Jahnke's Thoughts

Today, Stanford’s Office of Development had our annual field staff retreat. Anyone that is a “field fundraiser” (i.e., meets with and solicits alumni donors for gifts to Stanford) was expected to attended and each year we have a different topic. Today, we spent the day discussing best practices and learning more about stewardship and its important role within fundraising in general. In its most simple form, stewardship is thanking donors and letting them know how their donations are being spent to further Stanford’s mission of higher education and research.

As we delved further into the topic, I found myself thinking how we could do a better job of stewarding our donors, and some of the important details we learn each time we interact with donors that can be important clues for how to further our relationship with them and, ultimately, get them more engaged with Stanford. Asking open ended questions about philanthropy in general is certainly important: Who in their family impacts philanthropic giving? What inspires them to give to Stanford year after year? What other organizations do they support? What gift do they feel has had the most impact on any organization and why? In theory, if we’re doing a good job of stewarding our donors, they’ll want to give to Stanford year after year and seek out giving opportunities.

Our facilitator for most of the day was Karen Osborne from The Osborne Group, whom I had seen present before at a CASE conference at Dartmouth in New Hampshire in 2006 when I was working at MIT. She is a wonderful speaker and got the group thinking about interesting ways that we can impact our donors and provide them with better stewardship. As Stanford begins to wind down our approximately $5 billion campaign (The Stanford Challenge), I think this topic will continue to become more and more important.

There were two surprises for us towards the end of the day. First, today the Council for Aid to Education announced that for the sixth year in a row, Stanford raised more money than any other University in the world ($598 million in 2010). Harvard came in a very close second with $596 million and Johns Hopkins with $427 million. Although it’s not a content, it’s still pretty awesome to know that we’re #1 for the sixth year in a row!  The press release had some interesting statistics, although the one that I found most shocking was that all three of these schools, as well as seven others in the top 20 raised less in 2010 than in 2009. This is especially shocking given how well the economy has done in the last six months, and how poorly the outlook was for the entirety of 2009. Second, Jerry Yang, a graduate from the class of 1990 came to speak to our group about how he and his wife have been involved with philanthropy over the years.

Jerry and his wife Akiko Yamazaki are huge supporters of Stanford, having most famously given a large sum to have the Y2E2 building at Stanford named after them. Jerry’s comments were interesting: he said they were hesitant to have a building named after them, but that giving to higher education is an important tradition in Chinese and Japanese culture. He mentioned the phrase ‘nurturing mother’, which reminded me that the phrase alma matter is Latin for nourishing mother. In a way, I hope that all the work we do with our donors nourishes them as people and philanthropists, and that the students and researchers that are the beneficiaries of their philanthropy get nourished by their gifts. A second interesting comment Jerry made referring to their first significant gift circa 2000 was that “We didn’t want to wait to get started with our philanthropy. When you wait, you don’t know what you’re going to miss out on.”

He was referring to research opportunities, but I thought this was the most inspirational quote I heard all day, and it got me thinking. If you’re ready to do something, just do it. Don’t wait … you really do never know what you’ll miss.

It’s been a very, very long time since I posted on this blog. All kinds of stuff has happened in the past 15 months including taking on a new role at Stanford University’s Office of Development, getting engaged in Yosemite Park, buying a house and moving to San Carlos and traveling to Playa del Carmen for two weeks during Christmas Break.

In my role at Stanford, I’m still working as a fundraiser, but with a very different group of people. I’m an Associate Director with the reunion campaigns team, and my job is recruiting volunteers, soliciting five figure gifts (and some six and seven figure gifts) from alumni celebrating their 25th year reunion, and managing the day to day fundraising operations for Stanford. It’s been a great experience, and the class I just finished working with had a remarkably successful campaign. With over 80 volunteers participating in the effort, we were able to raise just under $11.5 million for Stanford and achieve an overall class participation rate of 48%. We raised about $1.5 million specifically for The Stanford Fund, which solely supports undergraduate education at Stanford and provides financial aid to hundreds of Stanford students each year. One effective and interesting tool that we used was a matching challenge from two anonymous classmates: they agreed to give $75,000 in matching funds, and we were able to market this fact to non-donors and other classmates that hadn’t made a gift to the class campaign. The idea was that if they participated with a gift of $19.85 or more over a specific time period (it was about 40 days from late August until early October), their gift would be matched 7 to 1. So $20 got matched with $140 and turned into $160, more or less. I think this strategy helped us to reach an audience that otherwise would not have donated and tie the class record for highest participation during a reunion campaign.

