Happy Ninth Birthday Event 360!

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A quick post to share that today is an important day in our E360 family. Yesterday was Event 360’s ninth birthday, meaning that today is the first day of our tenth year. 

If you put your future on the flip of a coin you’d still get much better odds than if you banked on your company surviving into its tenth year. Fewer than one-third make it that far.

The fact that we’ve turned nine and are ending one of our busiest, most exciting, and most successful years – with a growing number of exciting projects, in the most difficult economy of the last three generations – says volumes about the vision, values, and commitment of our team. I’m continually amazed at what a great group of people we have here.  

Together with our clients and partners, we’re building an exciting future. Our mission continues to be simple: We help nonprofits use experiences to create a better world. There’s a lot of need out there, but we’re helping to make a difference.

And the best is yet to come. Onwards and upwards!

Galaxy Explorer

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Here’s a quick Thanksgiving post. When I was 7 or 8 years old, the one toy I wanted more than any other was the LEGO Galaxy Explorer. I could go on and on about it, but suffice it to say I hounded my parents for months and months and I simply tortured my poor sister with my pleading and begging. This was all way back, when Christmas was still a mystery, and gifts were few and far between, and winter meant staying home with the people I thought I’d always be with, my family.

Santa in the form of a loving Mom and Dad sought fit to place the Explorer under the tree that year, and I played with it for years. I still remember laying all the pieces on our blue shag carpet Christmas morning, putting it together for the first time with my Dad and Uncle Rich. I put it together and dismantled it and augmented it and blew it up and reconstructed it dozens, or probably hundreds, of times after that. I couldn’t count how many times the Galaxy Explorer crew and I saved the Universe.

As I grew older I lost or gave away or broke most of my toys, and I got involved in things that seemed cooler and more mature. But I knew enough to save the Galaxy Explorer — and my mother, bless her heart, never got rid of it. When my parents died I was touched and excited and oddly heartbroken to find the box lovingly stored away. 

This morning I pulled out the box and put it together with my two oldest sons. I’m not sure that this makes any sense to anyone except me — but the whole thing encapsulates everything I’m thankful for this year.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.  

Falling for Instagram

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I spent the better part of two hours last night playing around with Instagram, the photo sharing app for iPhone. I’m well past late to this party — the app is only a year old but there are already over 10 million users (and counting fast). Still, there have to be others like me who have become more and more overwhelmed with social networking and so haven’t had time to discover this wonderful little program.

Facebook is now a way of life; it is quickly becoming a work tool as well as a personal communication standard. Sadly, I’m guessing I’m not alone when I say that I Facebook (verb) with people I talk to everyday!

Twitter is also pretty much obligatory. I’ve found Twitter more and more useful for sharing articles, deciding what to read, and keeping in touch at conferences and meetings.

Add in Yahoo Messenger and Yammer at work, and Ping at home, as well as Google Reader and Google+ (still trying to figure that one out) and — oh yeah! — email, and I have so much social networking that I don’t have time to be social. What do I need Instagram for?

I’m not sure what exactly moved me to download it today, but as soon as I did, I was hooked. I was hooked on the filters — it will make even an all-thumbs photographer like me seem half-decent. But I was more hooked on the feed. Instagram allows you to share pictures with friends and subscribe to their pictures in return. What you get is an ongoing narrative like Facebook or Twitter, but aside from a few captions it is entirely visual. And the fact that Instagram only runs on an iPhone adds a nice creative constraint. You don’t spend a lot of time fretting and editing — you just shoot something and share it.

There’s a huge emotional element that only this kind of image-based dialogue can convey. Why not use it to showcase the people who work to create a better world at your organization (with their permission, of course)? You could create a year-long exhibit of your World-Changers. Or better yet, share pictures and stories of the people you serve. Or, you could share a series of pictures about what the world will look like when you achieve your mission. Or showcase what it would look like without you here to provide your services.

In a time when we have an abundance of tools at our disposal, Instagram captured my imagination more than most. Worth putting to good use for your good cause.

