Foundational to their approach are the 10 Core Values. Take some time on your own to dive into them, but today I wanted to touch on #1: Deliver Wow Through Service.

Service seems to be a dying art in America. I can remember my first job in high school working for The Finish Line. At the time, they had less than 50 stores and the four original founders were still actively involved. I can remember being intimidated that one of them came to the store for a visit. That day, he helped me unload a truck full of shoes. I was terrified! But, I learned he was a terrific guy and that listening to him would teach me a lot.  The Finish Line stressed product knowledge and excellent customer service back then.

Today, I rarely see the type of service they preached in retail stores (sadly, even at the Finish Line). Zappos is different! Much different. So different, they shouldn’t even call it customer service. Calling Zappos is like calling a good friend for a quick favor. There is a peacful, playful, interchange that makes you forget your handling a transaction. And that’s the magic!

Here is how they describe delivering Wow:

WOW is such a short, simple word, but it really encompasses a lot of things. To WOW, you must differentiate yourself, which means doing something a little unconventional and innovative. You must do something that’s above and beyond what’s expected. And whatever you do must have an emotional impact on the receiver. We are not an average company, our service is not average, and we don’t want our people to be average. We expect every employee to deliver WOW.

Insert nonprofit for company and either donor, client, or volunteer for customer.  Are you delivering Wow to your stakeholders? How would it transform your organization? How would it reenergize your career, your team, your organization?   How much more fun would work be?

Please share your feedback on Delivering Wow.

Thanks for taking the Trolley.

Indy Media School offers small class sizes for more personal attention. Learn from the same team that brings you Blue Trolley Press!

The pot of charitable dollars that the U.S. population is willing to contribute annually is rapidly approaching its threshold, which means that either charities need to redefine what a successful year means – where growth from one year to the next might not be possible – or larger organizations may need to begin to consider acquiring or absorbing smaller organizations of similar mission to eliminate the competition for charitable dollars. At the very least small organizations will soon need to band together to leverage the “strength in numbers” approach, in order to manage an ever-increasing cost to market to their donors. If not just for the benefit of the industry, for the good of the donors across the United States who are being flooded with donation requests.  ~Stephen Ferrando, Donor Power Blog, Feb 3, 2010

Happy April Fools Day!

Some of the key findings include:

•77% knew that they could donate via texting to support Haiti relief work
•17% of Gen Y & 14% of Gen X donated to Haiti via texting
•3% of both Boomer and Mature donated via texting
•36% of all respondents would consider texting a donation after a crisis
•31% would text a donation if a friend was raising money for a charity

One of the drawbacks of mobile giving is the lag time from donation to recieving the funds. Nonprofits can expect up to a 90 day delay to recieve the donation. For disaster relief, that can be a big problem. Expect to see creative solutions over the next 6-12 months to reduce the wait time.

Once your event is created, the real fun begins. You can leverage social media sites like Facebook and Twitter to promote your event and send emails to prospective attendees. All of these features are available via their easy to use dashboard (screen shot).

You can use PayPal or Google Checkout to process payments, create waiting lists, and even generate name badges and check-in lists.  They even have a feature to reserve a spot for people who would rather pay at the door! It’s an event planner’s dream!

If your nonprofit has used Eventbrite, please tell us about your experience.

The competition is sponsored by the Case Foundation and Parade magazine and it launches October 7th.

Nonprofits can compete for awards of up to $50,000.  More details can be found on the Case Foundation Blog and in the October 11th issue of Parade. 

Causes Exchange has provided several useful tips to help nonprofits be more competitive:

Visit Causes Exchange for their complete list of tips for successful Giving Challenge campaign.

We’ll blog about it, forward it to our Nonprofit Boards and Executive Directors and hope that this is the time they listen. Sometimes it takes an outsider with the marketing chops and the publishing pedigree for the top decision makers to listen.

YouTube is an inexpensive way to leverage the power of video to reach your audience. Not sure where to start? If you are new to YouTube, watch this video to learn some of the basics. If your nonprofit is already using YouTube, send us a note and we will post your video to Blue Trolley Press.

Particularly useful is a “Twictionary” that helps you understand the language of twitter and “10 Twitter Tips to Increase Online Donations.” You will want to share this free download with your development staff and board. For those who are skeptical about how Twitter can help your organization, Twitter Jump Start will win them over!

So here are three easy things to keep in mind when you are planning and designing your next research report.

1. Make your research usable, and re-usable. Choosing a restrictive copyright can discourage readers from sharing or using your information – even for a good cause. An easy way to apply non-restrictive but legitimate copyrights to a document is using Creative Commons.

