Almost 10 years ago Roger Craver gave me the book Moneyball from Michael Lewis. I was excited, because I have played ball since I was a kid. I love baseball. The book is about the Oakland Athletics baseball team and its general manager Billy Beane.
Roger told me it could widen my horizon, that I would look at things differently and think outside the (batter’s) box. He wasn’t talking about baseball, but fundraising…
Read MoreIt's been some years ago since I’ve read Ken Burnett’s 89 great ideas in The Zen of Fundraising. Many, if not all of them, keep coming back to me from time to time. Lately it’s this one: make the 90-degree shift.
Ken explains: “The 90-degree shift is nothing more complex than seeing things from your donor’s point of view rather than from your own or your organization’s point of view.”
He illustrates this with three good old marketing sayings:
- When a customer buys a quarter-inch drill, what he really wants is a quarter-inch hole.
There are a trillion fundraising topics to choose from, but today I’ve chosen one I consider the most important: donor loyalty.
When I started to use Twitter I decided to tweet only about fundraising. To boost my followers I thought I'd summarize the best Tiny book in the series: Essentials of Donor Loyalty from professor Adrian Sargeant. In the end I tweeted the tiniest summary of the book ever done... in 71 tweets.
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