of their work, their unique process, their wins.

But creating and sustaining impact is a collective effort. That’s the case whether you’re securing food or housing or working for systemic changes to policy, politics or economic structures.

We often position and manage community in either member or organizational terms. I’ve advocated in this space: create value for members if you want them to stay with you over time.

Yet we live in a time of existential crisis – be that climate change, guns, pandemics, white nationalism, war, creeping autocracy or something else. We have video and endless analysis on our phones 24/7 if we choose.

Are people are seeking signs of progress, of repair and solutions? I think so. And they want to play a role in that kind of work. The question before us is how can we engage people in creating community that creates change? What does that look like? What do community, membership and organizing leaders need to prioritize, plan and try?

There’s no one answer. It means investing in community and civic engagement, in media, journalism and democratic and deliberative work. It means building community across interests and policy topics, meaningful communications not just petitions and fundraising, community-based news and voices, collaboration, clarity of purpose, and honesty about how change happens.

About that stupendous fundraising match in your inbox

April 12, 2023 by Ted Fickes

Recently I wrote about why people stay with a group. We looked at relationships, trust and delivering value to people. Keeping people on your list, in your community and donating, buying and engaging isn’t just helpful. Retention is a must. Inactive subscribers are costing you money. And disengaged supporters are telling you something about the quality of your communications, fundraising and overall value.

Conversations and questions about retention and reactivation keep popping up in my feed and among friends. I think it’s sign of economic and political uncertainty.

Folks are taking a hard look at how to optimize their email and other lists. Or they’re being told to by their bosses. It makes sense. Email lists aren’t free to build or maintain. A bigger list is not necessarily going to raise you more money, turn people out to events or develop activists, leaders and supporters. But a bigger list is going to cost more to host and send to. A bigger list may also increase inbox problems (aka more spam) and send the wrong signals about community power to your organizing and fundraising directors.

A barrel of monkeys approach

The world of powerful CRMs, big data and fast internet lets us find, label and reach people with amazing speed and volume. It also leads us to believe that we know people. We have email, name, location and their giving and engagement history. We may get the voter file, census data, buying history and all the sorts of things that come with consumer data files (income, home and car ownership, marital status…it goes on and on).

This isn’t much more than putting colors on monkeys in a barrel if you’re sending countless emails with countless asks for donations, actions, purchases.

The other day a colleague linked to an episode of a podcast for Republican politicos. The Business of Politics Show had a conversation with John Hall of Apex Strategies. Hall is credited with raising over $1.5 billion from 48 million individual donors. There’s perhaps nobody who knows more about shady methods of buying/renting lists and pitching 76X match gifts (an actual pitch in political fundraising) or any number of other lies (that’s what they are) to “subscribers.”

Hall isn’t seeking absolution for past acts. But he made a clear case for the need to shift perspective. Build donor lists, he says, not just big lists. It’s better to have a million subscribers than one but most million subscriber lists are failing to raise money for Republican candidates. Democratic and nonprofit lists are similarly underperforming if they’re optimized for size not community and impact.

Community and Impact

You probably don’t have the time and money to drag around a list that’s 50%, 60% or 75% inactive.

Instead, what does optimizing for community and impact look like. A few ideas:

Be much clearer and more honest about what you expect from community members, subscribers and supporters.

If you need donations then hone in on who gives, why they give, when they give and how they’re being retained over time. Recruit from places where you’ll find donors and have clear budgets and strategies for turning new people into donors.

Likewise for activists, volunteers and other categories of engaged supporters. Bring your communications and content, organizing, education and training staff into the planning for supporter engagement and its metrics.

Be brutally honest about subscriber value. If a new subscriber doesn’t open, click on or donate in the first 4-6 weeks after coming on board perhaps they’re already targets for reactivation. And this is a signal that their origin (list, event, lead gen activity) isn’t working.

You may be able to carry inactive people for months. It’s possible some will re-engage. And a community-driven organization should show some compassion for its community. But understand the costs associated with holding onto them. And recognize the signals that their inaction sends. What can you offer that increases their responsiveness? What obstacles do they face when engaging with you? Are your emails even landing in the inbox (or just spam)?

