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Relationship-Building in the Networked Age:
Some implications of the Internet for Non-profit Organizations

By Doug Jamieson
This article appeared in "The Philanthropist", January, 2000, Vol. 15, No. 2

Fundraising has always been about relationship-building, whether it's with single donors, volunteers, the media or funding agencies. Successful organizations are built on healthy relationships with people at all levels. The Internet is emerging as an essential tool for building these relationships, and charitable and nonprofit organizations must learn to take advantage of the tools or risk losing out to those groups who do forge communities and service their donors more effectively in the networked age.

As 1999 began, there were 4,272,000 Canadian households with at least one member using the Internet, an increase of 25% over 1997. These households represented 36% of all homes, up from 29% in the prior year.1 By the end of the first quarter, 55% of Canadians had access to the Internet, while more than 60% of home-users, and 44% of work-users, were spending more than three hours online each week. 7,632,000 Canadians were weekly Web users.2 Canada ranks seventh among all nations based on number of Internet users per capita. 3

Canada is rapidly becoming a network as we approach an era of ubiquitous, instantaneous, electronic communication. One need only look at the Y2K problem for evidence of the extent to which information technology has become embedded in most processes. We now search for information across our own computer hard drives, the local area network or Intranet in our organization, and the world-wide resources of the Internet. This searching is relatively seamless and transparent, and will continue to become more so. As I write this article, Sherlock is waiting patiently within my Macintosh laptop. Sherlock is a software program that will search for anything, anywhere, anytime.

A true network implies that there is no centre, that every node has an equal transmission and reception capability. This is, conceptually, difficult to comprehend for those of us whose perceptions of the world, and the way it works, were moulded in an age of hierarchies.

Hierarchies imply a concentration of power at the top, and enable executives to exercise that power through the selective release of information, both internally and externally. Within organizations, hierarchies are the conduits that facilitate control of the timing and substance of most information provided to staff members and volunteers.

Externally, hierarchies communicate with each other at many levels, mostly on a peer-to-peer basis, but communications intended to influence policy and major decisions are usually effected at the highest levels --- board member to Deputy Minister, Executive Director to federation head, and so on.

On one hand, as individual consumers and citizens, most of us will applaud the democratizing and empowering effects of information technology. Who can argue against free access to information for those who need it to find help, make good decisions, expand knowledge and understanding? Most of us will admit to a growing Internet dependency, and it is not one that we intend to renounce.

Meanwhile, the same technology that enables our organizations to function effectively presents new and difficult challenges on several fronts. As executives who seek to manage and influence, some of us may be ambivalent about changes that are forcing us to modify familiar, time-tested approaches that have long been effective.

A challenge to hierarchy and authority

Hierarchies aren't about to disappear, but new information technologies, especially networks, permit the authority of ideas to challenge the authority of rank to an unprecedented extent. Intranets within organizations, and the wider Internet, facilitate the spread of ideas in a relatively unhindered fashion. Good ideas from any source can achieve widespread currency.

In earlier times, a junior staff member would often have had difficulty pushing an idea up to a decision-making level, short of a chance encounter with the CEO at the coffee maker. Now, e-mail can circumvent the gate-keepers, and personal Web sites may be created quickly and easily, giving any individual a broadcast channel. Criticism of organizations, irrespective of merit, can be distributed instantly via discussion lists, Web-based forums and newsgroups to thousands, even millions, of people. A disaffected client, staffer, volunteer or donor can unburden him/herself to the world with a mouse click.

Most of us are also geared to a time when the influencing of public opinion could be orchestrated, within limits, through relationship-based media relations programs that dealt with a limited number of somewhat-empathetic news organizations. Newspapers, radio and television now compete for audience share with online news media, many of which have very different values, objectives and public accountability than do traditional news outlets.

Traditional promotional and fundraising approaches are threatened

We should recall that all new communications media, when introduced, are viewed with scepticism, with their full potential unrecognized. This was the case with today's traditional communications technologies when they arrived on the scene.

The postal service is a dinosaur. If not headed for extinction, it is devolving into a delivery system for junk mail as Electronic Funds Transfer replaces the invoicing/payments process, and e-mail handles most other categories of correspondence and document exchange. Direct mail, long a fundraising mainstay, will undoubtedly need to adapt to the cyberage.

Caller identification and voice-mail are changing the way that people respond to a ringing telephone. Internet phone, still a curiosity because of bandwidth constraints, has the potential to make every call a local call. As user patterns change, can telefundraising avoid being caught up in these new behaviours?

