Strategy nonprofitsandinnovation1.0
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This document discusses developing an internet strategy that supports an organization's offline business strategy. It emphasizes assessing audiences, prioritizing them based on objectives, and treating them differently. An example is provided of Easter Seals prioritizing potential donors, prospective clients, and referral networks as high priorities to attract new, younger donors and assist more client prospects. The document provides a checklist for developing an internet strategy that includes reviewing business plans, prioritizing audiences, securing leadership support, committing stakeholders, inventorying audience needs online, and investing in people and tools.
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Strategy nonprofitsandinnovation1.0
- 1. IT ALL BEGINS WITH STRATEGY Using the Internet as a strategic tool Shirley Sexton Sexton Consulting
- 2. “If you don’t know where you are, you’re nowhere.” Gilbert M. Grosvenor Past president and current chairman of the board of the National Geographic Society
- 3. Get your cheese plate to champion the cause.
- 4. “Politics is more difficult than physics.” Albert Einstein
- 7. Audience Assessment & Priorities • Easter Seals audience prioritization was based on identified objectives, particularly the following: – Attract new, younger donors and increase donations – Assist more client prospects in reaching appropriate affiliate High Medium Internal • Potential Donors • Prospective Clients • Referral Network • Corporate Partners • Existing Offline Donors • Volunteers • Current Clients • Media/Press • Students • Legislators & Influencers • Headquarters Staff • Affiliate Staff
- 10. The Internet is a big place. Get out there.
- 11. Fork it over for the right tools and people.
- 12. Review your org’s business plan Internet Strategy checklist Prioritize your audiences Secure support from leadership Get commitment from stakeholders to move in the same direction Inventory where your audience(s) needs and where they are online Invest in people and tools
Editor's Notes
- Thank you so much for joining me here today. As <name> mentioned, I worked for many years at Easter Seals, which is the 13th largest charity in the U.S. and the largest nonprofit in the U.S. serving people with disabilities. And yet I’ll bet there are more than a few of you in the room that have heard the name Easter Seals but aren’t quite sure what we do! That’s a common problem. Unless your life is touched by disabilities, you may not be aware of Easter Seals. And here’s an interesting fact, and the the primary reason I ended up working with Easter Seals. Traditionally, Easter Seals depends largely on direct mail fundraising for public support. And the average age of our direct mail donor is 72. 72. Now as you can imagine, the leadership at Easter Seals said to themselves a few years ago that it was imperative they engage and introduce a new, younger donor base to Easter Seals. Thus entered the Internet and Shirley. I had worked previously as an Internet consultant with many nonprofit organizations such as the ACLU, Association of Fundraising Professionals, National Safe Kids Campaign, the AFLCIO, Pew Charitable Trusts, and more. I want to share with you today some lessons working with all those organizations, and using Easter Seals as an example, in the hopes that it’ll make your own path easier. I want to start by asking for a show of hands. How many of you want to drive more traffic to your Web sites? OK, just about everybody! Now raise your hand again if everyone in your organization has discussed and agreed on WHY you want to drive traffic to your Web site, and what you want people to do when they get there? Yep, far fewer hands, because that’s the hard part.
- Strategic planning for the Internet is a lot like planning a trip. You have to decide on your destination and what you want to do there before you can decide what route to take, when to go, what to pack, etc. But you’d be amazed at how many organizations I’ve seen over the years have wanted to skip that step. Whether it’s because of time pressures, budget pressures or what have you, they just jump right to the technology and design implementation, without working through their strategy. I promise you, there’s no point to it. You’ll end up having to go back to the drawing board. To build off of Mr. Grosvenor’s great words, if you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll end up nowhere.
- Any strategic plan, Internet or otherwise, assumes big change. Otherwise you’re just doing business as usual right? If you’re going to try to bring about big change in your organization, you’ve got get the head of your organization, or as I like to call him or her, the big cheese, to champion the cause. Unless you are the big cheese yourself, you simply can’t change an organization dramatically without leadership from the top. When you’ve got the top three cheeses of the organization you’ve got a cheese plate. And that’s some serious support!
- Albert Einstein was once asked why it was that mankind was capable of discovering the nature of the structure of the atom, and yet we have not been able to devise the political means to keep the atom from destroying us. His reply was, “That is simple, It is because politics is more difficult than physics.” In any Internet strategic plan, the hardest part is working out how to get the people involved to work together. Compared to that, the technology is easy. Frankly, there are still many in the field that don’t appreciate the importance of presenting ourselves as a consistent whole. Your organization’s issues will be different, but they will also be unique and also have little to do with technology and everything to do with people. So the next time you receive a cold call from a Internet software salesman and they won’t take no for an answer, tell him or her, “Sure, anybody can build a bomb, we’re trying to figure out how not to blow ourselves up!” That should get them off the phone in a hurry.
