Flipping the funnel – the future of fundraising?
Posted by Bryan on February 15, 2008
Recently I’ve been using an analogy originally promoted by online marketing pioneer Seth Godin to help illustrate how individual donor fundraisers, steeped in traditional direct marketing, need to evolve their thinking to capitalise on the new opportunities being offered by Web 2.0.
In his free to download ebook ‘Flipping the Funnel’ (with a tailored version for nonprofits), he highlights how fundraisers should re-evaluate the traditional approach of funneling high volumes of prospects into a fundraising programme to convert low volumes of supporters.
In Godin’s analogy, when you ‘flip the funnel’ (with the help of Web 2.0 tools) what you end-up with is a megaphone, through which passionate supporters can shout-out to their network of personal contacts on your behalf – overcoming the decline in mass-market appeals and reaching people traditional fundraising communications can’t reach.
In his own words “A new set of online tools makes this approach not just a possibility, but also an imperative for any organization hoping to grow. Give your fan club a megaphone and get out of the way.” I couldn’t agree more!
raj dasani said
I like this fliiping the funnel idea- could and should be the future. I saw the below site recently which seems to encapsulate this idea. You may have reveiwed it on this blog already.
Six Degrees is a charitable initiative of Kevin Bacon in partnership with Net for Good.
http://www.sixdegrees.org/