Should You Just Spend the Time Calling Donors Instead?

For a lot of more traditional fundraisers and nonprofit managers, communicating via the internet is a kind of scary idea. It's hard to believe in the economy of scale that communication technologies can provide and to believe that sending broadcast emails or creating a Facebook page, for instance, can ever be helpful in developing the type of personal connections that nonprofits rely on.

In my line of work though, I just as often run into nonprofit technology staff and consultants who I think have an *over-reliance* on technology. Technology is the hammer for which many things becomes the nail. Want to communicate with donors? Let's do email! Facebook! A blog! We need to use these online tools to start a conversation! Those things absolutely can be useful, but it's important to prioritize them against other things you might do.

For instance, you could spend that time simply calling donors and constituents at random, to thank them, or to ask them a quick set of questions (how did they like the services they used? what do you do well? not so well?). If you've never done this, it can be pretty magical. Often people are amazed that you've called, happy to talk, and have useful insights. It gives you a great sense as to who your constituents actually are and what they care about. And not coincidentally, my experience is that it fosters great new connections. People want to volunteer, wanted to ask you something, and, not coincidentally, donate at considerably higher rates after. Nothing starts a conversation like, well, an actual conversation.

I think this is a really useful bar to measure online communication techniques against. Should I send that email, create that Facebook page, write that blog, or would it be more effective to just spend that time calling donors?

Emails often pass that threshold - for instance, we spend about two hours a month sending out our eNews. It's pretty clear to me that the number of people that we reach and affect (and inspire to help us) by sending out resources beats the number of people we could connect with by phone. But Facebook? The jury's still out for me on that one (though just trying it out is mission related for us - so we have the luxury of investing for other reasons).

And blogs? A tough call, based on the goals you're trying to achieve. A blog can help you reach out to more people, have conversations that you hadn't considered, and show you as an expert to the press and your sector. But it's so time consuming for your staff people (assuming it's actually a staff blog). Would you gain more by spending that couple of hours a week calling donors? Perhaps. It's worth considering.