 

A problem of the heart

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Allison Fine, one of a dozen or so excellent nonprofit experts I follow regularly, posted an article yesterday asking why it is that giving has been essentially flat for 40 years at 2% of GDP. The occasion of her post was the publication by Blackbaud of a whitepaper entitled Growing Philanthropy. It is a meaty report, with 32 recommendations for nonprofits about how to increase overall giving. There is a lot of substance there, and yet I fear its size will inspire more people put it on their “I should read this” pile than actually read it.

It is also rather academic, and as such while I think it adds to the dialogue I’m not sure it describes the whole solution, or even identifies the entire problem. The problem cannot just be solved with best practices and organizational efficiency. We need passionate calls to action to the many who are not yet involved, and passionate encouragement for further engagement to those that already are.

Taking a step back for a moment, the concept that giving is consistent as a percentage of GDP is a Big Idea in capital letters. Once you get your head around it, you realize you have found one of the core dynamics shaping the entire nonprofit system. It is surprising not only for its 40-year consistency, but more notably for the fact that most nonprofit leaders seem to be completely unaware of it. I am constantly struck but how few nonprofit executives, development professionals, and marketers will acknowledge that giving is pegged to GDP. The few who do know seem to think (or hope) that their own organizations exist outside of this reality. 

Giving USA has been tracking this for years and years. About five years ago – prior to banking explosions but well into early signs of recession – I wrote several position papers on this topic for our clients at Event 360. If giving is constant as a percentage of GDP, it stands to reason that dollar giving will go up in times of growth – and unfortunately, will decline in times of recession. That is exactly what happened, of course; but even organizations which saw the recession coming were unprepared for the drop in giving. 

The more pressing question, as Allison points out, is not “does the dynamic exist” but “why does it exist, and how can we change it?” My own experience with very large peer-to-peer programs has probably colored my view – but I will say that we consistently find it is easier to get people who are already giving to give more than it is to get people who haven’t done anything to make the first gift. My sense is that this same truism operates at a system-wide level in the whole nonprofit space. 

More to the point, after twenty years in the space I’m not sure that we’ve gotten any better at getting the large numbers of people who do not donate a thing to get involved. And before I go further: My last sentence references another Big Idea that those of us who live and breathe charity tend to forget. We are surrounded by giving and so we forget that large numbers of people do not give at all. A Harris Interactive poll conducted late last year found that only 12% of people admit to not giving at all. Well, that doesn’t sound so bad! But ominously, the same poll found that only about a quarter of people felt “some responsibility to improve the world they live in.” Wow. (Further, we tend to forget that of individuals who do give, over a third of that giving come from and goes to religious organizations – the only organizations I’ve run across which have integrated a recurring, weekly, in-person, experiential ask into their mission. They ask in the pews, every Sunday.)

In any case, my point is that I think we’ve gotten a lot better at activating those who are charitable, but not any better at inspiring new charitableness. When one-quarter is literally carrying the weight of the world, we’ve got a big challenge on our hands. Improving effectiveness with social media, making better investment decisions, providing better training, and sharing workable solutions are all important. But this is a problem of the heart as much as the head. We need to make giving more accessible and less tedious, and as amazing as it may sound, we need to do more to not only emphasize this cause or that but to convey the obligation, transcendence, and joy of giving itself.

The Business of Multiplication

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It is fairly presumptuous of me to assume I have anything to add to the vast number of poignant 9/11 commentaries you’ve probably seen this weekend. But I do think I have something to add about my favorite topic, which is why the the world needs you and the work you do.

As I’ve listened, watched, and read a variety of 9/11 tributes today, I’ve been struck by how each person’s experience of that day is so similar and yet so particular. We each experienced the grief, and fear, and confusion. But we each experienced it in our own way. The person who sat on the phone trying to reach a loved one. The person who drove crosstown to help. The person who enlisted. The person who watched dusted figures walk by. The person who gave out free food and water. The same streak of light through fifty million prisms.

My memories, like yours, are likely special only to me. My uniqueness involves the impending birth of my son Matthew. He had his dad’s love of drama even then, already ten days overdue. Waiting to make an entrance. That morning found me at home in Los Angeles getting ready to take Jeanie to the hospital. She was to be induced. As we woke to pack the bags for the hospital, we turned on the television and our lives changed in the same way yours did. In the ways everyone’s did.