There were no short cuts or secrets to our success: it was a lot of hard work, volunteer outreach, and a strategic and coordinated marketing campaign that encompassed email, snail mail, student callers, and events around the country. In October 2010, tens of thousands of alumni came back to campus and participated in Reunion Homecoming Weekend, a massive logistical feat executed almost flawlessly by my colleagues at the Stanford Alumni Association. It boggles my mind to see the amount of planing and coordination that goes into organizing that many people, and they do a spectacular job of it. Almost everyone I met over the course of the weekend had an amazing time, despite the inclement weather.

Aside from that, lately on campus Stanford Football has been the hot topic, and I also had the pleasure of seeing the Dalai Lama speak on campus in mid October. I think the coolest part of that entire experience was watching a group of Tibetan Buddhist monks create a sand mandala in the lobby of the building where I work. It’s hard to explain, but imagine putting together a giant, intricate, tapestry like portrait with grains of sand. Except these guys do it one grain at a time. And then after working for four days, almost eight hours a day … they simply brush it all away. Talk about being zen. There’s a great link all about it from The Unofficial Stanford Blog.

The two most successful fundraising campaigns that I have been involved in both had one thing in common: effective matching gifts. I think the most common type of matching gift in higher education does exactly what its name implies. For every dollar that you give, a donor (Atwell match) or a company matches your gift dollar for dollar. Although this increases the total amount of money that an organization can bring it, it doesn’t address the fundamental questions that all donors have: ‘why should I give to your cause, and how will my gift matter’?

At my previous employer MIT, and during our very successful Stanford Senior Gift Campaign in 2009, we chose a different type of matching gift. The style of this matching gift is not based on ‘matching’ whatever amount you’re going to give. All this does is reinforces the idea that the University only wants you to maximize your giving. By contrast, our challenge gifts gave a certain amount of money based on a target goal of the class participating in the fundraising campaign. This type of challenge encourages a different type of behavior than just maximize your individual gift. It promotes the idea of giving, encouraging classmates to give, and maximizing the participation in order to take full advantage of the challenge dollars. In this scenario, gifts of $5 $50 or $500 all have the same impact on the ‘match’.

This past Spring at Stanford, our Parent’s Advisory Board Challenge gave $5,000 for every 10% of the senior class (~1,550 students) that contributed to the class’ fundraising campaign. In other words, when 30% of the class participated, the class gift received $15K from the Parent’s Advisory Board.

A challenge gift framed like this is more inspiring and relevant for Young Alumni and students. Their gifts of $5, $10, and $20 really do have a significant impact with this type of match.  The amount of money given by each individual is irrelevant. Promoting the behavior of giving back to the University is the important goal. With our matching program, the many $5 gifts quickly turn into a $5,000 contribution from the ‘matcher’. It  deals with the common objection ‘I don’t have enough money to give’ or ‘my small gift doesn’t have any impact at such a huge school’.

My goal this year for the Stanford Young Alumni campaign is to find 5 ‘challenge donors’ from each Young Alumni class willing to contribute up to $5K each. For every 1% of the class (approximately 15 classmates) that give, these 5 challenge donors will give $1,000. In other words, if the class gets a 30% overall giving rate, the 5 challenge donors would each contribute $6K as a match.

It’s been a really long time since I’ve written a blog post. A ton of different stuff has happened to me personally, professionally, and academically over the last few months. My grandfather was diagnosed with cancer in late June, and he passed away in early August. That was the first time in my adult life that I had to deal with death, and the first death of a close friend and family member. I started my MBA at University of San Francisco in late August, and am neck deep in my coursework. So far, I’ve met a ton of great classmates and am enjoying my two courses – macroeconomics and learning to lead. At Stanford, our fiscal year recently ended and we have started a new one. Not surprisingly, we had less donors and dollars than in years past, but are pretty on par with our peer institutions. I’ve also finally gotten an iPhone, which has gotten my much more involved with twitter and foursquare. Hopefully, this will be the first of many more frequent postings in the coming weeks. Tomorrow, I’m heading to Stanford very early for a presentation by Charlene Li, the founder of the Altimeter Group.

I read a very interesting post on Get Rich Slowly the other week that I can’t stop thinking about. The author listed 11 bits of wisdom passed down from her father that she tries to live by to be frugal, but this one in particular hit home: eating to stop the feeling of hunger.

