When it comes to your direct mail campaigns, you’ve probably over-farmed your land.

You’ve been emailing and snail mailing the same donors you have done for a decade. It is time to leave the land fallow and let the lists rest. You have probably responded to lower donations and attention by relinquishing too much power to your direct marketing firm and they have been much more aggressive than you’re comfortable with, sending out many more snail mail and email donation requests than ever before. You used to blame the economy for decreased giving but you’re starting to believe it has more to do with the fertility of the donor list than it does with the economic collapse of 2008–or a lot less than you’ve been led to believe. You realize that the nonprofit space is ever more competitive, but your brand is strong and respected and comes up well in Charity Navigator, so what gives?

Well, in agriculture, it is possible to over-farm your land. Indeed, it is probable, in a couple ways:

Ultimately, you need to do one or more of a couple things: allow the land to rest, either ceasing farming completely or throttling down substantially, though this is impossible if you’re tending only one plot of land; enrich the land you already have with better aeration, nutrition, and pesticides with the expectation that you will be able to increase your yield; rotate your crops within the land you already have with crops that tend to enrich the soil that has been depleted by your main crop, naturally returning your field to a cycle of fertility; or you can expand your fields, distributing your yield over a larger plot of land, reaching into a greater diversity of quality of land, essentially hedging your bets over land of varying quality, durability, fertility, and health, resulting in a more consistent crop that is less dependent on any particular geographic focal point.

What this means to fundraising messaging is that you can no longer beat the same drums and rally the same troops. Not only is the economy in the sort of slump that is putting 100-year-old charities into seizure but there is less barrier to starting a charity or foundation, there is less trust that a charity will deliver the goods to the issues they purport to support, and then there is the Internet, allowing anyone to initiate a financial call-to-action on their own, completely by-passing traditional charities. So, while there used to be a very strong field from which to harvest donations, each crop results in a much lower yield. Deafness to your message because of over-mailing is only one symptom of this “over-farming.” The deafness is caused by direct mail firms stepping up the seven touches to 11, hitting the same lists again and again, going back further historically, and also buying cold lists from other organizations for cold hard cash, all in an attempt to make quarterly forecasts and budgets. This has proven a dangerous game because these are all very short games and the outcome has been devastating: people are deleting your emails and throwing away–hopefully recycling–your physical mailings.

Ceasing farming completely or throttling down substantially: This is almost always impossible unless you’re sitting on a huge pile of foundation or grant cash. We at Abraham Harrison use email lists all the time and we never reach out more than three times to one recipient over the course of one campaign (one harvest) and then retire it until the next harvest. We sometimes go one step further by retiring some recipients if there haven’t been any recent conversions. Sometimes we allow that list to rest completely, not using it in any other campaigns, either, because the list had been completely over-used. This most often happens with tech blogs and parenting blogs (mommy bloggers, daddy bloggers, etc). Letting lists rest is not optional, it is essential. The only question is to whether you have more than one field in play or can increase the health and yield of your plot through some methods I will discuss below.

Enrich the land you already have with better aeration, nutrition, and pesticides: As an aside, I am trying to get back into shape. This doesn’t only require exercising and diet, it also requires cross-training. Your muscles quickly become accustomed to the same workout routine, the theory being that you need to constantly “surprise” your muscle groups with different challenges–to mix it up. It’s the same thing with messaging as well as farming. How has the state of the art progressed? Are there new pesticides or pest-resistant strains of crops you can use? Or fertilizers? Or farming methods?

Have you been feeding the earth as well as the crops? Well, at Abraham Harrison, we’re working towards the best relationship advice ever: give the gift your recipient wants rather than giving the gift you want to give. It can be tricky. What do the members want that you have not given them? It is a challenge to praise your donors for their generosity, their support, and their sacrifice–effusively–when you feel like they’re being selfish cheap bastards. Is that true? Are you offering tote bags when nobody wants totes anymore? Could you reward your donors in a more public way?