The morning was a flurry of phone calls. Calls with family, and friends, and of course, the family and friends I worked with — many of whom I still work with ten years later. Did Murph stay overnight or did he go direct? Did anyone know what freaking flight he was on? Was Conigs downtown? Can anyone reach her? Was the team from Canada accounted for?

When Jeanie and I finally made it to the hospital, we looked at our O.B. and said simply, “We are not inducing today. We will not have our son born today.”

And yet, the most troubling and redemptive characteristic of life is its imminence. It won’t wait. Life is always just about to be. And so on the 12th we were back at the hospital, unable to exert any more influence on Matthew’s timing. We sat and watched CNN and wondered, at least a bit, what kind of parents we were to be if we were selfish enough to bring a child into a world like this.

And you know the rest, or at least your part of it. It is not historical self-indulgence to assert that the last ten years have been fundamentally different than those that came before. We have seen, in a real way, a decade of division. Towers split in half. Families torn apart. A world brought briefly together, and then too, a world splintered.

We became used to separating things. Our shoes and belts at the airport. Our loved ones sent to other places. Our inward thoughts from our spoken opinions. It became a decade of divisions in geopolitics, and then domestic politics, and then in business and economics too, as the math we learned years earlier seemed to stop working. The reds and the blues; the right and the left. More disturbingly, the haves and the have-nots. The us and the them.

There are many groups of people, many talented and dedicated groups of people, working to overcome these divisions. And despite my penchant for cynicism, I have immense respect and gratitude for the women and men of the military, the political community, and the government. I think by and large they are doing their best to solve the vast array of problems that a decade of division has laid at the doorstep.

Yet these people can only do so much. There is only so much that can be accomplished when the prime directive is to stop the loss. “Minimize the damage” can only take us so far. At some point, the momentum has to be reversed.

That’s where you come in. You may not recognize it, but you are in the business of multiplication.

In event fundraising, the multiplication works in a mathematical way I can prove: One participant brings 50 or 60 donors. It is in datasets; I can see how it works.

But the multiplication is more powerful than that. I have seen it in the way one walker brings five family members to cheer her on. In the way laughter spreads across a camp. In the way a small email encouragement is passed on to dozens of friends. In the way one shoe raised ripples across a crowd 1,500 times.

Whatever your profession — teacher, attorney, firefighter, bus driver, pilot, consultant — I will bet that when you reflect on the myriad of interactions you have each moment of your day, you will find there is multiplication at the core of what you do. Every single day of every single week.

The most profound reason my last decade has been different than the ten years before it has nothing to do with 9/11 at all — nothing to do with terrorism, or anti-terrorism, or financial collapse, or political discontent. It has to do with a wonderful boy named Matthew. When I look back on how my life has changed, I can say that he changed it more than any of that, in a huge, positive, profound way; that he multiplied my love and care and hope and optimism fifty thousand times more than anything that happened to divide it. Love is the ultimate force multiplier.

We are indeed still at war, and mainly we are at war with ourselves. Are we strong enough to look forward and create a better world? To take the risks and make the commitment to a more powerful future, a future that is the right future to create even though we may not be here to enjoy all of it? To sacrifice ourselves for a cleaner earth, a more tolerant community, a more equitable country, and a more peaceful world?

Answering the questions to create this world will require an abundance of character, and mainly it will take hope, love, and hard work. When I really open my eyes to look at the people around me, I see all three evidenced in dramatic quantities — and it makes me proud of the “what” you do, and excited for the decade of multiplication we together will help to create.

Watching you, I am ready for the next decade. It is onwards and upwards from here.

And finally: Happy birthday to the fourth of my force multipliers, Danny, who turns three this very day. 

How To Choose An Event Fundraising Consultant

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Over my career, I’ve often been asked by potential clients for advice on how to pick the best event fundraising consultant. Initially, the question left me a bit bemused – after all, as the President and CEO of an event fundraising company myself, I could hardly be called an impartial observer! Well, let’s see… um, pick me!

