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3 Tips to Rock #GivingTuesday and increase Donations

We were smitten with MadMimi's awesome post on tips to increase the efficacy of your outreach on one of the coolest special days in the calendar. For our non-profit users and customers, we wanted to add one thing that would actually make adopting MadMimi's tips even more effective (even if you were using plain old email)...TARGETING. 

Instead of one generic message, try dividing up your donor, supporter and volunteer base, and then diving even further into interest and location-based groups. To do this you should have a good understanding of how your email database and organizations facebook and twitter connections line up. The numbers don't lie: A more personalized email is 10X more effective (open rates are higher, engagement and action is higher). 

1. Make your ask as personal and relatable as possible!

Hey E, how's the roadtripping?

Giving you a heads up because I think this is up your alley. I'm doing the NYC Tri this year and raising $3,000 to support Camp Interactive, an awesome program that takes kids from the neighborhood and 1) gets them outdoors and 2) gets them learning how to use their unique perspectives to build awesome stuff...

This is literally my jam...and I think given your love of social good and general awesomeness, I figured this would resonate. So take 30 secs and throw down. In addition to basically guilting me into having to finish, there are also reward levels to make it even more fun for you to support.

We can crush this. Let's raise this money and set free a posse of kids who see new possibilities for themselves...and the whole damn world.

Support here: https://www.crowdrise.com/2014nyctri/fundraiser/ronjdub

Let me know what you think and drop 8/8 in your cal for the post-race special edition #whiskeyFriday to say thanks to our supporters!

If you know which supporters, friends and followers specifically self identify as caring about "social good" or "tech" or "diversity" reference that and target the ask.

2. Make it competitive!

Use your understanding of your segments to make your asks competitive in a fun way. Like Brooklyn NEVER wants to get beat by queens.

Hey Bill, my NYC tech nerd friends and followers are outraising the west coast! Are you gonna let that happen??

3. Do targeting EVEN on social channels

You may not have emails for ALL of your friends, followers and supporters. To be clear, email is our favorite channel for performance but you can leverage "smart social" outreach. Try pulling selective people into conversations based on their interests. BUT ONLY if those conversations are authentically relevant to those followers and friends.

You can do this on twitter, facebook (or even linkedin). Targeted mentions work.

Learning how to build is such a crucial skill for underserved kids. My developer and engineer peeps especially, help me get more of these kids seeing just how super the superpowers are! I'm look at you guys in particular Doug Tabuchi Arthur Dobelis Eric Neuman Hilary Mason bit.ly/runronj 

And because I'm able to search on any combination of simple keywords (and location as a premium customer), it means I'm only a few clicks away from know exactly how to talk to my audience.

Et voila! 10-20X better engagement and 30% of email recipients actually giving could be yours! We're huge fans of Giving Tuesday and want as many great orgs as possible to get funded so they can deliver on their missions!

If you need help figuring any of this out, tweet at us. Email us. Take free Simplist for a spin and then ask for an upgrade.

Share this if you know your friends and followers need to know this.

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Get your daily dose of encouragement!!!!

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Yes!

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How will you take risks in an org dominated by Status-Quo-ticians? Is it time to build something of your own? Who should you collaborating with?

[getsimplist]

They're ignoring your emails, posts, and tweets too. Not because they mean to (mostly not because they mean to), but because sending one giant blast of a message to every single person and hoping the right ones see it is so 2013.

So whether you’re asking for donations for your Crowdrise campaign, prospecting for potential customers of your new Doggy Treats of the Month app or raising money for your new startup, be sure the right folks get the message wherever they are in your network.

(this applies to more than friends..followers, business contacts and leads want to be talked to in personalized, relevant ways).

[getsimplist]

Know any great Angel investors? We do.

In 2010 Ron J approached a charismatic serial entrepreneur who also happened to be a skydiving triathlete. In addition to those shared interests, it turned out they both had NYC, some shared connections, and not being bantam weights in common.  His name is Peter Shankman, world traveling author, media personality, customer happiness expert and the first thing they ever did together was to sit down and grab coffee. As a team we are proud of Peter for being named one of NYC's 25 Angel Investors you should know. And we are grateful he believed in us so early and has continued to mentor, advise and back our play as we've grown and evolved.

But here's the thing: It started with a coffee. Plus validation that they had shared interests and connections. Percolate's Jason Shen wrote about how coffee literally powers Silicon Valley. Guess what, it's the same everywhere because what the coffee meeting is about is cultivating a rapport with smart creative people you'd like to collaborate with. Especially the ones predisposed to be warm to YOU and YOUR IDEA, ORGANIZATION and MISSION.

A VC went on the record this year saying that of the thousands (literally 1000s) of inbound requests for meeting his firm got, he didn't take a single "cold call". Every single meeting he took was through a warm intro. 

