Charities, Not-for-profit agencies, non-profit organizations, or NGOs can all lose support easily. They should not be focusing on trying to remind me to donate money to their cause consistently. Most of these organizations are focused on fund raising and the only way they seem to know how is by consistently mailing or emailing me about renewing my membership or donating to a cause.
This is not going to work effectively because I am not going to donate to every charity out there. I just can’t afford it and to be honest, I often feel there is an moral grey area in fund raising. Even when I was fund raising for the United Way a few months ago I did not really like sending off emails asking for support, not that it even had a major effect anyways because majority of people did not respond.
With the introduction of the Internet, and in particular Facebook, fundraising can be a lot simpler and less intrusive for an individual. It gives the control over to the people rather than the organization. It sounds scary but if you want your cause to be supported, then allow people to have the choice of choosing to be reminded.
If I wanted to donate again, I will. If I wanted to be reminded, I would ask.
An organization crosses the line when they send me reminders to renew a membership, even after I have already gone through the renewal process months ago. This is an annoyance to me and just reminds me of why I won’t want to renew my membership next time around. Believe or not, I keep getting notices over and over and over again. I don’t need 5 notices in a month to remind me to buy a charitable lottery ticket or 3 envelopes in the mail telling me to renew my membership after I had already renewed it three months ago.
Lessons for today:
- Let people choose to opt-in rather than the traditional opt-out
- Make sure your system is working effectively and that customers or supporters do not receive additional “reminders”
- Supporters are customers too. They buy in to the cause that is being
soldpromoted to them.
