Jahnke’s Thoughts

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.

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.

I recently wrote a guest blog post for Involver about what I do for a living – fundraising. The gist of this post is essentially that fundraisers need to tell a compelling story to be effective, mail/phone appeals are too costly and do not do a very good job at this, and that a combination of video and email is where fundraising professionals should be focusing their time and effort in order to inspire and educate donors. The Stanford Young Alumni and student campaigns I manage are going to be testing out some of the things we learned from previous campaigns over the next couple of months, and I’m very excited to see the results.