Flipping the Funnel: Non-Profit Edition (1 of 12 free samples)

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COPYRIGHT
Flipping the Funnel: Non-Profit Edition by Seth Godin. Copyright 2006 by Do You Zoom, Inc.
All Rights Reserved. Sharing not permitted.

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Flipping the Funnel

Give Your Fans the Power to Speak Up

by Seth Godin

Author's Note

In a book called eMarketing, which I wrote in 1995, I said something like “There are only four kinds of people: prospects, customers, loyal customers, and former customers.” The book was ahead of its time, and I was wrong.

For a book called Permission Marketing, which I wrote in 1998, the subtitle was “Turning strangers into friends and friends into customers.” My timing was better, the book was a bestseller, but I was still wrong. Or at least incomplete.

Flipping the Funnel finishes the sentence. Now, I might just be right:

Turn strangers into friends.
          Turn friends into donors.
                   And then... do the most important job:
                             Turn your donors into fundraisers.

The math is compelling. Most of the people in the world are not your donors. They haven’t even heard of you, actually. And while many of these people are not qualified buyers or aren’t interested in supporting your organization, many of them might—if they only knew you existed, if they could only be persuaded that your offering is worth investing time and energy and passion and money into.

But how on earth are you going to get them to know about you?

We’re living in the most cluttered marketplace in history. Whether you are curing cancer, encouraging faith or educating people in need, people are better at ignoring you than ever before. You don’t have enough time to get your message out.

Not only that, but you can’t afford to interrupt all the people you need to reach. The cost of running an ad that gets seen or an ad that gets clicked on or a direct mail campaign that gets opened is higher than it has ever been. You just don’t have enough money to get your message to all the people who need to hear it.

And not only that, but you don’t have enough people. Your fundraising team isn’t as big as you’d like it to be, and all of your best volunteers are funning flat out—without succeeding as much as you’d like.

But wait.

You have assets that are underused: your friends and your supporters.

I define your “friends” as the prospects you’ve earned permission to talk with—even though they haven’t turned into donors or volunteers yet. And your donors have crossed the Rubicon; they’ve been converted from total strangers to interested friends, and then all the way to dedicated supporters of your cause.

And there’s a bunch of them.

You’ve certainly got more donors than fundraisers (at least I hope so). And your list of permission-based friends probably dramatically exceeds your list of donors.

The Funnel

Marketing is a funnel. You put undifferentiated prospects into the top. Some of them hop out, unimpressed with what you have to offer. Others learn about you and your organization, hear from their peers, compare offerings, and eventually come out the bottom, as patrons, converts and supporters.

If you’re like most marketers, you’ve been spending a lot of time trying to shovel more and more attention into the top of the funnel. After all, if you can expose your idea to enough people, you can afford to buy more attention, to run more ads, to put more people into the top.

As we’ve seen, though, the amount of time and money you need to keep that funnel filled can explode your budget pretty quickly.

Here’s a quick example. The chart at right compares Web traffic at diabetes.org (which is supported by more than a million dollars’ worth of advertising and in-kind support every year) with Squidoo.com, a brand new community-driven site. Squidoo is in blue. (Click the chart to enlarge it.)

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