Nonprofits: a New Frontier for Solar

The nonprofit sector would seem to represent a natural fit for the solar revolution. Nonprofits exist primarily to do good. A community center, a food bank, a nationwide health-related charity: all these try to give a helping hand to needy people in a particular geographic area, or to a specific group, or to the sick in general. While they’re fulfilling their missions, why shouldn’t they help the environment, too, by going green – not to mention giving a boost, by cutting energy costs, to their own bottom lines?

But naturally, it’s not that simple. Perhaps the biggest drawback, ironically, is one of the most crucial stimulants to the rise of solar elsewhere in the economy: tax incentives. Because of the tax-exempt status of nonprofits in general, these simply do not apply to them. And because most of a nonprofits’ donors (and usually its board as well) are looking over management’s shoulder to see where every donated dollar is spent, the initially high investment to install a solar array can seem a prohibitive indulgence.

At least three means of getting around this problem have so far evolved: a) outright donations of funds by groups and/or organizations to purchase solar arrays for nonprofits; b) crowdfunding as a means of generating the money to finance the installation of arrays; and c) the use of PPA’s (Power Purchase Agreements) as solar investments.

Earlier in December, the San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts in Texas went solar with a 16.5kW array over its carport. The money to create the array was donated by the Sun Club, an organization created by Green Mountain Energy, which calls itself “the nation’s longest serving renewable energy retailer.” Through the Sun Club, Green Mountain invites its customers and employees to contribute to a fund through which donations are made to worthy nonprofits to install solar arrays – over 600 kW of power to over 50 companies so far.

Crowdfunding has also become a popular way to help nonprofits go solar. San Francisco-based Everybody Solar, which is itself a nonprofit, is one organization using this method. Its mission is to help organizations go solar, “thereby benefiting not only the environment but also the nonprofit’s budget.” Although donations are solicited from the Internet, the organization’s crowdfunding model tends to focus on the communities that will most benefit from a nonprofit’s work. And because Everybody Solar partners with a nonprofit installer, SunWork, it can provide solar panels at a cost more economical than many commercial providers.

RE-volv, also based in San Francisco, has an even more ambitious crowdfunding plan. According to the organization’s YouTube video, it seeks to establish what it calls a “solar seed fund.” Intended to finance a few small scale projects at first, the fund would generate profits from these projects, which would then be continually reinvested in a greater and greater number of projects, creating a multiplier effect.

Finally, there is the Power Purchase Agreement (PPA), a financial mechanism creating third-party owners that can claim tax benefits while providing solar power as a service to worthy nonprofits. Note that contributors under this method, often community members, are not donors to the nonprofit, but investors to the third-party owner that provides power to the nonprofit, with such investments, plus interest, eventually paid back over time. An important provider of PPAs is San Diego-based CollectiveSun, which helps nonprofits organize their communities to finance solar projects as investments.

Perhaps the biggest reason to be encouraged by these trends is that nonprofits are often considered leaders in their communities. When small businesses and homeowners see their local charities and civic organizations with panels on their roofs, it makes the idea of going solar seem that much more acceptable. The proliferation of solar arrays for nonprofit organizations may be one of many tipping points in the coming acceptance of solar as the dominant source of 21^st Century power.

The Professional of Emotion

When I maintain that the ideal nonprofit writer should be a “Professional of Emotion” what does this mean? Is the phrase a subtle contradiction in terms? Professionalism, after all, implies, for many people, a certain detachment. The professional is, or should be, adept at facts and figures, at rational argument, at coherent organization of his own and others’ time. “Emotionalism” might well be seen as a threat to professionalism, implying that feeling might overrule proper planning or research. But an understanding of the true meaning of my phrase may bring some insight into what the nonprofit writer does, and the unique value that I think he or she can bring to an organization.

We can clarify exactly what it is the nonprofit writer offers if we imagine what might happen if a non-writer, however experienced or well-meaning, attempted to do the writer’s job. The Director of Development of a famous charity (for example) composes a letter to be mailed to the organization’s entire donor base to announce a major new campaign. She knows full well that modern donors, particularly younger ones, unlike their parents and grandparents, will not give automatically out of a sense of duty. They are wary. They want to know if the cause they’re contributing to will be worth the sacrifice. They want to see the plan, and to know beforehand all the facts and figures. And the Director, writing entirely from the head, not the heart, gives them what she thinks they want. Yet the letter doesn’t work. Why? Because the Director doesn’t fully grasp that even the most hard-headed donor needs to be appealed to on some primal level. She adds at the end of the letter, almost as an afterthought, something like “and your contribution will give inestimable comfort to so many of the people we serve”… but it is not enough. She cannot give to the letter what the writer ideally would have given: a delicate mix of both information and feeling, seamlessly blended.

