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Did you see this amazing New York Times story of manuscripts and other Timbuktu artifacts being stored away for protection? (click here, but may be subscription-based) While the circumstances there are dramatically more dramatic than any development shop, I was moved by the care in handling these materials. And, at the risk of seeming glib, I thought this fit well in the spirit of National Constituent Record Filing Month. What files does your organization most treasure? Are they safe yet still accessible? Give it some thought.

Photo courtesy: The New York Times
Photo courtesy: The New York Times

February is National Constituent Record Filing Month…

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stack of papers
These are the sorts of piles that sometimes just get thrown out for expediency’s sake.

…and thankfully, this is the shortest month of the year.

All those who loathe filing (digital or paper), say “Aye!”. Newton had his law of gravity. Einstein devised E=MC2. My law (for this month anyhow) is that filing is universally reviled.

Don’t get me wrong, Cannon’s Law of Reviled Filing doesn’t mean it’s unimportant. It doesn’t mean that some people and processes are really, really good at it. It just means that it’s the last on the list. And, while the post-election “binders” jokes have worn thin, I would bet most of you that you have somewhere in your office “binders full of prospect notes” and other “piles of shame” containing all those things you haven’t gotten around to filing.

So, because it’s important yet boring, we should shed a little light on the topic. I should note that there are entire professional groups and technology suites dedicated to this topic. You can learn all about those things here. Instead of filing details, I wanted to share a central framework to guide of focus on National Constituent Record Filing Month:

  1. It’s the institution’s file. Those emails and paper files strewn about your desk. They belong to your employer. If not due to a confidentiality agreement, it’s just the right thing to do for your institution’s long-range relationship building.
  2. The risk of a blank is worse. Have you ever stumbled upon an empty file folder that clearly once held the holy grail of detail on that donor? You can see the folder is slightly bowed and once held important tidbits about a great uncle’s railroad lines in the 1890’s. Now, you have nothing. That’s what will happen with your prospects if you stop the filing cycle.
  3. There’s more nuance there than you think. Filing isn’t just about paper anymore, which is one nuance. But, even more subtle are the things that can be learned from a file. Did your organization’s previous president strike the “Dear William” on a letter and write-in a heretofore unknown “Bubba,” indicating a pretty close relationship that perhaps has gone dry. Did the donor’s $100 check come from the Bank of Saudi Arabia? Sometimes, the database doesn’t hold the whole story, so the files are that much more important.
  4. Automation and discipline will get you through the month (and beyond). If you enjoy filing as much as I do, you need to a) automate and b) get rigorous. Contact a vendor who can digitize and link files (or, if you have resources in place,  do even more with your current application). Set a day a month where all filing will be completed. And, if automation is still out of the picture, hire an intern to help focus on this issue.

National Constituent Record Filing Month may not catch on. However, we owe it to our organizations to spend enough time on this topic to maintain a time-honored tradition of capturing and filing data for the sake of future fundraisers.

Facebook’s (continued) move into online giving

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This month has focused on Business Intelligence, the process of gathering all your organization knows (typically through a centralized database and a cool data visualization tool, etc.) and improving your analysis and decision making. A key component to great BI is how to get at all of the data relevant to your constituents–bio-demographic, giving, activities, and, more and more, their online engagement. This means what Facebook, LinkedIn and others do matters to your fundraising operations.

Facebook (NASDAQ: FB) is delving deeper into providing a donor giving application function. The NonProfit Times offered a helpful synopsis of the Facebook’s plans. On its face, this is a neat idea and may hold promise for the charities involved. But it also has some risks. (How) will data be shared? What fees are involved (FB doesn’t have any now)? And, my personal favorite, what will be the real cost of handling such giving, particularly when the thrust of the tool appears to be tribute giving.

Money in mazeThis last point is important. On the one hand, I’ve written about the real costs of handling any gift. It’s pretty hard to do for less than about $7. No matter what. On the other hand, once a nonprofit loses control over data and deliverables, there can be substantial donor service costs. For example, a few years ago, as a result of a Facebook fundraising effort outside of its control, a client of mine spent dozens of staff hours trying to make a few donors-via-Facebook happy. This effort appears more structured than the example I shared, but the data-exchange-donor-satisfaction issue could be significant.

