I once saw a job ad for a communications role at a non-profit that had to do with Tibetan Buddhist culture. That was exactly the kind of work I was interested in so I applied. It turned out to be very low-paying, but intriguing, so I accepted the offer. There, what the work wound up becoming was several hours a day of stuffing envelopes with donation appeal letters, sealing them and getting them ready to be mailed. There were thousands that were sent out at a time.
The director did the same work so there was no power play or sense of exploitation. The pay was quite minimal, less than $200 a month, but there was something appealing about being there.
After stuffing thousands of envelopes and being in the office part-time for months I noticed that there was a lot happening internally, but the organization was not sharing information about all their work. The donation appeal letters were based on a template and contained a little information about a campaign or a project, but did not go much in depth or detail.
So it seemed logical to me that it might be effective to share more information with their donors. I suggested creating a newsletter and that idea was accepted, but I was told I would be the one to do it. They had Quark on a desktop computer so I started learning that by trying out various layouts for a newsletter. The non-profit also had a sister organization which was a publishing company. Once the newsletter file was complete it could be sent over to them for printing. I wrote some content and had the Executive Director write a story about visiting a monastery in Bhutan. The organization had plenty of content to work with because it specialized in preserving Tibetan culture. Mainly, they had a huge number of books and other materials they had been translating from Tibetan into English.
They also participated in a world peace ceremony in India, so they had many evocative, rich photos. In fact, they had a great abundance of materials to work with so putting together the first newsletter proved to be fairly straightforward and easy.
The newsletter was laid out in four pages that folded together into a self-mailer with an address window on the back for a label and a return address. About 4,000 copies were printed and mailed. We stuffed the envelopes ourselves. Eventually, donations started coming in as a response to the newsletter. There was no particular intention to use the publication to raise funds. It mainly was to share more information and specific details about the organization’s work. The donations generated by the newsletter exceeded its printing cost, so it brought in a net income for the organization.
Sometimes simply sharing information by documenting what you are working on can add value to your target audience. In this case, it was a donor list, but the donors were strongly connected to the organization’s mission so they were more than donors.
The intention was to share value with them in the form of content. Are you sharing content of value for others without the intention of getting something in return?
Gary Vaynerchuk has described his strategy of documenting what you are doing to share with others who might be interested or who may benefit by your example.
Defining an intention for your content and the sharing might seem a little strange, but if it comes from a genuine desire to help others and to educate you might be surprised to see how positive the response can be.
Genuinely helpful content can be a strong signal in the midst of a lot of content noise. To sum it up, generosity can function like a magnet.