The Internet allows much smaller donors to be actively appreciated for their micro-donations. My favorite podcast, No Agenda, while not a charity, spends well over half-an-hour of its 150-minutes lavishing praise on the people who donate cash-money to support their Thursday and Sunday live show. If you donate more than $33, have a birthday, or do something that Adam Curry and John C Dvorak consider to be PR, you get a shout-out.

If you pay in a few hundred dollars on a single show, you become an official producer, and if you accrue $1,000 in donations over-time, you receive an 0n-air “Knighting.” And their zealous listeners, myself included, eat it up. While this isn’t possible for many charities (why not?), I experience push-back again and again from my past charity clients who are uncomfortable with thanking bloggers who have promoted their cause or furthered their message because “we don’t do these sorts of endorsements.”

The biggest enemy of hallowed and honored charities and foundations is their resistance to innovation and reinvention and their addiction to tradition. Why can’t you shake up your routine? Why can’t you do things a different way? Why can’t you lavish praise on the smallest of donors?

The Internet allows all of these things to be easily and readily tested. Go ahead and play? Go ahead and borrow, copy, and steal things that have worked for other organizations, and don’t be afraid to invest more in your lists than you expect to extract, allowing some good will and equity to be left over after harvest for the next.

Rotate your crops within the land you already have with crops that tend to enrich the soil: I touched on this above a little bit: give more than you get and switch it up. That said, there is more. It is important to not harp on the same thing in your messaging all the time. How hard are you plucking people’s heart strings, and are you plucking the same string over and over? Fear, guilt, and shame are very powerful motivators but they’re also such strong elixirs that they can kill their emotional receptors, pitching the recipient into hopelessness and retreat, “why do I even write these checks anymore? There’s no hope anyway and I am throwing good money after bad, what’s the use?” That is surely two steps too far, to the point where the earth seems salted, a wasteland! That’s a bad place to be and generally unrecoverable, as far as that donor goes.

We have been helping the Fresh Air Fund for years and we were under retainer to amplify their yearly requirements and goals. What we did for them, with regards to crop-rotation, was to break the year into seasonal requests: Winter donations request, Spring search for host families and camp counselors, Summer camp stories and experience-sharing, and Fall thank you campaigns. While only one of those seasons focused primarily on donations, since the Winter Holidays are traditionally the biggest gift-giving season, the other three were hybrid messages. The three other seasons lead with stories of urban children getting into the fresh air, into renewing and enriching Summer camp and host family experiences outside the city, lead with needs of hosts and counselors, and generous thank-yous to everyone involved. These lead messages are also followed closely with opportunity to give, to follow, to Like, and to connect.

While we did also have extensive field-expansion strategies going concurrently, as I will discuss below, the crop rotation messaging strategy allowed the Fresh Air Fund to convey much more than just a glimmer of hope, they were able to show, in black and white, the copious success of the program, the long-term relationships that were formed, the real-time joy and happiness that was the direct result of donations of time and talent. They supported the seasonal messaging with direct mail outreaches as well as daily updates shared via Social Media to their followers and friends on Facebook and Twitter.

So, in this case, crop-rotation includes rotating the message, rotating the recipient pool, as well as rotating the medium, from blogger outreach to direct email to direct snail mail, to Facebook and Twitter. In our case, we garnered over 1,800 earned-media-mentioned annually in support of their other efforts.

Expand your fields, distributing your yield over a larger plot of land: My uncle Jack used to own Oscar fish. These fish are omnivorous and are often fed small mice. They are also known to grow as large as their tank allows, though they will not outgrow their tank. That reminds me of many fundraising campaigns and the mindset of many charities and foundations. While they continue to do their best farming the lists and relationships they have, they’re often limited by what their lists are capable of producing in any particular economy or any particular news cycle, oftentimes ceding donations to the issue of the week.

In the case of the Fresh Air Fund, they were limited by a perceived relevance only to the Tri-State Area of the New York metropolitan area, the historical and logical region around Manhattan that traditionally supported the Fresh Air Fund with funds, families, camp counselors, and children. They also relied exclusively on the New York Times as a platform for development, a platform that is becoming less and less viable in the information age.

