Tag Archives: research

Let’s Talk Research Life, Not Your Job

4Researchers, , ,

Many of the important decisions about your life are made when you are not in the room.

Don’t believe me? Tell me, were you there when…

  • Your spouse decided whether or not to keep dating you early on?
  • The sellers decided to accept your bid on the house?
  • Your mortgage company decided to risk a loan on you?
  • Your boss decided to hire you over other candidates?

Who is going to be in the room when you go for a pay raise or a promotion? Who decides whether your department has enough in the budget to send you to an industry conference?

The recent APRA Prospect Development conference in New Orleans demonstrated with gusto that our field is alive and thriving. Many in our profession have become a driving force for success in their fundraising departments. How did those individuals get to the place where the decision makers felt really good about fundraising research?

Maybe you feel a bit like Dorothy when she first approached the Wizard of Oz – a little intimidated by leadership. But let me take you behind the curtain…

The Influencers

In social media we hear a lot of talk about finding the influencer – the person with the biggest following and the highest engagement.  In your office, many of the same rules apply. Influencers are those who interact with a lot of people and have direct control or influence over decision making.

Make a list of how many people you interact with. How many of them directly control or influence decisions that are important to you?

You might be surprised who turns up on your list. What about the president’s assistant? She might interact with a large number of people, including you. Does the president listen to her when she has an opinion?

The Plan Man

Now that you have the list of people you interact with in your organization, pull out a fresh sheet of paper and make a list of all of the people who influence the decision that is most important to you. Maybe that’s training and using analytics tools, attending a conference, or implementing a new process.

Take your two lists and identify a few people that are on both lists – not too many – that you could develop a better relationship with. Treat them the same way you know how to treat donors. Create a cultivation plan that builds rapport, engages the person on relevant topics of interest, and gives the person more of what s/he wants. Ask good questions. What is her biggest pain point? Help her somehow.

You might also find that by developing a deeper relationship with a few key people, you meet more of the decision makers in your office.

Now that you have your cultivation plans, decide what three words you want people to think of when they think of you or your department. Think it through carefully. Now use those words when you talk about yourself and your work. I don’t mean to go bragging on yourself, but in regular conversation consciously use those words.

Not only will people begin using those very same words to describe you and your work, but you will begin more closely aligning your behaviors with those descriptors.

For more than 15 years , my three words have been:
Integrity | Accountability | Growth

And, yes, I need to be reminded to use them more!

Relationship Time

At conferences like APRA’s Prospect Development conference, the visionary ideas presented, the cross-pollination of ideas and sentiments with colleagues, and the new skills learned can be transformational.

But this year, my biggest takeaway was how important it is to choose time spent on relationships very thoughtfully.

We all know in life that not everyone will like us. But making decisions about who to spend our precious time with is never easy. If there are people in your life who energize you, who excite your curiosity by being different, who bring out the best in you (add your own criteria), then invest in them. If there are people who don’t do all those good things for you (or you for them), then gently step away.

When you deliberately examine your social networks both inside and outside the office, strategically choose the people to invest your relationship energy with, and understand and promote your own core values, you will succeed. Paths will illuminate. Opportunities will arise you couldn’t have dreamed up.

Your Job or Your Research Life?

It’s up to you to define success in all aspects of your life. For me, research infuses almost every part of my life. Methodically approaching any kind of problem – treating it like a research project – has been my modus operandi since I was a child. Back when it felt like I could learn about anything just by reading books in the library. Nothing is too difficult if you have a method, an approach.

If you want more out of your research job, consider tweaking the phrase to research career – or even research life!

More Resources

Takeaways from other APRA peeps:

CareerInspirationSM

Carla Harris has been inspiring my career for years! Maybe she will inspire you too.

 

 

 

Yikes! Donor Personality Traits Can be Predicted?

Discussion, Focused Fundraising, , , , , , ,
Who’s watching your brain?

Wouldn’t it be great if we could discover the personalities, values and needs of our donors and prospects? Now we have access to demographic information – things like age, sex, marital status, residence, average income. But what if we could really *know* what makes our prospects tick?

Of course, businesses would love this deeper layer of extremely personal information too. And a group of researchers at IBM’s Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California are getting much closer to making this information accessible. How? Well, just for fun, let’s use the current buzzword – Big Data!

But it’s a little more nuanced than that. Really it’s social media. That’s the place where we bare ourselves the most. We talk with our friends candidly and share our feelings along with facts. Led by Eben Haber, the IBMers are capitalizing on research done by Tal Yarkoni at the University of Colorado on how certain words correlate with certain personality traits. Dr. Yarkoni looked at blogs. Dr. Haber and crew are looking at Twitter.

What do you say in your Twitter feed? A new product created by Dr. Haber and his team is being tested by a financial services company. The claim is that in just 50 tweets it can describe your personality reasonably well. In 200 tweets it gets uncomfortably accurate.

The big question is: Could we use information about personality traits to raise more money?

Up until now, the big data sets have been pretty exclusive to higher education and sometimes other large institutions. This is not because they have so many individual records (although they often do), but because universities have so many pieces of data on each of their alums. They keep track of things like what clubs they belonged to, how many degrees received, events attended, participation in directories and more recently, online alum communities. The local food bank is not likely to ever have that much information about each of its donors. But could organizations have more information in the future?

Multi-channel fundraising – print, email, website, Facebook, Twitter, etc. – means that organizations have access to multi-channels of data. This data is attached to specific individuals. Before you can blink your eyes, the software to ride the big social media data beast will drop in price and become more accessible to the masses of nonprofit organizations. Okay, maybe it will take a few eye blinks, but if the past is a good predictor of the future, it is definitely coming.

Right now the most common piece of data we use to determine whether someone has an affinity (likes our org) is giving. We want to see things like frequency, recency and longevity. We can do a wealth screening to identify people capable of giving a lot, but that does not help us turn them into donors – into people who have an affinity for our organization and its work.

Now close your eyes and imagine … wait! read this first before closing your eyes … that you can run your database through a screening that assigns rated personality traits to each constituent record. Ahhhh! Now you can group people by personality traits and create messaging that resonates with who they are – resonates with the core of their personality. WOW! People would convert to donors at amazing rates! Right?

Until that magical day, let’s see if we can’t work on our current messaging. Little things like communicating with donors in the medium in which they like to give. No more of this sending paper to people who have demonstrated online giving. Many organizations are still struggling with what feels like “traditional” message segments, but are quite new to many. Messaging. It’s like exercise and good nutrition. There’s no magic pill (or database screening) that will ever replace it.

Which brings us back to the heart of fundraising – relationship building. Some organizations are better at it than others – regardless of budget size or the depth of data.

So although it is always fun to play with new technology and to imagine a day when science will turn “magic” into a software product, the feet on the ground (you and I) need to stay focused on what builds the best and most relationships with our organizations and missions. The right messages. The phone calls and face-to-face visits. Being real with real people.

P.S. Are you on Twitter? Let’s connect! You can find me @jenfilla I promise I won’t try to predict your personality!!

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