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Elections, fundraising and community

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Sure, American elections are total madness. But you and your organization can help people through this. Right?

A few months ago I had a conversation with someone in the UK about their coming elections (held on July 4th this year) and how it impacts online advocacy and fundraising.

Ha. Imagine if you will a six week election season. It’s manic! And glorious.

U.S. elections are constant, loud and generally exhausting for everyone. The ads, texts, emails have been going for a year or more.

Where we are now – after party conventions and two months from election day – is a grind of nonstop shouting for attention, money and volunteering.

How do nonprofits and news organizations compete? How do you get heard, seen and read amidst the chaos?

You know your audience

Hopefully you know where your people are, what issues are important to them, and how they engage in their community and politics. Your people who are community activists and funders may already be out making calls, knocking doors and clicking donate buttons for their candidates. Meanwhile, your people who are busy working, paying bills and taking care of kids or elders are trying to get through the day and may have a lot at stake in local or national elections. But not enough time to sort through any of it.

Know where your folks are, accept it and communicate as a partner in the messiness. As a c3 you can let folks know that the election is relevant, give them info on registering to vote, and connect them to local news sources who are going deeper into election guidance than you’re probably doing. If you’re a c4 with a voter guide or other candidate materials then get those out there.

You accept and reflect your audience’s reality

Elections are here and people are concerned, confused, annoyed, troubled, and (see above) busy. Don’t carry on like nothing’s happening. Don’t assume that fundraising will continue apace but don’t just write off these months.

Elections and candidates come and go. Your mission and work continue.

Show your people how to get involved. Tell the stories of priority work in November, December, next year and beyond.

You serve your audience every day

Keep the good work, storytelling and action coming. People will continue to be impacted by rising home and food prices, fires and floods exacerbated by climate change, the direct and indirect impacts of conflicts in Gaza, Ukraine and beyond.

Create opportunities for people to talk with you about your work before and after the election. Election results may can be gratifying or concerning. But they’re almost always confusing. Be of service to your audiences in a time of confusion. Be accessible and supportive. Address the reality of the election before diving right into your regularly scheduled year-end fundraising programming.

Resilient organizations are those who continually help people recognize the value of their work. They deliver results, tools, and frameworks to support personal and community success. They engage people in conversations about the big concerns facing their family, community or country.

Looking for something to read?

Interesting articles spotted around the internets:

News without community is just words. Newsrooms are finding new ways to build community, online and off by Celeste Lecompte in Nieman Lab.

“We have learned that there is an audience that is happy to pay for fearless journalism and fun blogs that are written by real human journalists.” 404 Media recaps its first year.

“Right to repair” meets social media platforms? How a law that shields big tech is now being used against it in the New York Times.

Subscribe to Harvard Public Health’s email newsletter and you’ll be presented with a great example of a new subscriber survey.

Great long-read on the challenges of small town news: Bought-out, priced out, burned out: the individuals fighting to keep local journalism alive in Colorado by Chase McCleary.

Swooning for a slide deck that speaks the truth. The screenshot below comes from Mattia Paretti and newsalchemists.org. It’s speaking about journalism but it’s true of a much broader range of nonprofit comms, fundraising and marketing – far too much of which exists only in the service of attention and money. See also Mattia’s deck from his talk at Media Party 2024.

10 elements of newsletter thinking

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Last Friday I joined 402 other folks in New York City for the first Newsletter Conference. It was a brilliantly organized event packed with experience, knowledge and space for networking.

Dan Oshinsky speaks in front of a large screen with the words The Newsletter Conference on it. Dan is standing in front of four empty chairs on a stage at The Times Center in New York City

Why go all the way to NYC to spend a day talking about newsletters? Good question.

The best newsletters capture what I call newsletter thinking.

Dan Oshinsky of Inbox Collective, and the day’s emcee, touched on newsletter thinking early on with this:

Email is an owned channel but ownership belongs to audience. The inbox belongs to the reader. We have to earn their trust every day.

