Jahnke’s Thoughts

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.

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.

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.