Major newspapers are serving an aging audience. The wired generation increasingly relies upon specialized online publications that appeal to personal interests and enable users to opt only for news that deals with specified topics. Such new media are, collectively, beginning to take a measurable share of the news audience and advertising dollars.

All of these changes present opportunities and risks.

The Non-profit Sector Lags

For-profit corporations, particularly those that provide consumer products and services, are urgently re-organizing and re-focusing their businesses as e-commerce threatens traditional distribution channels. Executives are coming to grips with disintermediation (elimination of middlemen), re-intermediation (emergence of new types of middlemen), and other Internet-driven trends that impact their future survival and success. As recently as 1997, such issues were rarely detectable on corporate radar screens. Now they top the list of priorities for businesses ranging from banks to bookstores.

As the Internet becomes the default source for information for most of the population in developed countries, audiences expect organizations to provide an open communications channel and comprehensive information/support via online media. This is unfolding very rapidly in North America, and is being driven by demographics. A generation that is comfortable with computers, and which has embraced the Internet, is now maturing to an affluent life stage. Businesses understand this, and consumers can now find information in depth from all corporations of substance, and from many smaller, entrepreneurial organizations, too.

Business Web strategies are also defensive. Corporations have moved quickly to establish procedures for monitoring what is being said about them, their products, services and personnel in cyberspace. Trademark infringement and unauthorized use of intellectual property are also monitored, and appropriate action taken.

There is no equivalent level of urgency visible among of the majority of charities and other non-profit organizations. Approximately 20,000 such organizations in Canada are believed to have a presence on the World Wide Web but, with a few exceptions, they are half-hearted, unsophisticated and largely ineffective efforts. Often, they are created by amateur volunteers or members, or by communications staff who are poorly equipped and supported. Although well-intentioned, these people have an incomplete appreciation of their organization's communication, service delivery, and fundraising strategies, and usually lack the necessary planning, design and technical skills required to execute a successful Web-based program in pursuit of those strategies. In fact, these efforts may do more harm than good if they run counter to the image that the organization's management wants to project. They may also provide an incomplete information package that implies disinterest and disorganization.

Non-profit organizations have much to gain or lose through strategic implementation of online communications, fundraising and service delivery programs, but the world is accelerating away from them.

For many, inaction is tied to lack of resources. Others intend to jump on the Internet bandwagon at some future, undetermined, date, when online fundraising is in full swing. The former may be excused. The latter are making a major strategic error.

The wired audience that businesses are scrambling to woo overlaps the constituencies of non-profit organizations. It spans all age groups and income levels, and includes those who seek the services delivered by NGOs, as well as those who have accumulated sufficient wealth to donate time and money. They expect to find information about an organization online, and are loyal when the organization reciprocates. Otherwise, they move on, as thousands of other Web sites are just a mouse-click away.

Relationship-Building, as Always, is the Key

It is unwise to view the Web and e-mail primarily as fundraising tools. While the longer term potential for fundraising is great, today they are, fundamentally, relationship-building tools. Organizations should begin their strategizing by understanding and filling the information and communication needs of their publics, seeking to become action central in their particular space, however narrowly defined. Make no mistake --- in this new marketplace of ideas, the competition is for loyal eyeballs. There will be winners and losers.

As in all fundraising, some relationships lead to donations, bequests and so on. As with other approaches that have gone before --- direct mail, telefundraising, special events, canvassing, grant seeking --- online fundraising involves both art and science. Neither can be learned overnight. A few Canadian organizations, such as World Wildlife Fund Canada 4, have spent years testing and refining their online appeals and methodology, and continue to do so. Latecomers to the party will find that they are trying to learn the game in a milieu where relationships have been built, appeals polished, methodology refined. As money continues to move into the hands of the wired generation, online fundraising will become a major source of revenue for non-profit organizations, and those hoping to share those revenues should start learning immediately.

Even now, organizations are missing significant opportunities. Many Canadians in their fifties are rewriting their wills to reflect estates that have grown. They are making decisions now that will result in bequests down the road a few years. A growing number of these people use the Internet as their basic research tool for all kinds of decisions, large and small --- which lawnmower or stereo system to buy, which cruise to take, which organizations to support. Has your planned giving staff mounted a compelling appeal on your organization's Web site?