Sometimes the donor’s emotions are appealed to more blatantly… except they are the “wrong” emotions. A disaster-relief organization serving the victims of several drought-stricken African nations appeals to a first-world audience for help. On its website, the grimmest pictures of the situation are shown, together with captions that only rub the viewers’ noses further in misery. Surely this, the Website Manager thinks, will move donors’ consciences. And the presentation does move them… to leave the site. The nonprofit writer, with his/her feel for nuance, would have understood something the Website Manager didn’t: that people give more easily when they glimpse the dawn of hope rather than the midnight of despair, and would have fashioned a narrative – in words and images – through which the donor would perceive the gift as the beginning of these victims’ journey out of pain.

In short, the nonprofit writer is the Professional of Emotion because he/she fully grasps the complex feelings that an organization’s messages need to evoke, and the subtleties of language and image through which this can be achieved.

7 Cures for Nonprofit Writer’s Block

By Kivi Leroux Miller

[Reprinted by kind permission of the author]

Not sure what to write about? Get out of your own head and look around for inspiration. Here are my seven favorite sources of ideas.

1. Look at Current Headlines. Peruse the covers of magazines and look at the titles. Can you adjust a few words and come up with a title for an article for your publications? This is easier to do with printed magazines than online, so take a walk to your local news stand or grocery store.

Take the current cover of Vogue. We see “The Dream Life of Penelope Cruz” and “Fish Out of Water: Jon-Jon Goulian.” Could you write about the dream life of one of your clients? How are some of the people you work with (someone on your staff, a volunteer, etc.) like a fish out of water? Use headlines to help you uncover stories that are already around you, but you just can’t see them for what they are.

2. Look at the Calendar and Holidays. Every month of the year includes holidays — real and creatively imagined by various organizations to highlight issues and causes. I’ve noted a handful for each month here, and am delivering an email once a month to subscribers on our free Monthly Nonprofit Writing Prompts list.

3. Pick the Format First. There are several tried-and-true article formats that readers generally love. When I’m struggling for ideas, I’ll often decide, “OK, I’m going to write a Top Ten list. Or I’m going to write a how-to article with five steps.” That gives me just enough structure to get started.

Here are my top five favorite formats:

• How-to Article
• List (e.g. Top Ten)
• Fact Versus Fiction (or True or False)
• Advice (usually in response to a question)
• Roundup (group several smaller items together under a common theme)

4. Fill in the Headline. Like picking the format first, this gives you a push in the right direction. Copyblogger offers several fill in the blank headlines. These are some of my favorites for nonprofits:

• The Secret of [blank]
• Get Rid of [problem] Once and For All
• [Do something] like [world-class example]
• Have a [or] Build a [blank] You Can Be Proud Of
• The Lazy [blank’s] Way to [blank]
• Do You Recognize the [number] Early Warning Signs of [blank]?
• You Don’t Have to Be [something challenging] to be [desired result].

5. Start with a Metaphor. Granted, this approach usually requires a little time for brainstorming, but the results can be very powerful. Pick a topic, and see how you can use it to describe your work. From that, story ideas will flow. For example, how is your work like gardening? Or travel? Or parenting? Download my free e-book, 25 Metaphors Nonprofits Can Use to Get Their Messages Across for many more metaphor ideas and tips on how to use them in your writing.

6. Survey Your Readers. This won’t work for writer’s block you need to solve today, but it’s the best solution long-term. Go to the people you are trying to serve with your writing and ask them what problems they are facing, what issues they are interested in, what surprised them recently about your work, etc. Get a better understanding of the information needs and interests of your readers, and deliver matching content.

7. Ask a Question on Facebook. If you don’t have time for a survey, but still have 48 hours before you really need the idea, throw it out to your supporters on your Facebook page (Twitter works too).  Ask what questions fans have about a topic, what they want to learn more about, or poll them to narrow down a list of ideas you already have.

This article first appeared in Kivi’s weekly Nonprofit Marketing Tips newsletter on May 25, 2011. Go here for the original post.

 

The Writer and the Nonprofit: a Brief Essay

In the not-too-distant past, the writer in America had a much more exalted position than is the case today. From the 19^th Century to about the 1950s or early 1960s, many gifted young people strove to be authors. They burned with ambition to become The Great American Novelist, Playwright or Poet. Their admiration for the literary masters even sometimes drove them to try to imitate the lifestyles of their heroes (e.g., Hemingway), with often dubious results. The writer’s craft was a kind of priesthood, set in contrast to the crassness and commercialism of other media, such as the movies.