Every email, article, page, form, post or advertisement we put out there is a chance to earn or lose trust. Newsletter thinking doesn’t mean forgetting about what you want or what your organization needs from the subscriber. But it does mean seeing the world through the eyes of the subscriber.

The newsletter for everyone is a newsletter for no one.

Know your audience and talk with them directly. Don’t write for everyone who might possibly in some theoretical way be interested in your topic. I know voice is hard for nonprofit organizations. But get over it. You have something important to say so say it.

People trust people. Not brands.

The “creator economy” (as overhyped as it may feel at times) is living proof of this. Stop sending faceless organizational emails. Put a name to your newsletter. Put people in your content – and let them tell a story.

View growth from the subscriber’s perspective.

People with a clear sense of what they’re subscribing to are your best prospects. Stop pre-checking subscription boxes at the bottom of unrelated forms. Stop hiding unsubscribe links. People know how emails. Trust them to subscribe when they want to subscribe.

Let people know you see them.

Ashley Hoffman (Philadelphia Inquirer) and S. Mitra Kalita (EpicenterNYC and URL Media) talked about the power of newsletters to reach audiences underserved (or completely ignored) by national media and shrinking local news coverage. A news or nonprofit organization can rapidly (and relatively inexpensively) stand up a newsletter, do audience research, market and test a product, and deliver useful content.

There’s a lesson here for local and small to mid-sized nonprofits who can reach people largely underserved by national nonprofits with boring or unrelatable content and email programs.

Co-registration is big. And maybe bad?

If you’ve ever subscribed to a newsletter (or signed a petition) and been presented with a chance to subscribe to 3-5 other newsletters or email lists – that’s co-registration. It’s a common list building tactic. And one that nonprofits have used for years (decades!).

Co-registration is common in newsletter list-building. The problem is people end up on lists they don’t know or care about.

Many newsletter operators will remove these subscribers after a few weeks if they aren’t engaging.

Nonprofits are rarely willing to cut disengaged subscribers. I suspect that variations on co-registration have played a role in building large zombie lists.

Riches in niches.

The internet is full of communities of people who care about specific topics. Look for your audience in specific subreddits, the IG audience of topical creators and influencers, YouTube channels and discords. Aine Stapleton of International Intrigue described growing their newsletter by working with meme channels on Instagram. “It’s where our audience is,” she said while pointing out that everyone in the audience spends time on IG meme channels (yes, even you in the back). People who hear about a newsletter on a meme channel will look it up and subscribe.

Reply to this email.

Ask new subscribers to reply to your welcome email. Better yet, give them a reason to reply. Ask a question. Offer something. Inbox placement and deliverability (not to mention relationship building) improves with, you know, actual engagement.

Ask questions.

You need first party data to understand your audience, why they subscribe, why the respond, why they donate, and what they need. Stop relying on 47 question annual surveys. Many (most?) newsletters are taking new subscribers to a short survey. See the examples below from Fintech is Femme and International Intrigue.

A screenshot of a survey presented to new subscribers of Fintech is Femme.
The first few questions of a survey presented to Fintech is Femme subscribers.

Don’t be afraid of open-ended questions. ChatGPT is great for summarizing responses.

Ask little questions in newsletters. A one-question survey – a question of the day – could become a feature, not a burden.

A screenshot of a new subscriber survey used by the International Intrigue newsletter. Questions include age range, how you found us, industry you work in and more.
A survey presented to new subscribers of International Intrigue.

Blow up your metrics.

Opens and clicks aren’t telling you what you need to know. Do you want people to read your newsletter? If yes then put valuable content in the newsletter. Give it editorial meaning. And don’t measure value by clicks out. If your newsletter is just a marketing tool to transport people to a web page then don’t be surprised if people stop opening your newsletter.

Help readers be smart.