We decided that the mission, message and ministry of the Fresh Air Fund transcends New York and is compelling to not just the region but also the Nation and the world, and we were right. We started prospecting bloggers globally who were in the same vertical that the Fresh Air Fund historically had success with locally and that wrote in English. Compassion for children surely transcends the Hudson River, right? Why yes! We were able to drive conversation on behalf of the Fund internationally, rewarded again and again when bloggers would amplify their noble message, a message that has been a continued resource for inner-city youth since 1877.

Talk about expanding your field! If you can sing Olly Olly Oxen Free loudly enough to light up bloggers and blogs globally while also lighting up their associated Facebook and Twitter streams and reaching not only their readership, their followers, their friends, and their friends’ friends, you’re definitely taking a very bold and effective first step at bringing the powerful mission of your nonprofit, your foundation, you NGO, or your charity into entirely new and fresh land, raw and uncultivated but also not tough and over-farmed, either. You might have to start at zero with your seven+ touches toward giving, but you’re also not having to deal with insensitivity and deafness to message, either.

And that is to say nothing about the powerful effect that all that global conversation will do for your ranking on Google, Bing, and Yahoo! search, as well as search.twitter.com and on Facebook as well, where 800 million global denizens spend their working hours. The search benefits–the organic SEO–is beyond comprehension when it comes to the sort of due diligence that modern contributors go through before writing those checks any more. Oh, come on, you know it’s true–and why Charity Navigator scares you as much as Yelp! scares stores and restaurants to death.

None of this was even remotely possible before the efficiencies of the Internet. When dealing with Internet communications, you need to understand that this is a revolution and not an evolution. That it is now possible to easily, cheaply, and efficiently access a global market or a hyper-targeted market, reaching them right where they live and not in the hopes that they’ll open the Times on a particular date.

There are hundreds of millions of potential donors who have both never heard of you before or been emotionally abused by your incessant requests for money before. This is fresh meat!

And, while you’re cultivating these new recruits, you’ll be able to lean heavily on your oldest and main lists, allowing them some time to miss you, to rest, and to heal. To paraphrase Dan Hicks, how can they miss you when you don’t go away?

Via Biznology and Socialmedia.biz via Marketing Conversation

Related articles

• You’ve probably over-farmed your donors (biznology.com)
• How to Double Global Food Production by 2050 and Reduce Environmental Damage (obxcommonground.org)
• Integrated Aquaculture (timbuktuchronicles.blogspot.com)
• 400,000 Farmers in Southern Africa Using ‘Fertilizer Trees’ to Dramatically Improve Food Security (scienceblog.com)
• Fertiliser tree systems can double agriculture yield in two thirds of cases in East Africa (nextbigfuture.com)
• Zero Budget Natural Farming (ZBNF) (pensci.wordpress.com)
• Trees ‘boost African crop yields’ (bbc.co.uk)

Look what just popped up on my Twitter profile when I visited via the Web today — you can now share a photo directly through Twitter by uploading your photos to Twitter.com instead of through TwitPic, yfrog, Twitgoo or img.ly.

I wonder how this will affect the third-party providers. The image hosting back end is provided by Photobucket, one of the largest photo hosting sites, which is an interesting partnership.

Here’s the scoop straight from the source:

About Image Uploading on Twitter
Uploading and sharing images on Twitter.com is easy! Below you’ll find a brief how-to and some answers to common questions about uploading images on Twitter – right from your Tweet box!

Where do I upload my image?

• When you click inside the Tweet box on your homepage or on the New Tweet button, you will see two small icons in the lower left hand corner, one for adding your location (a compass), and one for uploading an image (a camera).

How large can my image be?

• You’re welcome to upload any image that is 3MB or smaller.
• We’ll scale the image for you to fit into the display pane on the right side of your Twitter.com timeline.

What do I do after I hit the “Upload image” camera icon?

