🏀March Baader Meinhof Madness

Although I am currently the reigning champion of last year’s office NCAA bracket, I’m not the slightest bit sporty. So, when it comes to basketball and March Madness, I really have no idea who’s playing, who’s winning, who’s losing, or who has the best font—although I’d love to weigh in in the latter just for fun. In fact, at our office we place all the team names in a basket and conduct a very unsophisticated drawing. How else do you think I won? It was 100% luck! But everyone else in the nation is doing it, so we might as well join in on the fun, right?

And that’s why today’s blog is called March Baader Meinhof Madness. The basketball hype of March Madness is hard to avoid—it’s everywhere. Which brings me to the Baader Meinhof Effect. Have you heard of it? Experienced it? The Baader Meinhof Effect is a psychological phenomenon wherein once you learn about something, it starts to appear everywhere. And I mean everywhere!

Many women experience this when they’re pregnant. Obviously, there have always been pregnant women at the store, at work, at school, at the park, etc. But once you’re pregnant, all the sudden you see pregnant women all over the place. The same holds true for a new car. Buy a Jeep and the next thing you know you can’t unsee a Jeep. It’s sort of mind-blowing.

They say it’s a form of frequency illusion—you first learn about something and the new information seemingly appears everywhere. It makes sense. When we don’t know about something, we’re not on the lookout for it. Once an idea is front and center—like March Madness basketball—the brain starts to pay more attention to it and you then feel the frequency of that concept making an appearance more than ever before.

And, yes, the Baader Meinhof Effect has both a left brain marketing method with an Emeril Lagasse BAM of right brain marketing moxie that will serve you well if you’d only take this psychological effect and use it to your advantage. Think about it this way…

Left Brain Marketing Method: You’re heard my support of finding your minimum viable audience and segmenting your donors into groups that have something in common as well as an affinity for what you do and the capacity to do something about it. But you also need to be putting some thought into how often you’re communicating with these donors and how you might be recycling your messages in other mediums where your donors might discover you. A good left brain marketing plan can be the equivalent to your financial budget—a yearlong strategy on where to spend your time or money to further your mission. Then, you can let Baader Meinhof works it’s magic.

Right Brain Marketing Moxie: By far, the #1 question I get every time I speak to a group is this, “How do you come up with all these creative ideas?” While I do believe that doing the left brain planning work first will free your right brain up to do what it does best, I also believe that the Baader Meinhof mojo starts working on me, too. And not just on me! I’ve seen this happen with my whole entire team—both left brain and right brain people. And it can work to your advantage, too…if you let it.

So whaddya say, shall we get this Baader Meinhof Party started?

Left Brain Marketing Methods: A good marketing/communication/stewardship plan is developed intentionally, ahead of time. I know many of you are flying by the seat of your pants and wondering from week-to-week or month-to-month what message to send, who to send it to, when the right time to send it might be, and who should send it. I was there in 2013. It felt like marketing fire drill mode every week—and it was exhausting in all the ways. Everything from determining if we had enough envelopes to filling up our account at the post office, it was the outcome of poor planning. And then I had a dream about how to fix this problem. And that’s why I write this blog today--because the strategy worked.

Think about it this way…would your Board of Directors ever let you enter into a year at your organization without a budget? How much do you anticipate spending? How much do you believe you’ll receive in revenue of all kinds? Do the numbers make sense? In fact, most of you, if not all, present your current financials at each Board Meeting. The Board has a fiduciary duty to make sure that the numbers are in check. It’s important, so we don’t overspend and so we’re on track with revenue generation.

Yet, where is the communication ‘budget’? Most of the time it’s in a binder titled Asset Development Strategy and that strategy never made it to an actionable plan. It’s sad. So many strategic plans die on the bookshelf. Yet, we’d never let that happen to a financial budget—we all have those.

But that’s not gonna happen to you, because you’re reading this blog. You want to know better and you want to do better. So, you’re on your way to putting some legs to your fundraising and stopping the madness you experience in March and every other month of the year!

By activating the psychological phenomenon of Baader Meinhof, you can give your donors the idea that they are learning about you and beginning to see the work you do everywhere, simply by planning to communicate with them frequently. Of course, it will depend on how big your team is—and by team that could include paid and unpaid staff and board members—to determine what your capacity is. In my office, we communicate with our donor segments with intentional, customized messaged six times per year. Every other month, our donors are going to hear about us. And then during those in-between months, we are taking those messages we wrote and recycling them for all the different social medias. But we would also convey those messages in other mediums as well: enewsletters, advertising in the newspaper, guest spots on the local radio program, guest speaking at service clubs, etc. All the places that we believe our donors are getting their news, we try to be there. And then we just let Baader Meinhof take over.