I think the reason it has stuck with me is because for as long as I can remember, I have never eaten to stop feeling hungry. Sure, hunger may signal it’s time to eat, but I don’t stop when that hunger feeling goes away. My last year of University, when I started really exercising hard I was eating to gain weight. Consuming 10,000+ calories a day, I would force myself to eat a can of tuna right before bed and make sure I drake two, 3,000 calorie, 120 grams of protein shakes every day. My goal was to cross 200 pounds, but 195 was the closest I ever got, and that took a LOT of effort.

I still feel proud to show off how much a tall, skinny, white boy like me can put down my pie hole, but without the protein shakes and 3 spare hours every day dedicated to lifting weights against the force of gravity, it’s almost impossible to cross 180. I once consumed four pounds of this pig over the course of 12 hours at a pig roast for Jane and Tim’s wedding. Excessive, yes – but man that roast piggy was good.

I think another reason I’ve thought about this phrase so much is because I wonder what the consumption of food and how we expend calories says about modernity and our society? In nature, animals strive to preserve calories and limit physical activity to what is necessary for survival. For me and almost everyone I know, however, the creation and consumption of food is a huge aspect of social life, family bonding and being engaged with the world around us. Stroll through any neighborhood in San Francisco at any given time – going out to restaurants, buying food at farmer’s markets to cook a special meal, and consuming beer, coffee, juice – all are hugely social activities usually not associated with necessity or moderation. In the exercise world, people train for months to run 26 mile marathons, burning calories quickly and squeezing high calorie power gel out of little packets during their journey whist pounding their legs into hard pavement for the camaraderie, exercise and satisfaction of achievement.

After much thought, I concluded that even though it may cost me a lot more money over the course of my lifetime, be bad for the environment, potentially bad for my health later in life, and inconsiderate of those in want of food – I’m going to keep consuming food until I’m stuffed, not just to stop feeling hungry.

We’re currently in the middle of the last week of our Stanford Class of 2009 Senior Gift Campaign, and it has been interesting speaking with seniors as they’re finishing up classes, making preparations for graduation, and making their gifts.

We started recruiting the committee in early October and had our first big event in the middle of January. It went ok, but we didn’t get a lot of turn out. We sponsored a class pub night in April, which went really well – tons of gifts, and a lot of brand awareness was built. We had a repeat of last year’s most successful event, but only a as many people showed up, and we were apparently not clear enough that there was an open bar (on a side note, Stanford undergrads don’t drink nearly as much I remember drinking in college, but that could just be a Canadian thing).

We sponsored a photo booth a la Amilee at their senior formal, which almost the entire class attended, and got a ton of people aware of the campaign. I think we did a terrific job promoting our brand and getting people to join our facebook cause – a firsts for Stanford’s development office. We started to campaign pretty heavily at the beginning of May by sending emails, many of them with embedded video, from members of the class committee and Stanford administrators like Dean Julie. She has been our most successful solicitation so far, and our tabling in white plaza, the main campus thoroughfare, is more frequented this year.

What has been interesting is hearing the wide range of feedback. Some people hadn’t heard about the campaign at all, and asked how we had been promoting it. Other people come up and apologize for procrastinating for so long before making their gift. Often, people reference specific points from our emails – ‘I can’t believe Dartmouth got 96% of their seniors to give!’ or ‘I’m coming to the Margarita thing on Friday with my family, it’s $20.09 for the gift, right?’. We’ve had feedback that we haven’t been clear enough about what the campaign is raising money for, that we’re being too competitive in comparing ourselves with east coast peers, or that we should have started earlier or should be going into people’s dorms. In short, the feedback is all over the place, and there doesn’t seem to be much consistency – either positive or negative.

I guess what it boils down to is that no matter what we do, or how often we do it, we need to keep doing everything. Events, emails, peer to peer promotion, facebook groups and causes, campus solicitation … maybe even, dare I say it, snail mail. It seems that the only pattern emerging is that we’re going to reach different members of the class, at different times, with different methods, at different events, focusing on different aspects of the campaign. So no matter how annoying I feel we’re being, or how many messages we’re putting out there … we can always do more. I guess the take away here, is marketing mix is important.

One of my closest friends during University plays floor-ball. For my ex-girlfriend Kathryn, it was dance. My old boss at MIT was an incredible artist, with a niche comic book franchise world wide. A lot of the time, I feel like I’m missing my thing. You know, that thing you want to do all the time, and never get bored of. The one that you obsesses over, and are super passionate about. Don’t get me wrong – I have hobbies. I like playing squash, I go to the gym four of five times a week to run or lift weights. I read a lot about politics and current events, and am really in to technology. I’m starting my MBA part time in August and have a full time job. Playing poker and shooting pool always makes me happy. I’ve traveled internationally, and have done a ton of camping and canoeing trips. I guess it just doesn’t seem like any of those are my thing, or that I’m doing them often enough.