It’s easy to find breaking news. It’s hard to understand what’s actually important. People subscribe because they trust you to help them learn and be smarter. Lean into that.

Newsletter thinking means being interesting (even entertaining). It means knowing and respecting your audience. Newsletter thinking will find you testing ways to reach new audiences and dumping inactive email addresses so that you’re successfully finding new people who want to subscribe.

Newsletter thinking also means taking seriously the relationship between you, your email and the reader. That relationship has real value. The subscriber wants to root for you. Give them reasons to stick with you.

Why trust matters in an era of distrust

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Trust is having a moment. We live in an era without trust. Sociologist Eric Klinenberg, in a reflection this week on how the U.S. handled Covid, notes that distrust is built into American life: while other countries built trust and solidarity, America — both during and after 2020 — left millions to fend for themselves. The collapse of social trust, wrote David Brooks in 2020, is the stuff of failed states.

The public apparently doesn’t trust journalists (and just the whole – waves hands – idea of journalism and news), a problem consuming plenty of attention. Projects like Trusting News are doing good work here. The premise of Hearken, with its focus on community engagement, and Solutions Journalism Network, which advises journalists to help show people their power to solve problems, offer the collaborative approaches that build trust.

Worrying for many folks in my network: nonprofits and community organizations have their own trust issues. Nonprofit leaders must confront the trust problem “before it’s too late” says the headline of a 2022 piece in the Chronicle of Philanthropy.

Graffiti painted on a wall says the word Trust.

Rising inequality means more (and more visible) billionaires. It’s simple to paint high profile donors as in it for themselves. Beth Breeze, Director of the Center of Philanthropy at the University of Kent, tells Devex that “rather than being worried about good intentions that are imperfectly executed, I think that now the public are worried about the bad intentions of nonprofits and, in particular, of their donors.”

A few weeks ago, Spitfire Strategies released Replenishing trust: Civil society’s guide to reversing the trust deficit. Spitfire, a strategic communications firm that works with nonprofits and progressive movements, opens by saying:

Trust for institutions across society is declining. This growing trust deficit is a serious problem: It erodes a high-functioning pluralistic democracy, compromises public health and makes it impossible to solve collective problems like climate change.

Spitfire offers 10 actions leaders can take to earn trust including “Prioritize knowing, following and modeling moral norms” and “Encourage participation so people feel included and heard.” Check out the full report. They’ve done their research, found great sources and show steps forward.

That said, there’s nothing new here.

Trust in institutions (and each other) has been declining for decades – perhaps for as long as anyone has been observing the data. People point to social media, political polarization and disinfo campaigns as

In 1996, The Washington Post published a series on trust in America that opened with reporters Richard Morin and Dan Balz writing Americans Losing Trust in Each Other and Institutions. Their data from national surveys and other sources was grim. Some excerpts:

  • Today, nearly two in three Americans believe that most people can’t be trusted;
  • Half say most people would cheat others if they had the chance, and an equal proportion agree that “most people are looking out for themselves.”

Morin and Balz note that lack of knowledge about how government works diminishes trust in governing institutions. Yet those with civic and policy knowledge didn’t report much higher levels of trust.

The prospects for the future didn’t sound good in 1996. Does this sound familiar?

An environment in which a majority of Americans believe that most people can’t be trusted breeds attitudes that hold all politicians as corrupt, venal and self-serving, and government action as doomed to failure.

Instead of collaborative solution making we’re left with political sloganeering. We talk of draining the swamp. But even the likes of conservative pundit Ross Douthat notes that our time and energy is wrapped up in creating chaos instead of actually doing anything. Douthat writes of the GOP and Trump that “The goal of destabilization, after all, is to eventually create a new stability, in which your party and vision and coalition are understood by most Americans to be a safe and normal place to belong.”

Politically speaking, perhaps we’ve reached peak venality and failure. Distrust has moved from the symptom of a problem to the center of the post-truth reality. If we can’t trust our leaders we can at least stan them. But approaching political figures and movements as celebrity fandom groups, even quasi-religious cults, seems ill advised if we care about trust much less democracy or the future.