AI and that barrel of monkeys

John Hall, in the conversation linked above, spoke about the potential for AI to revolutionize how we customize subscriber, donor and supporter engagement. When you carry around a lot of data about supporters it makes sense to give an AI app the responsibility for turning that data into personalized content to motivate donors.

We’ll see a lot of this in coming months. Especially with the 2024 campaign. You can expect nonprofits to use these tools (and consultants and vendors to talk a lot about them).

But the potential for AI to leverage more donations isn’t community. All the data in the world isn’t community. Be clear about what you want with community, what people need, where those people are and how they’re living. Know that and you’ll know how to engage, retain and perhaps use the tech that’s here (and coming).

Why people stay

March 28, 2023 by Ted Fickes

Can we build email, donor and supporter lists with value and trust instead of churning through names?

Most nonprofit (and ecommerce) marketing runs on a model fraught with peril and waste.

There is a constant cycle that’s roughly so:

Get people on an email list via paid or sometimes unpaid methods. Maybe get their eyeballs on Instagram, Facebook or some other platform.
Send those people email. And/or online ads and posts. Send them more email.
Thank them if they give (or buy).
Send them more email and ads.
Keep sending them email and ads.
For those (often the majority) who never do anything you may eventually send them one (or a few) last emails asking if they still want emails. You may or may not be serious about the response.
You take them off your list. Or you don’t. In which case you send more email.
Get (more) people on an email list via paid or sometimes unpaid methods.

Many organizations have built an economy of churn (which could be, but isn’t, a portmanteau of chase and burn). The hope is to replace more names than they lose and make enough off them in the short term to pay for the cost of getting them in the first place.

Many (most?) organizations have supporter relationships that begin, live and end online. This makes it harder to connect to people, build personal relationships, and give people a reason to stick with an organization.

Let’s assume that one can do little, if any, in person or on the ground work with supporters; that we’re constrained to online activities. We can use email, websites, social media and perhaps text messaging, voice mail, print.

Community, fundraising, membership and online organizing folks should understand why people stay with an organization and how to bring this into online experience. And I don’t mean simply mean “engagement.” Clicks, pageviews and videos liked or viewed are engagement. They’re also simple indicators of attention. And attention is not retention.

A photo of ground covered by small rocks. A large rock in the middle has the words Be Here Now written on it.

Trust, value and why people stay

There’s a lot of research out there about why people stay in jobs, in domestic relationships, in their houses.

People often stay because it’s easier than leaving. A 1973 article on Why Employees Stay in their jobs pointed to inertia. Most people stay not because their happy or like the job but because it’s too much trouble to change. Their prospects are uncertain. Having a mediocre job is better than no job at all.

As you may guess, employee inertia doesn’t do much for productivity. This is a 50 year old article. But it seems possible that inertia is still a factor in staying in a job.

Email lists are probably 75-90% inertia people. Sure, those people are “staying” but they’re not helping out. Their data sends the wrong signals. They tell us we could and should have 200,000 subscribers so we busy ourselves (and our money) replacing the 20,000 people who unsubscribe or lapse off the list. And we don’t optimize for the people who want to stay.

Richard Florida, an urban studies theorist at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, often writes about the connection between people, education, careers and the vitality of cities.

In the 2014 article, Why people stay where they are, Florida noted that housing costs, affordability and community economic strength are not, as most people believe, a driving factor in choices to leave or stay in a community. Community quality – things like comfort, safety and sense of belonging – keeps people around (or pushes them away).

Taken together, this would seem to imply that the decision to stay is tied less to quality or affordability of housing itself, and more to the quality of the neighborhood or community. … The main reasons why stayers stay, according to our analysis, revolve around social relationships and quality of place:

The ability to meet people and make friends; the quality of public schools; and the overall physical beauty and quality of a neighborhood. These were much more important than economic factors like the availability of job opportunities or the perception of future economic conditions, which our analysis found not to be statistically associated with why people stay.

We could also look at the oft-asked question: why do people stay in disaster prone cities? Gina Yannitell Reinhardt, a professor at the University of Essex, studies disaster relief and resilience. Reinhardt found that trust in government keeps people in place. Lack of trust pushes people to leave. Trust is won or lost during disasters when people rely most on institutions for support, guidance and safety.

Reinhardt also writes that people stay because “it feels like home.” This is part inertia. But it’s large part based on relationships. People build strong ties to neighbors, businesses, parks and more. If others stay we have social proof that we will maintain these relationships, jobs, customers and friends.