But I have grown to understand the question. As event fundraising programs have become more successful, they have become a more important part of a nonprofit’s fundraising portfolio. This importance means many groups are looking for clearer guideposts. And, with increasing success comes increasing competition – more and more groups are entering the space, and there’s a need for a better roadmap. 

Here are a few suggestions. 

  • Area of Focus. Does the firm focus specifically on event fundraising in the nonprofit space? Many marketing and event production firms occasionally dip their toe into event fundraising. These forays seldom work. Producing concerts, competitive races, or product launches is often impressive and complicated work – but it isn’t event fundraising. Event fundraising is a specific discipline that involves creating an impactful experience to reflect an organization’s mission and coupling it with an effective, directed ask for support. It is one thing to create a fun event to sell a new product that someone may want or need; it is something altogether different to create a moving experience that convinces someone to contribute money out of generosity and empathy. Look for a firm with specific competency and experience in coupling event production with fundraising; this means experience not only in traditional marketing, but also in traditional fundraising practices as well. A good event fundraising firm understands the development pyramid and can speak to issues like donor retention and donor migration.
  • Professional Affiliations and Certifications. Following from the above, a legitimate event fundraising firm will have affiliations to prove it. Is the firm (and its principals) a member of AFP? APRA? The Giving Institute? And, has the staff spent time studying the discipline? Many of our consultants have or are pursuing certifications from the Fundraising School at the Center of Philanthropy at Indiana University. Similarly, we ask our project managers to pursue PMP certifications. 
  • Industry Familiarity. Here’s a quick litmus test: What magazines are sitting on the waiting room coffee table? Do you see the latest issues of The Chronicle of Philanthropy, the Stanford Social Innovation Review, and the Journal of the Nonprofit DMA Foundation? Or do you see AdWeek and Fast Company? There’s nothing wrong with the latter two publications – I read both of them, plus Fortune, the Harvard Business Review, and many others. But I spend a lot of time learning about the nonprofit space.
  • Methodology. Can the consultant tell you how they will approach their work? What is their process, and how is it monitored? What tools and frameworks do they use, and have those been reviewed by peers in a public setting, or are they proprietary? My experience is that there is little in the space that is actually proprietary; almost everything is derivative. I mean that in a good way. The most effective tools, methods, and approaches are adapted and improved from earlier, tested work. Event fundraising, at its core, is fundraising, and there are many proven tools and approaches that have been tested, published, and refined.
  • Fees. As you begin to talk with a firm, do not hesitate to discuss fee structure right up front. In fact, doing so can save you much consternation later. 
    • How much? A good event fundraising firm will be able to tell you a range for their fees, and be willing to refer you to another group if your needs do not match their usual profile (more on that below). 
    • Flat or proportionate? It is against the AFP Code of Ethics, as well as any sense of professional integrity as a fundraiser, to base compensation on a percentage of the amount of money raised. As more firms enter into event fundraising, I’ve noticed that this line is getting blurred. Per capita structures that are based on the number of participants who attend or the number of web hits received are just cloaked percentage structures. It is tempting to believe that such structures “align incentives”; what they really do is give a firm a reason to overcharge you if they simply do their job, and a reason to ignore you if a program doesn’t take off. A real event fundraising firm is going to say, “This is our fee.” It should be a number, period. If you have to break out a calculator to understand the fee, it might be time to end the meeting. 
    • How are participant registration fees treated? Do you get them? Some events, particularly athletic events, charge participants a registration fee in addition to required fundraising. These registration fees are your money, not the consultant’s. Sadly, with the rise of pseudo-charitable events that give a “portion” of their income to charity, this wall is eroding. An event in which you receive a portion of the net and none of the registration income is a cause-marketing relationship, not a fundraising effort. On that note: Accountants differ in what they will allow regarding treatment of these fees. I have seen some count them as donation income, and others that are violently opposed to that accounting treatment and instead treat participant registration fees as an offset to expenses. In either case, registration fees from participants should be part of the nonprofit’s income, not the income of the event fundraising firm. And if you are actually paying for the registration fees yourself… take a closer look. 