Seems grim. Where to now?

I think this spiraled from “trust has always been an issue” to “diminishing trust has doomed us” – and that’s not so helpful.

Most of us just want to get an interesting job, get more subscribers to our newsletters and find more members and donors. Fewer spam texts would be nice, too.

What I’d like to leave you with (and figuring that you’re a nonprofit leader, tech person, writer, digital news person, organizer, fundraiser, community builder, or wear many of these hats) is that neither journalism nor nonprofits and civic organizations are causing trust problems or can single-handedly fix them.

Measuring trust is like measuring love. It’s many things and different for everyone. Sure, we can gather data and build an algorithm that spits out per capita rates of love (or trust). But, really, you know it when you see it. It can happen overnight but also evolves over time. And our narrative of trust (like love) is crafted by what we see and experience in a lifetime of family, school, friendship, politics, work and community.

Rich Harwood, who knows more about civic and community engagement than anyone, talks about next steps in his recent piece What Does it Mean to Say ‘Enough.’

It’s time, Harwood says “…to come together and build. We must do the hard work of forging trust, getting our hands dirty in the messiness it takes to create progress and generate authentic hope.”

For news organizations, nonprofits, civic groups, associations, and companies – at least those who care for the communities in which people live – it means more than efficiency, service projects, and giving back.

It means advocating for and modeling community engagement with clients, customers and supporters. It means showing people how to help, inviting them in and showing them results that go beyond meeting fundraising goals.

It means asking for (and acting on) feedback, delivering content people can use, and being transparent about the work. Help people experience the warm glow, and the cold truth, of wins and losses.

It means knowing who your audience is and doing the best work, creating the most useful content, the best experience possible for THEM, not everyone. If someone else does better work on an issue someone cares about then send people that way. Build abundant partnerships, not competitive walls.

It also means individuals and funders trusting people like journalists to do the work they’re good at – and investing in that work.

2,024 (or maybe 5) thoughts about content, community and fundraising

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The year ahead in Future Community

[1] Content needs purpose

A few things need to go: paying for leads and email addresses of people that could care less about your work, more fundraising emails (because what’s the harm in sending one more?), 4X (and 5X and 6X and 10X…yes, they’re out there) matching gifts, and optimizing for page views without understanding the audience or conversion goals.

All of this is working against the value of your content program.

Instead, start with a clear goal for every piece of content you put out there. Awareness, visits and more subscribers aren’t goals.

Ask hard questions about the kinds of subscribers, followers and members you need. What will subscribers do? How much will they give? What actions will they take? What is your plan for getting an action or payment? How do you find out what moves you and your subscribers/members/supporters to that goal?

Treat your content with care because it is out there creating and sustaining relationships with real people (and bots and LLMs).

Measure and learn. Test and adjust if content isn’t working. Talk with people. Understand who they are, why they subscribed and gave, what they need from you, their hopes. Build for that.

[2] Register for 2024

No no, you don’t need to register to get into 2024. You’re already here.

But I think people working in nonprofit content and online media more broadly will (or should) be talking more about registration this year.

As mentioned above, your time and money spent creating content demands that it have purpose. And that purpose needs to be measurable.

Too many nonprofit digital strategies hammer away at list growth and fundraising at all costs. We’re scraping the jar looking for an audience and then throwing them right into the “Donate Today” blender.

With that we lose opportunities to understand why people come to our websites and email lists. We can measure page views but not the value of those views to users (or even ourselves).

Site registration has direct and indirect benefits.

