On Monday, I got my first (and so far, only) contribution to RESULTS. A member of my scuba diving club contributed $100. After making his donation, he told me something about the donor page I wasn’t aware of.
Clicking the Donation link opens a secured web page but the URL is https://friendraising.towercare.com and to my friend that understandably implied his contribution would go to a company called Towercare rather than RESULTS. That caused my friend to pause and reconsider whether he should contribute or not. He’d contributed to RESULTS a couple years ago when I last participated in a Friends and Family Campaign, and he’d learned about RESULTS from me and his own research. Towercare, on the other hand, was an unknown quantity.
After weighing his decision for a few days, he decided to go ahead and contribute. Thankfully, he told me of his dilemma so now I can warn other potential contributors who may be hesitating for the same reason.
Towercare is the company that RESULTS has partnered with for this Friends and Family Campaign. Towercare provides the website fundraising technology that RESULTS is trying out with this campaign. As I’ve written before, I can see a lot of potential benefits with web-based contribution campaigns, but I’ve personally experienced technical problems with the technology and, with my friend’s comments, now see another problem that needs to be addressed better.
So how is the campaign going? The campaign is in its last week. On Tuesday, March 20th, I learned we fundraisers as a whole passed the 50% mark toward our goal of raising $30,000. Normally, the last minute push gets RESULTS past or much closer to its goals–whether the goal is reaching a certain dollar amount of fundraising or getting a target number of members of Congress to support a particular bill or sign onto a “Dear Colleague” letter. How we’re doing right now, I don’t know.
I’m disheartened that I’m so far from my personal goal of raising $1000, but glad that I’m the cause of RESULTS getting at least $100 more than it would have had I had not joined the campaign. I’m reminded of a quotation I read today from one of ice hockey’s greatest players, Wayne Gretsky. He said, “You miss 100% of the shots you never take.”
Tomorrow, I’m going to send out one more e-mail to warn my friends and family about the Towercare issue, remind them the campaign ends in a couple days, ask them to visit my contribution page if they haven’t already, and thank them for considering making a contribution.
And that reminds me of something I heard many years ago when I was on a RESULTS training call about working with the media. Those of us on the call were counselled that when dealing with an editor, the most important thing wasn’t getting the editor to write an editorial in support of our issues. The most important thing was to further our relationship with the editor.
Since then, I’ve tried to keep that objective in mind when I contact editorial writers and congressional aides. It’s actually good advice to keep in mind when dealing with everybody. Advice I need to remind myself of.