Quick News Roundup (a.k.a. B.O.B. -- Borrowings from Other Blogs)

On lunch break. Very tired after long week. Still trying to hit that 150 posts in 2009 goal, so here's a quick news roundup:

Thanks to Librarian in Black for pointing out a January Information Today article on tech trends for 2009. A few that especially caught my eye, and which I believe will most affect fundraising tech:

• Open source solutions looking increasingly attractive to companies cutting costs (and the longer the economy stays depressed, the more attractive they will be)
• Increasing use of social networking services for communication (rather than email)
• Increased data portability among systems
• Enterprise search becoming increasingly more discovery-oriented, with easy browse and navigation powered by faceted metadata
• New transparency in government with the Obama administration
• Security and privacy remaining major concerns (this one is permanently on my watch list)

Check out the whole list here.

Thanks to Robert Frank over at the Wealth Report for Who Will Get Rich off the Stimulus? Wealth Report is one of my consistent favorites, and I have to restrain myself from continually re-posting everything Frank publishes.

And, earlier this week Dr. Larry Brilliant announced he was stepping down as the head of Google.org. First, I love the name "Dr. Brilliant," and wish that was my name. Secondly, the New York Times reports, "Google.org might curtail its financing of nonprofit groups unless they are closely aligned with Google projects. Dr. Brilliant said he would become chief philanthropy evangelist for Google."

That's all for now, dear readers. I haven't forgotten my promise to give you an RFM tutorial. As soon as I am able to think clearly again, count on it.

The Cost of a Lost Phone Number

Today I did a very fun math project. I calculated the value of finding a new phone number for our Telefund program to call. I was hoping to demonstrate that the dollars it takes to find new phone numbers are more than repaid by the dollars raised by having additional prospects to solicit.

And, they are -- many times over. This project yielded the best investment opportunity I've seen recently!

This seems like a no-brainer, but sometimes you need to show your work to motivate action. And, of course, making decisions based on data is generally a good idea. You tend to learn some surprising stuff, in addition to confirming suspicions. For example, I was surprised to see that the value of a found number varied widely between different areas of my institution.

So, how did I do it?

First, I calculated the net attrition of records with phonable numbers. (How many less numbers do we have this year than last year?)

Then, I projected how much revenue was lost because we weren't able to call those records. I multiplied the number of lost records by the participation rate (percentage of donors who give) of that particular pool of donors, and multiplied that result by the average gift size of that pool.

Gross lost revenue = number of lost records * participation rate * average gift

Net lost revenue = (number of lost records * participation rate * average gift) - cost of finding a new record

Okay, so now I know how much revenue could have been had. Then, I simply divided this lost revenue by the number of lost records, yielding the average cost per lost record. Or, to phrase it positively, the average potential revenue gained by finding a record.

Average value of a lost record = lost revenue/lost records

Then I made a few lovely charts, one of which was a bar graph showing more and more lost revenue each year due to phone number attrition, and including a projection for next year. It literally resembles low-hanging fruit, due to its inverted nature: since it displays negative numbers, the bars actually hang below the x axis.

All in all, this was a fun and easy project, once I figured out how to conceptualize it. I would love to hear from other people who have undertaken similar projects. Comment, please!

(Some caveats -- this was a fairly rudimentary stab at this concept. I didn't control for people who had opted out of being called (as opposed to numbers simply lost), nor did I consider whether people with lost numbers are likely to have different participation rates and average gift sizes than those whose phone numbers we retain. That's a more complicated project for a different day.)

Prospect Research and the Annual Fund: Now More Than Ever

As I suspect most development researchers are doing, I've been thinking a lot about where to focus my work in a time of down portfolios.

Just a year ago I thought, "Well, my job's pretty secure because it's dependent on wealthy people, and that's a pretty stable source of income." Tell that to the yacht dealers. Even the rich Russians are starting to disappear.

It seems to me it is time to turn our attention to the oft' overlooked step-child: the annual fund. Don't get me wrong: I love the annual fund. It's just that in the boom times, prospect researchers (especially those of us in small shops) focus nearly exclusively on major giving, since that's where the big bucks are.