  • It helps you think about what content people value enough to “register” to receive. And then create that.
  • A registered user has moved up the engagement ladder (or down the funnel). It’s an act they’re going to take because they’re getting value – not just giving you something like a donation. And a user who indicates that they value you is worth ten (20? 100?) who don’t.
  • Registered users are telling you a lot more about their user experience and the value of their site. There are privacy issues to cover here (be transparent with users about what you’re tracking, for starters). But the gist of it is that you’re already tracking people with google analytics, cookies and CRMs/apps like Hubspot. So why not have clear insight into what content is working for your visitors and (more importantly) your registered supporters.

Site registration – or a “registration wall” – has largely been confined to publishers. The idea is that asking people to register is a simpler ask than a paywall. Many news sites and other online publishers don’t have a history of requiring paid subscriptions. Or they may want to keep all or most content available to everyone. This is common among nonprofit news sites or alt-weekly sites.

Registration deployment is flexible:

  • They can be used to meter content: you can view five articles before needing to register.
  • Or certain content can be available only to registered users.
  • Or all content is free to everyone but there are persistent registration requests.
  • You can also deploy registration in the user flow which is common for events and e-commerce sites. Everyone is familiar with registering with a site like Eventbrite or when buying a product. Registration simplifies the process – you can see order details, past orders, shipping progress and save payment info.

Overall, if you’re interested in creating content that’s valuable to users and brings value to your organization then registration offers a way to present and measure that value, it establishes a landscape for community and relationship building, and it doesn’t need to present big cost or technical hurdles (or restrictions on users).

MUCH more to dig into here. Would love to get your feedback or talk with folks who are using registration in their nonprofit or media projects.

[3] Substack still ? hearts ? Nazis

A few weeks ago I joined in a community campaign asking Substack why it lets official (and unoffical) nazis use and profit from its platform. The campaign received (and continues to get) coverage.

It took a week or so but eventually Substack responded with what amounts to this:

Nazi money is money.

Substack appears to be using the old “well, we’re just an infrastructure company” line.

I get it. Nobody wants to spend their days moderating content. Just ask Mark Zuckerberg.

But the world needs people who know right from wrong and aren’t content to make money on what’s clearly wrong.

Substack can do better than this. Or maybe they can’t.

There are other options and Future Community will probably be moving along. If you want to make that migration more costly for me feel free to share this newsletter with potential fans.

Perhaps the departure of Substackers with larger and paid audiences will motivate Substack? Like Molly White (who did leave) or Casey Newton (who’s talking about it). Substack’s response is essentially daring people to go.

Follow Marisa Kabas, who organized and continues to organize the Substack campaign, and her newsletter The Handbasket to stay on top of Substack’s Nazi problem.

[4] Content is people

There are real people at the other end of this email newsletter. (Hello!) And, except for those bots, everything you put out there is being heard, read and viewed by a real person with ideas, hopes, needs, emotions and not a lot of spare time.

It’s on us as email writers, communicators, storytellers, producers, Instagram celebrities or Facebook posters to understand the journey on which we want to take people.

Be clear with people about what you need and what you expect them to get from and do with your content.

Your content team is also made up of people. Too often these teams are scattered across departments with little support, coordination, training or shared goals.

It really is possible to get people in there who are passionate about content – whatever the format, fascinated by improving with data and, maybe most of all, really care about the audience and what they do, say, read and view.

Of course, that means changing up how we build, lead and run content programs and teams which, for oddballs like me, is the fun part.

I wrote about content product teams a few months back.

[5] Why the job list?

Perhaps you’re here because of the jobs listed below ?? or the full list here. That’s cool.

It takes a fair bit of uncompensated time to maintain a current job list. Why bother?

I’ve spent 30 years in and around nonprofit fundraising, campaigning and technology. A lot of good folks have left this space (or figured it wasn’t worth their time) because of poor fitting jobs, bad management, lack of skill-building and poor career growth opportunities.

Tapping a big network to help curate good roles seems like the least I can offer. And you meet good folks along the way.

But I have questions for you (if you’ve made it this far):

Do you have feedback? Is the Future Community jobs list useful to you? What would make it more useful? Would it be worth it to run it on its own email list and/or put the list online in a more “job list” type format? Other ideas?

