Each year about this time, nonprofit marketeers sit hunched over monitors, anxiously awaiting year end returns. The current economy has not helped ease fundraisers’ sleepless nights, though overall donors still give generously this time of year.

Whether your organization focuses on email appeals or symbolic holiday gifts, matching gifts from corporate partners or private donors, tax-deduction plugs or holiday tie-ins, many organizations use will use total donations through December 31 as a key marker to build budgets and programs for the year ahead.

Here are 3 common mistakes of end of year appeals:

1. Sending too few messages.
If your organization only sends one or two messages per year, mark your calendar for July 2010 – that’s a great time to begin planning year end efforts for next year. Make sure to invite your organization’s most creative minds, and plan a communications stream that stretches from pre-Thanksgiving to post-New Years.

2. Lack of continuity between messages.
A good end of year campaign tells a story, building from the first email to the last. The asks, tactics, and even authors may be different, but the arc of the story should be clear, positive, and hopeful. Your supporters likely get messages from multiple organizations and you want yours to be recognizable.

3. Thank you’s as an afterthought
In the rush to create compelling campaigns, we sometimes forget that donors choose individual organizations because they are passionate about the mission. Think about how your donors connect to your work and whether there are new, more meaningful ways to acknowledge their commitment.

Happy New Year!

As web sites get bigger and more sophisticated, it seems like more and more of our build work involves working and collaborating with multiple parties, rather than just working directly with a few folks on the client team. Now projects frequently require bringing other vendors and stakeholders to the table – design firms, brand agencies, technology vendors, you name it. From a project management perspective, this adds a layer of complexity to the project, and requires adapting some of our standard practices and tactics.

Communications. This is the Project Management equivalent of “location, location, location” to real estate. In successful project management, too much communication is rarely the problem (ok, so maybe it’s possible). When partnering with multiple parties, this is absolutely critical for success. At Beaconfire this means:

• Clearly identifying and understanding the makeup of each of the project teams. Who are your peer PMs? Who are the decision makers that need to signoff for approval? If possible, gather all the key players around a table for a real meet and greet. You’ll be spending a lot of time together, and it’s great to put names with faces, especially in today’s virtual world.
• Out of the gate everyone is invited to our project extranet. We use a tool called Central Desktop , but Basecamp or other collaboration tools will work. The bottom line is that using only email to communicate just won’t cut it. By having all documents and exchanges in one place, people can more easily map in and out of the project.
• Create a clear project schedule and definition of tasks. Sometimes we find it worthwhile to create a separate Roles and Responsibilities matrix. This lists the major project tasks, and identifies the specific person responsible for the task as well as those who also need to weigh in.
• Schedule meetings and calls in advance. Scheduling is always a challenge, but can be nightmare as teams get bigger and more diverse. Creating a Workshop Guide at the onset, listing all the upcoming meetings, a brief description and required attendees can go a long way to help with this.
• Extra meetings. I know, I know. No more meetings. As a PM, sometimes I avoid having a team meeting by sending a detailed Project Update / Recap email to everyone. However, it is really important to meet frequently as a group to talk through the latest issues and make sure everyone is on the same page. To respect people’s time, I do try to make sure only the necessary people are invited to the meeting. Or, I start the meeting with a topic relevant to a person, and then let them go while we continue the rest of the meeting.
• For team meetings, it is critical that the PM prepares an agenda IN ADVANCE. Meeting notes are also important to make sure there is a record of decisions and next steps. As a time saver, I’ve also learned to take rough meeting notes right into our project extranet. They may not be pretty, but they do the trick.
• Finally, it is worth taking extra time to document the basics. This includes developing a Project Charter that contains all the key information about the project, creating high-level systems diagrams, API documentation, etc. Taking a few extra hours to define key information will save hours of miscommunication and frustration in the end.

This isn’t rocket science, but taking the time to follow some of these steps will go a long way in ensuring a happy project team and successful project delivery.

Fundraising is all about impact.  You want your message to convince donors that your cause is important, that their donation is necessary, and that you will do something worthwhile with their money.

It would seem only natural that, to show some big impact, you want to put some impressive statistics behind your work – dollars raised, lives saved, and so forth.  Right?

Wrong, actually.

It turns out, people aren’t so good with numbers, and numbers (especially big ones) don’t necessarily make people more likely to donate – often, the effect is the opposite.  Katya Andresen shows some great examples of campaigns – see which ones move you to give.  She guesses it’s not the one with the numbers front and center.

Here’s what is true:

• The more someone cares, the more likely they are to donate
• The more someone thinks they can make a difference, the more likely they are to donate

In this recent talk, Dr. Paul Slovic explains in some detail, with a lot of research to back him up, just why numbers won’t make people care.  The whole talk is worth watching, as he gets into a lot of the psychology behind donations. He specifically shows that people are more likely to donate to save a single person – 1 child, for instance – than to save 2, or 8, or hundreds.  In fact, the more people you claim to be saving, the less the claim will resonate.

There’s also the drop-in-the-bucket effect: it takes an intellectual leap to believe that your donation (combined with thousands of others) can save hundreds or thousands of people, but it’s fairly easy and intuitive to believe that your own donation can save one person.  Most donors feel more emotional connection with the idea of what their own donation can do.

Slovic talks about caring, in the context of saving lives.  But I think the problem with numbers is more basic than that, in some ways.  It’s easy to say that 5,000 is a big number, and 50,000 is a much bigger number… but most people have no sense of what they really mean.  I can’t visualize either of them, and I’m guessing you can’t either.  I certainly can’t count them on my fingers.  So, on some level, there’s no difference between them.  They’re both “big”; they are too big to easily understand, so the intuitive part of your brain is likely to skip over them, dismissing them as “big numbers.”  (For example, what does it really mean that the USA has a $1 trillion federal deficit?)

Thus, for most fundraising and advocacy efforts, you’ll be better off focusing on a single, real example than your very best statistics.  This is a large part of why organizations like Kiva and Heifer International are so successful – they focus on the small picture, on what you, as an individual, can do to help one real person.  (They have also both taken hits for misleading donors about where their money actually goes – transparency is especially important if you use this model.)

Don’t throw out all your numbers, though.  Slovic’s studies look at low-dollar, one-time donations, often with first-time donors to that organization.  His studies show pretty clearly that numbers aren’t effective in those cases.  But what about long-time donors, or major donors?  They’re already supportive of your work, and are likely more invested in it.  They might want to know the numbers behind your successes, and are more likely to spend the time to understand them.  This is pure, unsupported conjecture on my part, but I would imagine that a few significant, well-framed statistics could well have an effect on your loyal donors.  I’d love to see someone do a study on this.  You could try it out with your donors and see what happens.

There will also be times when you really do need to convey the scope of your work with statistics.  Check out some thoughts on how to put your statistics in context and make them more meaningful.

A few things to think about, with online fundraising and advocacy in particular:

• Keep the stats to a minimum.
• When you do use numbers, put them in context as much as possible.
• When you do use numbers, use as few as possible – the more numbers you include, the less meaningful each becomes.
• Focus on one example of a person you can help – but make sure you state somewhere whether donations will really go towards that person/campaign/country or whether supporters will be making a general donation
• Use images with a high emotional impact – but don’t assume that all email recipients will see the image.  Many email clients disable images by default.
• Reinforce the images by using them on your landing page
• Call out key, emotionally-charged words and phrases to help make your point (especially to users with images disabled)