You don’t want to be a tool, do you?
Who do you read to make you think? One blog I like to check in on is Trevor O’Donnell’s Marketing the Arts to Death. As the title says, it’s about arts marketing. But to me, it’s broader.
Trevor shows how mistaken arts marketing often is. Because its focus is internal. Because it’s what insiders think is important or impressive.
But it’s not about the audience. What’s in it for them? Why would attending be a fun, enlightening, or pleasurable experience for them?
His recent piece put it succinctly: Are you selling drills or holes?
Go ahead, and give it a read. I’ll wait here.
His lesson applies to fundraising as well.
In the past few days, I received two newsletters from nonprofits. One from a local organization, and one from a huge national organization.
Both are doing great work. But I was so disappointed!
Whether local or national, every headline was about the organization and its accomplishments. To use Trevor’s metaphor, they were selling drills.
“Look, we’ve done good stuff!”
They hope to prove their worth to the donor or prospective donor.
But that misses the point.
Because reporting on your impact is important…
But connecting the impact directly to your donors is even more important.
Think about it: if you can do it all, why do you need donors?
And if donors can see you getting it all done without them, why would they feel the need to give?
In Trevor’s example, the hole is the audience’s experience. In fundraising, it’s the donor experience – the giving high a donor feels when she can help someone or something – that matters to her.
Don’t cheat her of that feeling!
Mary, thank you for this awesome blog post! It’s an approach artists just tend not to thing about! We should always consider what’s in it for audiences.
Well, I think artists like you tend to intuitively think about it, Rosemary. You know how your performance is being received, and you calibrate it accordingly. What would make my audience happy?
We should be thinking along the same lines in fundraising. Not as much about what we need, but about what a gift can DO. Giving can be such a happy thing – we ought to focus on that more!
Thanks so much for the comment!
I recall taking a marketing class ages ago (Bush the first or Clinton the first era) and the instructor used a Black and Decker campaign as an example. It was “We sell the hole” or something like that. That has stuck with me forever as a way of talking about what charities do.
Yes! Trevor’s metaphor exactly. Sell holes, not drills.