Getting users the content they need

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The future will be here one of these days

December is a time for predictions. Soothsaying seems fraught given how this year has gone and that 2024 is an election year. But some predicting, like that at Nieman Lab, we focus prediction work we get something useful. I do love their annual Predictions for Journalism and find it useful for broader content and engagement strategy.

A crystal ball sits on the ground at sunset (or sunrise). The ground beyond the ball is reflected upside down in the ball.

Sure, the few dozen pieces are largely written by and for journalists and people working in the news business. But anyone thinking about community, content or organizing can learn about engagement to support fundraising, applying data and metrics to communications or content strategy in a world of rapidly disaggregating platforms.

A.J. Bauer’s Hyperlocal information warfare rises up looks at how the extreme right is using local and state-level news sites to seed and spread disinformation. This isn’t news to anyone doing on the ground community organizing but most state, regional and national advocacy organizations are less aware of how to engage with and counter these projects.

In Collaboration with ethnic and identity publishers becomes a must, Ashley Woods Branch, Executive Director of the Fund for Equity in Local News, explains the rising presence of ethnic and identity-driven news publishers. Small news outlets like these and local alt-weeklies rely on trust, are tightly connected to their community and aren’t reliant on Meta or other single social media platforms. They’re an outreach partner, even a communications model, for nonprofits.

Call it audience, community or users. Whatever. Just consider people before platform.

I’m concerned about how organizations use their scarce content and communications resources in a landscape flooded with audience and platform choices. The typical group will be looking to 2024 thinking along the lines of “We have websites, email lists and post on Facebook, Instagram and doing more with TikTok though that’s a whole other kind of video we have to create. And I don’t know what we should do with Twitter.” Platforms are many. And a mess.

Sarah Marshall runs global audience development strategy at Condé Nast. In We get past “post-platform”, Marshall offers a framework for thinking of audience needs instead of platforms. It resonates because, well, we talk a LOT here about what members and supporters need, and (see above) platforms are coming and going.

“With a seemingly limitless number of platforms on which to meet and engage audiences — but still a finite number of hours in the day — teams will need to develop frameworks to understand where to start, stop, and pivot.”

The credibility of influencers is debatable (see Taylor Lorenz’s The creator economy will be astroturfed in last year’s Nieman Lab predictions). But nobody wants to hear from an institution. People also want to hear from other people, not organizations. Don’t have a TikTok strategy. Have a people, community, member, audience strategy.

Marshall sums up the audience needs approach at Condé Nast in 100 or so words:

In 2023, we updated our “user needs” at Condé Nast, determining that our audiences have six needs:

  • Update me
  • Inspire me
  • Divert me
  • Educate me
  • Guide me
  • Connect me

We added “guide me” to an earlier iteration of needs — and started thinking about newsletter audiences with that need. For example:

  • Audiences need to be “guided” when shopping, and the “new arrivals” curated shopping experience has become a destination in itself for Vogue.
  • The Goings On newsletter from The New Yorker (with Substack-inspired subscriber exclusives) is my personal favorite guide.
  • “Connect me” isn’t a new user need, but you should know that younger audiences want to participate. While community is nothing new (ask the Ars Technica community member who has commented 100,000 times over the past 24 years), audiences want to find new ways to express their own values.

Sure, user needs are in the forefront. But, just as a nonprofit’s list, community and content are driven by fundraising budgets, user needs are driven by revenue.

“Guide me” doesn’t get nearly enough attention in the nonprofit and news space. And it has so much potential. We work so hard getting a new person’s attention and first engagement or donation. Those are things we can put a dollar value to. But we aren’t as good guiding (and measuring or valuing) their ongoing journey with us (at least not until the next donation or sale).

