Sam Danger and my personal branding conundrum

After 6 hours of tick-tacking, I finally managed to get Bethany's blog configured properly last night.  There was a lot of back-and-forth between GoDaddy.com, Google Apps and Wordpress.  At the end of the day, I think she'd be better off using Blogger, which I must admit I'm partial too.

As I was working with her to help establish her brand I started thinking about how to tackle mine.  Personal branding seems to be a hot topic recently, and I'm actually going to be co-presenting on campus about it in the coming months.

The trouble I'm having is that there's another Sam Venable.  Now normally, this wouldn't be a huge deal.  Except this Sam Venable is a columnist at the Knoxville News Sentinel.  

We even look alike!  The Venable nose is unmistakable (side note: though I'm sure we're not related, I'd be interested to see if we have any shared ancestry).

But the real kicker is this - not only do we kind of look alike and have the same name - he's also a writer.  Of course, the primary difference being he gets paid to do so.

So I've been debating what the best strategy to tackle this is.  How do I differentiate myself from him?  

When I first started writing and created this blog, I thought the best way was to stage myself as the "other" Sam Venable - but the problem is there are probably a few hundred of us elsewhere in the world.  So, if I take the Seth Godin / Gary Vaynerchuk approach, I haven't really found a good niche.  I'm not specific enough, and I'm not positioning myself for success.

Secondly, as I started to contemplate my own domain, I realized that www.othersamvenable.com is a bit longer than I want it to be.  How do I concisely describe, differentiate and promote with a URL?

I don't have any answers yet, but I'm working on it.  

Lunchtime post: I get the Gist

A few weeks back we had an OU alumna, Jackie Reau, on campus to give us an instructional seminar on social media (SM).  Few colleges have delineated a cohesive, intentional strategy for communications via SM - and we're just in the infant stages of our implementation.  But I digress...

I had the opportunity to go to dinner with a few colleagues and Jackie, and she is an absolute blast (read: is as technerdy as I am).  After a few minutes, we started talking about a few different tools we use in our job.  I shared my experience with Tungle and then she mentioned a tool she'd just discovered called Gist.  I'd never heard about it, but early the next morning I was checking it out.

Gist is like a CRM tool for managing your personal networks - think of it as Google Reader for your contacts.  It aggregates your networks from the likes of your Gmail, Outlook, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc., and compiles their public information on the web into their interface.  News stories, blog posts, links, pictures, tweets: they all show up in one place.  

Now I know you might be thinking it's a bit creepy, but I find myself using it less for work and more as an extension of how I use other SM / networking tools.  

David writes a blog post?  Boom!  I see it right there on my dashboard, with a snippet and link to get to the full article.  I can send a follow-up note to David, interact with him directly on the blog or connect with him another way.  Gist makes it super easy to connect, and the information it provides is a great conversation starter if you need an excuse.

If you want to learn more about their company, they have a webinar or two posted on their blog you can check out.  They also have some great information on their website.

What tools do you use to manage your networks?  

Lunchtime post: Responsible non-profits and the SM gold rush

One idea many NPs fall victim to is the reliance on direct-appeal solicitation letters.  We've run into this on our campus - someone gets excited about an idea they have, and their first response to "how are we going to pay for it?" is "with a letter campaign."

In my last post, I said:

...non-profits need to do a better job of targeting their donors.  We are notorious for blanket direct appeals (AKA junk mail) that are poorly written and convey a lack of professionalism.  If I give $10 to a NP and they send me $5 worth of direct appeals, how confident can I be in their management of my gift?  

Let's roll up our sleeves and delve into this.

I don't know about you, but I receive a TON of direct appeals at home.  Just over the past two weeks I amassed a pile from The Smiles Foundation, Better Homes and Gardens, Chase, and even a few of those random coupon booklets that I've never had use for.

Want to know where I put them? Right in the shredder.  And I know I'm not the only one.

This truth is forcing NPs to rethink how they engage their prospect base, which is why you're hearing a lot about social media (SM) in fundraising campaigns.

The trouble with the idea was that, by and large, most efforts to fundraise through SM have produced little dollar support.  In Friday's Talk of the Nation spot, Stacy Palmer, editor of the Chronicle of Philanthropy, said the majority of mid-sized non-profits reported raising less than $100.  

My office has been using social media as extension of our existing fund raising efforts for some smaller causes.  Specifically, I've been coordinating the Facebok fan page for the Marching 110.  After six months of experimentation, we found that it CAN be successful - but only when centered on specific, targeted campaigns with realistic goals.  

Our 110 is famous on campus - students come to watch the band at the football games and then leave after halftime.  They're entertaining, passionate, and a hard-working group of student athletes.  Its alumni base is historically very engaged, though financially there has been a bit of a disconnect.

We developed the fan page as an outlet not only to drive awareness about the band, build community and control our messaging, but also to encourage our fans to support the band financially.  

