National Catholic Development Conference 2010

If you will be attending the National Catholic Development Conference in Chicago, please come and visit with me.  Brian Lacy and Associates will have Booth 322 from Sunday September 19 through Tuesday September 21.  On Monday morning at 9am we will host a roundtable entitlted “Interesting New Ways to Boost Direct Mail Results”.  Can’t make it to conference, but you live in Chicago and work in development, every evening great groups will be going out to dinner to talk about development.  Call me (860-478-9291) or email me (brian@brianlacy.com) if you want to join a dinner group.  I can likely hook you up wth a group interesting in the same aspects of development as you!

Regards,

Brian Lacy

10 Twitter Apps for Nonprofits

Hardly a day goes by where I don’t hear about some new Twitter initiative in the fundraising sector. FromBritt Bravo‘s recent Twitter chat to Roger Craver discussing the reach of Twitter and social media, Twitter’s influence on keeping donors engaged is undeniable.

If your organization isn’t utilizing Twitter to its fullest potential, Heather Mansfield, owner of DIOSA Communications, which specializes in social media and mobile marketing for nonprofits and small business, and keeper of the Nonprofit Tech 2.0 blog, offers 10 Twitter apps for nonprofits “that can also be used to improve website, e-newsletter, blogging and social media campaigns.” Here are the 10 apps she recommends.

1. Bit.ly: Allows users to shorten, share and track URLs. This is a must-use tool, Mansfield writes. “Without tracking how many clicks the links you post on Twitter are receiving, you are Tweeting blindly.”

2. TweetMeme: TweeteMeme ReTweet Buttons encourage the audience to retweet content on Twitter with a click of the button.

3. Favstar.fm: Allows you to see the “most favorited” tweets across Twitter at any given time, Mansfield says, and it also allows you to track your own tweets to see who is favoriting them.

4. Twibbon: Allows followers to embed icons on their Twitter avatars and spread them throughout Twitter.

5. TwitPic: Lets you share photos on Twitter.

6. 12seconds: Allows users to easily record videos and upload them to their 12seconds video channel to post on Twitter.

7. BubbleTweet: Allows users to embed video directly onto their Twitter pages.

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US News and World Report Rankings Adjusted

In the realm of college admissions, today is a day to rejoice—or rant. It all depends on your opinion of college rankings (or, perhaps, your college’s place on U.S. News & World Report’s annual list).

Today the magazine unveiled the 2011 edition of Best Colleges. As you may have heard, some university in Massachusetts topped the list of national universities, and a small college in the same state took the top spot on the list of liberal-arts colleges.

Although some things never change, the ranking methodology does. This year, for the first time, U.S. News included the views of high-school counselors in its measure of “academic reputation,” perhaps the most controversial aspect of the rankings. Previously, the magazine used only an annual “peer assessment” survey of college presidents, provosts, and admissions deans to calculate this measure, which accounted for 25 percent of each college’s overall ranking.

This year, U.S. News lowered the weight for academic reputation to 22.5 percent (for national universities and liberal-arts colleges only). Ratings by nearly 1,800 high-school counselors surveyed accounted for a third of that measure, and ratings by college administrators accounted for two-thirds. In other words, the opinions of college officials carry less weight than they did last year.

Complaints about the peer-assessment survey were among the reasons U.S. News brought counselors into the fold, says Robert J. Morse, the magazine’s director of data research. Over time, participation in the annual survey has declined steadily (this year, 48 percent of college officials who received questionnaires responded, the same as last year). For years, Mr. Morse has said that U.S. News would invite other experts to participate in the rankings, if necessary.

“We went out and searched for people who had a stake in admissions, who had a certain expertise,” Mr. Morse says. “High-school counselors play a big part in college admissions, so we counted their votes.”

The significance of this change may be more symbolic than substantial. Sure, the power of the peer-assessment survey, long loathed by some college officials and high-school counselors, has been diluted. Nevertheless, reputation—that slippery and subjective thing—still matters a lot in the U.S. News formula. The mix of reputational experts has just become more diverse.

“The concerns people have about rankings will not be assuaged by giving high-school counselors a voice in them,” says James W. Jump, director of guidance at St. Christopher’s School, in Richmond, Va., and the departing president of the National Association for College Admission Counseling. “The idea that No. 9 is better than No. 20 concerns me. Ranking simplifies what should be a complex process.”

In other changes this year, U.S. News raised the weight of the “predicted graduation rate” to 7.5 percent, from 5 percent, of a college’s overall ranking. The magazine also expanded the number of institutions ranked in each category, and it changed the names of two categories (“Universities-Master’s” and “Baccalaureate Colleges”) that had puzzled readers.

U.S. News considered at least one change that it did not make. In June, Mr. Morse wrote on his blog that he and his colleagues might add “yield” (the percentage of admitted applicants who enroll) back into the rankings. In 2003, the magazine’s editors removed the measure from its formula amid criticisms that the rankings had driven colleges to become obsessed with yield. Never mind that colleges have long had plenty of other reasons to fret about yield, or that yield accounted for only 1.5 percent of a college’s ranking by U.S. News.