The rock generation changed all that. The Who’s classic song, “My Generation,” with its stammering singer stumbling and bumbling over words as if through a minefield, seemed to declare war, in a way, not only on “unhip” older people, but on literary culture in general. The dream of becoming the Great American Writer suddenly became less glamorous. That vision was replaced by that of The Great American Rock Star. Fortunately, at least some of those stars (e.g., Bob Dylan, Paul Simon) were also talented enough writers to make the transition palatable. And in fact, at least one major American (okay: Canadian) novelist, Leonard Cohen, acclaimed by critics in the early ‘Sixties as a literary heir to James Joyce,  went over to “the other side” and joined the rock world.

What would be equivalent of The Great American Writer today? The American Idol? The Great American Video Director? One thing’s for sure: the writer-priest of old has been defrocked. There are bestselling authors, acclaimed authors and a handful of people who manage to be both. But seldom if ever anymore is the writer an object of veneration.

This situation is, in a sense, extremely odd, because writing of all kinds is literally everywhere: email, Facebook posts, the twittering of a billion tweets and, of course, blogs like this one. Furthermore, since the 1950s, the whole focus of the American economy has shifted from the making of things — steel, cars, appliances — to the providing of services. In such an economy, all sorts of communications, particularly writing, are absolutely vital. Yet a sense of the importance of the writer, not just in artistic pursuits but in the everyday world of business, seems to me to be lacking.

Which brings me to nonprofits, the subject of this blog. It’s true that what nonprofits do is dependent upon actions. But much more than is the case even in the corporate world, the deed in the nonprofit sector in inextricably intertwined with the word. Sales, which almost always involve some sort of presentation, are surely the lifeblood of corporations, but only in the nonprofit world do we use the phrase, “the ask.” It can truly be said of nonprofit development that “in the beginning was the word…”

I’d like to make clear at this point that I’m not downgrading the crucial role of speech in fundraising. The face-to-face meeting will always be a crucial factor in any nonprofit’s success. But I would affirm that the written word must partner with the spoken word, just as the word must go hand-in-hand with the deed, for a nonprofit to be as effective as it can be.

But nonprofit veterans will undoubtedly say, “we already make use of writing all the time.” Yes, but is it used effectively and consistently? Is it properly integrated into the overall strategy?  Is it employed with the user’s (particularly the donors’) needs and convenience in mind? This is not just a question of branding, though that’s important. It is a matter of synergy, both between different kinds of writing that nonprofits do (email, direct mail, website, blog, etc.), and between writing and other forms of communicating.

I would like to make the case that the times call for a new role for the writer in nonprofit organizations.

There should be only one person, reporting to top management, in charge of all the writing produced by a nonprofit, though that person may have one or more staff members reporting to him/her, as well as, perhaps, freelancers that can be brought in to assist on major projects. To put it another way, the content of the organization’s message would remain the responsibility of top management and/or the Board, but the shaping and presentation of that content for maximum effectiveness would be the writer’s responsibility. This would cover reports and white papers, direct mail, emails, website content, blogs and other social media. Such centralization would not be just for economic reasons. This would help create synergy between different types of official communications, allowing them to achieve a power together that they could not attain individually.

For example, a direct mail letter targeted to recent donors in the 20-30 age group might contain a QR matrix barcode. This would in turn connect, through the recipient’s smartphone, to a blog post specifically targeted to that type of donor, describing, in a conversational tone, a fundraising event or campaign that might be of particular interest to him or her. Finally, the blog would connect to a web page (again individualized) that would provide additional information and allow her or him to make a donation. It would be the writer’s job to control how much information is revealed through each of these media, and what tone to adopt in each one.

The writer’s (ideally) close working relationship with the development team makes necessary that he or she be a managerial employee, rather than a “glorified clerical” one. Any shift in strategy by development must take into account the writing function, and the writer should have some input into the overall direction. The result of this coordination would be a more powerful engagement with the donor. In turn, this should result in more and larger gifts.

I will discuss my ideas on this subject in greater detail in future posts.

The writer in the nonprofit entity should not be peripheral but central to the carrying out of the organization’s mission. Only when his or her skills are used to the fullest can the nonprofit enjoy the full benefit of them.

Will the future see the birth of the Great American Nonprofit Writer? Time will tell.