To supplement our current online giving page, we partnered with Razoo to give our fans the opportunity to use another SM technology to make their gift.  The idea behind Razoo is pretty brilliant - they want to give donors the ability to support and monitor all their philanthropic causes in one place. One great feature they have is the ability to login to their site using Facebook connect.  They also allow donors to remain anonymous (we'll get to that - that's a topic for another post).

There are a few shortcomings the tool has - for example, the progress against goal measurement won't allow you to account for outside funds raised - but by and large we were satisfied with it. With time, my expectation is that more donors will be comfortable with third parties 

Our online campaign with this new approach increased online gifts by four times what we'd been previously doing; but more importantly, our fans' engagement level increased exponentially.  The page now has more than 4,000 fans.

So, let's wrap up with three key takeaways:

1. Social media isn't THE answer, but it's part of it.  NPs need to think proactively about how they can use these tools to further the mission of their organizations; the trouble with the past is that there were few early adopters and most of us are playing catch up now.  
2. Don't rely on SM as your ONLY fundraising / stewardship arm - use it to supplement what you are already doing.  
3. Finally, and most importantly, set realistic goals and expectations.

What are your thoughts?  Feel free to continue the dialog in the comments area.

Text me, tease me: non-profit edition

Was listening to Science Friday on Talk of the Nation this week, whose opening segment was about the surge of interest in text-to-give campaigns we've seen recently.  This, of course, is the result of the Red Cross' campaign for Haiti.

The interest is certainly understandable - $30 million is no laughable result from a simple text campaign.

Unfortunately, news reports of their success is giving non-profits (NPs) a skewed, unrealistic perspective of text-to-give program success.  I've heard rumblings in our office in interest in this medium, and I know other NPs are facing similar circumstances.  However, there are still some practical and philosophical issues that for the immediate future will prevent these from taking off.

Cost

Text-to-give campaigns are traditionally expensive; moreover, 100 percent of the transaction does not reach the NP.  To give you a framework, mGive is one vendor that handles this service.  They charge $399 / month for their 'bronze' package, $.35 per transaction and a 3.5 percent 'successful transaction fee.'

So, let's say someone gives you $5 via text message.  Of that amount, SEVEN PERCENT of their gift doesn't reach your non-profit.  While it doesn't seem like much, if your campaign reaches a similar level of success to that of the Red Cross (and all donors give at the $5 level) that would mean $2.11 million of the $30 million you raised would go toward transaction fees.

Granted, mGive is waiving the Red Cross' transaction fees for this campaign; smaller NPs would have a much more difficult time getting the same.

Our approach to donor data

One of the reasons, I believe, the Red Cross has been so successful with this effort is that they've allowed their donor to remain anonymous, if they so choose.  That means the Red Cross receives their transaction information, but cannot see your billing information, name, etc.  

During the show, the single caller brought up a very valid point - most donors would like the option to remain anonymous so the aren't peppered with follow up pieces.

Admittedly, this is the fault of traditional-minded non-profits that run bad campaigns, for whom "concern that they are able to properly steward the donor" is nothing more than a thinly-veiled spin on their desire to capture as much data as possible so they can persist you.

There are three key points here.

• The first is despite the increasing level of transparency the internet age has brought, people still want to feel some semblance of privacy.
  
  
• The second is non-profits need to do a better job of targeting their donors.  We are notorious for blanket direct appeals (AKA junk mail) that are poorly written and convey a lack of professionalism.  If I give $10 to a NP and they send me $5 worth of direct appeals, how confident can I be in their management of my gift?  If we improve execution of our appeals, I believe this will be a smaller issue.
  
  
• The third is NPs need to reach a level of comfort with anonymity.  Regardless of your feelings as a NP, there will always be someone that simply wants a one-and-done relationship with your NP.  Again, if we improve the targeting, I think this will be a smaller issue.  But let's wake up people.  Be realistic.

So, why has the Red Cross been so successful despite these obstacles?

1. The immediacy of the gift
2. The fundraising event was tied to a very specific cause, with a limited time frame
3. The ability of donors to remain anonymous
4. The simplicity of the giving process
5. The fees were waived for each transaction

In a later post, I'll address point number two, because I believe it is absolutely critical in how NPs approach the use of SM for fundraising.

In conclusion, while the Red Cross campaign has been successful, remember this particular case is the exception and not the rule.  There are still some outstanding obstacles - cost and donor data control - the will prevent text-to-give from becoming mainstream in the immediate future.

Jim Harrison's Legends of the Fall

Just finished reading Legends of the Fall last night - and have to say I was really impressed.  A friend of mine had recommended I pick it up back in September, and for one reason or another I haven't had the chance to read it since then.

The book consists of three novellas: The Man Who Gave Up His Name, Revenge, and Legends of the Fall.  I was surprised after picking it up that there was more than one story, and even more surprised after finishing that Legends of the Fall was the weakest story among the three.

Harrison does a great job in the book utilizing language to weave together stories with description that could have easily been 300 pages for each story rather than the full book.  The style, as much as the story itself, was totally captivating - at least in the first two stories.