    • Are there performance bonuses involved? In some cases, firms will ask for a performance bonus upon attaining some level of achievement. We don’t usually structure our engagements in this way, but it is somewhat common. Such bonuses are not unethical (as long as they aren’t based on percentages), but can be abused. Make sure the performance in question is actually the performance you want to reward.
  • Projections. Once you get further down the road and begin talking about specifics of an event, you may see some registration and income projections. Here are a few things to watch for.
    • Did you pay for the income projections? A good event fundraising firm, like any good fundraising firm, will be very wary of giving you income projections without first being engaged (that is, hired) as part of a defined, focused feasibility effort. Yes, that means a commitment on your part – but it ensures you substantiated, researched work. Be wary of income projections that float into your office free of charge. 
    • Are they intuitively realistic? I’ve seen concept projections that show first-year events generating thousands and thousands of participants. Does that seem right to you? Would you believe it if a major giving firm told you that you could generate thousands of major donors in one year starting from a full stop? A good firm will show a growth rate, and more sophisticated firms like Event 360 will show you sensitivity analysis with a range of outcomes and risks attached to them. Just like direct mail efforts, some programs might take several years to generate net income. If you see big numbers promised and an equally big page of disclaimers in small print, it is time to ask a few more questions. 
    • Does it promise money from nothing? No effort works without capital. While most event fundraising programs become self-funding, they never start that way. How much up-front funding is required? 
  • Intellectual Property. How will intellectual property be treated? A reputable event fundraising firm will likely retain rights to specific models and intellectual frameworks, but will happily tell you, at the outset, that the rest of their work is work for hire and that you will own the event marks, iconography, collateral, and tools. 
  • Expenses. How will expenses be treated? When you get into budget specifics, make sure you bring your finance team into the room. Again, some of these questions are worth asking right at the outset. 
    • Who pays the vendors? There are two models we use in our projects, and the model we use depends entirely on the wishes of each particular client. In one model, we pay vendors directly and submit full documentation for reimbursement; in the second, we manage the relationships but the client’s own accounting group pays vendors directly. Either works, and a good event fundraising firm won’t have any skin in that game. The documentation you receive should be very thorough either way. 
    • What approvals do you have? Regardless of whose logo is on the checks, the nonprofit should have full rights to approve all expenses (above petty cash amounts) before they are incurred. Is the firm willing to grant you contractual rights to this oversight?
    • Are you allowed to use your preferred vendors? There are times when my firm may have a special pricing relationship with a vendor, in which case we would strongly suggest that a client use one vendor over another. But those cases are few and far between. In all things, from catering to marketing services to software, you should have a large say in the decisions and, if you so desire, make sure your event fundraising firm is willing to issue competitive RFPs for the subcontractors it uses. 
  • References. I’ll end with one you probably already know, but is worth repeating – a good event fundraising firm will have many performance references.
    • Are they willing to furnish names of people you can actually speak with? When you do speak with the references, make sure to ask not only about performance but relationship. What was the firm like to work with?
    • Are the references recent? In fundraising, we’re only as good as our last initiative. It is great to get the story of what happened five or ten years ago, but what is the firm doing now?
    • Is the firm willing to tell you what didn’t work? Everyone has failures, and unfortunately in fundraising not all initiatives are successful. Be wary of firms that don’t have any mistakes they can tell you about. Can you speak with clients for whom the firm’s work didn’t pan out? Can the firm’s team tell you what they learned, and how their latest work is different?

