Dave Toycen of World Vision on Telling Stories, Decline in Giving and Fundraising Costs

Dave Toycen has retired after 18 years as CEO of World Vision Canada. During his time, the organization saw its revenues rise to over $400 million a year. To what does he attribute that success? Telling stories.

That’s one of things he told the Globe and Mail during a recent interview.

Said Toycen: “The key element has been the way we engage the public. We believe that it is important to tell stories—to share the needs of the world through personal detail, and how you can make a difference.”

Of course, it helps that World Vision mostly tells stories about vulnerable children; who can resist? But his comments are still instructive. Story-telling is key to inspiring and motivating people to give.

Toycen’s comments about telling stories wasn’t the only thing that resonated with me from his interview. His comments about the state of the charitable sector were also right on.

“It is actually a much more challenging time for all of us, but especially larger NGOs,” he said. “There are 88,000 charities in Canada now, and the growth in numbers is putting pressure on all of us.”

That includes World Vision. Although the organization has seen considerable growth over the past number of years, that growth has slowed more recently.

Competition is one reason; another is a decline in charitable giving.

Although about 84 percent give to a charity of some sort, around 50 percent of those give less than $125 a year.

And why is that? One reason, said Toycen, is that people’s concerns “about the money they need, personally, are probably higher than ever before.”

A friend of mine who is a long-time fundraiser has coined the word “precarity” to describe how many Canadians feel financially today.

By that he means many people feel precarious about their economic situations. They may have jobs, but that could change—they could be downsized, the factory could close, their jobs could be transferred off-shore.

Plus, many Canadians are employed in part time jobs, or on contracts. If people are unsure about their financial security, there are implications for giving.

Toycen was also asked about social media? Isn’t that a solution?

Yes and no. Yes, he said, it engages many more people. But no, it hasn’t resulted in higher giving.

“The new technology has been effective in engagement, but not in actual fundraising,” he said. “People feel like they are doing something when they give us a ‘like’ on Facebook. But in the past, there was more willingness to make a a donation.”

Toycen also said out loud what all of us in fundraising know—it’s expensive to raise meony.

Back in the mid-1980s, when I started in non-profit communications and marketing, few church-related charitable groups employed fundraisers on staff. 

All we had to do was send out a letter to churches once or twice a year. The churches took offerings, and the money came in.

Those days are long gone.

Today, only a fraction of the dollars raised by church-related non-profit groups actually comes from churches. Most of it comes from individuals.

This is partly because many churches are struggling just to pay their own bills. Others are busy supporting local charities or ministries or sending money overseas to their own service projects.

Add in the decline in church attendance, and there is less money coming to church NGOs.

The result? Organizations need to target individuals. That means direct mail, e-mails, sophisticated databases and, yes, fundraisers.

Said Toycen: “It is costing more to reach people. You get smaller audiences now—in radio, TV or newspapers—but nobody is charging you less.”

At World Vision, they spend 20 percent on fundraising and administration. Other organizations are similar.

Again, this is different than when I started, when five to ten percent was normal.

Overall, it was an interesting interview. You can read it here. 

"If The News Is Important, It Will Find Me”

Earlier this year I spoke to a university class. I asked the 20 or so people in the room where they got their news.

Newspapers? (Online or in print.) Two or three.

Radio? A couple.

TV news? One brave soul put up her hand.

So if they didn’t get their news from traditional media outlets, where did they get it from?

Facebook, they replied.

My tiny poll confirmed what research is increasingly finding out on a wider scale: When it comes to news, many people learn about the world from social media.

According to the Pew Research Center, one in three Americans get their news through Facebook today.

This is why some of the largest media outlets in the U.S., such as the New York Times, recently struck an agreement with Facebook to host its news on that site.

Of course, people aren’t going to Facebook for news; they find it there while looking for something else.

"People go to Facebook to share personal moments — and they discover the news almost incidentally," says Amy Mitchell, director of journalism research at Pew.

And how do they do that?

The same way we all do: A friend posts a link and says: “Check this out!”

This is more than just a shift in the source of information. It also represents a profound shift in thinking.

Among the first to notice this was Jane Buckingham of Intelligence Group, a market research company.

As reported by the New YorkTimes in 2008, Buckingham recalled conducting a focus group on where people got their news.

A college student said: “If the news is that important, it will find me.”

Let that sink in a moment: If news is important, it will find me.

For the mainstream media, or for any non-profit group trying to share its messages, this is represents a reversal of how news dissemination has worked for a very long time.