1. Clicking on the camera icon to upload an image will prompt you to locate the image you want to upload on your computer.
2. After you attach the image to your Tweet, your Tweet box should look like the one pictured below, with the thumbnail in the lower left hand corner, and the camera icon highlighted in blue. (Image 1, below)
3. Once you’ve added your image you’ll see the character count to the left of the Tweet button update. (A link to the image takes up some characters)
4. If you selected the wrong image or no longer wish to share that image, just click the “x” control in the thumbnail or next to the filename to delete the current image.
5. Then, simply enter any text you’d like and hit the Tweet button.
6. Once you’ve successfully tweeted, click on the Tweet to view the image in the display pane. (Image 3, below)

Image 1 – Camera icon is highlighted in blue after a photo is successfully added to a Tweet:

Image 2 – Please note: In some browsers, you may see the name of the file instead of the thumbnail:

Image 3 – Clicking on the Tweet will show the image in the details pane.

What does “powered by Photobucket” mean?

Twitter is launching a native image experience that allows users to upload images directly to Twitter.com from a computer. The images themselves are hosted by Photobucket.

Why can’t I upload images yet?
We’re rolling out this feature on Twitter.com over the course of a few weeks. If you don’t see the camera icon under your Tweet box, bear with us! You’ll get access to image uploads very soon.

Will Twitter continue to support Flickr, Twitpic, yFrog etc?
Yes. You’ll be able to view images hosted on most 3rd party images providers indefinitely.

What’s the deal with protected accounts?
Protected accounts will work the same way with images as they do with text Tweets: you won’t be able to see images from protected accounts unless you’re following the account.

What happens to the Exif data? I heard there are privacy concerns there.
We remove the Exif data on upload. It is not available to any consumers of your image.

Can you comment on an image?
Yes, you can do this by replying to the Tweet containing this image.

How do I delete an image?
You can delete an image by deleting the Tweet containing this image. Once a Tweet is deleted, the image will be be made unavailable. It may still be cached in some browsers and servers, but the image will no longer be available from Twitter.

Are you going to have galleries of my images?
Not at first. But in the coming weeks, we’ll add user media galleries, which will let you see the images a user has shared on Twitter.

When you do have galleries, will they only include images uploaded to Twitter or will other services be included? If so, which ones?
User galleries will include images a user has shared on Twitter, including those uploaded via other services, such as Twitpic, yfrog, and Instagram.

Will all images appear in search?
Unless you have a protected account, there is always a chance that your image will appear in search results.

If I have a protected account, will my images show up in search?
If you have a protected account, your images should never show up in search results.

If I delete a Tweet containing an image, will that image still show up in search?
No, deleted images will not show up in search results.

If I change my account to “protected,” what happens to my images?

• Images previously shared by you when your account was public will be replaced by an error page.
• Your images will still be viewable by your followers.
• If you don’t want anyone to see your images on Twitter, you should delete the Tweets containing these images.

Is there an image upload API? If yes, can I use it?

• There is an image upload API but it is not available to third-party developers yet.
• Third-party developers will be able to access the image API shortly after we’ve rolled out the feature to all users.

Via Marketing Conversation viaSocialMedia.biz

Simply put, Bag Closure Power Strip Organization Hack passes the simple and elegant test, via MAKE:

Make intern, Tyler Moskowite, sent over this clever bread bag closure power strip organization hack he found on the Interwebs. I have yet to find the original source for this hack, but hopefully someone will leave their name in the comments and we can all congratulate them for a job well done. This hack reminds me of the Binder Clips As Cable Organizers hack from a while back, but is obviously equally as cool and unique. [Thanks, Tyler!]

This is a very interesting screen I almost never check out that Facebook is willing to show you — I have invited 181 people to explore Facebook for the first time.

I find it enlessly amusing that I am number two under my high school friend Emy Louie, who has me beat — she is, indeed, a superior networker than I.

This is pretty interesting and I cannot tell you how interesting a page like this is.

Be sure to check out your “Impact” by clicking over to www.facebook.com/#!/impact and tell me what you discover — how many people have you introduced to Facebook? What was your impact on that?