But since major gifts come from appreciated assets (and there aren't that many of those around these days), it's time to look at the income-based giving of the annual fund, while there is still some income remaining to be given.

How can researchers help the annual fund? Just as we help major gift efforts -- by increasing the efficiency of our solicitations. That is, make sure we are spending less money to raise more money by focusing our efforts on people who will give money, and by asking them in ways to which they will respond.

So what's a researcher to do? Here are a few ideas (some inspired by the CASE VIII conference I attended this week).

In a future post, I'll share how to do a simple data mining project, RFM analysis. RFM stands for Recency, Frequency, and Monetary, and it simply asks, "Who has given me the most money, most recently, and most often?" This can be a very helpful rudimentary segmentation tool.

Some of my other ideas include more complicated data mining projects including cluster analysis, channel preference analysis (how does a particular person like to be contacted), and message preference analysis (what kinds of messages inspire a particular person to give)? And of course, I'll be looking at which clusters, channel preferences and message preferences ultimately correspond to major giving.

In the long run, an increased annual fund focus can only be a good thing, since that is where we can do some great prospecting for major donors. And in this economy, we don't want to stop prospecting for major donors, but if we can combine prospecting with increasing the effectiveness of the annual fund, everyone wins.

Final day of CASE 8

Not much to report today.

My presentation went well, despite some sort of stomach bug. I decided to use it as a growth experience: presenting when you feel awful. I was surprised -- the adrenaline enabled me to overcome my nausea. So, next time you're sick, try public speaking!

Unfortunately I had to skip the remainder of the sessions, because my nausea returned immediately after my presentation.

So, I've got nothing further to report, but thanks for following along with my little live-blogging experiment. (It still blows my mind that I can update my blog from my phone!)

Update from CASE

Quick update, because I'm sick and need to get some rest for my presentation in the morning.

Some insights from today: People lie about their channel preferences (Oh, yes, save a tree -- solicit me by email! But I won't give unless you call me on the phone.) So, it's all about analyzing actual behavior, rather than stated behavior.

Josh Birkholz from Bentz Whaley Flessner is still so number one! I have seen a variation of the same presentation he gave today at least three times. I took more notes in that session than any other. Way too much to get into tonight, but I am so excited about data mining possibilities.

Okay, off to sleep.

"Live-Blogging" CASE VIII

[Compiled from previous posts with some added links and context. I know this is counter to the spirit of "live-blogging" but I just can't help myself. I'm a perpetual editor. ]

Opening plenary. Lots of flight-themed metaphors. Howard Behar, former president of Starbucks is the first speaker. Just advocated for the secession of Cascadia. (I agree. Howard, call me.) Behar isn't prepared to talk about Canada either. I feel better.

Howard Behar seems like he'd be great to have a beer with. His first point: be yourself regardless of your context. If you have to be a different person to be at work, it's no good. This is also about setting a mission and values, and living up to them. Behar calls this his 'one hat' principle. Next: live up to your values, and be prepared to pay the price to do so.

Second point: The person who sweeps the floor should choose the broom. Behar just told the story of how Frappucino became a $6 billion business, after almost being killed by the powers that be because 'we don't do that'. The idea is that you need to let your people try new things (choose their broom). If you don't, "they will never make a mistake, but they won't do anything else either."

Behar also points out that people are not assets. They are unpredictible humans with personal problems, and should be treated as such.

Point #3: 'Care, like you really mean it' Behar does seem like he cares about humanity, so this isn't as cheesy when he says it as when I type it. Behar said that laying people off should be embarrassing to executives (as it apparently is in Japan).

All in all, a well-delivered talk on what could have been a tired topic. (It's about the people.)

Addendum: I received Howard Behar's book, "It's Not About the Coffee" as a gift for speaking at the conference. I am looking forward to reading it, and I'll report back.

See You in Seattle!

I'm off to the CASE VIII conference in Seattle, where I'll be presenting a session titled "Beyond Google: Quick and Easy Prospect Research Tricks for Development Officers".