2. Leave Them Asking for More. The research abstract can be a great way to generate further interest in the entire body of work, but really it should tell a journalist on deadline everything they need to know. So, distill valuable information, make the abstract comprehensive and quotable, but don’t just copy and paste the executive summary.

3. Get the facts out there. Once your report is released, go through it and extract short phrases, quotes, and statistics that can easily be shared online. Micro-blogging (sending brief text updates) has become an increasingly important skill and tool for organizations that wish to keep constituents informed. Lastly, always make sure you include a direct link to your report listing page or .pdf – nothing worse than not finding the source of good information!

By Luise Barnikel, IssueLab

We’ve started the page off with a Twitter theme.  Three white papers and your choice of Tweet Deck or Twirl as free downloads to manage your nonprofit’s Twitter account more effectively.

Blog World Expo 2009 will take place in Las Vegas October 15-17. On the 15th, the Social Media Business Summit will take place.  We had hoped to give you the speaker lineup before the early bird registration deadline, but as yet they haven’t released it. I know that’s been frustrating for some of you that were waiting for the schedule to make the decision on whether you would go.

We will keep an eye out for any special discounts that might pop up via a particular sponsor/vendor. And, we will post the schedule as soon as it is available. In the meantime, if you can afford it, we recommend this conference for any nonprofit that wants to elevate the quality of their blogging strategy.

When I was a kid, friends were the other kids you hung out with, playing homerun derby in the street, building forts in the woods, facing off on Nintendo and just chilling during recess. I knew my friends’ faces, physical attributes, and mannerisms because I spent hours with them every week, if not every day.

When I was a kid, I watched some of my classmates who had many followers, those other classmates (and me) who literally followed others around, walking down the hall after them, sitting near them for lunch, playing with them during recess, hanging on their every word as the spouted their knowledge to anyone who would listen.

When I was a kid, having friends and followers (or being a friend and a follower) took time, and presence. Today it is oh so different.

Today, when you say the word “friend,” I would venture that a majority of the under-50 crowd would immediately first think of Facebook where you and I can be linked with hundreds (up to 5,000) “friends” who can follow each other through the computer. For many of these “friends,” the only picture they have of you is not the one they see in your presence, but the photo you’ve displayed on your Facebook page.

And the word, “follower” immediately conjures up Twitter where you must sign up to be a Twitterer’s follower in order to read the daily or hourly machinations of the Twitterer which is many cases is nothing more than the what you would have casually said to each other while playing on the playground or passing each other in the grocery store. Ashton Kutcher is on a race to beat CNN to be the first on Twitter to have one million “followers.”

Why is this good news for you as a nonprofit major gifts officer? Because you no longer have to be physically present with all of your donors and prospects. Certainly, being literally in front of your donors and prospects is likely going to have better returns and should still be your goal as much as is possible. But we no longer define “personal” contact as that contact which happens in person or over the phone. Today, “personal” is as much defined as being a “friend” on Facebook or a “follower” on Twitter. The advantage there is that whatever you do on your own Facebook site or Twitter account, you do for all your connected donors and prospects simultaneously.

Many have bemoaned the new definition of “personal,” but regardless of our concern for such a definition in the course of how we experience and relate to each other from an anthropomorphic or psychological sense, the new definitions could help you in your personal connection to donors and prospects. Imagine the look on your boss’s face when your monthly statistics for “Personal Contacts” with donors go from 66 one month to 512 the next…and it’s only a matter of time when nonprofits will begin tracking friend and follower statistics for their major gifts officers, AND income that comes from those two channels.

While no one can guarantee that using Facebook and Twitter will work for major gift officers, one thing is certain, your donors are alive and well on both platforms. Big business and small business alike are spending a lot of time and energy in doing the Facebook and Twitter thing right. And nonprofits are doing the same. Is yours?

“Through this valuation, we hope to help all nonprofits better understand how to protect and evolve their brands to generate as much revenue as possible. Valuing brands gives organizations a license to demonstrate to companies and other partners that there is an established and justified cost to aligning with nonprofits.”

The report also includes a variety of good information about enhancing your nonprofit brand and a breakdown by sector.  If your organization is not on the list, spend some time studying how the top 10 manage their brand and online presence.

Purchasing a unique URL for your event costs less than 10 bucks -it won’t break your budget. With a simple WordPress based site, you can create an inexpensive place to host your event. Consider a solution like eTapestry to take registrations or ChipIn to encourage individuals to raise money for your cause.