Previously, people depended on experts to help them make sense of the world—to select the stories they thought people should see.

It was what’s known as a “push” strategy. A few individuals at the centre push information out to consumers.

Today we live in a “pull” world. People look for the information they want and discard the rest.

Of course, it was probably always this way; few people read everything an editor put into a magazine or newspaper.

But social media changes things dramatically. Instead of a few sources of information about the world, people have access to a multitude—including their friends.

Increasingly, that is the new filter being applied when deciding what to consider.

So instead of subscribing to a newspaper or newsletter, or watching a newscast, people check their Facebook feed to see what’s coming their way.

Their friends are the new editors, in other words, and they do the same for the people they know.

Again, it was always this way, whether around the campfire, the church foyer or talking over the backyard fence. Social media changes the scale.

For non-profit groups, this means using people (donors) to amplify and pass along their messages—being part of the social media conversation.

We can contribute to the conversation, and try to shape it, but in the end it’s what the audience decides is important that will get shared, and which others will finally see.

Because when it comes to making the news these days, many people don’t go looking for it. They wait for it to find them.

 Infographic at top from Daniel Zeevi.

When it Comes to International Development, Are We Nuts?

“Are we nuts?”

That’s what Hockey Night in Canada commentator Don Cherry asked in 2013 on Twitter after learning the Canadian government had sent tens of millions of dollars to Haiti.

"Maybe it's just me,” he wrote to his 118,000 followers. “But Canada gave Haiti 49.5 million dollars last year. Are we nuts?"

Cherry acknowledged that he, like most Canadians, wants to help people who are poor in the developing world.

But he asked if Canada can afford to do that when people in this country are hungry, homeless and in need of medical care.

"We've got a guy dying in Toronto waiting 3 hours for an ambulance," he Tweeted.

“We got people waiting 7, 8, 10 hours, if they're lucky, in a waiting room with one doctor for a zillion people.

We nickel and dime our doctors, nurses and veterans plus a million other services. Yet we can send almost 50 million to Haiti."

Through his Tweets—which received extensive media attention—Cherry asked the question that is on the minds of millions of Canadians.

Why do we send money to other countries when there are so many needs right here?

It’s an important question, and one that deserves an answer.

Unfortunately, those of us who work for international NGOs often don’t spend enough time developing a response.

We do spend a lot of time planning various communications strategies. We create talking points and messages about MDGs and SDGs, about the causes of poverty, the effect of climate change, the Istanbul Principles for CSO effectiveness, and many other topics.

All important—but that's not what the public usually wants to know.

Their concerns and questions are simpler, and more basic, and just as important.

So it’s good that someone like Don Cherry comes along to remind us.

So: “Are we nuts?”

Does anyone have an answer? 

Why Audiences Say They Like Vegetables But Eat Candy

A recent survey by a coalition of Canadian international development organizations found that 94% of Canadians say it is “important to improve health, education and economic opportunity for the world’s poorest people.”

I'm sure they feel that way. Who wouldn’t? It would be a very mean-spirited and Grinch-like person who says the world’s poor shouldn't be able to improve their lives.

The aid groups that created the survey might think this proves to government that it should increase foreign aid spending. The public wants it!

But it really proves no such thing. At best, the question only tests aspirations, not what they really believe or do.

In the world of polling, questions like this are known as a halo or angel question. That is, people answer with what they think or believe they should say—the thing they aspire to.

There’s nothing wrong with aspirations; we all should have them. But they only measure what people think they should do. They don’t measure what they actually do.

A good follow up question would be: And when was the last time you donated to help poor people improve their health, education and economic opportunity? 

That would provide better data for making decisions.

For non-profit groups, asking good questions is key when doing surveys about giving. It is also helpful when doing surveys about communication.

We want to know: What do people want to read in our newsletters and websites? The challenge is that people will tell you one thing, but do another.

This is something the media is discovering, sometimes to its chagrin.

For decades, it was hard for TV, radio and newspapers to know what kind of news audiences actually watched, listened to or read.

In focus groups and TV and radio measurement books, people reported that they liked hard news about the world. But who could tell if they were really telling the truth?

Then the Web came along. Now the media knows exactly what people pay attention by counting what they click on.

It’s not the result they hoped for.

Intuitively, editors and news directors knew that international news ranked lower than, say, horoscopes and celebrity gossip. But by counting the clicks they now know how much lower it is.

Last year, BuzzFeed released a review of traffic to sites within its partner network, including the New York Times and The Atlantic. Of the 20 most viral stories across those sites, just three dealt with recent news events.

