SuddesGroup

WSJ on ROI

Nick Fellers | December 20, 2007

An article in the Wall Street Journal this morning

Doing Due Diligence On Your Donations
(subscription)
As Charitable Giving Grows, So Do Services for Donors Who Want Evidence that Their Money Is Having an Impact

“Donors can readily compare charities from a financial perspective: how much an organization spends on administrative costs or fund raising, for instance. But givers, especially younger, business-minded ones, now tend to want more information on how successful a charity’s programs are in addressing the issues the charity sets out to resolve…”

The article goes on to debate methodology. I would contribute that simply making a commitment to communicating your ROI - however you do it - is imperative - even if only (in some cases) it can only be done anecdotally. The challenge (currently) is not how we evaluate and communicate impact but if.

I’m reminded of double training camp alum - Tracy Elliott. Before committing his life to the For Impact sector he was a banker. In his current role as executive director he sends out quarterly bank (impact) statements to investors. These ‘bank statements’ include total number of lives saved/impacted, families served, and other stats. The statement then outlines ‘your investment results’. Pretty cool, pretty powerful and pretty effective in demonstrating how money is having an impact.

From Yoga Practice to Funding Practice

Tom Suddes | December 18, 2007

Three things hit me in
the last 24 hours around this one word of ‘PRACTICE’.

1. MY YOGA
   ‘PRACTICE’. At the end of class last night, we were
   reminded to keep up our ‘PRACTICE’ during the holidays.To ‘PRACTICE’ yoga means that you never really
   stop… it never ends… it’s a lifelong ‘PRACTICE’…

   a literal journey.

   Same thing is true when you ‘PRACTICE’
   medicine or law or accounting.

   More importantly, we need to
   make ‘LIFE’ our ‘PRACTICE’.

2. NOTRE DAME
   BOXING. In a conversation with this year’s captain, we
   were talking about the schedule for our six weeks of training
   beginning January 15^th. It really is about the
   ‘PRACTICE’ (training)… not about the fights
   themselves.As I remind all of the participants (225 guys and
   100 young ladies), this is a sport that you really, really need to
   enjoy/love the TRAINING (PRACTICE).

   At the very most,
   assuming you win all of your fights (the prelim, the quarters, semis
   and the finals), you will have fought for 19 minutes! Think
   about it. Over half of these boxers will ‘lose’ in
   their first bout, which means they will have actually fought for
   real in the ring for a total of 3 rounds or 3 minutes and 45
   seconds!!! (Many of them won’t even make it to the third
   round.)

   In sports,
   there is this wonderful idea of enjoying the ‘PRACTICE’

   (TRAINING). In fact, the better the athlete, the better the team,
   the more enjoyable the PRACTICE.

   How can we apply this to our
   lives? To our careers?

3. ‘PRACTICE’ vs. ‘PLAY FOR REAL’.
   In our third training session with Ohio’s College Access
   Network, we challenged the College Access Programs to go out and
   make VISITS and JUST ASK. One wonderful young lady who is Executive
   Director at a program shared a story of how she went out and made
   her first three visits… and viewed them as “JUST
   PRACTICE”. She didn’t even call on her ‘best
   prospects’, but rather on people who have no association or
   relationship with her program.

   She got one $10,000

   commitment and two $5,000 commitments!!!

   She is a
   very talented ‘program’ person who runs a strong
   organization. But, as she says, she didn’t have any
   fundraising experience’ and didn’t really want
   any. The idea of going out to “PRACTICE” made all the
   difference in the world for her.

My closing thought is
that a ‘PRACTICE MENTALITY’ provides a “nothing
to lose”… “it’s just practice”…
“there’s no pressure” attitude.

We
should all operate like this in ‘08.

Where Do We Find New Prospects?