Doesn't mean you can't make cold outreach work. But you should certainly work smarter and smart with what you've already got access to.

So what are you waiting for? You've got great ideas. You've got exciting plans. Figure out which angel investors (or funders if you're a non-profit) you should be talking to immediately. And don't miss opportunities for warm, easy conversations. Find out which founders you can ask for angel investor intros.

Make SURE you don't miss any across you and your team's thousands of connections. Those coffees that change your life ain't gonna schedule themselves.

Pro-Tip for finding investors using Simplist:

If you're still reading this far, here's the recipe of terms we'd suggest you use to identify and start tracking investors in you and your team's networks (twitter, facebook, linkedin, addressbook):

Angel Investors Search Terms: "angel invest" "early stage" "seed stage" "active angel"

Founders Search Terms (people to share your "Search Party" link with): "founder" "entrepreneur"

[getsimplist]

The tweet heard nowhere around the world

You wrote the perfect post.

You artfully crafted the perfect tweet.

But nobody saw it.

Now what?

Simple fact is that as we've all become more connected to more connected people, we miss stuff in our streams. And the stuff we post gets missed by the people we know should see it.

No more than 5-6% of your network ever sees a tweet or facebook post.

Stuff we need for our business. Friends and followers taking jobs at companies we're trying to sell to. People we've wanted to hire for years who JUST changed their profiles and are now looking for new gigs.

You prepare a perfectly good message and know in your mind who should care but you have NO guarantees that they'll see it when you post it on Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin. In fact, Bottlenose CEO Nova Spivack ran an experiment demonstrating that while twitter "shows" your tweet to about 6% of your network only about 0.5% truly see it in an engaged way.

SO STOP THINKING OF TWITTER  AND LINKED AS BROADCAST TOOLS ONLY. Instead, figure out which followers, friends and contacts are relevant to your messaging and then utilize the most reliable channel in the digital world: Ye olde email.

The Daily Muse's Allison Stadd wrote a great piece on one of the ways that she is mashing together perspective on her contacts and connections to get the right messages to the right people.

Being able to do targeted, customized communication at scale that feels as close as 1-to-1 as is possible is the holy grail. And the only way to guarantee that the right people see and engage that perfect post and tweet.

If you want to learn how to do this at scale for yourself and your ENTIRE organization. Leave us your email.

[getsimplist]

DECLASSIFIED: We helped keep Obama in office (almost)

For the past 2.5 years, the team that makes Simplist and the tech (Knodes) that makes it possible, has kept a secret: that we spent a lot of time pitching the Obama for America campaign in early 2012. Now, we're finally "declassifying" the pitch document below. So skip to the bottom if you hate context and props.

Context

We didn't win the business but we've always been SUPER proud that the smartest and most technically sophisticated product/tech team EVER assembled in a political contest led by superhuman Harper Reed and his squad dug what we were doing. Enough to take meetings and calls galore. Enough to assemble their entire product and technical team in person in Chicago. In person. All of them.

Amidst the crush of deadlines and too much to do, they understood that our take on how to leverage social data to segment communication and power highly intelligent social referrals was unique.

And in that room full of people who are now legend, the quote I'll always remember after John put our developer docs and "API harness" on screen was "holy shit. THAT is cool".

We showed them a future in which every supporter gets an email customized based on 1) what that supporter has been talking about on the social web AND 2) who's been responding/interacting on those topics. We showed them that referrals are good but that we'd built a way to make them 20X more effective simply by targeting them.

No more one size fits most emails. No more tell whomever you can think of. 

Yeah, we've been building the future of smart social interaction and integration into UX, communication and marketing for a little while now. We love this stuff. And even though we didn't win the OFA2012 business, we LOVE that we got to trade ideas and learning with such an incredible team.

So take a look at the pitch. Tell us what you think. Turning social signal into action and outcomes for even the smallest of teams is our jam. -- Ron J

What We Pitched the Obama Campaign in 2012 from Ron J Williams

**THROWBACK LOGO ALERT!

[getsimplist]

What are you missing out on?

Now we've got a Simplist Community channel that we're filling with pro-tips videos and answers to questions about how you can look at your network differently (read: leverage it authentically).

Follow us here and there! We love hearing from you guys! It will also be where you see our smiling mugs from time to time as we share news and hacks that YOU guys throw our way!

[getsimplist]

Ron's getting Old. So you're getting free stuff.

[getsimplist]

Don't leave home without it

You know that gnawing feeling you have when you’re planning a business trip and you can’t remember if you might be forgetting someone worth calling on while you’re in town?

You ask yourself:

Was there was a potential client I forgot to schedule coffee with?

Which SaaS investor did I connect with on Twitter and promise to reach out to next time I came to town?

Who are the tech Founders who follow me and live in London so I can invite them to join for whiskeyFriday in November (Londontown Edition after I keynote at Financial Times Innovate conference)?

