I really like the “Mythbusters” television series.

I find that my adoration of the show grows in direct proportion to the amount of gunpowder they deploy in their iconoclastic ventures.

I find that there are some annual appeal myths in dire need of busting.

Close and methodical segmentation of our annual appeal data tells us everything about everyone (those who give and those who don’t give)

Pass the dynamite.

All too often, development officers look at specific key donor attributes to determine the shape of their pending campaign.  These may include such factors as giving rates and frequencies as well as appeal participation rates within zipcodes.  As very few diocesan development offices have data analysts on staff, a quick review of historical data sets often suffices as the final ladder to ultimate donor understanding.

Light the fuse.                                                                                                   

The simple fact of the matter is that if a development office is going to gaze into statistical tea leaves, it needs to do so in a thorough manner.

Diocesan development offices would do well to deploy “data clustering” in their statistical modeling efforts.  This is done by identifying a set of characteristics present in those groups whose behaviors you are seeking to change and developing solutions germane to each cluster.

Huh?

For example, if your major donors are, say, clustered in three zipcodes, are married, and all have an average fund participation range of between $500  – $2,500, you may want to do a targeted mailing to other married couples in this zipcode asking for a gift in that range.

More on this later.

See, wasn’t that a pretty explosion.

With the new year just around the corner, I hope you are earnestly considering your resolutions that will, no doubt, frame your actions for the upcoming year.  If you have not, if I may, let me recommend some:

1. I will not mail out the same annual appeal solicitation materials to all of my constituents.
2. I will not change one paragraph in a solicitation letter and consider such change “data segmentation”.
3. I will run NCOA on my development database at least twice during the year.
4. I will develop yearly, distinct, and sustained communication programs with my annual appeal major donors.
5. I will, by December 2011, know what a personalized uniform resource locator and QR code is.
6. I will, by January, 2012, know how to integrate personalized uniform resource locators and QR codes into my annual appeal.
7. I will only mail to those persons who are living.
8. I will code all the constituents in my database who have not made an appeal gift in the last 10 years as “inactive” and will stop mailing them solicitation materials.
9. I will work, very hard, to reacquire recently lapsed donors.
10. I will subscribe to The Chronicle of Philanthropy

May you realize all of your resolutions and Happy New Year.

When I was a diocesan development director, I relished the week before Christmas.

I would run out of the office, armed with a list of my top 25 Appeal donors, and rush into the local florist and purchase, for delivery, 25 boxwood trees, festooned with red ribbon.

They were expensive.

$30.00 each.

I figured that if someone gave a $10,000 annual gift, they may find something more than a card endearing.

And they did.

Take the time. Spend the money. Let people know they are special.

Oh, and Merry Christmas.

One Christmas during the Reagan administration, my sister, Maryellen, received a Cabbage Patch doll.  My mother, no doubt, had done homeric battle with the gathered hordes at Times Squares Store and had returned, in trimph, with this most elusive example of Christmas bounty.

It scared me and, daily, I would plot the eventual demise of this twisted piece of iconography.

My fear, however, was the exception, and not the rule.

These ugly things flew out the door and, in a very short period of time, the market was saturated and the attraction of this product faded from the public eye.

This was a fad.

A fad – a wave in the sea of popular culture – it quickly occurs, is deeply felt and is quickly forgotten.

As opposed to a trend.  A trend gathers in the sea of popular culture, slowly, and become a recurring tide.

Fads are fun, but fads are dangerous.  Companies and concerns that tie their future to a fad tend to disappear (remember who produced the Pet Rock?)

I have seen a lot of fundraising fads to include plastic bracelets, differing color Facebook pages and, of course, varied colored ribbons.

Remember, fads are fun, but fads are dangerous.

Focus on trends.

And stay away from Cabbage Patch dolls.

My first day as executive director of development at the Diocese of Albany, I found a report that was developed by my predecessor entitled

Development and Evangelization: A Roadmap for Collaboration

I threw it out. 

Times were good, people were writing checks and the Appeal was climbing quicker than a rhesus monkey in a banana tree. 

In Religion Among the Millennials (http://pewforum.org/Age/Religion-Among-the-Millennials.aspx), the author states:

young people are much less likely to affiliate with any religious tradition or to identify themselves as part of a Christian denomination.  One in four adults under age thrity are unaffiliated, describing their religion as athiest

Wonderfull. 

The “greatest” generation – those associated with the Second World War and, consequently, our best donors, are dying at a rate of 1,200 a day.

So, the base of diocesan support is eroding faster that the banks of Lake Pontchartrain and, as it stands right now, there are significantly fewer in line to pick up the philanthropic responsibility that has been shouldered by our parents and their parents.

When was the last time you went down to speak to the Director of Evangelization about “whats going on.”

You may wsh to consider doing so …

(did you notice the two snazzy comparisons in this article …?)