What was in the top most shared items? Quizzes, lists, and emotional poppers. Iraq, Afghanistan and the economy—three important topics—didn’t rank high at all.

In an article in Atlantic Online, titled "Why Audiences Hate Hard News and Love Pretending Otherwise," Derek Thompson put it this way: "Ask readers what they want to eat, and they'll tell you vegetables. Watch them quietly, and they'll mostly eat candy."

Audiences, he went on to say, "are liars, and the media organizations who listen to them without measuring them are dupes.”

The culprit isn't Millennials, or even Facebook. This challenge has existed for a long time.

According to Thompson, it’s about something psychologists call fluency.

“Fluency isn't how we think: It's how we feel while we're thinking,” he wrote.

“We prefer thoughts that come easily: Faces that are symmetrical, colours that are clear, and sentences with parallelisms."

For hard news, fluency creates two problems: "It's hard and it's new.”

(Fluency also explains why most liberals prefer to read and watch liberal-oriented media, while conservatives prefer to read and watch conservative-oriented media—because it easier to read something that bolsters your conviction thatn something that challenges it.)

Now that the media is able to precisely determine what people pay attention to—before there were eyeballs on our eyeballs—it was hard for them to know exactly what we were doing.

But now the media knows. And what they know, as Thompson put it, is that “readers lie.”

This is something to keep in mind the next time someone produces a survey saying that a majority of people feel one way or another about your cause or issue—so put more hard and detailed articles on your website.

People may, in fact, believe they should show read those kind of articles. But when it comes to what's real, your web analytics will tell the truth: Most prefer candy.

Read Thompson's full article here.

The Discarded Newspaper in Airport Metric: A Different Way to Measure Newspaper Decline

Not a discarded newspaper in sight . . . .

There are different ways to measure the decline of newspapers today.

One way to chart it is overall profit. In the first quarter of 2015 the top ten newspapers in the U.S. made about $21 million. Compare that to 2005, when one newspaper company, Gannett, alone earned $1.8 billion in net income.

Another measurement is print ad revenue. It dropped (again) in 2014 to $16.4 billion, 4% down from 2013.

The number of readers is also an important indicator. Weekday and Sunday circulation both fell in 2014.

The number of reporters? Down 3% in 2013, although that’s a bit of a win since it fell 6% the previous year.

Single-copy newspaper sales, which once made up 15-25% of sales, are dropping in double digits per year.

(All figures are from the U.S., although I have no reason to suspect things are different in Canada.)

These are all valid and important ways to monitor what’s happening to newspapers in North America today. But I have another way of measuring the disappearing world of print newspapers.

I call it the Discarded Newspaper in Airport Metric (DNAM).

I have been observing this metric since 1981, when I first started travelling for business.

During that time, I have been through a lot of airports. As a news junkie, I like to read local newspapers. 

Lucky for me, other people liked to read newspapers, too. When done, they discarded them on seats in waiting areas, where I found them.

When I finished, I left them behind for others, a pay-it-forward kind of thing.

For many years, it worked well. It was easy to find lots of discarded newspapers in airports.

Lately, however, things have changed. Discarded newspapers are harder to find. On my last trip through two major Canadian airports, I found only one.

Why is that? One reason is that fewer people read newspapers.

The other is if they do read them, they tend to do so on smartphones and tablets.

The result? Fewer discarded newspapers in airports. 

Or, as New York Times Deputy Tech Editor Quentin Hardy put it: "Dammit, I used to go through an airport and read discarded newspapers. Now I have to look for smartphones and tablets.”

And that digital revolution is, of course, one of the main reasons behind those falling profits, falling circulation, falling ad revenue, and falling jobs.

On future trips maybe I’ll have to break down and actually buy a newspaper, then leave it for other travellers.

Either that, or be like everybody else and read them on my phone.

Figures from Nieman Labs State of the News Media 2015. 

The Media and Facebook: The Changing World of Communications

In the 1980s, when I started my career in communications in the non-profit sector, I faced the challenge of how to get the attention of the broader public.

I knew it was highly unlikely they were going to start reading our newsletters and magazines. How to reach them?

The answer was simple: Use the media they were already plugged into—newspapers, radio and TV.

By working with the media, I could get into their homes and share messages about the work my organization was doing, and ways they could be involved.

It worked. Since I was offering reporters what they needed—good stories—I was able to get what I wanted—access to their readers, listeners and viewers.

For a long time, it was a good, symbiotic relationship. We both profited from the arrangement.

It still is, for the most part. The media is still a good way to extend the reach of non-profit groups. But there are challenges on the near horizon.