I never have that feeling anymore. I keep a running search (set it and forget it) and get updates  to my inbox on Founders I’m connected to across 5 cities (and counting). Plus I get updates on relevant people connecting to my teammates and investors in those cities because we have a Team Account (email us to learn more about Team Accounts).

There is no longer an excuse to travel anywhere on the company dime for just a single meeting. Increase the ROI of every single trip.

Simplist. Don’t leave home without it.

Just like Amex. Except not a credit card. And there’s no British gentleman fishing trout. Just a smart way to fuel your trips and feed your funnel.

[getsimplist]

Contact Management Smontact Management

Iconic. And so incredibly memorable. So allow us to stand on the familiar after months of observing how and why our users use. And why our customers pay (hint: ask for access to our Team Accounts program, stat). It's not contact management. It's fuel for your sales funnel. It's not a social addressbook. It the always-on lead generator. It's not a complicated. It's the simplest way to make every connection count for your business. It's Simplist. Whether you're recruiting and don't want to spend $20K per hire, or just want to figure out every single warm intro you can get into your target market, there's a simpler way to leverage your team's network. You shouldn't have to hear in a press release 6 months late that your old roommate just landed the CMO gig at your ideal target customer. Simplist should be telling you. You should have network superpowers.

We dare you to guess how many [fill in the blank] you and your whole team know across linkedin, twitter, facebook and your 15 years of contacts. Double dare you.

[getsimplist]

How much capital does your business need?

Pretty cool, simple tool for starting to think about how much money your business needs before you're ready to buy that yacht...or at the very least be break-even. http://growth.tlb.org/

[getsimplist]

Why doesn't your business have a sworn enemy?

Does your business have a sworn enemy? I don’t mean a frenemy whom you openly work with until that hopeful day when you can crush them. Not the people who kind of annoy you. I mean the businesses and people with values that are antithetical to the core mission of your team. I mean the entities that offend you with their very existence. In the immortal words of the Notorious B.I.G…the folks you have beef with.

A sworn enemy provides a foil. A true south to your true north. A dragon to wake up and slay every single day for your users, customers and for the world. As Josh Linkner wrote in Forbes, you’ve got to pick a fight to build something that really matters.

Your sworn enemy might be mediocrity in a market. It might be bad, ugly design in Enterprise software (shout to FieldLens). It might be inefficiencies in supply chain, or poorly managed retail operations that lead to higher prices for end consumers (looking at you Jeff Bezos). It could be mercilessly attacking the stuffy whiteshirt and propriety of old school Valley VCs with passion-filled expletives and non-traditional money-ball strategies (hell yeah Dave McClure!)

Our team’s sworn enemy: the mediocre introduction middleman. You know that guy who offered to introduce you to some Angel Investors if you pay him to play? Yeah, him. You know that recruiter who keeps calling you with candidates half of whom it turns out you share connections with (and the other half of whom aren’t a good fit because that recruiter doesn’t know you or your team well)? And for the basement bargain price of only $10,000-$20,000? Definitely him.

It’s not that there aren’t amazing recruiters and incredible advisors that you’d be lucky to work with. It’s that mediocre middlemen have built an industry around your fear that you can’t get to the right people for your business to succeed. That’s bull.

I get higher quality intros and candidates than 99% of the crap that cold calling middlemen lay on my doorstep; simply by combining the power of my team’s networks

So we’re putting you on notice mediocre introduction middlemen: step up your game. Empower your clients. Collaborate with them on identifying who they already know so you can go find the leads they TRULY can’t get to. Your target clients are the people that are increasingly using Simplist to turn every team member, advisor and investor into a connector across every single one of their combined networks (linkedin, twitter, facebook, their contacts, and we’ve got more coming!)

A small, scrappy team can do all of the following without paying a middle man if they know how to leverage their networks:

Get to their first 2,000  users

Raise their first round of funding ($100K - $1MM)

Close their first 5-10 business customers ($100K - $1MM in rev)

Recruit their first 5-7 employees (~$150K in savings)

Yeah. We’re gunning for all mediocre middlemen (and mediocre middlewomen), especially the ones who prey on early stage founders and small teams. That’s beef.

Building is a team sport. Simplist wants to help you combine the power of ALL your networks to build faster and more cost-effectively.

[getsimplist]

Who (or what) is your business' sworn enemy? #whatsbeef

[getsimplist]

Responses to Comment Thread on ProductHunt (by @ronjdub)

Got pinged by Jesse Middleton, one of the brilliant minds working on making WeWork a household name for growing companies in need of a home. He was like "dude, Simplist is on ProductHunt!"

In a nutshell it means someone likes that we're building the simplest way in the world to build your business faster and better leveraging (and collaborating with) your network. In fact, they like it so much they submitted to ProductHunt that Simplist is something to watch. (Thanks Kris!)

