Give 'em Something to Talk About
Your fundraising message may be good, but will it spark the grapevine? Because if your people aren't thinking and talking about you, you're irrelevant!
Get your people talking about your fundraising message by crafting something that compels conversation. They aren't interested in the same old school-speak. Have you looked around at school web sites recently? They practically all have the same mission statement, same vocabulary, messages, etc.
Remember: People talk about the unusual, the outliers, the unexpected.
To invigorate your word-of-mouth marketing, consider two important rules about the grapevine:
- Negative stories travel 1000% faster than positive stories.
- For a message to spark, it must be more than 5% different than what is expected.
Your message must have an edge to it! People don't talk about the mundane, yet the committee, consensus approach of most schools systematically produces a bland story. You want an edge that sparks conversation. You have to plan for word-of-mouth marketing since it is such a critical element for fundraising—and also for growing admissions.