Tom Suddes | December 13, 2007

In our work with thousands of ‘nonprofit’ organizations, staff and volunteers, as well as sales teams in the business world, this is the most FREQUENTLY ASKED (BIG, BIG, BIG) QUESTION:

“WHERE DO WE FIND NEW PROSPECTS?”

It’s almost always followed by this comment:
“OUR OLD PROSPECTS ARE TIRED OF GIVING. (Or tired of buying.)”

THE BIG ANSWER:
“IT’S THE WRONG QUESTION!!!”

It’s not about ‘NEW’ PROSPECTS…

It’s about the ‘BEST’ PROSPECTS!!! And, it’s about MAXIMIZING RELATIONSHIPS… with these BEST and most QUALIFIED PROSPECTS!!!

The reason many of you are looking for ‘NEW’ prospects is because you believe:

“We have gone to the well too many times.”

“We can’t go back to our best prospects for more money.”

“We are taking advantage of our current relationship with our top prospects.”

To this, I would add 3 other thoughts coming from your current top givers that I also believe are very fair:

“I want you to get other people involved besides me.”

“I want you to broaden the base of support.”

“I don’t want to be the only one funding this organization or this project.”

While ‘expanding your base’ and ‘bringing in new relationships’ is important to your organization, it’s not the ‘ANSWER’ to your funding challenges!!!

I’d like to challenge your thinking with this idea:

LOOK IN YOUR OWN BACKYARD! Stop ’searching the world’ for new prospects/ fresh money. Before you figure out how to get to Bill Gates or Warren Buffet or the Walton’s…look to your own CHAMPIONS who have the strongest interest in your Cause and your Case.

Here are 3 stories to re-inforce this idea of ‘YOUR OWN BACKYARD’.

Russell H. Conwell wrote one of the most powerful and motivational classics of all times… “ACRES OF DIAMONDS.” (First Published in 1921) Conwell actually gave his speech entitled “ACRES OF DIAMONDS” more than 5,000 times… and earned enough in this effort to help found Temple University!

Here are summarized versions of 3 STORIES in the book that I hope will have a huge IMPACT on your thinking about ‘NEW PROSPECTS’.

GOLD. In 1847, a man who owned a ranch in Northern California heard that gold had been discovered somewhere in Southern California. He sold his ranch to a Colonel Sutter, and then went south to search for gold and riches, never to return.

Colonel Sutter put a mill on that stream. One day, he discovered flakes of gold in the spill off. Sutter’s discovery, in 1849, started the CALIFORNIA GOLD RUSH!

DIAMONDS. An old Persian farmer was desperate for riches. He sold his farm, collected his money, left his family and went off in into the garden to drink. As the camel put his nose in the shallow water of the garden brook, the new owner saw a flash of brilliance and reached in and pulled out a diamond (in the rough). This discovery became the famous diamond mine of GOLCONDA!

OIL. In Pennsylvania, another farmer sold his farm to take a job with his cousin, who was looking for coal oil in Canada. He, too, was searching for wealth… in other places.

According to the county records, the farmer sold his farm for $833.
The new owner found oil… on that same farm. That oil was eventually
worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and this discovery became the
PENNSYLVANIA OIL FIELDS!

*I hope the moral in all of these stories is clear and evident.

‘FUNDING YOUR VISION’ is usually about your TOP 33 INVESTORS… and perhaps your BEST 300 QUALIFIED PROSPECTS. Many of these top prospects are most likely sitting right in front of you… right now! (Not literally, but pretty darn close.)

Focus On 33 (Top) Prospects

Tom Suddes | December 12, 2007

Nick and I did a session last Thursday on QUALIFIED PROSPECTS. One of the best comments/feedback was from a wonderful Social Entrepreneur with whom we’ve been working for quite a while.

She said, basically, that while everything she heard/learned in the one-hour teleseminar was good stuff… the most important thing to her was the REMINDER re: FOCUS ON YOUR TOP 33 PROSPECTS!!!

That feedback reminded Nick and me that sometimes we just don’t emphasize this enough. Sooooooo…….

