Now is not the time to be tight on professional development

Over the past couple of months I have been to a ton of workshops to learn. To learn about marketing, fundraising, communications and Twitter. I'll tell you more about Twitter and other social networking experiments another time, today I want to talk about learning.

While there is talk of the economy recovering, it looks like it's going to be a long while yet before things are rosy again. And there are stories of nonprofits cutting costs in different areas, some of this makes sense and some is plain madness.

One area of madness is when it comes to training. I have just got back from the Bridge Conference in the USA, which is jointly run by AFP and DMA, the American equivalents of the FIA and ADMA. According to a friend, who is a USA commercial sponsor of that conference, they were hoping for 1,300 attendees but fell well short.

I was told that many North American conferences are suffering, and a series of workshops in Canada that used to be well attended had to be cancelled this year because of low attendance, the main reason being ‘the recession'.

Just two weeks before the Bridge Conference I was at the ADMA Forum in Sydney, with over 600 attendees - all but 12 from non-charities. Charities are one of the biggest sectors in spend on direct marketing, and at the conference were tons of direct marketing experts sharing results and information, yet hardly anybody from charities attended.

Is it because we think there is nothing to learn from the likes of Priceline, Forrester Research, SBS, Australia Post, ANZ, 3 Mobile, Lavender, Y&R and lots of others I reckon not. I suspect there are many at charities who have never heard of the ADMA Forum, but I also suspect that people at charities didn't go because of the price and tough choices about training opportunities.
Which one should I go to? Australasian Fundraising Forum, Pathways Australia workshops, MDU, FIA conference, Pareto presents, Xponential workshops, ADMA Forum ...?

I often hear charities that employ tens or hundreds of people, with a fundraising team in the double digits (who are responsible for raising millions) pleading poverty.

Guys, don't be tight - it is a false economy! Don't send everyone to everything, but make sure you have people at most of these things. Depending on earlybird/charity/member rates, ADMA Forum costs about $1,500-$2,000, FIA Conference about $1,000 and the Australasian Fundraising Forum about $770.

For all but the smallest of charities these rates should be peanuts - the return will well outweigh the costs. Attending just one event could make - or save - thousands of dollars. This is great value whether helping to develop a strategy, pulling realistic budgets together or even just for ideas on tactics.

Yes, there are books around, and great articles and blogs, consultants and peers. But conferences often provide tons of useful, practical and evidenced ideas you can put into practice. I know many will be cynical (we have all been to rubbish sessions at conferences) and perhaps some people think they won't learn from any of the speakers. I have been in fundraising for nearly two decades and provide training at many of these events, but I cannot think of one conference I have attended and not learned something really useful that could make my charity (and now clients) more money.

The problem is, many charities don't budget for training, or when they do it is minute. A good rule of thumb I tried to push through at my last charity job was to budget for 5%-10% of staff costs. My reasoning was that I would rather have 18 or 19 well trained staff than 20 not. And it could actually save you money in staff retention - people like to be trained and are therefore less likely to leave.

Of course, conferences are not the only training option, but I think conference attendance is a good litmus test of an organisation's attitude to professional development. In-house and on-the-job training is essential, but without external input, these alone will create an internal spiral of sameness, lack of innovation and eventually, termination.

You will notice my nom-du-blog is ‘Sean is always learning'. Because it pays to learn. But sometimes I have to pay to learn too.

Sean

(Originally published in Fundraising and Philanthropy Magazine E-Bulletin).

I just woke up and realised I was getting old.

I just didn’t understand it.

I thought I was pretty with it on using computers.

As a member of the first computer generation, I owned a ZX81 when I was 12, bought during the Falklands War, when Thatcher was PM and Britain used to have mines. Getting a program running on my computer then involved typing in something like:

10 PRINT ‘SEAN IS COOL’
20 GOTO 10

Then hitting run. “SEAN IS COOL” would appear across the screen, line by line for ever. Boy, was I cool.

