DotOrgPower

Asking Still Matters: Creating a Culture of Asking and a Giving Revolution

My friend and colleague Andrea Kihlstedt is our first guest thought leader. Andrea is the cofounder of the brilliant site Asking Matters and the author of Capital Campaigns, Strategies that Work (Jones & Bartlett) now in its third edition.

Andrea's innovative thinking around using technology to support major/donor fundraising has been an inspiration to me. She has challenged me to see opportunities I absolutely would not have seen. If you are helping a nonprofit raise money (staff, board, friend of, etc.) please read this post and share the post and Asking Matters.

by Andrea Kihlstedt
Cofounder of Asking Matters

It’s easy and fun to give on-line today. Kickstarter, Donors Choose, Kiva and a host of other sites make it a click to give to projects near and far with little muss and no fuss. Many of these sites harness the principles of great fundraising—a goal, a timetable, donor recognition, reporting and great communication. What they lose is the person to person, face to face focus on asking.

Over a long career as a capital campaign fundraising consultant, I’ve worked with dozens of organizations that have quadrupled or quintupled their income from charitable gifts through a campaign. Organizations that raised, for example, $600,000 annually, raised $3,000,000 or more through a campaign.

What is it about these campaigns that makes such a difference? The answer is quite simple. Campaigns create a culture of asking. They set the stage for staff and board members to get out and ask.

With the current crisis of under-funded non-profits, I wondered if we couldn’t harness the power of the internet to get more people out asking. Not just any kind of asking, but face to face, person to person asking. And not just asking anyone. But asking people who have the ability to give, an interest in the organization, and a personal contact with the organization.

So I connected with my former colleague, Brian Saber, one of the best fundraising professionals I know. And together we set about creating a platform to help staff and board members find the will and the courage to get out and ask.

We figure that if we can motivate even one-quarter of the 1,250,000 nonprofit organizations in this country to ask more and ask more effectively, we can help create a giving revolution. And in doing so, we can make a big difference in the world.

Penelope Burke in her 2011 Donor Survey found that 49% of the respondents said that they could have given more to charitable causes. According to the survey “Capturing that elusive next level of philanthropy is the issue, of course.” Brian and I know from experience that the way to capture that elusive next level of giving is through more person to person, asking.

Asking Matters is the result of our work. Asking Matters provides a robust set of materials, some free and some for a fee, to help people learn how to ask in the way that suits them best. Our simple but revolutionary system of Asking Styles (complete with an on-line assessment) sorts people into four categories, Go-Getters, Kindred Spirits, Mission Controllers and Rainmakers, and outlines the ways in which people of each style can approach asking.

Free to everyone are over a hundred short videos of board members, executive directors, development directors and consultants sharing their experiences asking.

In addition to the basic material, members have access to free webinars, a robust knowledge base of material about asking, and a variety of motivational tools.

The platform serves organizations small and large, beginners and experts. It’s a valuable and fully affordable resource. We have small schools and social service organizations and large national organizations using the site to provide a common language of asking to their board, staff and volunteers.

Consultants use the Asking Style system with their clients to get people talking about asking. And development directors use it to find better ways to support the people who are asking in their organization.

We know, of course, that the importance of asking extends far beyond the non-profit community. When we get good at asking, the world opens up to us. So perhaps this is just the first step in making the world a better place.

Find your Asking Style. Are you a Go-Getter? a Kindred Spirit? a Mission Controller? Or a Rainmaker? Take the Asking Style Assessment. Let me know what you think.

Increase the Surface Area of Your Organization - Thoughts from Linkedin's Talent Connect

Twenty-five years ago, just a couple years into my career, the head of the advocacy organization I worked for said to me "build relationships with your young colleagues. They’ll be running the country one day. These organizers, canvassers, beat reporters will be running companies, in congress, and editing the nation’s leading papers.”

At the time it sounded preposterous.  Now, of course, it’s true. Relationships matter and the better job we do of building, sustaining and deepening relationships the more likely we are to succeed at work and life.  

Today, technology enables these professional relationships – our professional networks – to be more helpful and more powerful than ever before (both ways – technology makes it easier for us to assist others, not just for us to be assisted).

Tim O’Reilly (O’Reilly Media) observed on the final day of Linkedin's Talent Connect Conference that each Linkedin connection adds surface area to your network. That’s a VERY helpful way for nonprofit leaders to think about networking.

Cause leaders want to have as much of this kind of “surface area” as possible.  And we want it in as many areas as possible – in the business community, with funders, with elected and government officials, with the media, with academics, in our own area of expertise, outside our expertise, etc. 