Be forewarned: I may try some liveblogging from the conference, depending on how much I can get away with tapping away at my mobile phone.

Topics of speculation include: What's up with the "airplane/flight" theme of the conference? How many people will actually be there, given cutbacks in professional development budgets? Similarly, how many sponsors/exhibitors ponied up to be there? Will Canadians be angry at my presentation, because it doesn't really address Canada?

Rad-Ons!

In a previous post, I covered some of my favorite tab-related Firefox add-ons. Here are some miscellaneous add-ons that make searching easier and more enjoyable.

Add to Search Bar -- One of my all-time favorites, this add-on quickly places any search box on the list of the search engines available in the search bar on the navigation toolbar. Simply right click in a search bar (say finance.yahoo.com/search or the bizjournals.com archives). This add-on can be a little persnickety, but it has worked well for the majority of engines I've added.

Resurrect Pages -- Nothing is more frustrated than a "page not found" (aka 404) error. Maybe you even saw a bit of promising text offered up in search results, but now, nothing! What's a researcher to do? Breathe new life into dead pages using this add-on, which retrieves cached versions of the pages from a few different cache sites, including the WayBack machine at archive.org.

IE Tab -- Why the heck does anyone still make websites that don't play well with Firefox? IE Tab can't answer that question, but it will help you work around this inconvenience by creating an Internet Explorer environment within a Firefox tab. Now you don't have to launch IE and toggle back and forth between browsers, just because one key site can't handle Firefox.

Extended Copy Menu -- If you do lots of cutting and pasting between websites and other programs, download this add-on today. Extended Copy lets you copy in plain text or html. Plain text copying lets you skip reformatting the text once you get to your destination document.

Morning Coffee -- This is a cute little add-on that places a coffee cup on your navigation toolbar. When you click the cup, your daily selection (adjustable by day of the week) of websites pops up. This is really handy, not only for the sites you open every single morning, but also for remembering sites that are published on a weekly basis.

p.s. Last night I had a dream that someone was telling me how totally cool Google Chrome is. So, I suppose I'll need to take it for a test drive.

Recessionzilla: The Reptilian Wrath Rages On, and A Hopeful Prediction

In the last installment of Recessionzilla, you heard the thrilling tale of the rising unemployment rate and some predictions about when the turnaround may happen. Now let's break it down by geography and sector. (For those just tuning in, this is my take-away from a recent talk by Oregon's state economist Tom Potiowsky.)

The worst hit parts of Oregon: Medford and Bend are feeling the effects of the housing bubble worse than other geographies. With the biggest boom comes the biggest bust. Unemployment in the Bend area has already hit 11.3%.

In general, Oregon was not terribly affected by the housing crisis, largely due to the urban growth boundary, which prevented builders from oversupplying the market as badly as in states like Florida. Potiowsky predicts that we will not lose too much more value in our housing market due to the bubble. Lest that start feeling too good, "due to the bubble" is the operative phrase. Oregon's home prices will continue to decrease in value due to the recession in general.

Anything housing-related is already feeling the hit: construction, wood products, home improvements (e.g. Home Depot). Potiowsky predicts housing will stay negative in 2010, and may bounce back some in 2011. This prediction takes the federal stimulus into account. (At this point, Potiowsky's entire audience audibly and visibly winced.)

One final bit of real estate and construction-related bad news: non-residential real estate is starting to go south as well.

The export boom is ending due to the global financial crisis. This will primarily affect the Willamette Valley, the manufacturing core of Oregon. Forty percent of our exports are computer/electronic equipment. This sector is just beginning to tank. The good news: Oregon is well-positioned to rebound quickly in manufacturing once the economic crisis turns around.

Speaking of manufacturing, transportation equipment (think Country Coach, Freightliner) is already in the toilet. Who can forget those crazy high gas prices?

Rural Oregon, highly dependent on timber, has been hurting for the last few years. (Hark back to tales of libraries closed and citizens arming themselves due to lack of police protection.) Unemployment is in the double digits in many rural Oregon counties, including 15.9% in Grant and 12.2% in Klamath. These figures do come with a grain of salt: less people work in the winter than in the summer in rural counties. However, both of the aforementioned unemployment rates represent four- to five-point increases over 2007's fourth quarter.