Invest in staying, not coming and going

How do you grow and sustain a community (and your fundraising) if you’re churning through people? You do it by buying and burning through lists. Check all the unread emails in your inbox to see how that’s going. You can do it by not taking people off your email list. That’s bad for deliverability, skews results and decisionmaking, and turns people off.

You can grow multi-channel content: social media platforms, video, messaging apps, even print or audio. This can be a step in the right direction if you don’t recreate the broadcast-only dynamics that are common in email.

Perhaps it’s possible to invest in relationships and retention, not just acquisition. What might this mean?

Look to recruit in high-retention environments

This may mean smaller or more niche audiences and lists. Partner with smaller organizations, online media outlets and influencers. Build relationships and offer value to the partners.

Make the most of your first days and weeks together

Relationships take time. But a good first impression is critical, especially in digital where the background noise is loud and distracting. Onboard new people like your life depends on it.

Create a welcome series. Test it and track it. Invite questions and conversations. Bring member and community voices to the welcome, not just staff or leadership. Make it familiar. Provide social proof.

Bring value to the table

Communicate more than asks for action or money. What would be useful to your people? Provide calendars of events, data about your issues, eye-opening visuals, explainers and FAQs. Provide insights and news, not just alerts. Invite people to a series of webinars or trainings. People remember offers of value (and proof of credibility) even if they don’t attend.

Get to know people

This is hard at scale. But why add people to a supporter list if you have no ability or intention to hear from them or know them? Plus, today’s CRM tools and multiple two-way comms channels make dialog much easier, especially when you start with what’s above. Activists, volunteers and current donors can also scale supporter contact.

Learn about community, trust and value from (and with) other groups and fields

Create networks and opportunities for nonprofit development and membership teams to learn alongside civic community builders.

Collaborate with journalists and digital media sites, all of whom are busy testing ways to find, engage and retain supporters (aka subscribers). See this from Gina Bulla, audience research director at The Atlantic, who is describing research aimed at finding future subscribers (new high-retention environments):

One of the big, important questions we’re focused on right now is: who are our future subscribers? We’ve just executed research to help us identify audiences that may be inclined to subscribe to The Atlantic in the near or not-so-distant future. We’ll use this research to ideate strategies to increase conversion, engagement, and discovery.

This sort of research and approach to audience identification could be useful to nonprofit organizations. [Madeleine White / The Audiencers]

People stay in relationships built on trust, value and passion (sure, it’s possible to love an organization and its cause or a community the same way you might your partner). We can build communications, content and organizing programs built on trust, value and (yes) passion if we choose to.

Inertia also keeps people around. This is a big part of email list size now. But we shouldn’t equate presence and action or an email list with a valued relationship.

Give people stuff they can use

March 4, 2023 by Ted Fickes

In late-2021, Intuit completed its acquisition of the once wee newsletter provider Mailchimp. Intuit paid $12 billion in cash and stock.

Substack announced this week that newsletters hosted by the platform had over 20 million active subscribers and 2 million paid subscriptions.

Some folks think there is money to be made in email.

Given the financial structures needed to host, send and manage email, the culture of email is more commerce than community. Every morning your inbox has 97 new unread messages from companies and candidates that you’ll probably delete or ignore.

This is largely true in the nonprofit sector as well. Our metrics – and benchmarks – focus on response rates, donations and revenue. These metrics are at best awkward proxies for supporter satisfaction and value that email and other communications provide members, donors and others in our networks.

A commerce (or fundraising) role for email is essential for most groups. Nonprofits need money. More than once, I’ve advised organizations to build donation asks into their new subscriber welcome series. People want to give. Get them used to it. But a fundraising focus limits the scope of what’s possible with our content and community strategies.

Many people, including those creating emails in organizations, complain about email. It’s all dollars, doom and dashed hopes.

Candidates: My opponent is a bad dude who will do bad things. I’m good. Donate before tonight’s reporting deadline.

Organizations: The future is at risk. Click here to send an email to your congressional rep. Or click here to make your 5X match donation.

Companies: Everything is on sale. Click now! (person clicking: well, only the purple camo print joggers in size 6 are on sale. WTF?)

Too often we train our community to expect the least from our organizations.