“In the end,” Mr. Morse says, “we didn’t want the discussion of yield to take away from the other changes we were making.”

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International and Aborignal Student Key to Canada’s Future

Academic Ranking of World Universities – 2010

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Where Do Online Donors Go Once You’ve Got Them?

As part of our recent benchmarking at Pareto Fundraising, we were asked to look at the subsequent behaviour of new onetime cash recruits. In other words, looking at donors that are recruited online, where do they go once on board? What about direct mail donors? Do they follow the same stream or veer off into other vehicles?

Here’s what we found

Direct mail recruits tended to keep doing what they did originally. Ninety per cent subsequently kept giving through the mail. No surprises there.

The same mostly rang true for telephone recruits, 85 per cent continuing to give via the phone and almost 15 per cent through the mail.

For online recruits, there are slightly more varying (and perhaps surprising) results. Around 75 per cent continued giving through the method of recruitment, around 15 per cent then gave through the mail, and the remainder through a combination of other channels.

What’s the upshot of this?

Whilst some of this may appear on face value a little startling, all is not what it seems at first. In other words, the reason a large chunk of online-recruited donors moved across to donate offline does not necessarily indicate too much about their giving behavior.

It tells us more about their giving requests and cultivation. Many of our charities have much more sophisticated and coherent offline fundraising streams. Therefore, if the numbers are small, we tend to include donors in the bucket that allows the most flexibility, largest volumes, and has the most frequent communications.

And often that’s the mail.

I’m not suggesting it isn’t noteworthy – it dispels somewhat the myth that online recruits won’t give offline, but contextually I think it says more about programs than behavior.

So what should you do?

Test. If you have, or are planning to recruit, a significant stream of donors from one particular channel (let’s take online for a moment), then you need to be looking at how best that group responds when treated in different ways.

As suggested above, it appears that the behavior of various groups is dictated by our treatment – in other words, what we send them and how we send it.

At the moment we’re undertaking a head-to-head split test looking at whether a group of online recruited donors responds better to an online solicitation (in this case a survey) than to an offline (mail) solicitation (again, a survey).

We want to find the optimum way to treat this group. Initially we want to determine, with a survey ask that includes a cash request, what generates the best overall net return. Down the track we’ll measure the optimum suite of communications for this constituency, which could actually be a mixture of offline and online pieces.

Regardless of method of recruitment, always look for the best way to move onetime cash donors across to monthly giving. Monthly giving for our clients grew 9% in 2009, at the height of the recession.

Always look deeper. The data shared above could easily be misunderstood. It certainly wasn’t suggesting that online donors are necessarily ripe to move offline.

Remember that the decisions we make have more impact than environmental factors outside our control.

By:  Jonathon Grapsas

“This copywright article originally appeared in Canadian Fundraising & Philanthropy, www.canadianfundraiser.com, and is reproduced with permission.”

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15 Donor Data Security and Privacy Questions

In today’s online-obsessed world, data security is a major concern for donors and consumers alike. It’s vital for nonprofit organizations to gather and store as much information as they possibly can to engage donors and prospective donors and ultimately to get them to give. 

But in order for donors to provide that information, they must trust that your organization will use it appropriately — and that their data is safe and secure and their privacy is not violated. One slip-up or security breech and all credibility for your organization is lost. 

How can your organization ensure data security and donor privacy? In the Association of Fundraising Professionals‘ book “Internet Management for Nonprofits: Strategies, Tools & Trade Secrets,” authorsTed Hart, Steve MacLaughlin, James M. Greenfield and Philip H. Geier Jr. provide 15 questions to consider regarding donor data security in chapter 16, “12 Steps to Protect Your Organization and Donors from Fraud and Identity Theft” (Page 347):

1. Do your service providers have valid PCI DSS  and PA-DSS  certificates that are required today to process credit card transactions through payment applications?

2. Do all of your third-party suppliers and vendors that handle credit card transactions for you have valid PCI DSS or PA-DSS certificates?

3. How do you protect your donor’s confidential data in your organization?

4. Are your organization’s databases that store, transmit or process cardholder data encrypted to PCI DSS standards?

5. Who in your organization has access to sensitive donor information and cardholder data?

6. Is all cardholder data locked up, or is it left out so that unauthorized staff has access?

7. Do all people handling cardholder data have criminal and credit checks done as part of your hiring practices?

8. Is cardholder data processed, stored or transmitted on or between computers in your office or from call-center staff without proper encryption?

9. If cardholder data is stored, does it need to be?

10. How is cardholder data handled when collected by phone or in the field?

11. In times of disaster-relief campaigns, how is cardholder data transported between offices or collection offices?

12. How long do you store cardholder data?

13. Are your website and other applications coded to the security standards of the Open Web Application Security Project ?

14. Do you have written security policies outlining procedures and processes?

15. Do you provide security education for all staff and volunteers?

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