4.06: Disconnecting the dots: "Visibility" and fundraising success

Visibility

A newspaper article is nice, but...

It happens all the time.

A board member, asked to fundraise, laments, "I told my friend about our organization, and he said he'd never heard of us! If only we had more visibility in the community, it would be so much easier to raise money!"

And now the idea is on the table: Let's launch a "visibility campaign." Get some press coverage. Produce TV and radio Public Service Announcements. Maybe even put some posters up on buses.

That way, the reasoning goes, when I call my friends to press them for gifts, they'll already know how great we are. Even better, the community at large will know how great we are and gifts will spontaneously erupt!

It makes perfect sense…to novices. But it doesn't work, for a couple of reasons.

The first is simply this: you shouldn't be pressing your friends for gifts. That's cold calling. And nobody likes it, on either end. Effective solicitors only ask people who have already expressed an interest in the cause. They may, in fact, be friends. But, more important, they have an interest.

The second reason is even more compelling: your organization's attempts at "increased visibility" will most likely produce no additional charitable revenue, certainly not in the short term. What your attempts WILL do for sure is eat up a lot of staff time and possibly money.

We know of one case where an addiction recovery program spends $4,500 each month to retain a prestigious local PR firm. The goal: "increased community awareness." Translation: signs on bus shelters and maybe some press releases. Cherished hope: that charitable support will increase once those bus messages are in circulation. The sad, expensive truth is it won't. In fact, it can't.

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LOCAL AWARENESS DOES NOT EQUAL CASH

When you consider the vast outpouring of charitable support that followed the 9/11 attacks or the South Asian tsunami, you might reasonably conclude that increased media attention is the secret to fundraising.

But those were major news events: the earth moved, literally and emotionally. And the media attention never quit. Nor should we discount the role of the Internet, which made giving easy and quick through secure online sites. Many of those gifts were, in effect, impulse purchases, spur of the moment decisions. And experience shows that relatively few impulse givers ever make a second gift.

On a local level, things are different anyway.

Even if your organization is in the newspaper a lot, most people still won't know much about you. Why? Because the newspaper is a crowded environment serving a mass market. The vast majority of readers are not deeply interested in your work, so they fail to take much notice. You're "here today, gone tomorrow," just one of dozens of stories.

Even more important: news stories generally do not have any call to action ("Please send a gift to the following address…"), so no checks roll in. Burn this into your brain: people give because they are asked to give (and that goes for bequests, too, not just annual gifts).

When there is no "ask," nothing much happens. The fantasy that someone out there will read about your organization and spontaneously write you a large check is just that, a fantasy…at least, statistically speaking. Miracles happen, of course. But well-managed fundraising programs don't count on them. Which is exactly why that $4,500 month visibility campaign will almost certainly be a flop.

By the way, the real value of a news article about your organization isn't at the moment it appears, but in the many photocopies you will make to share with prospects over the months and years to come.

[Thanks to Simone Joyaux for suggesting the topic! She works on board and fund development with organizations across the U.S. and sees this distracting issue of "increased community visibility" come up again and again.]