Think bigger about email, content and community

If we expect more from our community could we design content strategies, including email programs, that meet those expectations?

Perhaps our metrics could be optimized for friendship or other relation-driven measures. Does this person volunteer? Does this person come to an event or invite a new supporter to an event? Does this person contribute an idea, photo or comment to a document, web page or report?

What if we viewed our advocacy and fundraising campaigns as products, like a shirt or a book, or services like visiting a restaurant or hiring a plumber? We could invite feedback and reviews. We could ask: “did this event, fundraising campaign or online action meet your expectations?” Or: “Would you recommend this campaign to a friend?”

These ideas are hypothetical. They’re a search for more informative metrics. But this product/service approach seems possible.

Most organizations occasionally send a survey to supporters asking for feedback on newsletters or other communications. But these are one-offs that reach only your most engaged supporters. Surveys don’t offer much insight into the impact or value of your ongoing email and other communications.

Content that helps people get things done

I’m most interested in how organizations are using email and other content to solve problems, meet their needs and otherwise get things done.

Email, especially when combined with hosted assets like video (and charts, maps, etc.), is a great teaching tool. Most organizations have loads of knowledge in their resource libraries, toolkits, and staff member brains. Many groups use webinars or trainings to teach volunteers. But these are events. They require someone to be there to engage in them. We’ve all registered for webinars knowing we won’t make it and will watch later but, realistically, we rarely “watch later.”

The New York Times has grown its email newsletter options. You can get morning or evening updates and email newsletters from your favorite writers or columnists. But the real growth in content (and revenue) has been in non-news email that is useful to people (Cooking and Wirecutter) or entertaining (Games and the Athletic). As Poynter wrote about last November, its about a bundle of information:

…the Times is heavily pushing what it calls internally “the bundle.” That is an all-access product that also includes Games and Cooking verticals, audio, the Wirecutter product information site and now The Athletic, which the Times purchased for $550 million in January.

CEO Meredith Kopit Levien said that the bundle costs roughly 50% more than a news-only digital subscription. Beginning this quarter, she added, the company plans to increase the price of single-product subs to news or other products, hoping to “compel people to take the bundle.”

The New York Times is a newspaper. But most people today call it a “media company” and, well, a media company produces all kinds of media, not just reporting. We can debate the pros/cons here (I have many arguments for and against this) but it seems that:

It’s hard/impossible to fund journalism with subscriptions and advertisements.
It’s hard/impossible to fund nonprofits with donations and/or membership fees. Most organizations need more diverse revenue streams.
People are willing to pay for good information and entertainment which helps fund journalism.
People will pay for info, goods and services they need. Payments to organizations for information, training and other services could help fund programs.
Info/entertainment opens the door to new audiences.
Many (most?) organizations are not centered in a community. Their audience may be local, state, national or global in scope but its most likely virtual in nature. Lead generation limited to specific issues unnecessarily limits growth .

Most organizations aren’t media companies with the content depth or deep pockets of a New York Times. But they don’t need to be. A one off series of emails that dives into the insights from case studies and reports sounds dry (for real) but could have an audience. It may be possible to turn a staff or volunteer training series into a set of online videos paired with emails and other content for a self-paced training series open to broader audiences.

Given the breadth and scale of nonprofits out there the options are endless. I’d love to see a funder or seven experimenting, testing and reporting back on content aimed at audience and revenue growth. And, of course, funding such work.

How scale kills campaigns

February 11, 2023 by Ted Fickes

We were told that we needed to reach everyone to create the change we need. Maybe that’s a problem.

[Photo by Daria Nepriakhina via Unsplash]

This piece started as an explainer on how nobody is reading your organization’s emails and if/how/why you might care about that. And what to do.

That still seems like a good topic. Nonprofit open rates average around 25% for newsletters. Most other message types are lower. And open rates are inflated/totally misguiding so far fewer folks are reading anything. Heck, for many groups, 10% or more of all email is going to spam.

The real issue here is that people are busy, buried in content, and have priorities. There’s no one solution. Sending fewer (or more) messages probably won’t fix this. Moving to Mastodon won’t fix it. A preference center won’t fix it. A multi-channel (or omnichannel?) strategy won’t fix it. And, good god, P2P texting won’t fix it.