I hope this list helps. I’ve been excited to see the growth in the event fundraising space over the last 20 years. There are more participants, donors, and nonprofits interested than ever before, and they are creating some great experiences with the help of event fundraising firms like mine. 

And perhaps that leads to my last piece of advice: There are a number of great event fundraising firms out there, and none of them do everything. I feel strongly that my team at Event 360 is the one of the brightest and most passionate you’ll ever meet. But I also know of – or actually personally know – most of  the other folks in the space, and like Event 360, each of them do some things really well. Jack Hudson at OP-3, Brian Pendleton at CauseForce, Steve Biondolillo of Biondolillo Associates, Billy Starr at Pan-Mass Challenge, Craig Miller at MZA, Dave McGillivray at DMSE Sports – all are great professionals who have made and continue to make a huge impact for nonprofits across the country. 

There is a lot of good advice out there. When you hear someone tell you they are the first, the best, and the only, it might be time to look for a second opinion.  

Incomparable

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Incomparable: It’s a big word. Yet I had two great experiences in Boston last week which both deserve it:

1. A tour through the new Yawkey Center for Cancer Care at Dana-Farber, which houses among other wonderful things an incredible (an incredibly moving) gene wall. It is basically an experiential rendering of their progress in gene therapy. Not-so-great picture to the left. What an incredible institution.

2. While in the city, I met the incomparable Aubrey Barr, who has been running the NYC Marathon as a fundraiser for Memorial Sloan-Kettering for over 20 years and has personally raised over $500,000. Aubrey and I were recently introduced and are doing a presentation together at the Nonprofit DMA Conference in August. It was inspiring to meet with her. 

It’s likely that many of the people I work with every day of my life would be considered “incomparable” to others. Boston was a reminder of that, and I’m grateful. 

The Voice

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After an invigorating but long week of travel, I’m sitting down to watch the most recent episode of The Voice. It’s really hard to describe how much I love this show. 

Slow and Steady

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Some of you know that I occasionally dabble in music — or rather, I constantly dabble in music but only occasionally finish anything I think is worth sharing. It’s been about nine months since I posted anything, but I put something up earlier today.

I’m not sure where I come down on the debate about art, whether it exists in and of itself or if it is only present upon being received by someone else, but it does seem like there’s some imperative to let it out to the world, warts and all. 

So with that, here’s a new song, Freedom II. (There was an original Freedom, and I ended up shelving it. My naming certainly hasn’t gotten any more original.) I don’t claim it to be anything special, but it is mine, and I’m happy to claim it as that. hope you enjoy it.

Watch the game

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It’s Saturday morning, which around our house means a busy morning getting everyone ready and out the door for our weekly soccer mini-marathon/forced march. Does everyone have their soccer shoes? Everyone have a water bottle? What happened to your coat? Did you bring the snack for the second game? Do we need the soccer ball today? Are we ready to go? Wait, what happened to Danny? Who took my keys?

When we get to the field, there’s a similar set of questions and distractions. Yes Ellie, you can go over to the play set. Johnny, did you talk to your coach? Yes, you can have a dollar for a snack. Is Ellie still over there? Did we leave a folding chair in the car? I didn’t think it was going to be this cold. Is that the woman we met at the restaurant the other night? Has anyone seen Ellie? Who took my keys again?

It always surprises me how much sound and fury (albeit at the elementary school level) can accompany three soccer games. And after four hours of constant activity, inevitably I’m driving out of the parking lot thinking, “Did any of the kids win their games?” After all of that, I can probably count the individual plays I can remember on one hand, because I’ve spent three hours running errands, scurrying about, looking the other way, and attending to various distractions.

There’s a somewhat trite and overly obvious event fundraising metaphor here, and since event fundraising is what I do, I’ll go ahead and make it: Oftentimes we spend so much time attending to the details of the event (and for most events, there are hundreds, if not thousands of details) that we lose sight of the fact that the event at its core is an effort to make our mission real. And more specifically, the event is a way to make the mission real so we can raise money to achieve it. The mission, and our passion to fund it, is the what the event is about. Place settings, site maps, signs, thank you cards, and the ever-present t-shirts are all important details. But that isn’t the event, any more than talking about play sets, snack time, lawn chairs, and neighborhood gossip helps me do what my kids really want, which is watch them play soccer.

There’s an only slightly less trite, slightly less obvious life metaphor here, too, and since I’m the blog writer I’ll go ahead and make that one as well. We all spend a lot of time preparing for the game: Packing for it, driving to it, ensuring we’re properly clothed and fed and protected for it. But we spend so much less time actually enjoying it. 

A good message for spring: Don’t worry as much about the details. Watch the game — or better yet, get on the field.