We can think more about email welcome series, of course. But what about onboarding videos? Or new member FAQs and live or recorded “welcome” videos? I’d love to see an organization try a “new to our site” collection of tooltips similar to when you download or update an app. Guide Me content could also include surveys (even single question “how are we doing?” or “what are you looking for?” questions). Guide Me content also sets up a framework for user registration in which people can become a part of a community and you can better track if and how you’re meeting needs.

It is words, pictures and videos that, mushed together, tell a story or solve a problem or create wonder in someone’s day. A donor, subscriber or member is basing their allocation of money, time and emotion in your work based on if and how that mushed together story reaches them and meets their needs. Think first about those needs.

Turning a list into a community

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Create meaning, not size, and people will support you.

We spent much of September and October working with partners at humansize to launch a membership program for Cleveland Scene, one of the country’s longest-running and most successful alt-weekly news outlets.

Membership/reader revenue work with a local news organization like Scene is a joy. There’s a deep connection between people in the community and the organization. Everyone, including readers, wants the organization to succeed. Our initial surveys and interviews surfaced a passion for Scene and the results of our campaign show that people will support local news when given the chance to do so.

Our work included research, content creation (email, social and news fundraising campaigns), massaging data and platforms (oh the joys of Stripe and CRMs and Mailchimp and Google Analytics and Meta, to name a few), and mentorship/teaching.

Membership (or reader revenue) is not an app you buy and attach to your website. It’s a practice you grow over time. You’re investing in people. You’re testing, learning and growing alongside your members and staff.

We would love to talk if you’d like to learn more about our work with Scene and other community and membership revenue projects.

Of note: The people of Cleveland (Scene readers at least) love their city! It’s fun to be part of that kind of community.

So Much Content. So Little Meaning.

Let’s talk about how people do (or don’t) connect to and find meaning your content. If you’re a community group, NGO or campaign your content should be as useful to (and valued by) your audience as any news article.

Content – all the emails, websites, articles and blog posts, social media posts, IG reels, TikToks, YouTube videos and on an on – is 90+ percent of how people find, learn about and engage in your organization.

Content should engage, of course. It should also drive fundraising and membership results. But too many organizations (and political campaigns) are churning out content but struggling with fundraising.

Chances are your comms, fundraising and digital teams will spend more time testing donation button amounts, colors and placement (should buttons be stacked or horizontal? hmm…) than it will talking to current and potential audiences about their needs.

The challenge – and its an existential one for your organization – is not simply creating content. That’s easy. The challenge is creating meaningful content that connects to individuals. That’s hard. Especially when we live and work in a context of growth and scale.

The Problem With Big

A decade ago Nicco Mele published The End of Big: How the Digital Revolution Makes David the New Goliath. Mele’s premise was that accessible and powerful communications and data tech gave individuals and small groups tools to be heard, organize, raise funds and generally catch up to or even overcome “Big” group power. We would see new entities reinventing business, politics, culture and more. “Radical connectivity” would shift power from big institutions.

Mele was right. We’ve seen new organizations grow and reshape whole sectors. Netflix and its peers didn’t just give us a new way to watch movies, they changed how movies and TV programs are written, produced and distributed. We’ve seen unknown politicians and political movements string together social and communications networks to take power from (or just take over) political parties (see Breitbart, Trump and the remaking of the GOP).

But Big didn’t end. Small groups often became big groups. And Big ones became Bigger.

Big groups could grow their email lists and social media followings at astonishing rates. You could send emails to your list weekly, daily, or multiple times per day and follow that up with Facebook and Twitter posts targeting people on your email list.

In The Great Social Media-News Collapse Charlie Warzel writes about how social media platforms grew global news consumption to great heights and then pulled back as quite nearly everyone accused (and continues to blame) Meta, Google, Twitter, TikTok and others for manipulating algorithms and news visibility.

This is a big shift, even a threat, to the news business and the public’s access to accurate information. Warzel writes:

It would be wrong to suggest that news—and especially commentary about the news— will vanish. But the future might very well look like slivers of the present, where individual influencers command large audiences, and social networking and text-based media take a back seat to video platforms with recommendation-forward algorithms, like TikTok’s. This seems likely to coincide with news organizations’ continued loss of cultural power and influence.

