Free Flowing Thoughts

SalesForce.com Offers Non-Profits Free Licenses

The ability to manage your membership data for targeting communications and planning membership programs requires a great CRM tool.  The larger your organization grows, the more important this will be. 

SalesForce.com is one the best CRM tools I've seen, but seemed out of reach for our non-profit organization.  Dell has deployed the tool to our sales team and they have loved the product.  There is a non-profit version of the tool that can manage your membership data and create easy to use web tools for events and membership renewals.

Turns out SalesForce.com will donate 10 licenses for your non-profit and take 80% off the license per user over the first 10 licenses. 

Watch this to learn more.

Thinking Bigger

Today I spent a beautiful Austin Saturday inside a windowless hotel conference room.  Other than that, it was the most energizing meetings I've had in weeks.  A small group of the MCEC board and staff were meeting to discuss a capital campaign and build a development plan. 

The big lesson for me was if you believe your organization has the ability to make a meaningful difference you have to be bold about asking for the money to accomplish your mission.  If you do not think your organization or program is worth funding, no one else will either.  At MCEC we know that what we do matters, we see examples of it every day.  But historically our group has been uncomfortable asking for money.  We know we have to move past this to ensure someone is around to make a difference for military children for years to come. 

The amazing thing is that even with this reluctance to ask for money our organization has grown from $36 to an operating budget of several million and it continues to grow at double digits every year.  Imagine what we could do if we really made this a priority.

MCEC's New Web Site: Part 1

Shortly after Al Gore invented the Internet, MCEC launched www.militarychild.org and like many non-profits we have not made significant changes since that time.  It is easy for an organization to not take the time to update their Web site with all the other pressing issues.  With phones ringing and emails coming in it's easy to forget that there is another critical communication channel you are neglecting.

But on a given day, more people outside your organization probably interact with your website than with you, your staff, your magazine, send email or call you on the phone---combined.  To make a good impression on your constituents you need to make the time for your website.

The expense is the first thing that usually stops nonprofits from getting around to updating their site. It's usually not as much as you fear. At some point in the past a company provided a bid for nearly $1M to redo our site.  This of course set the expectation with our group that the project was not affordable. There is no reason for a nonprofit to spend $1M just for a website update. 

The reality is you can spend as much or as little on a site but you can have a very nice site updated by a professional firm with an open source content management system for <$25k.  If you have a lot of content (multiple pages, sections, lots of documents to post, lots of pages with different structures then expect to pay $50-$75k.  A high end firm with very strong design and heavily involved account service will be in the six figures.

To get started prepare a detailed RFP, and if someone in your staff does have online experience then seek out an expert who will volunteer some time. MCEC sought advice from my co-workers at Dell and other experts who either provided feedback on the current site we should keep in mind or technical expertise when reviewing portions of the proposal.

Ask for references of firms from people who have recently completed online work. Look for contacts who have a lot of experience in this space, all web firms are not created equal.

Keep in mind this is the primary communication channel for your organization. Invest and budget with that in mind.

The Non-Profit Brand Series: Start With The Brand Vision

Some of the best ideas on brand development comes from Scott Davis book Brand Asset Management.  David Aaker also has some outstanding work on this topic and most of what you'll find are adapatations of their work.  In his book, Davis says brand visions have four components:

1. A statement of the overall goal for the brand
2. Target market(s) identified for brand development
3. How the brand will be differentiated from others
4. Financial goals linked specifically to the brand

1) Overall goals for the brand should be closely tied to the mission of your organization.  In most cases, the brand you are managing is your organization itself as few non-profits have the resources to actively manage a large brand portfolio (in most cases it is a mistake to try.)

2) Target markets are your constitencies.  You should spend considerable time understanding these different groups and how to communicate and engage each.  In most cases you will have more potential constituencies to focus on than you will have the resources to engage in a meaningful way.  Identify the three most important groups to accomplish your mission.  For MCEC, we selected: families, policy makers, and volunteers. 

3) Understanding how your brand is different from any other in your space is challenging, but may be the most important part of the exercise.  If your constituencies cannot understand what is unique about your organization they are less likely to engage with you.  MCEC is unique from other non-profits focused on military children in that our mission is to ease the transitional challenges affecting education.  We are positive, global in scale, and experts at what we do.  We are working toward the day when every military child walks into a new school and is greeted by name by their new guidance counselor and a Student to Student volunteer.  There would be no confusion or backward progress the student's level or graduation date.  They are quickly integrated into the same extracurricular activities they have been passionate about for years in their previous schools and they are actively recruited by major universities because of their unique perspective as a military child and not in spite of their mobile life.

4) No non-profit can survive without funding.  There are many different models to fund the efforts of the non-profit and you should develop your brand with this in mind.  If you organization is funded based on invidual donations your brand needs to be oriented toward attracting these individuals.  If your organization is funded from services you would have a slightly different approach.  MCEC funding comes largely from services, we are recognized as the experts in the transition challenges of mobile military children.  As we manage our brand, we keep in mind the importance of maintaining an image of accessible experts who equip caretakers of military children.

The Non-Profit Brand Series: What is a brand in the first place?

Whether you want it or not, your non-profit already has a brand.  From the first moment you told someone else about your organization you began building the brand.  Understanding the brand and influencing its direction is more important to your mission than most non-profits realize.  Your brand will impact who feels drawn to volunteer for your cause, who seeks your input in public policy, or whether or not they interact with your organization at all.

Your brand is more than the logo, it's beyond the organization's name, and it is more than a reputation.  Your brand encompasses every type of interaction people have with your organization.  It plays across every sense.  There are a number of great definitions of a brand, but my favorite comes from Casey Jones.  Your brand is not defined by what you think and feel, it is what your constituents think.  It is not developed by what you tell people to think, it is inferred from what you do and say. 

Everything brands.

As an organization you get to influence your brand, but you cannot directly manage it the way you can update a Web site or write an article.  Your brand becomes the accumulation of all these things you do.

If you are purposeful about influencing your brand, you can make it your most valuable asset to accomplishing your mission.  More on how to do that over the new few posts.