The Fundraising Interviews: 7 Questions for Shabbir Safdar

Author: Jono Smith on 1 April 2010 | 2 Comments

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We're launching a new interview series today on the Event Fundraising blog.  It’s called Seven Questions for Fundraisers & Marketers, and it's designed to give you quick insight into the minds of some of the sector's top nonprofit fundraisers and marketers.

If you would like to nominate someone (or yourself!) for an interview, please drop us an email at fundraising@event360.com.

Our first interview is with a true expert in web marketing measurement and online communications. In addition to being the co-founder of one of the largest digital public affairs agencies, he's also the author of a new eBook: 3 Fundraising Metrics For Your Nonprofit Website.

My name is: Shabbir J. Imber Safdar

My online profile(s) of choice can be found at www.truthypr.com and everything is linked from there

The abc's about me:
a) I'm an avid poker player.
b) I'm in love with measurement and analytics.
c) I can't believe it took me 40 years to finally get to San Francisco.

My take on Fundraising & Marketing: I analyze data from nonprofit websites and social media presences.  And what I've learned is that nobody realizes what they're doing is raising money, and why.

What's good: Omigod, Facebook.  To all of you that are paying a third party to deliver email at best, once or twice a month to your prospects, do you realize Facebook has handed you an audience of 400 million users and a free tool in which its socially acceptable to talk to them 1-3x per day?

Also Google Grants.  It's the most under-utilized tool in the nonprofit arsenal.  Hello?  $10k of ad spend per month, for free!

What's bad: Website redesigns.  They're very good for the agency, and very bad for the nonprofit.

What's next: We're entering the age of the numerati.  If you're not measuring it, someone else who is will be coming after your donors mind share.


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  • Let me preface this with the fact that I've worked in the agency world for 12+ years serving nonprofits and trade associations, so I've pitched/won/lost/executed a lot of redesigns in my professional life.

    A redesign is traumatic for the client organization. Especially in a nonprofit where decisions are made by a broad consensus. Most redesigns create a paralyzing shudder through the organization as they all try and revisit their mission and identity, and then attempt to make it visible in the redesign.

    Everyone has differing agendas, but there are no clear tiebreakers as there are in the commercial world. It's easy in the commercial world to point to the website goal the whole company gets behind: to sell more widgets, or whatever they do.

    In the nonprofit world the website is not often as clearly goal-defined, and everyone in the organization has a veto.

    What's more, that lack of clarity means the organization doesn't know what can easily be jettisoned in the process. They either finish with a website that doesn't include everything, or along the way, many things on the site that everyone forgot about have to be added late in the game to the project and run up the cost.

    Finally, and most importantly, the redesign rarely recovers the cost outlay because nobody knew what it cost to serve customers to begin with. If I told you your conversion rate for web visitors to donors is 1%, and that we could get it to 2% with a redesign, you'd instantly be able to compute a redesign budget based on the time of cost recovery.

    But if you aren't measuring that goal to begin with, as most nonprofits fail to, and you don't measure it afterwards, how do you know if you did anything besides spend some really expensive money for some art?

    Instead of big "all hands on deck to push to launch" expensive redesign, I think nonprofits should measure how they're serving their supporter base and then spend that money incrementally on things like:
    -more frequent editorial content
    -easier to navigate forms
    -convening user/customer/supporter forums to solicit and take real feedback.

    I could go on and on...and in fact I think I'll write and article next week for my blog about it!

    Posted by Shabbir, 01/04/2010 5:36pm (2 years ago)

  • I'd like to hear more about the cons of web re-design. Why do you feel this to be true?

    Posted by Brad Porterfield, 01/04/2010 2:41pm (2 years ago)

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