The answer, in most cases, is probably "No." Based on a review of the fundraising-related content on several hundred non-profit Web sites, we conclude that fundraising professionals have largely abdicated their responsibility for ensuring that their organizations present convincing online cases that will attract support. This important task must not be delegated to the techies and the designers.

Treat technology as the nervous system

Information technology is servant, not master, but it is an essential servant. If we view information technology as the central nervous system of an organization, it becomes the core around which all other systems and processes must be organized. The for-profit world understands that the Internet is not separate from this, and that Web-based programs must be fully integrated with other information systems. Inquiries should automatically add information about the inquirer to the organization's database to better server the client/inquirer in future and ensure that the information is available for communications, client service and fundraising purposes. Discrete databases maintained by fiefdoms within an organization are time-wasting, costly anachronisms. If any item of information is being entered more than once, expensive resources are being squandered, and the organization is not enjoying the potential power and efficiencies of its technology.

The Internet has, in automotive terms, just produced the Model T. It will become ubiquitous in the next five years, as Internet technology becomes embedded in the full spectrum of devices and software used in the normal course of business and personal life. There are already kitchen appliances that are Internet-capable. Web-based processes will be largely transparent --- people will not consciously launch an online connection as most do now. When devices need information that is not resident locally, they will invoke a connection to remote information sources in order to deliver their services to the user.

The full impact of these changes for non-profits is impossible to forecast, but it is likely to be very significant. Whether a charity serves a local, regional, national, or international constituency, both internal and external communications, (voice, text, audio and video) will be Internet- and Intranet-based. Database-driven, interactive technology will enable organizations to deal with donors, volunteers, clients and staff on a personalized, as contrasted with mass, level, heightening the potential for relationship-building, while reducing staffing requirements and the cost of management processes.

One consequence of all this will be the requirement for more sophisticated management and marketing processes, in order to satisfy constituencies' appetites for deliverables while successfully competing for scarce resources. Perhaps partnerships, co-ventures, and other relationships among non-profits, government departments and for-profit corporations will aid this transition.

As information becomes more readily available and deliverable, calls for increased accountability are likely to become louder. Organizations will be expected to provide online information that substantiates their worth for those making decisions to give dollars and time, and those that fail to pass accountability tests may jeopardize their continued existence.

In addition, the stateless world of cyberspace surely will lead to increased levels of cross-border fundraising. Insightful fundraisers will increasingly appeal to international communities of interest as the real world begins to emulate the virtual world in some respects.

How to get started

To reiterate, it's all about relationship-building, and that starts with defining the organization's audience and its information needs, then articulating communications objectives. The latter might include increasing membership, recruiting and managing volunteers, advocacy, media relations, team-building, opinion-sampling, public education, various dimensions of fundraising, service delivery, and any of a hundred other possibilities specific to an organization.

The Internet presence must:

1. Attract people who share a common interest or need.

2. Help visitors become community members with a feeling of shared ownership of the Web site and, by extension, of the organization.

3. Help members of the organization's online community develop a sense of membership through information-sharing and help-sharing relationships with each other.

4. Build on the sense of community membership to attract support for the organization.

Each new visitor must be helped through a 5-step progression:

1. Attract attention with a focused, exciting, well-promoted Web site.

2. Invite a relationship by resonating with the visitor's interests and beliefs.

3. Engage in a dialogue about issues that are important to the visitor.

4. Earn the right to ask for support, by delivering valuable information, services or assistance.

5. Facilitate action in the form of a join-up, purchase, donation, or some other behaviour that implies the visitor has become a community-member.

Online fundraising fundamentals focus on connecting with individuals, and then converting the connection into action. Revenue is an outcome of successful community-building, and online fundraising can go well beyond just asking visitors to make a donation by cheque or credit card. People must become personally involved in the online experience of the Web site before they are prepared to give or buy, and then they must be presented with a range of ways to give, or to buy something to benefit the organization.

Think Marketing

Non-profits already have what most for-profit organizations are trying to create --- a potential audience that cares about the organization and its social contribution. Nonetheless, from the moment of arrival at a Web site, each visitor is asking, "Why should I spend another10 seconds here?"

Online communicators must think like marketers to make their Web sites productive components of the fundraising mix. That means:

1. Understanding the demographics and psychographics of the constituency.

2. Setting explicit goals and measuring performance.

3. Recognizing that everything done online and offline is part of marketing. That includes design, content, promotion, responsiveness, and interactions with individuals.