Buried beneath Warzel’s prediction that video beats text is the rise of individual influencers coming the cost of institutional power.

In practical terms, comms consultants will tell you to “be better on TikTok, YouTube and Instagram reels.” That’s necessary guidance, perhaps. But it isn’t sufficient for fundraising much less shifting and holding power.

Making Sense or Noise?

Charlie Warzel’s is describing the fracture of big news by big social platforms.

But the response to so much news (and noise) isn’t new. In the context of information, it’s a natural human response to noise. There is only so much auditory and visual stimulation a person can consume. There is only so much news and information the average person can make sense of (or even needs).

The intensity and scale of our information firehose has outpaced our brain’s capacity to learn and synthesize.

People need to make sense of the world to make meaning of it. More noise is more complexity. People don’t have time to synthesize complexity. So they simplify arguments, seek out simpler explanations, and trust clarity over nuance. Hence the power of a 60 second TikTok or a Trumpian sound bite.

But a retreat from complexity and noise shouldn’t find us abandoning progress in the fight against climate change or equality. And it shouldn’t hasten the seeming simplicity and security of authoritarianism.

When You Can’t Find a Tree in the Forest

At the risk of mangling a metaphor…perhaps we’re too busy building forests (all the news and info at scale) to help people see and appreciate the beauty of the trees (the discrete bits of news and context that solve problems and answer questions).

I’m in a lot of conversations (and read a lot of articles and LinkedIn posts) about using AI to create more (and more personalized) emails, optimizing donation forms and ad copy, direct response TV data, and search optimization.

These conversations have two goals: getting attention and selling something when you have attention. Or, in the case of nonprofit or political fundraising, soliciting donations.

Instead, let’s talk about the questions people have, the answers we can provide, and how we user our content and community resources (and even data and AI tools) to simplify, make sense and show the value of sensemaking and trust.

The world of TikTok and YouTube is full of sensemaking. There are countless people talking about the best places to eat and drink in [anywhere], the meaning of Taylor Swift concert song selection, and how to replace your car’s air filter or repaint your coffee table.

There are more meaningful sensemaking examples, too. Vox specializes in explainers. Instagram accounts like so.informed break down complex political and social issues. Hearken helps newsrooms and nonprofits engage their audiences by asking and answering questions. Hearken describes its approach as:

…we make it possible for people to fully participate in the organizations that serve them. We use the power of democratic practices to rectify the disconnection and disengagement that prevents systems from thriving.

Shifting to Meaning

A ideas for prioritizing connection instead of creation.

  • Turn your content into audio and video segments for people who spend their time listening to podcasts or watching YouTube and TikTok. Don’t overcomplicate it. Don’t “create a podcast.” Start by reading it, putting out there, letting people know and seeing if/how it gets picked up.
  • View newsletters (and audio and video) as tools people may use to solve their problems, not self-promote everything you do.
  • Ask people what they need and want to know. Have your team respond to inquiries. Show people that you’re answering questions.
  • Put people in your work. Name the enemy. Name the good people. Name places. Talk about their hopes and dreams the value of your work, your supporter contributions.
  • Talk with people as individuals, not as audiences.
  • View acquisition as a long-term partnership, not a way to scale or address list churn. Frankly, most supporter acquisition approaches are too costly to not see partners.

I see and feel the intense pressure to find people and raise money from them (or sell to them). And to do it now. Many organizations are struggling and nobody wants to talk about community, content and meaning when there’s a fundraising deadline. (looks at calendar…sees that there is ALWAYS a fundraising deadline)

But an organization that is not creating meaning and value for supporters, which can be measured in part by their engagement and financial contributions, may have a broken business model.

What’s trauma got to do with it?

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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.

About that stupendous fundraising match in your inbox

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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).