FOCUS every ounce of your ENERGY and TIME on your TOP 33

BEST RELATIONSHIPS/ MOST QUALIFIED PROSPECTS/POTENTIAL INVESTORS!!!

You only need 33 great RELATIONSHIPS to totally TRANSFORM your organization. (Literally, to change the way you do business.)

You will have success beyond your wildest imagination!

ACTION: DETERMINE, very quickly, who are your:

• Your Top 3 Champions
  
• Your Top 10 Best Prospects
  
• Your Next 20 Potential Investors
  
• (total = top 33 prospects)

Then, GO VISIT WITH THEM IMMEDIATELY!!!

BE AUTHENTIC. You can’t screw up. Pull a Nike. Just (go) Do It!

Create an Action Forcing Event

Nick Fellers | December 11, 2007

I’ve never worked for the State Department but I know someone who has. Last week I was on the road and spent an afternoon with a campaign champion in California. He introduced a piece of State Department lexicon: ‘The Action Forcing Event’.

The organization I’m working with has a number of pending commitments. We’re using the executive director’s scheduled retirement (March 2008) as a reason for investors to finalize their commitments. This reason, he explained to me, is called an Action Forcing Event (AFE).

He went on to explain that in the government you sometimes have to make up an AFE just to get stuff done.

We can all be using AFE’s as part of our case/rationale for support around WHY we need the commitment NOW. Applied, this could be:

• A ground breaking event
• Campaign timeline
• A symbolic date

Without an AFE you are at the ‘complete’ mercy of the prospect’s timeline. Without an AFE the pending process can (and often does) drag on indefinitely.

I would encourage you to create an Action Forcing Event as part of your strategy for every visit. It’s not often that a visit results in a check on-the-spot so think about ‘timing’ as part of your presentation.

Attitude of Gratitude

Tom Suddes | November 21, 2007

There’s no better time of the year to GIVE THANKS for all that we have.

Almost every book I’ve read on success, happiness, personal development, etc. talks about how important it is to be GRATEFUL for what we have… and what a huge impact this has on our daily lives.

If “WEALTH IS AN ASSURANCE OF THINGS THAT WE VALUE…” and everything we really value doesn’t actually ‘cost’ anything… then, we should be truly grateful for our families and friends, our communities and country and our freedom.

I just read that over 3,100 have died in Bangladesh as a result of the latest cyclone. Having visited the country and see the living conditions, that was just another reminder to give THANKS for all we have.

Nick and I wish all of you a HAPPY THANKSGIVING - and we are grateful and appreciative of what you do every day to change the world and make an impact.

The Need to See Prospects

Tom Suddes | November 16, 2007

I love the magazine Selling Power (mostly just because I love the idea of sales). Gerhard Gschwandtner is the founder and publisher of Selling Power and has had a tremendous influence on my thinking. The subtitle of the magazine is “Solutions for Sales Management”, and they provide a lot of solutions!

I was skimming an old issue (May 2005) looking for more stuff on PROSPECTS and I came across this article called

GET OVER IT!
Post-9/11 Everything Changed EXCEPT THE NEED TO SEE PROSPECTS!

(Those are my caps and my exclamation point.)

The article was by Geoffrey James.

Here are the guts of the article:

1. “It’s never been more difficult to get through to an executive to make a FORMAL APPOINTMENT.” In our For Impact World, we deal with that in a number of ways. Most importantly, we don’t look for a “FORMAL APPOINTMENT”…
   but rather a VISIT!!!’APPOINTMENT’ (especially a ‘FORMAL’ one) immediately triggers your synapses to think ‘DOCTOR’! Or, worse, ‘DENTIST’!
2. “You have to do a better job of making prospects want to see you.” The way we do that is making a big, big deal of PREDISPOSITION!!!
3. The absolute best PREDISPOSITION for all of us in the For Impact World is to actually bring the ‘prospect’ to where you deliver your service. Let them SEE, TOUCH, HEAR, SMELL WHAT you do. Make it palpable. Make it memorable. Make it an experience.
4. “Once you do get in, however, you’d better be prepared to build a LASTING RELATIONSHIP.” WOW! As most of you know, our GOAL with all of our PROSPECTS is to create a RELATIONSHIP… ideally a LIFETIME RELATIONSHIP… and, thenMAXIMIZE THAT RELATIONSHIP…
   AT EVERY GIVEN MOMENT!
   