So why go through the trouble?  Here are 3 good reasons to create a page.

1) It provides another opportunity for people to find you on the web. You use multiple types of fundraising techniques, right? (direct mail, special events, planned giving) Why wouldn’t you apply the same concept to your online fundraising master plan?

2) It allows you to step outside your agency’s normal look and feel to create some excitement. Check out this example from the Salvation Army in Indianapolis. Here is their main page. Here is a special event page for the WIBC Radiothon.  Notice the difference in graphics, tone, attitude.

3) You get to show off your sponsors, create value for them, and strengthen that relationship.  The Salvation Army Indianapolis hosts event pages for 2 of their media partners: WIBC radio and WISH-TV.  The media partners are happy because they have one less thing to worry about. The sponsors are happy because they get more focused promotion.  Of course, both the media partners and the nonprofit are linking to the event website from their main pages.

These pages always manage to pay for themselves and the extra value keeps your partners happy.  If you have a good example of a specific event page please post a link in the comment section below.

For quite a while, I’ve viewed the newspaper business as dead. Turns out, it was only “mostly dead.” Check out this blog post from Chris Anderson (Author of the Long Tail). Some good food for thought when considering your marketing mix.

The problem started when Yahoo formed an agreement with Rivals.com to place college football and basketball content on Yahoo’s team pages.  It’s an interesting marriage because one company has created a subscriber based business model (Rivals) and the other thrives on providing free content supported by ads and up selling users various services and tools (Yahoo).  Unfortunately, Yahoo chose to rss feed the subscription content to its own pages.

Why does it matter? Imagine reading an interesting headline on your favorite college page on Yahoo. You click the link (which isn’t marked as premium content) and you get two more sentences and a sales pitch to read the rest of the article. Now, your ticked. Yahoo has wasted your time. You’ve been conditioned by Yahoo to expect to read articles for free. And now you’re mad at Yahoo and Rivals.  Do this enough times, and you find one of the many other sports news outlets.

The lesson in this is that Yahoo spent years training visitors to accept a particular model: Read our stories for free, put up with a few ads in the margin. Any partnership that disrupts this model costs readers. For nonprofits, it is a reminder that we can’t force donors to interact with us in a way that’s contrary to their conditioned expectations. They might not come back.

So, how do you get quality people at a discount?  First, if you’ve never read the book Moneyball by Michael Lewis, I recommend starting there. It follows the Oakland A’s baseball team as Lewis tries to answer the question: How does a team with half the payroll of the New York Yankees seem to field a competitive team year after year?

The lessons learned in the book apply to staffing your development team. Don’t have time to read the book? Here are some tips I’ve used.

1) Learn to spot inefficiencies in the way talent is evaluated.

Example: The obvious answer to how are we going to fill the open grant writing position is to hire the candidate with the most grant writing experience/success. I recently did the exact opposite! Of the final three candidates, I chose the one who had only marginal grant writing experience. What she did have was a vast array of experience that could easily have her filling a variety of roles in our department. The other candidates had much more grant writing experience, but that’s ALL they had. Plus, I knew she could write, she just needed some coaching. Now, I have an excellent grant writer who can do just about any job in our department (even mine!).

2) Learn to get talent at a discount.

Example: When A-Rod gets sick of playing in New York, he might just take less money to play in Minnesota. The same applies to recruiting staff. Keep your eye on people at other organizations who aren’t happy in their current positions and whose life goals align with your organization’s mission. This isn’t about paying somebody less than their worth. That’s not the mindset to have. It’s about being able to offer someone a position within your organization that rewards them in ways that a higher salary can never do.

3) Learn to let staff make mistakes.

Example: I frustrated a lot of staff members last fall at an event because they kept coming to me with issues and I kept sending them to the event coordinator. To some, I was goofing off or not taking my job as boss seriously. What they didn’t know was that our relatively new event coordinator had never put on an event of that scale before. She needed the experience. All of the experience, including issues, problems, and making mistakes. I intentionally removed myself from the decision making that day because I wanted her to grow as a person and an employee. I also know that someday, she would like to run her own event company. I’m not afraid to help her reach that goal, because I know she will work harder for me while she’s here if I help prepare her for what’s next.

The result: sure a few people thought I was a slacker that day. But, my event coordinator emerged with a confidence that has been noticed by many people. Now, she’s creating an event top to bottom and I don’t lose a second’s sleep over it. I know the event will be first class.

You can field a Major League team on a Little League budget. It just takes a different mindset to attract and keep talent.