This should reinforce for us the importance of building and tending to our own professional network. But even more important it suggests the enormous latent power in the networks of people who care about our cause – our staff, board, volunteer mentors, donors, corporate partners, etc. 

If you are connected to me I increase your surface area as my Linkedin InMap below illustrates. Here’s the fun thing. When I add people to my network I add value to YOUR organization’s network. 

And this is my HUGE TAKE AWAY from Talent Connect...

Everyday millions of people put time and effort into their professional networks on Linkedin. When they do this work they create value.

They connect to someone they met in DC. They reach back to reconnect with a colleague from 25 years ago. They make an introduction to help the career of another. They add to and share their knowledge.  

All of this work is being done, and will continue to be done, without you or your organization spending any time or resources. Yet this represents enormous potential value for your cause. 

This is because hundreds and possibly thousands of the people doing all this work are your organization’s stakeholders. They are your board, staff, volunteers and donors – past and present. 

You can turn this potential value into immediate, real value by simply getting organized and getting connected. You'll immediately increase your surface area. Whether you are trying to recruit great people, share your story, or build access and influence, your increased reach will increase your chance of success. 

There's even passive power in your growing network. Each time someone sees that a trusted colleague is on your board or is connected to your cause you plant a seed. Go plant a lot of seeds. 

If you are trying to change the world, trying to figure out how to leverage digital tools to help you succeed, you are not going to find much lower hanging fruit than this.  Create a culture in your organization of intentional networking and relationship building and go tap the latent value of your existing and future network on Linkedin.

PS - Mobilize your stakeholders to fill out their Volunteer Experience & Causes section of their Linkedin profile. It's good for them and good for you.  This link takes you right to the section on your profile: http://www.linkedin.com/profile/edit-volunteering-combined

Intentional Networking

Every organization can do this - big or small. Figure out the 100 people your organization should have a relationship with but doesn't. Who are the 100 people who will matter to your cause over the next 12 to 24 months.

Engage your staff, board, other key stakeholders to create and prioritize this list.

Then mobilize the people in your organization to find how you are connected to these influentials, collaborate to figure out the best relationship to tap, and pick up the phone. Yes pick up the the phone... have that board member or staff member reach out to schedule coffee or breakfast and use the old-fashioned, high-touch meeting to start that relationship. Or deepen that relationship.

That's intentional networking.

Digital technology supercharges our ability to do this by revealing connections, relationships you otherwise could not see. I'm thinking a lot about this here at Linkedin's Talent Connect conference #intalent because for many organizations Linkedin can be immediately helpful for this kind of intentional networking.

Start now. These folks are going to be around a long time. 

Starting a Conversation Today - Building a Network Tomorrow

Welcome to the launch of our DotOrgPower blog. We are eager to begin this conversation and excited to be doing it from Linkedin's Talent Connect in Las Vegas. 

Our site will be devoted to a conversation about nonprofit web strategy. We'll invite thought leader friends and organizational leaders to share their strategic insights, successes and failures.  

In the coming weeks we'll hear from friends on using technology to support major donor fundraising, using mobile to deliver program and bring in large donors (going beyond micro donations) and how old-school power-mapping can be supercharged by technology. 

This week we are sharing from Linkedin's conference in Las Vegas. We're here because Linkedin represents a huge opportunity for most nonprofit organizations.  We were working with clients to develop Linkedin plans before we heard about their new nonprofit division - the Nonprofit Solutions Group. Through Nonprofit Solutions Linkedin is cutting prices to make the tools affordable, developing tools and best practices and listening closely to the nonprofit community to learn how Linkedin can best serve the sector. 

We'll get into details in the coming days but there are three  major opportunities for nonprofits on Linkedin:

1. Getting the right people - staff, board, core volunteers. Linkedin has powerful tools for finding and attracting the right people - free and paid. The new Volunteer Experience and Causes section of the profile will make these tools even more powerful over time. 

2. Communicating your story and reinforcing a shared vision. By building out, optimizing and unifying organizational pages across your network, you can reach more people and reinforce the story you want to tell. You can work with staff, board, volunteers, alumni and other supporters to include your organization in their profiles and use preferred, shared language. More people connected to the organization means more visibility. It also means the ability to see a lot more connections. 

3. Building a strategic, actionable network. Organizations can use Linkedin to quickly build an actionable network of supporters. Most of you already have connections to key influencers and target decision makers. The relationships are simply unknown (or unknown to the right person at the right time) and are therefore not actionable. Linkedin can reveal these relationships and make them actionable. Once you connect your stakeholders you can mobilize the network to intentionally build your reach and deepen relationships. 

This strategic networking approach can be used for advocacy, major donor research, corporate partnerships, etc. 

Again - more to come. Stay tuned as we share what we are learning here.