The article goes on to talk about working to get a ‘VISIT’.

I love their “warning”:

“Working this system requires PREPARATION and PERSISTENCE.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

BOTTOM LINE: Your goal should be to get a VISIT (with a QUALIFIED PROSPECT… to MAXIMIZE THE RELATIONSHIP… at THIS GIVEN MOMENT.) Doing so requires PREPARATION AND PERSISTENCE.

Showing Napkin Messages and Nuggets

Nick Fellers | November 16, 2007

This notebook entry continues a theme on visual presentation tools. Just as Walt Disney did, it’s important for you to create visuals to illustrate your story (whether it be about a cartoon mouse or your operational budget).

I’ve pulled nine visuals from various presentation tools that were developed at or following training camps. These are intended to be used to create dialogue on a visit. They are not intended to be ’stand alone’ marketing pictures. YOU add the context.

Special note: I could write three pages about each visual. Put differently, each visual summarizes three pages… that’s the point. Use these visuals for inspiration and don’t worry about complete comprehension.

Napkin and Visual Elements
114 kb - PDF

“Our Service Model”
Help me understand WHAT your organization does: simply. This (national) organization connects enterprise with education.

“Impact of This Program”
12 Families. 12 Women. 19 Children. (Illustrated)

“Our Funding Model”
Only three pieces:

1. Priority initiatives (think: major gifts)
2. Our legacy society (think: planned giving)
3. Cornerstone Society (think: annual giving club/membership @ $1000)

“Annual Fund Impact”

• Expand existing programs
• Take to new areas
• Connect service locations

“A For Impact Mantra”
Your ability to communicate your impact determines your income.

“Our Focus”
We are the only organization focused exclusively on cancer prevention for kids.

“Where Does the Money Go?”
School: Three funding priorities

“Our Model”
“We make connections”

“Our Operating Model”
Complex budget explained with three pieces.

Bankers Do Not Have Any Imagination, None At All

Nick Fellers | November 15, 2007

Walt Disney was sending his brother Roy to meet with bankers in New York. He was going to pitch a new concept: Disneyland. At the time, Disney had cartoons but no theme parks.

As the story is told, he called in a young imaginer. To him he said,
“You know bankers don’t have any imagination, none at all. You have to show them what you’re going to do.” He then asked the imagineer to help him create a mock-up of Disneyland on a large storyboard. It was a splendid painting that even included black light paint so that you could see what Disneyland would look like at night.

This story comes from Walt Disney Imagineering: A Behind-the-Dreams Look at Making the Magic Real. The book includes pictures of the storyboard (pretty cool).

Always look for ways to SHOW what you’re going to do. Use Presentation Tools. Banker or not, there is a big difference between talking your way through something and showing your way through something. A presentation tool worked for Walt Disney… maybe it will work for you.

Talking Time: You v. Them

Nick Fellers | November 1, 2007

It’s a sales mantra: Selling is not telling.

We all talk too much on sales calls/visits/presentations.

Do whatever you need to in order to get the other person talking. The more time he/she is talking, the better.

In fact, often I will say, “I’m talking too much. Tell me what you think about…” [Then I shut up and listen - it's harder than it appears.]

Note: Watch what happens to the other person’s body language when you be quiet and engage her in the presentation by letting her talk. Watch as it changes from ‘lost fog’ to ‘enthusiastic engagement’.