We’ve gone so far with scale, reach, and attention that we’ve forgotten why we’re here: to help real people with real problems.

A list of the engaged, excited and passionate people with agency to create impact.

I propose that we see every person who engages in our organization or list as unique individuals with experiences, interests, and needs. We would get to know each of them.

This seems unlikely – and at scale downright impossible.

Why this won’t work.

We can come up with several reasons this is a bad idea. 😉

Organizations aren’t set up for this.

We have big legacy lists that churn through people and need volume to succeed.
Recruitment strategies that sometimes start with personal contact but have no ability to follow up. Canvasses, for example, start with one to one conversations at the door or in front of Trader Joe’s. Then we hand off that person to an email list with no relationship building strategy. It’s no wonder people think it’s all about money.
Staffing is not oriented towards people skills – customer service, engagement, organizing. We do give extra attention to large donors. Again, money earns attention.
We rely on paid staff for everything. We could never hire, train, manage, pay for the staff needed to engage with people at this level. It’s all hubs and centralization. People and cost are bottleneck to everything.

It hurts fundraising, budgeting and planning.

We have data on acquisition, fundraising and marketing costs. We more or less know how many people will respond, the average gift we can expect, and how many people we will lose or churn through each year.
This model is predictable and manageable.
Any change might cost more, lower response, result in fewer gifts, etc.

People don’t want or need it.

People are busy. They don’t have time to do more than click on an email or social post.
People join our list and give us money so that we will take care of the problem and keep them informed.
We already do things to work people up the ladder of engagement. We upgrade donors. We invite people to take bigger actions. We even have a volunteer program.

Or, actually, this is already how we do it.

We segment our list by interest, geography and donation amount. So we only send everything to most people most of the time. Not all the time.
We have regional offices that run local events.
We do surveys asking people what they think of our newsletter and what information would be helpful.

Look around (waves hands)…things are dire and we need everyone on board!!!

Problems like climate change, authoritarianism, inequality, racism, homelessness, and a health care that’s cracking up big, complex and systemic. We need millions of people to take action and press leaders for change. We need millions of people to change behaviors that uphold systems.

Reaching everybody means communicating at scale. We should grow our lists quickly. Send compelling messages expressing the importance of our solutions and urgency of taking action on them. We should encourage people to share messages and find ways to help them. We should go viral. We should spread our reach by working to change messages in art, TV, film and music. We should find and support influencers who can deliver this urgent information.

Given that, can we communicate one to one? Can we find out what people and their families need or want right now so they can eat better, get better jobs, pay their bills and access health care?

We need scale. But the way we run campaigns and organizations at scale is counter productive. We are great at creating content. But all that content is turning advocacy into entertainment instead of tangible progress.

People become wary of messages about change and progress. They hear it and see it every day and don’t see results. Change becomes faceless. Change is just another message – another fundraising email – from another organization.

Treat people as though they have agency. It could work.

The hypothetical problems listed above are driven by fear of change and a scarcity mindset. There’s little if any funding for experimenting with community building and communications, particularly when an organization’s only source of unrestricted funding is at stake.

But it’s imperative that we rethink community, engagement, membership and even fundraising. Especially when the need for action is urgent and the competition for attention is increasing exponentially.

Some thoughts on how we do this:

Only communicate directly with people who we’ve spoken to directly.

No, sending an email to someone doesn’t count as speaking to them directly.

We optimize for growth knowing that only a small – tiny, really – percentage of people will give money, send a petition, come to a public meeting or call their congressional rep or mayor’s office.

This means most people are being conditioned to ignore us. When something great or important does happen they aren’t likely to read the email and follow up.

Instead, place an emphasis on inviting people in through opportunities for direct action and conversation. Instead of sending actions to rented email lists, use trainings, webinars, and open conversations (online and in person) as recruiting events. Distribute online polls and surveys. Advertise training materials, reports and guides for download. Require contact info to download the material and follow up in person.

Create space for a conversation before adding to an email, text or phone list.

This could be one on one. Or in a group — a zoom call for new supporters about what we do, how to get involved, and expectations, hopes and norms. Begin relationships in community and you’ll grow from there. It’s a stronger position if you want co-creation and meaningful engagement.

“Our brains evolved to be social: We need frequent interaction and conversation to stay sane,” says Dr. Thalia Wheatley, a social neuroscientist at Dartmouth College. Organizations that create conversations are offering a service that’s of value and hard to find.

