Minecraft and Fundraising

For those of you who don’t live with a player, Minecraft is the intensely popular creation and simulation game that has sold over 50 million copies.  It’s a deceptively simple game loved by pre-teens and adults alike. The game is incredibly fun and allows for endless possibilities.

There are also zombies and dragons.

My daughter is obsessed with Minecraft, and I encourage it because it’s a great way to teach planning and resource management. Unless you have also have a kid that’s into it, you might not know that Minecraft actually has two modes you can play, and they are at the core of the game’s innovation. I started thinking about how these modes apply to our work as fundraisers.

Survival Mode – The Zombies are Coming

In Minecraft’s survival mode, you’re dumped in the middle of nowhere with limited resources. You use what you have and get going quickly, because you’re getting hungry and the zombies are on their way. This is the mode for many fundraising programs—limited resources, high expectations, and significant stress.

Survival mode is rough and it makes us avoid risk. Fear of mistakes and blame are greatly amplified. In survival mode, institutional politics and culture don’t encourage entrepreneurial thinking.

In survival mode, additional resources also don’t necessarily follow great success. Non-profit organizations in survival mode won’t or can’t adopt the business strategy that you have to spend money to get money.

If you’re hearing “this is how we always have done it,” or “this is the way we have to do it,” or “good job, now do it again,” then you may be in survival mode.

Creative Mode – Build Your Masterpiece

Minecraft also has “creative” mode. In this mode you get unlimited resources, you are invincible, and you can make any thing you can dream up. This is the mode where you see the massive constructions that players have made like full Babylonian cities and The Battlestar Galactica.

Creative mode can be pretty rare these days in fundraising but it allows for experimentation, testing, and new ideas. Successful fundraising creations like matching challenges, charitable crowdfunding, and giving days all happened when someone got into “creative mode.”

Groundbreaking organizations like charity: water, Smile Train and the micro-lending platform Kiva are examples of charities that are crushing creative mode every day.

Creative mode lets you try new things without the paralyzing fear of failure.

What’s Your Fundraising Mode?

I’ve worked with organizations that have generally been in fundraising survival mode most of the time. It’s not a bad place to be. It’s challenging and we work hard to keep our loyal donors in survival mode. We’re very conservative with fundraising resources to protect the funds we raise, so it can be a pretty donor-centric environment.

But my greatest fundraising successes have come with a combination of these two modes. I remember writing up the request to a generous donor for a six-figure challenge gift to increase alumni participation, creating online videos with funny stories to honor a beloved faculty member, taking the leap on an expensive auction event—all of which lead to significant success and new donors that had never given before. There were plenty of less successful experiments in between.

The successes came in part because we had the fundamentals down in our program and the plan was carefully and critically executed. A second important part was buy in from key stakeholders, including seeking the advice of donors. The rest was pure creativity. A carefully considered leap of faith.

I have to say that it’s frustrating to help charities that can’t embrace creative mode at least once in a while. I understand the fear of risk. If you have only a few solicitations each year, trying something new with one of them puts a big part of your goal at risk. Investing in expanding a channel like phone or trying crowdfunding might seem scary if you haven’t tried it before.  Missing the fundraising goal or overspending has a significant impact on real people who are relying on donor support.

Both modes are important. Donors are changing, and if we submerge ourselves in survival mode, we’re not going to take advantage of new opportunities. We can afford to be a bit behind the cutting edge of the marketing we see in the commercial world, but not by much because we are all competing for a piece of the attention economy.

Donors have other places to spend their attention and money so we need to stay creative to engage them.

Maybe it’s time to expand an existing channel, test a new style or voice for a communication, or adding something new that you’ve never tried.  My suggestion is to think about what mode you are in right now, secure the survival fundamentals and make sure you have at least a little creative mode time to build something new in your fundraising plan.

It could end up being a game changer.