Posted in community, consumer engagement, customer engagement, donor engagement, follower, marketing, social network on Aug 17th, 2010
I just got back from a short vacation house boating with my fraternity brothers. Had you asked any one of us 30 years ago if we could envision ourselves as old, fat, bald guys who float around together in a doublewide on a barge, you would have gotten a lot of laughs. Yet, we are [...]
Posted in donor, donor engagement, economic recession, fundraising, investment, lifecycle, marketing, marketing budget, non profit, nonprofit on Aug 3rd, 2010
While meeting with a client the other day the conversation turned to their growth plans. The client softly explained that their growth plans were pretty conservative considering the economy and how much their board of directors enjoyed their dividend checks. We both chuckled knowing that growth needs to be funded by profit and would cut [...]
Posted in banking, branding, community, consumer engagement, consumer perception, customer engagement, customer interaction, donor engagement, follower, fundraising, leader, marketing, network, social marketing, social network, spur communications on Jul 29th, 2010
I used to skydive. If you haven’t tried it, I recommend it. It’s fun. So when my son told me he and his friends were going skydiving I was O.K. with it. I checked out the airport and club behind his back just to make sure it was fine. After all I am his dad. [...]
Posted in donor, donor engagement, fundraising, individualized marketing, network, non profit, nonprofit, personalized marketing, social branding, social marketing, social media, social network on Jul 28th, 2010
I get asked this question a lot. When I talk with a community benefit organization about their marketing for fundraising, probably 4 out of 10 times I’m asked whether everything they send out should include a fundraising ask. In my opinion, the answer is quite simple — no.
Your donors and prospects are valuable but different [...]
Posted in banking, community, consumer engagement, consumer perception, customer engagement, customer interaction, donor engagement, financial services, follower, fundraising, individualized marketing, investment, lifecycle, marketing, network, non profit, personalized marketing, social marketing, social media, social network, twitter on Jul 27th, 2010
Frontline associates are often the most frequent point of human contact provided by an organization. I’m talking about folks like the teller at your bank and the undergrad working the alumni association telethon. They’re the tip of the spear, yet they are also among the least empowered in the organization. Their roles are viewed as [...]
Posted in branding, community, consumer behavior, consumer engagement, consumer perception, customer engagement, customer interaction, donor engagement, marketing, transformation on Jun 29th, 2010
There is a major intersection that a friend of mine cannot drive through. It isn’t blocked or under construction. There’s nothing technically wrong with the intersection. It is simply that 3 out of 4 of the corners have businesses with horrible logos on their signs. He’s not a design snob. The 3 bad logos are [...]
Posted in community, consumer behavior, consumer engagement, customer engagement, customer interaction, donor engagement, follower, leader, marketing, marketing innovation, social marketing on Jun 20th, 2010
There are three big questions that drive a lot of human behavior — what, how and why. Finding answers to them is key to most of your personal and business life. Since much of the world outside of the U.S. understands soccer to be a metaphor for life, I thought I would look at these [...]
Posted in branding, community, consumer behavior, consumer engagement, consumer perception, customer engagement, donor engagement, leader, marketing, network, social branding, social marketing, social media, social network on Jun 15th, 2010
Do you know your strengths and weaknesses? It seems like a simple enough question — pretty straightforward. We all know where we excel and where we come up short. Don’t we? Of course most of us can make at least a short list of a few things we do well, but we tend to dwell [...]
Posted in donor, donor engagement, economic recession, fundraising, marketing, marketing budget, network, non profit, nonprofit on Apr 27th, 2010
Over the last several years the economy has taken an alarming toll on the community benefit sector. For many organizations and foundations income is down 20% to 40% and sometimes more. No business can contract that much without suffering tremendous pain. While the markets have shown signs of rebounding over the last several weeks, other [...]
Posted in SPURspectives, community, consumer engagement, consumer perception, customer engagement, customer interaction, donor engagement, follower, individualized marketing, marketing, network, social branding, social marketing, social media, social network, spur communications on Apr 6th, 2010
Webinars are now a publishing mainstay. There are plenty of top 10 lists on the mechanics of hosting a webinar. This post isn’t about the mechanics it’s about quality. Why quality? Because supply and demand have long since caught up with the ubiquity of webinars and now we have choices. There are enough high quality [...]