So, as technology marches forward, keep in mind the some innovations have costs that should be calculated. Want to see what it costs your team to process a gift? Check out my calculator here.

Essential HIPAA Rules Changing Fundraising Practices

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My colleague Mark Marshall just posted some useful guidance on the new HIPAA provisions. Check it out here: Essential HIPAA Rules Changing Fundraising Practices. One of my recent posts provides some of the operations basics for you to consider.

For those on the fundraising operations side of house, there are some great improvements here in terms of data availability. And, for those of you who sometimes wrestle with compliance issues, the new rules make it even more clear that a sophisticated data-driven grateful patient program is acceptable. What’s more, it can now include department and physician information that should allow for even more data crunching (completed in a sensitive fashion, of course).

Good luck moving forward with these new provisions!

What do you know about CRM 2.0? Want to learn a little more? Join me and Katrina Klaproth for a free recording of our webinar on this interesting topic. Here is the information:

Subject: BWF Webinar Series: Is Your Organization Ready for CRM 2.0?

Recording URL: https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/gc_pro_namewreg_bwf/view
Recording ID: BWFCRM
Attendee Key: advancement

And, let us know what’s working for you.

Are you using Infographics as reporting tools? You should be.

advancement services, AFP, AHP, Business Intelligence and Reporting, change management, data analytics, data managament, database systems, fundraising, philanthropy, Uncategorized, , , ,

During National Business Intelligence (BI) Month, a number of top-notch infographics have caught my eye. These handy visuals are really reports, depicting data and details germane to a topic. But, they are also much more. They provide guidance about how to use the data. They tell a story. They provide business process guidance. In short, they’re quite helpful and you should be looking into how these can help your fundraising efforts.

I should note that I know this topic is not new. Infographics have been around for years and some folks have declared them irrelevant or unhelpful. However, any visualization of information that tells the story you need told can be valuable, so infographics likely have utility in your shop.

BWF Analytics Infographic

For example, our firm created a handy infographic (on the right) to present data from a survey we conducted on analytics. This image is really many reports in one. It presents the data in a logical order. In general, it is a useful guide to the topic of fundraising analytics, benchmarking for staff, and related information.

So, how should you set about creating an infographic?

  1. Determine your topic. Infographics can be great for 40,000 foot ideas as well as minutia, but generally not both.
  2. Find your data. What data do you have to display? What data would you like to go get?
  3. Lay out your story. The visual aspects of this process are important. Do you want the reader to “take it all in”, “follow along”, or just see some useful visual depictions of data and interpretation?
  4. Pick a infographic tool and get going. Many tools are out there. Check out this resource for some good and free tools.

Finally, I thought I’d take some of my own advice (for a change!). Below is the inaugural fundraisingoperations.com infographic. It uses data from a survey I did for my 2011 book An Executive’s Guide to Fundraising Operations. While my effort isn’t as amazing as this awesome college football bowl game pic, I created it in 20 minutes. Have any great infographic examples? Drop your links in the comments. Happy infographic-ing!

Data Quality and Quantity, v2
This pic presents data from Cannon’s 2011 book on fundraising operations, which shows how data quality expectations and perceptions vary.

Get your grateful patient process going

advancement services, AFP, AHP, Business Intelligence and Reporting, data managament, database systems, fundraising, Grateful Family Process, Grateful Patient Program, healthcare philanthropy, philanthropy, prospect development, prospect management, Uncategorized, , , , , , , ,

It’s 2013…a lot transpired in recent months that may affect healthcare fundraising. New and different taxes. New and different healthcare provisions. New and (potentially) different court rulings. But, one this hasn’t changed: your organization must get serious about installing and leveraging an effective grateful patient program.

Great grateful patient and family programs have interrelated components–physicians and other care givers, admissions, development, and compliance folks are all in the mix. None of your internal sensitivities should be ignored, but none should be allowed to derail an effort to put a great, HIPAA-compliant process in place. We also know that some parts of a program matter more than others. In particular, physician referrals seem to make the most difference. A robust, end-to-end business process will cement the behaviors needed to capitalize on, or start to create, such referrals.