So, what's next? Discretionary spending. The great service economy is going down: non-essential retail (toilet paper, you're good; Hermes Birkin, not so much), restaurants, and the hospitality industry are next on the list to fall to the great Recessionzilla.

The bright spot in all this: health care. Turns out, people are still getting sick. But this part of the economy is starting to soften also. (It is appalling to realize that healthcare is subject to the vagaries of the market, and that a lot of companies are probably run like AIG. Note to self: do not get sick until at least 2012.)

Having shared so much bad news, I'll pass on a more cheerful prediction for the future. I believe we may be witnessing the beginning of the 35-hour work week. Firstly, though there will certainly be many lay-offs, I am seeing hopeful evidence that workers and employers will "spread the pain" by reducing hours or enforcing unpaid furloughs, rather than eliminating whole positions. This will result in large amounts of the workforce experiencing additional free time. We may not be so willing to go back to forty-plus hours a week after a few years of reduced work weeks.

As well, though it's hard to believe now, Potiowsky pointed out that we will be facing a labor shortage around 2015, as the baby boomers age out of the workplace. This will result in two sources of demographic pressure on employers to offer meaningful part-time labor. Some baby boomers (particularly those whose portfolios are still recovering from the recession) will be willing to work part-time in a semi-retirement scenario, and Generations X and Y (who are famous for our love of work-life balance) will demand it.

We'll see -- social scientists in the 1940s fretted about the coming "leisure problem," when increased industrial productivity would allow Americans to work half-time. What would we do with our staggering amounts of free time? It is depressingly possible that we will emerge from the other side of this recession and bulldoze right back into our previous lifestyles, with no pause for self-reflection.

(For the unemployment stats I quoted and much more, check out OLMIS, the Oregon Labor Market Information System.)

In Which I Over-Use the Ellipsis and You Hear More Bad News About the Economy

It ain't pretty.

Oregon's economy has not hit bottom yet. I recently saw Tom Potiowsky, Oregon State Economist speak at Portland State. As promised, here's what I gleaned:

For once, the income tax is a more stable source of revenue than a sales tax would be. Generally, income fluctuates more than consumption. Due to what Potiowsky called the "bunker mentality" of consumers, consumption has gone way down. So, Oregon's doing better than sales-tax dependent states like Washington and California, both in serious budget crises right now. That's the good news (for Oregon, in a schadenfreude kind of way). The bad news is: the worst is yet to come for Oregon, since income tax revenues will certainly decline as...

...unemployment worsens. We've got around a 9% unemployment rate right now; it was 5.5% in June 2008. Two-thirds of 2008's job loss was in the fourth quarter. And, the bleeding continues. Potiowsky predicts Oregon's unemployment rate could hit 11% in mid-2010, after which point...

...the "feel-good turn-around" starts to happen. Potiowsky predicts the "technical turn-around" will be in the second or third quarter of this year. (When Paul Krugman was in town recently, he took a more pessimistic view.) It's a long time to the "feel-good." In the words of the Carpenters, "We've only just begun...."

...Tune in next time for the thrilling saga of the business sectors and geographies of the state that have already fallen to the mighty wrath of Recessionzilla, and those that are next on its stale-breathed and sinister agenda.

Big News Roundup

It's been a week of big news for fundraisers. Here's a quick round-up:

HIPAA change on the horizon -- A provision in the stimulus package will mean serious trouble for healthcare fundraisers. It would revise HIPAA's definition of healthcare operations to exclude fundraising. Yikes. This means development staff would no longer have access to the names and addresses of patients who have received care: in other words, their best prospects.

Taxation fixation -- The 400 highest-earning Americans paid an effective tax rate of 17% in 2006. Add this to the recent string of high-profile tax "troubles," and the focus on tax structure during the election, and we'll likely see some serious tax reforms in the next few years. Get ready, gift planners and CPAs -- prepare for an upswing in tax-motivated (or at least tax-considerate) giving once the recession turns around.