- Your Internet strategy should support your offline business strategy. That sounds pretty obvious doesn’t it? But it’s trickier than it sounds. First of all, you have to have offline strategic plan. Talk about mission. Raise your hand if your organization does annual strategic planning. OK about XX% of the room. So of those that raised your hands, let me get a sampling, in this current year, how many business objectives do you have? That’s a lot, and that’s pretty typical for nonprofits. I really envy those retail companies where all they’re trying to do is sell electronics, or shoes, or investment products. A common problem for nonprofits is that frequently we try to be all things to all people, and it’s a nightmare when you have to represent that on a Web site.?
- Assess your audiences, prioritize, and treat them differently. This sounds smart, and even fun, doesn’t it? We all care passionately about our constituents, or we wouldn’t be working at nonprofits. We certainly aren’t doing it for the money. (joke) Who are some of your audiences that you’d like to reach with your Web site? <List on flip chart, pull out more, what about volunteers, advocates, press, job seekers, grant seekers> Great, the Internet can help you reach all those audiences, obviously. In fact, the Internet can help you reach those audience more efficiently, more quickly, more effectively, more dynamically, than the communication channels we’ve had at our disposal previously. But the catch is, most organizations serve multiple audiences. And your Web site can not serve them equally. It can’t. It shouldn’t. Don’t expect it to. Neither can your Web staff. What do I mean by that. When you prioritize your audiences and decide that a certain few are the highest priority, that means the rest are lower priority. This is going to cause friction in your organization. Because those lower priority audiences are high priority to certain people at your office.
- The strategic plan we created for Easter Seals was called the Internet Action Plan, is 89 pages long and full of intense detail. The plan is literally a roadmap we’ve been following from that day to this on our Internet journey. Of those 89 pages, this one is probably the most important. It represents many meetings, in which we brought together representatives from all departments at Easter Seals. I’ll be quite honest with you that I don’t think everyone involved in the discussions at the time realized that we would base future decisions such as content placement on the home page on easterseals.com and assignment of Internet staff resources on these priorities, but such critical decision are the point of creating priorities. We follow this very strictly. We have to, if not there’s no point in having a plan. I have many bruises from encounters with staff whose priorities for their own area are different than these.
- Once you’ve done the hard work of prioritizing your audiences, you need to identify your desired responses from them and their needs. This will lead you quickly to initiatives and tactics. For example, when thinking about potential donors, event participants, product purchasers, advocates, volunteers, or anyone else who you want to conduct a transaction with, they have one thing in common, they want the option to do it in their pajamas. That means 24 hours a day, online. And that leads to making it a high priority to cover online security, privacy, usability, etc. It’s about the constituent’s needs and their convenience. You need to become a constituent or customer advocate, and pull yourself out of the business as usual model. Success online demands that an organization pull itself out of siloed departmental or multi-affiliate barriers and collaborate for combined goals. This is easier said than done, but it is the absolute key to online success.
- Once you’ve done the hard work of prioritizing your audiences, getting your internal stakeholders to agree to move in the same direction, getting your cheese plate to champion the cause, (all the while fending off the advances of technology representatives who want to tempt you into starting implementation before you have a strategic plan) then the fun really begins. The gathering of information about individual constituents, and more importantly, the ability to access and sort that information, is key to a strong Internet strategy. It is the sophisticated database behind the Web site that allows you to have a dialogue with your constituents, and that is the key to an effective internet strategy. Fortunately, database systems that are integrated with online tools continue to increase in functionality and there are more affordable choices than ever designed specifically for nonprofits. Be sure that you have someone involved on your online team that is conversed in database marketing. Be very nice to that person. Buy them snacks.
- There’s a reason they call it the World Wide Web. Don’t be so egotistical in your Internet plan that you only think about making people come to you, or that is, to your Web site. Why should they? Why don’t you go to them? In Internet planning, we all have a natural tendency to equate our Internet strategy with what we do with our Web site, and then with our email communications. But really that’s so limiting. Why do we do that? Because it’s relatively easy to measure. It’s easy for our board to find. But at the end of the day, it’s our audience that counts. Potential donors are doing their research on sites like Guidestar, network for good, and other charity portals. And potential clients are searching for services all over the Web. Do you know where your target audiences are congregating online, and do you have a strategy to be represented there?
- We need to be realistic and talk more openly about what it takes to be successful online. There’s a famous saying that on the internet, no one knows you're a dog. Well on the Internet, nobody cares about your tax-status either, the same rules apply if you want to succeed.
- Thank you for joining me. I hope I gave you some food for thought.