I was vanity surfing Twitter mentions of “Chris Abraham” and came upon an article over on the What About Paris? blog by blogger cum lawyer cum traveler cum intellectual cum academic cum Renaissance man, Dan Hull, Esq, entitled Chris Abraham: Seer, Force, Renaissance Man, Your Future:

He’s a Force of Nature and there’s nothing anyone can do about it so just follow his career and eventually join him. Berlin and DC-based, on fire, a Renaissance Man and a mainstay Hull McGuire mentor and friend, he’s the human reason–together with Washington, D.C.‘s Mark Del Bianco and Chicago’s Patrick Lamb–What About Clients/Paris? even exists. So we are in his debt.

He moves (i.e., vibrates), he talks, he laughs, he persuades–and he brims with ideas and joy. And, like the undersigned, he is infuriatingly right about too many things. Chris Abraham over at The Marketing Conversation is someone you should get to know. Chris is probably going to find you anyway. I see him in D.C., California, Charleston and–well, I could not avoid him anywhere I go.

Chris found me seven years ago–and explained what a “blog” is. He was just warming up. Since then, he and Abraham Harrison probably have been doing more to change the way people think, live, gesture, market, connect and otherwise collaborate together globally–and, yes, the ways we view ourselves, view each other and talk to one another in the Cosmos–than Buckminster Fuller, Edwards Deming and Marshall McLuhan combined.

You might as well give in to the guy. We did.

Like I said in the comments:

You are entirely too generous my friend. You are an F-22 Raptor and I am merely a Cessna 162 Skycatcher. Thank you!

More about What about Paris?

24/7 News and Ideas for Doing Business Globally aka What About Clients? Business. Law. Politics. Foreign Affairs. Verve.

Here’s a little proof that Twitter is now not simply location aware, in terms of latitude and longitude or address, but is now place-aware.  I checked in to both of these places on FourSquare and Twitter recognized these places by name:

Then, I decided to click on the Trader Joe’s, Falls Church link beside the little map marker, and lo! there was the following pop-up window, which is very much aware of not simply location anymore but they’re following the trend of Facebook Places and the other location-aware social networks by starting to connect to businesses:

Via Marketing Conversation

There really are social media gurus and social media experts and my Chief Programmer Phillip Rhoades wrote up the best of their genius on his article The Best Of The 60 Ways to Increase Your Influence Online — it is both an interesting article for who and what Phillip includes in the list as well as who and what he doesn’t include.  You can read the original article and full list here via Sam Rosen at Copyblogger.

The Best Of The 60 Ways to Increase Your Influence Online

Sam Rosen and Copyblogger recently hosted a very short conference and had several thought leaders come up with 60 Ways to Increase Your Influence Online. Quite a few of the methods are sort of stock, cardboard, filler, but there are some gems. Here are a few that I really liked:

#3. Mike Volpe. “We share lots of things that most companies would keep internal. By sharing both the good and the bad, you build digital influence.” -@mvolpe

#11. Hugh MacLeod. “We use other people’s stuff or other people’s content to socialize. And your stuff’s either a social object or it’s not.” -@gapingvoid

#22. Shama Kabani. “Create [video] content around your area of expertise and then distribute, distribute with gusto!” -@shama

#24. Johnny B. Truant. “Defy convention where it’s appropriate. Only a few people dare to step outside. And people take notice of that.” -@johnnybtruant

#46. Brian Clark. “Learn to be a storyteller. Narrative — it’s what makes us human. Big media does it great. You have to as well.” -@copyblogger

#51. Shashi Bellamkonda. “Find out from your customers which social networks they are using, and be there for them at the moment they need you.” -@shashib

#52. Gretchen Rubin. “Self-expression is the new entertainment. Get people talking. I had success just asking, ‘What’s your comfort food?’” -@gretchenrubin

#59. Julien Smith. “Get someone else to take a look at what you have that you maybe take for granted and gives you an advantage over other people.” -@julien

Any that you particularly like? Any that you think they completely missed?

Summer intern, Leslie Quiros, must be a pretty popular young woman — she is appalled by the huge volume of birthday wishes she gets every day-of-her-birth.