Then I went over to vote myself (even the President votes for himself, right?) and realized there were some GREAT questions about what we're up to. So, I'll answer them here and keep this updated then when my account is approved for commenting, I'll put in-line on ProductHunt:

1. Jeremie Berrebi, (Co-Founder of Kima Ventures) commented:

Looks very interesting...but not sure LinkedIn will allow this...

Response: Jeremy, legit issue to consider. Our sincere hope is that Linkedin recognizes that as a team, for the past several years, we have only focused on trying to make these networks more useable and valuable to the end user. In this light we are never trying to siphon off users or build a new "uber" network so much as we take a user-focused view; in order to make it easy for them to get to the right people in any of the places they have connections or are looking to make connections. In fact anecdotally (supported by exit data) we send our users BACK to linkedin to do the "last mile" of connecting with new prospects that our users' friends or teammates have referred. We actually want to create value for the network by first recognizing that insights about the connections and paths are in fact highly valuable to business users (and businesses). That said, if you'd like to help us make our case to the product team at Linkedin, shoot me a note. :) Love to know what you think about this.

2. Erik Torenberg (rapping @raptfm, hustling @ProductHunt) replied to Jeremie:

@jberrebi if they would allow it, wouldn't linkedin let us do this directly already? i like it a lot, but it seems to good to be true.

Response: Erik, 1st off as a (semi)-retired rapper I love what you're up to at raptfm and may have to jump in a cypher with you. Ok, back to work. :) Linkedin blazed an incredible path as the first indispensable professional network. And it built a huge business by achieving massive scale and then charging recruiters and salespeople for the ability to reach out to users. That made (and still makes) a ton of sense for the salesperson, but leads ultimately to a decline in awesomeness of user experience. We are really excited to demonstrate the ways in which all of this connection and expertise data can be made commercially actionable for end users without cannibalizing the core focus on Linkedin's business. If you (and me) and other users signal with our dollars that this kind of user-centric data mining is commercially interesting (for you as well as for them) then we think everybody wins even though our approach is not native to Linkedin's DNA today. Make sense?

3. Mack Flavelle (biz dev, tapstream) commented:

Just poking at this now. If this works as well as I'm fantasizing this could be really interesting. My linkedin account has become unusable in the last year due to so many VERY loose ties. Maybe this helps fix that.

Response: Mack, we're definitely hoping to help make all of your networks more useable for you in three ways

quickly getting to good shortlists of "prospects" (whether for recruiting, fundraising or biz dev) based on smarter and smarter filters about who the right people are for you (we've started with social data but are integrating some pretty interesting 3rd party data sets very shortly)

making it dropbox simple for people who want to help (teammates, friends, advisors) to be able to quickly identify who they should be introducing/recommending and

making sure that we're constantly updating you about the things happening in your network relevant to your team's priorities.

Obviously to say we have a long way to go is unequivocally true but we hope we can help your network work better for you starting now.

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Please ask any questions over at ProductHunt or here and I'll do my absolute best to answer. Full disclosure: Our product is rapidly evolving so we REALLY love all feedback, even the harsh kind. When we do our jobs right, you're able to build your companies and causes better and faster and we take it seriously if we're not living up to it.

[getsimplist]

Why I love my job more than Bill Cosby loves Jell-O

You. You're why. My team is addicted to that look of accomplishment on our users' faces (or tweets) when they get to the people they need to help them build. When they communicate in personalized and effective ways to activate their community.

It's unique. It's inspiring. It's that moment when they realize that their team's network of contacts connections and customers is more powerful than they ever realized. It's the moment they see even more possibility.

I love that instant that they look up and realize they just cracked the riddle on their hunt for the perfect person...

That intro to THAT investor

That developer without the exorbitant recruiting fee

That decision-maker without a cold call or even having to hire a "20 year sales veteran"

I love that when we do our jobs well, you guys build amazing companies and causes faster and better.

Keep it up y'all!

Ron J

[getsimplist]

Who's putting people back into politics?

We tend to focus on founders, freelancers and small teams but this piece was great. Awesome article by Wired UK on which digital tools will help British politicians take home the win. Props to Geoff Mulgan for a smart mention of our friends Thunderclap and other powerful tools like Nationbuilder. We love simple tools that empower people to connect and engage authentically. Grassroots at scale is on its way. (full Wired article here. Great read)

For our part in this new world, we want to be the best in the world at enabling collaboration around WHO (perfect people, intros and endorsements) and HOW (best channel, most compelling messaging) to engage. Quickly. Actionable people lists for outreach/engagement. 

Curious what platforms you think we should be teaming up with...

Teams need simple tools to leverage the greatest asset they start off with...the support and expertise of their team/community's networks. So we're rooting for more "force multiplier" tools like Thunderclap and will continue to do our part to make networks work better for everyone building stuff.