Ways to Increase Charitable Giving

This is a great article that highlights four easy to implement ideas how to increase charitable giving at your organization.  Increasing donations, especially at a rough time economically, is such a daunting task, but after your read this article, it will seem a lot more feasible.

The Giving Pledge, the effort by Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett to increase giving by the nation’s wealthiest people, missed a key opportunity, fund raisers say. Instead of simply reaching out to billionaires, they should have promised to match donations of people with a lot less money.

That’s one suggestion offered in a new report by Adrian Sargeant and Jen Shang, two scholars who study and teach fund raising at Indiana University.

The report is based on ideas to increase charitable giving that were offered by influential nonprofit leaders and other executives.

Besides suggesting that billionaires offer matching gifts, the report includes 31 other ideas for improving giving, which has been stuck at 2 percent of average household income after taxes for the past 40 years, according to “Giving USA.”

Other ideas from the report:

* Encourage charities to develop productive ways to handle complaints from donors, which would reduce negative word of mouth, build trust, and provide ideas to improve fund-raising operations. Charities could take a lesson from the business world, the authors write, where “complaining customers are the firm’s biggest asset.”

* Place more fund raisers on nonprofit boards so they can educate fellow trustees about the best ways to raise money.

* Persuade fund raisers to stop talking to donors about annual funds, capital campaigns, endowment drives, and other such insider approaches and instead urge them to focus on what their money will accomplish.

As an example, the reported noted that Harvesters, a Kansas City, Mo., food bank stopped asking its donors for annual gifts or capital donations. It now uses appeals that ask people to help it feed children, families, and the elderly and to promote healthy eating habits. “The new approach is immensely more powerful,” the authors write.

“No one supports a single nonprofit because they happen to have an annual fund or an endowment,” write Mr. Sargeant and Ms. Shang. “It is not the vehicle that matters to donors; it’s the difference they can make in society.”

Nonprofit Leaders Suggest Ways to Increase Charitable Giving
By: Holly Hall

Handle Complaints Swiftly

Handle complaints swiftly or face more of them

Roger Dooley of Neuromarketing blog has a great post on the contagious nature of complaints. Negative impressions have a way of spreading, says Roger, even when they aren’t valid.
He tells this story of an experiment by Martin Lindstrom, author of Brandwashed:

We set up a table in the middle of the restaurant, and four actors were hired to pretend to be friends sharing the conviviality of a meal. They all ordered the soup, since it was the only starter on the menu, thus allowing an element of control. After breaking some bread and taking his first mouthful, one of the actors called for the waiter and proceeded to deliver a three-minute rant about the scalding temperature of the soup. As the soup continued to be served to the other tables, the complaints began rolling in. By the end of the dinner, 26% of the guests had made similar complaints. Each bowl had come from the same pot, so either they had extremely sensitive tongues or they had all been influenced by the initial complaint.

Negativity spreads fast.  Take the “nocebo” effect as another example from Roger—subjects given placebo pills with no side effects will report nausea if they’re told they might have that side effect.

In other words, if people expect something to be bad, they will experience it as bad.

As Roger says, watch out for contagious negativity: “Fix the problem. Apologize. Anything you can do to mute the complaining quickly will prevent contagious dissatisfaction from spreading.”

That’s good advice.  React swiftly and graciously to criticism on social media, in your office and around town.

-Katya Andresen, Katya's Nonprofit Marketing Blog