By Kara Andrade

In a moment of clarity after my bedraggled week of “offline” organizing, I decided it was time to talk to Beth Kanter–trainer, coach, and consultant to nonprofits in the area of effective technology use, but known to most of us as the mad wickedly smart Beth who is the master of online fundraising. A 40-minute call with Beth helped to dymystify the art of offline and online organizing and possible next steps for Spotus.  Here’s what I learned: 

Build From Your Core Base

• There is an initial core of people who are interested in your project and its mission. Start with the people who are already there and work through their networks.  This SpotUs is already going, but we want to expand past the interested journalists supporting us and into the vision of the community feeling ownership with the project.

• Build and maintain the relationships with those folks one by one. Beth said that at the beginning she knew all her readers and followed all her comments (now there are too many). She would contact them when they weren’t commenting and just check-in.

Remember Not Everyone is Online

• Offline you have to do a lot in the community talking to people and getting people on a snail mailing list. There are core of people who are over 60 who are interested in your project, but may not necessary be online. Also think of different types of communities and different ways they access information. While Beth was mostly doing the online piece she would coordinate her online to coincide with what the  The Sharing Foundation founder was doing – that is talking and doing presentations to the Rotary Club, etc.

Build a Community Advisory Board

• You need access to both an offline and online crew of volunteers. She had a core group of 25 people who would help with campaigns and spreading the message and other activities.
• Recommendation for SpotUs: Recruit community activists in San Francisco and Oakland who are always in the community and support our organization and its different campaigns.
• Cultivate the local bloggers, form collaborators.
• Every week we need to do a strategy brief with these core crew.
• Remember you want people giving small amounts and going out there for you. 

Driving the Action

• At the beginning you have to drive the activity until it takes a life of its own.
• She was also doing conversational fundraising, she didn’t ask for money, she talked about the cause. 
• Know your audience you’re driving the action for. With this campaign, she didn’t directly ask anyone except through Facebook Causes. On Twitter she just talked about the progress that was made, the things that I was learning, that the kids were emptying out their piggy banks.

Planning, Action, Reflection, Revision Goes a Long Way

A couple of weeks ago Beth did the birthday cause thing. I asked her if she would walk me through her strategy. One of her interests for doing these kinds of campaigns online is to experiment, but also to do case studies and lessons learned which is one of the “takes” of her followers.

• The first thing to determine is “What’s the message you want to get out to people? What’s the Ask?  She wanted people to donate the minimum donation on Facebook Causes which is $10 to go towards buy uniforms for Cambodian children. 

• Maintaining Momentum: The Causes application was good about giving her tips, so she continued the conversation and giving people updates. She would send the message out to 60 of your friends everyday and changeher status message.

• Write a blog post: She would would write a blog about each donation, it’s part of that building momentum.

• Recognition: She put  a screen capture of the people who had donated, and then shared lessons learned.

• The last two or three days she started tweeting about the match in and daring herself to match. 

All of these were extremely helpful and applicable to our own efforts with crowd-funded journalism and connecting our community to our individual stories, which are more like “causes” and we should treat them that way. While we are a platform and a tool we have to bring people to it, show them what they get out of it when they support our cause and then continually connect with that community. Thanks to Beth for making the time to give us her personal recommendations on how we should proceed.

Related posts:

1. In 90-Minutes Beth Kanter Raises $2,500
2. First look at Spot.Us in Action
3. We’re Organizing a Beast Bloggers BarCamp on Saturday, July 18!