I'm not entirely sure why Legends of the Fall didn't interest me as much, but I had a much more difficult time finishing it.  Admittedly, part of it might have been the timing (I finished the first two novellas over Christmas and have been squeezing Legends in after work).

I think it's weakest point is that the protagonist isn't fully revealed until halfway through the narrative, and at that point you've lost out on his lead-in because you weren't entirely sure it was relevant.  The setting also changes frequently enough that it's much more difficult to picture where he is.

The book as a whole was the kind you keep on a shelf and read it every two years or so - if nothing else, it's a great lesson in how powerfully words can be molded to create a great story.

Scheduling made easy

Technology is supposed to make our lives easier, right?  I've been struggling for years to find a way to ditch the paper planner and rely solely on my phone and computer - but somehow, someway, I always keep defaulting back to that 200 lb., 3-inch wide monkey hanging from my back (or arm).

And as you know from yesterday's post - if there's one thing that irks me, it's doing something one way even though you know there has to be an easier way to do it.

On my end, I use Oracle Calendar at work (tied into my MS Outlook), Google Calendar for my iPhone and iCal on my home computer.  As previously chronicled, that process alone can make you want to throw your computer out your third-story office window.  But then you add friends and colleagues into the mix and it's enough to make you sit in the corner flipping your FranklinCovey pages mumbling incoherent phrases and cursing.

Enter Tungle.

It's a web-based service designed to seamlessly sync between multiple clients.  It doesn't matter that I use Outlook at work, iCal at home and Google Calendar on the go - if I make a change in any location, it pushes that to the cloud, and 'rains down' to all my devices.

There are two great features I like:

1. The ability of others to schedule meetings with me even though we might not use the same calendaring client.
2. The ease of scheduling.

Working across multiple calendar clients is a killer feature, and I'm so happy they've found a way to address this.  Even though many companies (like Google) have figured out a way to manage event invitations cross-platform, it's still not completely fool-proof.  Tungle's power in this aspect is that it replies via Tungle, syncs to your devices and allows all users to see attendees.

The ease of scheduling is, in a word awesome.  You to to someone's tgl.me page (if the user allows it to be public) - for example, mine is tgl.me/samvenable.  If you'd like to schedule a meeting with me, it shows all my available time slots.  You pick a few that work for you.  I get a notice you'd like to schedule a meeting; I look at your proposed times and pick the one that tickles my fancy, and *boom*, the meeting is set and everyone is notified.  This is what the interface looks like (online and in Outlook):

Frankly, I'm surprised they haven't branched out to doctor's offices.  Image if you could look at your doctor's schedule, pick a time that works for you and just show up.  The doctor wouldn't even necessarily need more than one staff person to help with appointments - most could be managed online.

But I digress.

So far, I've really enjoyed the service and have started sending it in my email footers.  It just makes sense, and I'm glad a company has finally figured out a good solution to the calendaring solution.  While I still haven't become totally paper-free, I'm making good progress.

And hey - anything that means you won't see me huddled in a corner with crazy eyes muttering curses at my agenda is a good thing.

Lunchtime Post: Fire breath

While I don't intend to write about apps very often here, occasionally there is one I discover that makes my inner-nerd pump up the jams and do a little dance.  One week ago today, I had a moment like that.

Last Tuesday, Nuance Communications released what I believe is the very first speech-to-text translation app on the iPhone - Dragon Dictation.  I've been looking for a few months for a solution like this, and was pleased to finally see it appear.  The best part: right now, it's free.

Nuance is responsible for the "Dragon Naturally Speaking" program, which David Pogue wrote about a while ago (saying the software was one of the reasons he's so productive).  The basic idea is that humans can speak much more quickly than we are able to type; why not save a step and automatically transcribe that speech?  Thankfully, technology has caught up with our ambitions and phrases like "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" aren't transcribed to "sup or cauliflower is stick ex pee all atrocious" (and yes, I did try it).

Frankly, I was a bit surprised someone hadn't already created something like this for long-form.  Sure, there are apps like ReQall, but those are for simple task / appointment voice notes.  The great thing about the Dragon Dictation app is the ability to create longer, nearly instantly transcribed memos.

There are many times when I'm mobile without access to a keyboard computer.  Most often I record a voice memo and type it out later, and there's nothing more frustrating than doing something one way when you KNOW there is an easier one.  I'm doing my praise-the-Lord dance that I don't have to repeat this.

On a side note, it's nice to see quality apps starting to appear.  My frustration with the App Store thus far is the plethora of completely useless apps (kind of reminds me of all the crapware that used to come with Dell computers; the only irony is that iPhone users CHOOSE to download these).  This is no more apparent than in the 'free' section.  Unfortunately, those are the most downloaded; thus, finding useful free or inexpensive apps is time-consuming and anger-inducing.

Any suggestions for filtering out good apps?  What have you all found useful?

Edit: Just found some interesting tips from Just Another iPhone blog; they provide most of the punctuation shortcuts for the app.