Today, the web makes it much easier for non-profits to reach the public. 

Unlike 30 years ago, when signing up for a print newsletter was the only way to get our information, today our stories are available to anyone, anywhere, anytime.

And for the media, that’s the problem.

For a long time, the only way to learn about what was happening in the world was through the media. Those days are gone.

In 2015, people have a plethora of options for getting news. And one of the main ways they do that is through social media.

A 2013 study by the Pew Research Center for Journalism and Media found that almost half of American Facebook users got their news from Facebook.

They aren’t looking for news on Facebook; they find it while searching for something else. And the group that gets most of their news this way are 18-29 year-olds.

Whatever the reason, the media is seeing it’s hegemony on the news slipping away. And if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

At least, that’s what the New York Times, NBC,National Geographic, the BBC and five other media outlets have concluded. 

These media outlets have reached an agreement with Facebook to share news content on that platform, rather than making people click on a link to visit their own websites.

Called Instant Articles, it promises to give the media a way to offer fast interactive articles on Facebook.

For the media, this is a new paradigm. It used to be that it was the platform others needed to help them reach the largest audiences. Now it’s the media that needs Facebook to do the same thing.  

They don’t really have a choice; that’s where the audience is. 

But it does make them uneasy. One fear is that it could become more of a destination than their own sites for the work they produce, drawing away readers and advertising.

Then there’s what seems like the capricious nature of Facebook, changing its algorithms for what seems to be no apparent reason. 

It’s hard to create a communications strategy when the platform you use doesn’t belong to you, and it keeps changing the rules about what people will see in their feeds.

Those of us who work in communications in non-profits will need to pay attention to this trend. What will it mean for our media relations work? 

In the future, perhaps the goal will not just to be on the front page or to lead the news, but also to get on to Facebook.

Things have changed a lot in the over 30 years I have been involved in media relations. 

And the only guarantee is that they will keep changing.

Never Bury The Lead!

In the movie Broadcast News, a producer played by Albert Brooks tries to convince another producer, played by Holly Hunter, not to date a handsome news announcer (William Hurt) that he has no respect for. 

Instead of dating the announcer, who Brooks believes is dim and devious, he wants her to date him.

Following an evening out, he makes his case for why she should date him. He concludes this way:

“I grant you everything. But give me this: he personifies everything that you've been fighting against. And I'm in love with you."

After that, he says deprecatingly: "How do you like that? I buried the lead.”

(See that clip from the movie here.) 

Never bury the lead. The most compelling, most newsworthy aspect of what you are trying to say must always be at the top of your press release. 

The lead is the thing that makes the reporter, editor or news director want to continue reading. It’s got to be a grabber. It has to catch their attention.

And it has to do it in about 30 seconds, the maximum amount of time most people in the media have to give to your e-mail.

This is the opposite of what they teach you in university, where an essay rises to a conclusion. In a press release, the most important information is always at the top. (See my post about the inverted pyramid style of writing.)

My friend Nick Martin, the education reporter for the Winnipeg Free Press, wrote about his experience with a buried lead recently.

On his blog, he wrote about a PR firm in the U.S. that failed to provide a local angle to a story Nick had written about.

Nick managed to write the story, about a Winnipeg company named Permission Click, but with no help from the PR firm. It was only after the owner of the local business called Nick that he managed to connect the dots.

“I reread the email pitch that had set all this off, and nowhere in it was there any mention or hint that Permission Click was local," he writes. 

"And I dug down into my deleted files, and there found a previous email from the PR people in Florida, a lengthy story pitch which, at the very bottom, mentioned that Permission Click is based in Winnipeg."

Since Nick gets 70-90 e-mails a day, it's hard to give each one the time or attention it deserves.

That's why the most important information needs to be right at the top.

As Nick wrote about his experience with Permission Click and the PR firm:

“If your client is local — and yes, we are parochial within a readership area larger than several states put together — then you should say so. Like, in the lead.”

His advice to the PR firm: “First paragraph: ‘Local Winnipeg tech startup Permission Click could have prevented the alleged theft of $24,000 in school lunch money.'

‘CEO Chris Johnson is available to talk to you about the way in which his company has already helped 12 Winnipeg schools communicate far more efficiently and easily with parents, and he can tell you about dozens of schools in Manitoba who are doing due diligence on his company and could soon be signing up.'"

Because that information wasn’t easily found, the story almost didn’t get written.

The takeaway for non-profits? When writing a press release, or proclaiming love, never bury the lead.