Change funding structures and incentives.

Individual contact and fundraising is usually a the only form of unrestricted funding for organizations and campaigns. It’s hard to mess around and take risks with this work. And there is no incentive for leadership and fundraisers to try something else. This puts us in the position of using crisis and urgency in messaging. And not having time to listen to people.

There’s a role here for funders – foundations and large donors. There’s also a role for leaders. We need to shoot straight with people. Maybe be more transparent about how what actually creates change. We need to invest in communicating with people, not at them. There’s also a role here for nonprofit institutions – the kind that host conferences – and companies making money off nonprofit fundraising and data. Organizations do need models, systems and tools to support their work and consultants, technologists and vendors can nudge if not push towards change.

On Imagination

January 7, 2023 by Ted Fickes

The world’s biggest problems can often be traced back to a complete lack of imagination. We fail imagine a better future. We see broken systems as unchangeable.

We fight over the meaning of history (in books, politics, immigration, economies, gender and so much more) because we don’t have the capacity to imagine the systems for living together in abundance.

Organizations, businesses and governments should prioritize the practice–the skills and work–of imagination.

Perhaps writing about imagination seems irrelevant. An act of decadence or privilege. We have so many real problems, after all. Why dabble in imagination, a space often seen as the realm of fiction?

I’d say that our lack of imagination – our growing unfamiliarity with the art and science of imagination – grinds us down, dampens our creativity and leads us to believe we should expect, even deserve, to be surrounded by discomfort and horror.

The world needs huge doses of imagination. 2022 offered little of use. This year, sitting as it does between two American election years, can deliver the hope and organizing power of imagination. Or it can continue our fights over history that only serve to dim the horizons of imagination.

2022 saw the start of a tragic and wasteful war in Ukraine. The war in Ukraine only serves to propel Russia, Ukraine and the world away from the potential of new ideas, intelligence and creativity. It is a war of small ideas – authority, money, disinformation. It is a war against hopeful futures and imagination.

The U.S. is fighting its own battles over the limits of imagination. The “Make America Great Again” slogan, white nationalism, and organized fights to ban books all use language that removes possibility and potential. These movements want us to ignore, even forget, that human difference has ever existed. It is a future without the possibility of multi-racial communities and queerness.

Organizations don’t typically consider themselves to be in the imagination business. We equate imagination and the “work” of imagination with telling stories of fantasy or science fiction. We should not leave imagination to books and movies.

Imagination fuels culture, creates possibility and lays out the framework for solutions to known (and unknown) problems. Imagination is essential to cultural and social progress.

Why prioritize imagination?

Imagination offers value to nonprofits, businesses and communities. The work and results can also be fun.

COLLECTIVE. Imagination isn’t just an individual or solitary space. It can, at its most powerful, be a collective act that fuels shared purpose and vision. Imagination is a process that can happen alongside others. It is generative and iterative. We can build on the ideas of others. Imagination is an act of abundance, not scarcity.

CREATIVE. Imaginative work isn’t bounded by the limits of expectation and practicality. Organizations are used to planning. But we most often iterate. We’re not used to reaching high and creating something new. This stasis and risk aversion leaves us flat-footed when circumstances (a pandemic? climate change? insurrection?) change quickly.

Most organizations – from neighborhood group to national government – could benefit from more creativity. And most leaders ask their teams, boards and supporters for creativity. Imagining the unknown builds the brain’s creative powers, Jane Porter reports in The Neuroscience of Imagination:

When you call to mind something you’ve never actually seen, it’s a lot easier to think creatively than if you try imagining something that’s familiar to you.

Want to dig deeper? Check out The Science of Imagination below (5 minutes):

ENGAGING AND EXPANDING Imagination creates stories and process to bring those stories into reality. These stories and their possibilities need not be restricted to your community or audience. In fact, the creative process relies on growing community. Imagination is about who could and should be there. And how to reach them, plug them in, give them footholds to climb on and how to extend arms to pull them into the conversations.

Imagination is essential to growing a community. With imagination, we can adapt and evolve. We can hone a collective and collaborative resilience. Climate change, economic shifts and technological progress are asking, and will demand, that organizations adapt, evolve and be resilient.