And, of course:

Salary caps -- $500,000 sounds like a lot of money to you and me, but for major donors, it's chump change. This will impact New York and Connecticut a lot more than Oregon. Oregon's chief economist, Tom Potiowsky, points out that our financial services industry (the primary beneficiary of the bailout) is miniscule in comparison to some East Coast markets. So the economic fallout from that particular crash is much smaller here.

But that doesn't mean bad news isn't on the horizon for Oregon. Timber, anyone? More on that later, when I report back on Potiowsky's talk at Portland State on Friday, "The Big Dipper: Another Roller Coaster Ride for the Oregon Economy."

This Just In: Sexy Tuesday, March 10 -- Be There.

Hot off the presses: Planned Parenthood of the Columbia Willamette's next Sexy Tuesday event will be on March 10, 2009 at Mint/820. Come enjoy a drink with me and a bunch of other rad pro-choice young people.

These events are always fun, and don't feel like a traditional fundraising event. (No rubber chickens, very few presenters who introduce presenters who introduce additional presenters.)

More details to come.

Tabulicious!

"Internet browsing" is a funny term. Browsing sounds so mellow; as a researcher, it feels more like I am internet rooting, wild boar style. It's an intense data experience. Being a successful researcher is more than just finding information: it's finding it quickly, and weaving together disparate sources to form your analysis.

It's all about the tabs. Firefox revolutionized internet research with its tabbed interface, and its open source design has encouraged myriad add-ons to improve the tabbed browsing experience.

Sometimes I find myself with more than fifty tabs open at one time. (How do I know? Tab Counter displays the number of tabs you have open. Not essential, but it is a neat trick.)

What's a nerd to do?



Tab Catalog -- Immensely useful. Tab Catalog shows your tabs as a thumbnail style list, allowing you to manipulate each tab, for example closing whole swathes at a time, or finding the one out of fifty tabs you need to see right now.

Speaking of finding that tab... HashColouredTabs and Aging Tabs are really helpful. HashColouredTabs will assign a colored icon to any site without its own icon -- this helps to visually distinguish between different sites. Aging Tabs is just as it sounds. The longer you have a tab open, the "older" it gets, and Aging Tabs darkens the tab.

Tabs Open Relative is one of my favorite low-key extensions. It changes the way tabs launch, so they open to the right of the tab you are in, rather than opening at the far right of the tab row. This is especially handy when you are dealing with a bunch of different types of information at once, as it allows for a rough segmentation of your tabs by subject area, since they open near each other rather than in a jumble.

And finally, Tab History is another quietly helpful tab extension. When you click on a link to open a new tab, the new tab will retain the history of the parent tab. A similar extension is Duplicate Tab, which allows you to clone a tab, along with its history.

Tune in soon for more Firefox add-on fun, including a handy tool that brings pages back from the dead.

Six More Weeks!

Book Report: Made to Stick

What do "Where's the Beef?" and the urban legend about having your kidney stolen and waking up in a bathtub full of ice have in common? According to Chip and Dan Heath, it's "stickiness." The brothers Heath have identified six attributes of a story that "sticks." Conveniently, these attributes spell SUCCES(s): simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional, story.

Made to Stick is an enjoyable read, packed with real examples that illustrate how to craft memorable messages. I immediately found myself thinking about the next few ideas I need to share with a group, from an upcoming presentation in Seattle to new workplace procedures.

The Heaths emphasize that while this book is certainly useful for professional storytellers, such as fundraisers or marketers, anyone can use the principles they share to communicate more effectively. There's no way that I am going to win any writing competitions with my fascinating prospect management procedures. But Made to Stick did spur some thoughts about how to present them so that they are memorable, making it much more likely that my co-workers will follow them.

Instead of just presenting the procedures (Step 1 -- do this; Step 2 -- do the next thing), I am going to tell the story of a new major gift prospect who becomes a major gift donor, and show how our prospect management procedures helped further that relationship. Suddenly the abstract and dry procedures I have written become a story about a development officer who successfully lands a giant donation -- much more compelling.

This book makes a great companion read to Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to be Persuasive, reviewed earlier here.