4. Establishing credibility with the prospective donor or member by providing various levels of information keyed to different levels of interest and foreknowledge, and demonstrating how the money is spent (Graphs are powerful).

5. Ensuring that web content is continuously updated and that all timely media, event, campaign, or other external communications are current.

6. Integrating the Web site with direct mail and advertising programs.

7. Continuously testing message effectiveness, and refining until you achieve acceptable results.

8. Ensuring that communicators, not techies and designers, drive the site's development.

9. Ensuring that fundraising professionals, are involved in the design and content development for the Web site's fundraising components.

10. Suggesting pledge amounts and enabling donors to direct their contributions to specific causes, branches or projects.

11. Providing examples of what certain donation amounts will buy.

12. Asking for gifts in kind, if appropriate.

13. Offering a digital product (e.g. screensaver, discount coupon) as a free gift that can be downloaded immediately upon completion of the interactive donations form.

14. Mounting a banner ad, promoting the incentive, on key pages within the Web site.

15. Informing the audience with regard to the progress of a current campaign.

16. Capturing names from a guestbook, e-letter subscriptions, information requests; ensure that they are entered in a database, and following up rigorously to move the relationship to a higher level.

17. Presenting little giving appeals and "Would you like to help with this?" links throughout the site.

18. Making the main appeal compelling.

19. Making instructions crystal clear, because there is no one to guide visitors, as is normal in the real world.

20. Making it easy for people to make contact by phone (toll-free), e-mail, postal service, fax (Never more than two clicks to this information).

21. Ensuring immediate response to every inquiry, request for information, or donation.

22. Understanding the Web site's value for building relationships that will improve the results of traditional, off-line campaigns.

23. Suggesting that visitors help promote the site (Electronic postcards, banners or logos that can be mounted on their own Web sites, encouraging reciprocal links).

A Touch of Showbiz

Drama, fun, activity, variety, personality --- these are the things that create excitement and involvement. The Web is a graphic medium, and its ability to use colour and images is part of its power. Video and audio are quickly becoming mainstream on the Web, but excitement can be created without going the full multimedia route:

• Dramatize the appeal with stories from real life (real people and how their lives were changed by the organization's work).

• Make liberal use of photographs and other images to help get the story across.

• Try innovative approaches such as auctions, boutiques and games to get the audience involved.

• Customize content for different types of community members (children, seniors, organization members, donors, media, professionals in the field, etc.).

• Add value for specific audience segments, with targeted services for specific audience categories (e.g. Look-up for classmates' e-mail addresses; sharing forum for those with the same disability or disease; Ask-the-Expert forum).

• Encourage participation and repeat visits with activities that involve the visitor (forums, surveys, contests, quizzes, article submissions, forms that enable members/alumni to update their personal information, suggestion boxes).

• Move relationships to new levels with learning programs delivered through combinations of Web pages, forums, listservers and e-mail.

• Enable members of the organization's online community to support each other, and reinforce their sense of community with mentoring and cyber-friend programs.

• Make personal home pages available for your members or alumni.

• Create a sense of dynamism (new sections, fresh content, a changing look) to spark frequent visits.

• Emphasize personalities (the people who run your Web site, respond to inquiries, deliver services, volunteer for your organization). Visitors should come to think of them as online friends.

• Think local, showing people what the organization is accomplishing, and how they can get involved, in their own real-world communities.

In a real-world community, people have conversations with friends; they offer and seek help; they have a sense of co-ownership with others possessing similar values; they teach and learn; they agree and disagree; they act in ways that benefit the greater community and themselves.

Online communities that emulate this will become interesting, dynamic, popular places, and their community members will respond accordingly.

Next week, learn concrete steps and strategies for making your web presence successful and engaging.

FOOTNOTES

1 Statistics Canada, The Daily: Internet use by households, April 23, 1999.

2 ComQUEST Research, Canadian Internet Trends: What to Expect, The Toddler Years, http://www.comquest.ca/press/st8web/sld001.htm, February 16, 1999.

3 Computer Industry Almanac Inc., 15 Leading Countries In Internet Users Per Capita, http://www.c-i-a.com/19980319.htm, March 20, 1998.

4 World Wildlife Fund Canada Web site, http://www.wwfcanada.org.

Doug Jamieson, B.A. M.B.A., is president and founder of CharityVillage®, Canada's comprehensive, online service centre for the non-profit sector. Doug may be reached at (416) 884-7321, or by e-mail at doug@charityvillage.com.

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