OK, I joke, I get quite a few as well, but I roll around in them. However, I am shamelessly hungry for love and approval and the endless birthday wishes makes me titter like a pothead on nitrous!

Anyway, please go take a look at her awesome article:  Alleluya!… Facebook fixes another problem

Alleluya!… Facebook fixes another problem

If you are like me and get annoyed by news feeds from people congratulating a friend who is celebrating his or her big day, you might find this post interesting.

If you are the type of person that checks Facebook every 30 minutes or so—like me— you might have noticed a few changes taking place. As the Facebook creators try to improve the social networking experience, they are now testing a new design that “organizes birthday-related messages in a much cleaner, simpler way that’s consistent with other recent user-interface changes (CNN.com).”

According to this article, you will no longer have to worry about opening your home page and seeing post after post of “happy birthday____, hope you have a good one!” from 50 different people. Instead, Facebook will summarize all birthday-related posts into a single news feed on your home page. As a result, your wall won’t be spammed with these posts and you won’t miss more important events going on in Facebook.

As Mashable points out, hopefully with this new design Facebook will find a way to also summarize all Birthday-related posts on the person’s wall so that more important messages don’t get lost or to avoid having 4 wall pages of “Happy Birthday.” I don’t mean to sound like the Brithday Grinch, but when you have more “friends” than you can count, it can get a tad irritating.

So readers who are like me… don’t be scared to jump up and down screaming Alleluya- for I already did!

I just noticed tonight, when I logged into Twitter‘s web interface, that there’s a new list of two suggest Tweeters featured on my home screen that Twitter suggests I follow.

Also, how long has this been live?  When did it launch? Days? Weeks? Months?

As you can see to the right, it also offers me a “view all” which leads to the “Suggestions for you” AKA twitter_suggests tab.

My question is: are @websuccessdiva and @chrisharrington really people I should follow based on some sort of sophisticated algorithm or is this a hustle?

Could these these recommendation be another form of advertising?  Paying to make yourself a priority recommendation, sort of like Jason Calacanis tried to do with his offer of $120k, $250k, or $500k for being a top recommended Tweeter on Twitter. (Did they ever take him up on it?)

Could it be a double secret marketing and advertising profit-making campaign in cahoots with Featured Users? Various versions of Featured Users are all over the internet, making quite a pretty penny in the competitive world of follower-wooing.

Well, I went over to check out the list of top-tweeters, at both Twitaholic and WeFollow Top and then followed Ashton Kutcher @aplusk and this is what I saw:

If you’ll notice, there’s the list below that states “Since you just followed ashton kutcher, you might also want to follow:” and they recommend @delta_goodrem, @AdhitHeaven, and @OfficialVernonK — are these recommendations based on a sophisticated match-making logic or some dynamic AI that looks at my choices and recommends these people to me based on my history, my tendency, their interaction with @aplusk, or their relationshop with him?  The number of followers?  The types of tweets?

Or, have they in some way bought their way into this “featured user” and “recommended user” rarefied air?

Do you have any more questions?  Do you have any answers?  Do you have any rumors? Conjectures? Conspiracies?  Via Marketing Conversation.

Dear Internet users: saying “backslash” in a URL is actually wrong and refers to one of these: \ and not this / which is what you mean.

Internet address URLs only use forward slashes or just “slash.”

“Backslash” generally refers only to the MS-DOS file structures that use the \ to define directory boundaries and pathways.

So, while I even hear Ashton Kutcher dictating domains with “backslash” this and “backslash” that, he’s wrong no matter how many Twitter followers he has.

Just say “www dot twitter dot com slash a plus k” and you’re good.

No real need to say forward slash any more. Post 1999, the forward slash has been universally replaced with just the simpler slash as a representation of the / character.

I just thought I would share it here since it isn’t simply just a quirk, it is literally an untruth which, taken literally, breaks things.

By assuming that “backslash” means / and not \ demands that everyone who listens to you corrects your mistake for you because you don’t know any better.

Worse, you’re confusing people and, moreover, spreading a mutant meme.

Thanks very much for your attention.