ACCESSIBILITY. One reason imagination expands community is its accessible nature. Done well, anyone can participate in and be valued by imaginative processes. One does not need to have gone to the right schools, lived in a particular place, have normed physical abilities, or possess a certain race, gender or values. Imagination is abundant. It wants all to engage at the level and in the form they can.

SKILL. Imagination is not exclusive, exotic, or only for academics, writers and designers. Imagination is a habit, skill, a muscle. It can be taught and practiced.

In Reversing imagination atrophy, Suzette Brooks Masters, reflects on how imagination can shrink when not used. The result is more limited policymaking, less ambition, smaller campaigns. Masters spent 2022 talking with people working in democracy to find the big ideas and opportunities.

I spent 2022 talking to dozens of these visionaries and realizing, painfully, just how small my dreams had gotten, how narrow my aperture of the possible had become. I needed an exercise regimen for my atrophied imagination muscles. Desperately.

If we can’t imagine functional democracy, peace, multiracial societies, climate stability, zero-carbon energy then, oh well, we’re never going to figure out how to get them.

BUILDS COMMUNITY. The work of imagination is open to all. Through content, events, workshops and more you invite people in, connect people and build relationships.

DEFINES COMMUNITY. There is a part of imagination work that identifies and describes what’s needed to turn possible futures into reality. This is a time for identifying who is in community, who isn’t, who could/should be there, and how to connect to others. In other words, we see our current and potential networks in new ways and can identify the connections between networks.

The work of imagination

Here are few ideas for bringing imagination into organizational programming. Some go big. Some are simply ways to bring creativity and forward thinking into the community.

10, 20, 50

It’s not unusual for leaders to talk about what an organization should look like in three, five or even 10 years. But rarely does that conversation look further into the future (20, 50 or more years) and rarer still is the broader community engaged in a meaningful way. There may be polls or surveys or even “town hall” events but the boundaries of possibility are already set.

Imagine what the community (not just the entity or organization) can look like in 20 or 50 years. What does it do? Who does it help or serve? What is it able to accomplish? Who is part of the community, leading it, participating?

Now describe what happened to get to that imagined future. Who got involved? What other communities and organizations were part of the process? What skills, experiences, resources and knowledge was acquired and used? What do we not know now that we’ll need to discover? Who helps with that discovery?

These are the themes of conversations and programs that use imagination.

How to get started with imagination

There are a thousand and one ways to bring imagination-centered conversations, plans and programs into your organization. Here are a few ways I’ve seen:

Use the I-word in serious conversation from top to bottom. Like I said up top, imagination is a word associated with science fiction writers. It’s a word, and process, that is all about creativity and even fun. But it can be serious work, spark big and positive change, and generate new ideas. Bring imagination into the organization lexicon.
Don’t use the word imagination if you can’t handle it. Talk about vision, big ideas, future, creativity, or, if you must, innovation.
Launch an imagination program. I don’t expect many groups to go full Pixar and hire a VP of Imagination. But seek out ways to embed imagination into different teams, cost centers, and programs. Minimally, give imagination more than a one-off or ad-hoc shot of attention.
Work big ideas about the future into your community conversation. Get people used to the concept of imagining what could happen. This is the ground needed so they can do the work of planning how to get to that future (or work toward a better alternative).
Create imagination-centered content. This could look like a section of a newsletter devoted to imagination – a section called “50 Years from Today” with a Facebook-esque ‘on this day’ image and description. It could be a one-off newsletter series imagining a future community. Do a podcast talking to community leaders and other members about their ideas. Create videos, animations, reading lists. Set up online or offline discussion groups.
Run imagination events. Host webinars. Set up tracks in your conferences that focus on the future.
Teach imagination and futures skills. Content and events engage people in imagination. But there are approaches, curriculums and frameworks for developing and using these skills in work. These can be explored, learned and shared.

I suppose the reality is that our nonprofits, governments, businesses, communities, schools and even our social movements are under extreme pressure to show progress, results and return on investment. The money invested is too great are the threats faced are too big to mess around imagining things.

But we close ourselves off from hope if we shirk possibility, potential and imagination for the perceived security of the way things were or should be. If nothing else, organizations should be intentional about imagining a better future for their community. Those that can’t imagine that future, describe it and map a path to it are wasting everyone’s time.