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Permission is in the Eye of the Beholder: Four Steps for Repairing and Building Trust with Online Donors
By Michael C. Gilbert, October 26, 2009
I'm teaching a workshop this week that doesn't mince words at all - Online Fundraising: You're Doing It Wrong! Based on close observation of the field since its inception and several large scale surveys, I've concluded that most organizations who are raising money online have enormous flaws in their programs. This article discusses one such flaw.
One of the ways in which we are getting things wrong in online fundraising is the way we treat the nurturing and tracking of the permission we have with our stakeholders. We need to stop treating it as a burdensome requirement and start treating it as a bountiful opportunity. Most of us who are involved in online fundraising treat the notion of "permission" as an obligation. An important obligation, perhaps, but still an obligation. At best we see it as a point of honor, the right thing to do. At worst we see it as a formality or legal obligation. In either case, we don't see it as a strategic strength from which we can derive value if only we would invest in it. But that's exactly what it is.
This attitude toward permission is not new. I remember my very first serious fundraising consulting gig, twenty plus years ago when not a single one of my clients had an email address of their own, let alone the email addresses of their donors. I was trying to convince this organization's board of directors to start with themselves and who they knew. I asked them each to make a list of friends who they would approach for support. They were terribly uncomfortable. Some of them had hoped that I would help them buy mailing lists of strangers to whom they could send appeals.
Therein is revealed the distinction at the heart of this issue: Permission isn't a legal checkbox. Sure, you might be legally allowed to send email to a list of strangers that you purchased, but they will most likely see that message as spam. Permission is an open door to a journey of engagement. You and I and each of those board members from twenty years ago have permission to send just about anything to our closest friends and - assuming we haven't already lost their trust by having sent them garbage in the past - they won't mark us as a spammer, they will open the email, and they will probably even reply. We have their trust.
Trust is what "permission" is all about, after all.
The first step in treating permission as a means of trust building is to stop treating it as a means of legal compliance. I'm not saying that you shouldn't have a legal checklist œ we live in a litigious world, after all. But a legal checklist is not a communication strategy! That means you need to pull that legal function out into its own process and not allow it to substitute for your thinking about trust and permission.
The second step involves a change in your point of view, as a communicator. Instead of asking whether a certain kind of communication (this or that particular email message or content) is or isn't technically in accordance with the "permission" you have, ask how your stakeholder will perceive it. Put yourself in their position. From the perspective of trust building, what's important isn't whether you or some third parties think your message is spam; it's whether your stakeholder thinks it's spam.
This change in point of view makes some types of cultivation harder and other types easier. It becomes almost impossible to justify list rental in any conventional sense. On the other hand, chaperoning starts to look like a really appealing model. (I'm seeing more and more of this recently. The Nation magazine and Alternet are both smart practitioners of the chaperoning model.) It becomes harder (though not impossible) to engage in third party appending (where you give a broker your list and they add email addresses for the people for whom you have only postal addresses or telephone numbers). Most people are going to experience getting email this way as spam, although I think it's possible to draft messages that mitigate that damage somewhat.
In fact, changing how you write messages is the third step. There is a lot more room for candor, irony, humor, and even openness about mistakes once you get past the narrow formality of legal permission. For example, let's say you have a large collection of email addresses from various events or forms, but you are unclear on what exactly people were signing up for. (This sort of thing happens all the time.) In the narrow world of formal permission, those email addresses are effectively lost. But in the world of experiential permission, there are lots of ways in which you can salvage the situation. More than once I've seen an honestly crafted email make it possible to subscribe everyone on such a list to a new newsletter. A little chagrined humor will go a long way.
If you think these first three steps make a case for personalization, you're right. But in a traditional one-to-many email relationship, it's impossible to have a finely grained permission scheme. There are too many people with too many histories and too many different sorts of email you can send to have unique permissions for everyone, the way we do with personal relationships. Just consider it is enough to drive anyone crazy.
Thus, the fourth and final step to pursuing the permission opportunity is to be smart about scaling up. Here are several ways to do it: As before, candor can come in handy. Just admitting that it's tricky on your end is often enough to allow you to keep your formal permissions very simple. Another option is to focus first on your hierarchy of engagement (you do have such a model, yes?) and tying your mailing permissions to it. In other words, if you have four meaningful levels of engagement (such as Follower, Supporter, Organizer, and Leader), you can tailor your outbound email accordingly. Yet another method (and possibly the most important one) is to leverage social media and, in effect, outsource some of your permission management to peer-to-peer relationships. Your organizers and leaders know what they can send to their friends, for example. That scales well by breaking the one-to-many model. All in all, it's important to keep your publicly defined permissions very simple in comparison to how you actually manage them internally, which can be highly personal and complex. This has a way of lowering expectations and keeping you from backing yourself into a corner.
As a sector, we have managed to force the round peg of online fundraising into the square hole of old-media practices. We shaved little bits off here and there and thus, it mostly seems to work. But I still think we are by and large doing it wrong. Moving from just tolerating the idea of permission to actually embracing it is one good way to start doing it right.
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