So, what does a great process look like? Much like great fundraising campaigns, details of the process will vary from organization to organization. I submit that a great process for some could be completely paper-driven and manual while others must be automated to be effective. All of them share key core process and technical components, though. The following diagram depicts each element that must be in place.

Grateful patient process

A few points about this process:

  • Patients can include outpatient and clinic visits, but you might want to start with the smaller data set of in-patients.
  • Nightly screening matters most when there is a subsequent daily review and triggers.
  • In-patient visits are permissible, but a philanthropic culture must be in place first.
  • If you don’t record and analyze the data and activity generated from the process, you are missing a big part of the process.
  • It will take time to yield big results, but some of our clients processes leverage annual giving channels to provide immediate financial benefit, and identify potential major donors.
  • There are dozens of other considerations not covered here but important to the process…so many issues, to be honest, that I joke this should be the subject of my next book.

Your team may not have the technical ability to build real-time data exchanges from the patient database to the screening company to your donor database. If API and SQL are foreign concepts, your process can still be rigorous and daily. However, automating visit ticklers, introduction letters, and other elements of the process, it is typically worth the effort. Ultimately, this business process should generate big-ticket leads while greatly expanding your solicitable constituency.

Remember that developing a business process here is the responsible thing to do. The law allows it and your organization’s competition may already be doing it. If you already have a process in place, could you make it even better? And, if you don’t have a process, now is the time to get going? Get the data, people, and processes in place and start delivering better and better prospects to support you fundraising efforts. Good luck and feel free to share any challenges or successes you’re experiencing.

January is National Business Intelligence Month…

advancement services, annual giving, Business Intelligence and Reporting, change management, data analytics, data managament, database systems, Donor Relations, fundraising, major gifts, motivating staff, philanthropy, prospect development, prospect management, Uncategorized, , , , , ,

…didn’t you know that? Of course you didn’t. With the holidays, closing some year-end gifts (not to mention the books), and learning an awful lot about Amazon’s post-holiday online return policy, how could you keep up with all of the information being thrown at you. It’s hard enough to have the right information, much less use it effectively. Plus, it’s not really National Business Intelligence Month. I made that part up.

So, why the subterfuge? We need to draw attention to the critical need in the advancement business for more and better reporting and analysis. Some of you already have what you need. Some stopped looking years ago. Some have that “special” report that some poor person spends hours to prepare. But, most of us want better reporting, the kind that actually helps us make decisions about the business and tells us things we otherwise wouldn’t have known.

Better reporting requires a few things. This flow chart shows the way to better reporting. But, even more important than creating reporting is turning it into business intelligence.

Report Development Cycle

Let’s work to get even better data into even more clear reports that drives even better decisions. Let’s stop with the ad hoc, don’t-really-learn-much urgent reporting and develop a thoughtful suite of reporting that allows you to direct the team. Let’s develop shared definitions and expectations, allowing our reports to mean the same thing no matter the audience. So, know that I think about it, let’s make January National Business Intelligence Month. Make sure to put it on your calendar for next year.

December 2012 is National Month Month…

advancement services, annual giving, Business Intelligence and Reporting, change management, data analytics, data managament, database systems, Donor Relations, fundraising, Gift Processing, major gifts, philanthropy, prospect development, prospect management, Stewardship, Uncategorized,

…or so I tweeted a few weeks ago. My plan is to envelope the work we lovingly call fundraising operations, or advancement services, or “the back office”, or “you know, that stuff they do with computers” into 12, neat monthly categories. The purpose is to drawn attention to whole sets of work that we sometimes avoid but can never quite escape (I’ve tried).

So, for those of us so fortunate to be toiling away the day after December 25th, what “National _____ Month” would you designate and why?

Integrated Advancement Ecosystem idea

advancement services, change management, data managament, database systems, major gifts, marketing and communications, motivating staff, prospect management, Uncategorized, , , , ,

Years ago, I created this image and phrase “integrated advancement ecosystem.” It guides my thinking, and I’ll be building on and detailing the concepts in this framework in the months to come. Some of the components are called different things by different (types of) organizations. For example, “constituent programs” for a university are generally “alumni relations” whereas in healthcare, perhaps it’s “community relations.” I welcome your ideas about it.

Cannon's Integrated Advancement Ecosystem