I remember in high school, my thing was music. I listened to a ton of it, knew how all the major artists were connected, and played saxophone obsessively. I was good at it, had a ton of people I could play with, and it was great. Jazz band practice for hours every week, the classical quartet, marching band, private lessons, the ska band, jamming randomly with friends in basements. My buddy Nick and I used to skip our lunch periods and play in the music rooms. Then, when I got to University, I stopped making the time and didn’t put in as much effort. I got distracted by school, friends, other priorities – in hindsight – most of them wasteful and self indulgent. I wasn’t in the music department, and soon, the skill curve seemed insurmountable. Now, I can barely read music. I feel embarrassed and guilty. No wonder it doesn’t feel like my thing anymore.

It seems that some people are lucky, and innately know their thing. Photography, a job or business they’re super passionate about and engaged with, a sport or a volunteer organization – there are tons of them. It feels like it’s something very lacking in my life right now. I know it will take hard work, time, effort, and a deliberate thought process. A thing makes life exciting. I could look forward to it, feel energized by it, get inspiration from it, and be creative with it. I need a thing.

I was watching TV on Saturday, and I noticed at the end of a VW commercial that, rather than their website, they had the URL to their facebook fan page. This reminded me of an experience in 1999, when I was in my first year of University and “the Internet” as we know it today was just becoming a reality. I finished a snickers bar, and noticed on the wrapper that they had their website printed on it. It got me asking ‘why on earth would someone go to snickers.com’ ? I mean sure, there would be nutritional information and stuff, but it seemed that basically you were subjecting yourself to more advertising and branding, I mean, you’d have to really like snickers.

Today, with facebook fan pages, users can interact with their favorite brands and companies, and discover other people that have similar interests. It makes sense that corporations and brands would want to partner with facebook – it’s so ubiquitous. What branding and marketing professional wouldn’t want influencers to self select to be a fan of their product, sharing this information with their entire friend network, just like they have for a government office, a type of food, or an actor?

It will be interesting to see how this continues to play out, and how companies will evolve in promoting their brands and products on facebook. So far, my friends at Involver have told me they’ve had the most success with their integrated facebook fan page platform through exclusive offers and valuable coupons.

Julie Supan, the senior director of marketing at youtube came and spoke at the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford last Thursday. It was a great discussion and interesting to hear her insights and experience about video, social media, and the tech industry.

Although she wouldn’t give us an exact ratio, she repeated a few times that far more people consume that create video on youtube. One challenge she said many companies continue to face is how to entice people – especially influencers – to create videos. She argued the goal should be to get people to collaborate, not create. She referenced a campaign launched by 1-800-Flowers that attempted to solicit user generated video that failed miserably as a career ender for the creative director. Her big insight was that clever, authentic, and entertaining content is key, and that literal doesn’t always translate. Implied messages often work better, and before embarking on creating anything, it’s important to think about goals. Who is your audience, and are you committed to engaging them? Leave the viewer wanting more, and keep in mind that word of mouth is still the most powerful and underrated distribution channel. At the end of the day, this is what most companies are trying to tap into.

Continuity and releasing videos incrementally are important, but repetition is key. I have seen the importance of repetition in our fundraising videos and messaging. It’s important to keep the story moving, and keep promoting the target behavior, even after “it” has “launched”. Spend time thinking about how your video will move through the entire ecosystem of your world, but more importantly, the world of your target audience. Tap into the zeitgeist and collective conscious. Remember that people seek fame.

Julie concluded by giving us some insight about the future of youtube – channel expansion and curator status are currently the big goals for the company.

We launched our first big email of Stanford’s class of 2009 Senior Gift Campaign late Thursday morning. This video, created by the boys over at Songline Media, is the best one I’ve used in my five year professional fundraising career. We used Involver’s player, embedded on our main page that is hosted on the Stanford server.

We sent a total of ~1,600 emails to current seniors. 81 had already donated and 1,498 had not. 47% of donors (38 seniors) and 46% of non-donors (689 seniors) opened the email.

Of those that opened the email, 3 donors (4%) and 235 non-donors (34%) clicked the jpeg image to start watching the video that was hosted on our main Senior Gift website. A total of 34 (14%) of seniors that watched the video ended up clicking the give now button and making a gift to the campaign, all in less than 4 days.