Since then I have been ‘into’ computers. I got a 16k RAM pack for the ZX81 then later a 48k ZX Spectrum, briefly a VIC20, a Commodore Plus 4 then took a Commodore Amiga with me to York Uni in 1988.

And I have always played games on them, and been a little ahead of the game on all things computing. After Uni, along came the Playstation, (then Playstation 2 and 3), XBOX, XBOX360 and most recently the Wii. I got them all, so thought I was pretty much still up on the computing world.

I was using JANET in 1989 and was used to getting information online by the time the internet actually arrived proper. (JANET was the Joint Academic NETwork, a sort of internet for academia, it maybe still exists).

And I was an early adopter of mobile phones and even SMSing. In the early days, you could only SMS within the same network and when most of my friends received a message they had no idea what to do to read or respond. SMS was around for about three years before everyone suddenly twigged – I guess it was the kids getting access to mobiles at the turn of the century that made it so massive.

But despite this, something happened to the next generation (and actually, those just half a generation behind me too) and I missed it. And I just woke up.

In his book ‘The World is Flat’, Thomas Friedman talks about how American Business was asleep and how information technology is flattening the world (actually flattened it, but America is just catching up). Good book, but a good cheat is to catch the video below.

Even after reading the book, it would appear I was still half asleep. A year I would never read a blog. I thought they were pure narcissism full of over inflated, unsubstantiated opinion. Now I know they are but I am an avid reader of several, and contributor to several too.

I still don’t get Twittering & Facebook daily feeling updates – it seems incredibly boring, even more narcissistic and scares me. (Ben Elton wrote a great book, Blind Faith, of a post climate change apocalypse Britain where these social networks have eradicated privacy and Twittering is scarier than the fiction.)

If you don’t know what Twittering is, please stay asleep.

Anyway. I just woke up to the power of blogs. You obviously get blogs, or wouldn’t be reading this, but they offer communication solutions beyond organised opinion columns like Professional Fundraising Magazine’s.

Over the past two months I suddenly got it. A real Eureka! Moment. As well as playing around with this blog I also set up an internal Pareto staff blog, accessible only to our staff.
It was amazing what happened – and how. The first thing was how easy it was. Using Google’s
Blogspot http://www.blogspot.com/ I set the blog up, including inviting relevant people and posting the first blog in about 15 minutes.

The next thing that is amazing is how it took off.

The first article was posted by me on 8 August 2008. Then there were a couple more from me, a couple more from early adopters and by the end of August we had 13 entries. Just over two per week.

September had 52 postings – more than one a day. People have posted results, tests, ideas, videos, piss-takes, inter-office Wii challenges, instruction manuals, commitments to the team, and more. It is blowing away those circular emails, and our internal newsletter is fast becoming redundant (there actually hasn’t been one since the Blog went up, and no one is missing it).

About 60 people have access to the blog, and it is a great communication tool. And so, so easy.

Since then I have set up another private blog for charities involved in Pareto Benchmarking, and more recently we have started using it for our Masterclass / training sessions. The Resource Alliance asked Jan Chisholm (Pareto Fundraising Australia’s CEO) and myself to work on a new style of Masterclass for the IFC.

This Masterclass includes real data information from a charity, and affords participants the opportunity to look at data and interpret, plan and then look again at what happened to the data.
This is all pretty complex, so what we decided to do was to actually use a blog to get the briefing across. It is semi-private, in that anyone can look but only members can comment or post. Check out http://paretoifc08.blogspot.com/.

I thought I was a tech-head, but I was falling behind. If you are behind, and have a responsibility for marketing your business or charity – please, wake up!

Day of Online Action

Amnesty International have asked us - and lots more people - to 'censor' our website for their day of action on 30 July. It was too late for our website but that should explain the weird stuff on my blog.

If you have a website or blog, then please visit http://action.uncensor.com.au/dop/ and join this day of action.