The next thing you know, your donors are talking about you at a wedding reception, are donating to you more than once a year, and are willing to accept invitations for coffee to talk about how to get involved in bigger, deeper ways to further your mission. It’ll feel a lot like basketball is feeling right now. A month ago, overtime was nothing but more work. Then March madness arrives. You're team is down three, shot clock's winding down, you're screaming "Shoot it!" at the top of your lungs and praying that someone, ANYONE, hits a triple to send things into overtime! Like March Madness, you can be everywhere your donors look, too.

Right Brain Marketing Moxie: I do speaking engagements all over the county. Just last week I spoke to a great group from Wisconsin via Zoom.  Each time I speak, I always begin with the data I’ve collected over the past nine years to prove why a left brain and right brain approach to marketing is vital, healthy, and ultimately more effective (read lucrative).

And I always follow that with some left brain strategies we implement that have proven successful to us in the growth of our overall annual fundraising, our increase in donors, the uprising in multiple gifts per year by individual donors, and even the number of endowment funds we’ve opened in that same time. The evidence is mind-blowing, measurable, and 100% driven by the data we intentionally collect. Yet, still, the #1 question I get when the presentations are done is about the creative right brain ideas. How did you come up with those? Do you really develop those in-house? What inspires those ideas? Do you think I could come up with ideas like that? I guess because we’re so used to the left brain, logical side of office work, we don’t tend to question it. But not many people are implementing right brain marketing strategies in the office—we save the fun for after work, I guess.

I believe part of it is our fear of not being boring. After all, we deal with wills and estate plans. We’re all about IRA rollovers, 401k plans, and insurance. Some of us are offering the fountain of youth that annuities tend to bring or executing CRATs and CRUTs. The instruments we often need to use are very legal and very boring—and they must be. However, even those of us with the most serious of missions deals in joy. The joy of a mother cutting the ribbon of her first home thanks to Habitat for Humanity. The first mentor a young boy has because of your after-school program. The pets that were saved at your no-kill shelter because of generous donors. We do the work we do because of the outcomes, the end results. They are worthy. They are joyous. They deserve some celebration. And all those things can bring some light-heartedness into the communications you share with donors. Just like in March Madness, everyone wants to root for a winning team. And the wins you have by furthering your mission are stories they want to hear. Glorious, amazing, happy stories!

Now, as you know, at my shop, we choose a theme every year to communicate our messages. The themes are familiar to the donors and gives them metaphors they fully understand as comparisons for concepts they might not know—some of the complex things we do that are difficult to explain if we don’t give them a hook to hang the new information on. And there is no question that once we select our theme each year that Baader Meinhof takes over! It’s unreal. We use Slack in our office to communicate quickly outside of email. So, one of our Slack Channels is all about Theme Ideas. As soon as the theme is selected, the frequency illusion starts doing it’s thing and all the sudden we begin to see theme idea everywhere! Last year our theme was Punctuation. Who would ever think that you’d see quotes and cartoons and memes and facts about punctuation at every turn? But it happened. I swear last year, I saw nary a blip on the radar about Space. But this year it’s our theme and I’ve seen it everywhere. Heck, I went to Hobby Lobby yesterday and took a few pictures with my phone of space ideas that I found while shopping. Literally, Baader Meinhof takes over and it’s a beautiful thing. #TogetherWeCanRuleTheGalaxy

So, whether you make your focus on your most joyful success stories and the end results you’re achieving with your clients or delve into the storytelling metaphors that themes can offer—let Baader Meinhof work for you.

I’m as unathletic as it gets and March Madness is on my radar—I cannot unsee it. Decide what result or theme you want to focus on and let the frequency illusion kick in. Then, find a place to store those ideas so you don’t lose them. Slack works for us, but a folder on your laptop or network does the trick, too. Never think to yourself that you’ll remember the idea later—you won’t. Start developing a library of ideas to access when you’re ready. Then peruse that library to pick the very best idea for that donor segment, at that time of year, with that perfect, custom message. As the book Creativity, Inc. says, ideas are king, but you must trust the process. Try it and let me know how it’s working for you.

Until then, may your communication plans be as complete as a March Madness bracket, my friend!

All My Best,

dawn
[email protected]
dawn brown creative, llc.