Month: March 2016

Always Be Converting Content

nickellinger, , , Leave a comment

glengarry

“Only one thing counts in this life: Get them to sign on the line which is dotted. You hear me? … A-B-C. A-Always, B-Be, C-[Converting].”
— Content marketer extraordinaire Alec Baldwin, Glengarry Glen Ross.

This week, we’ve talked about creating content, selecting topics, choosing a medium, and marketing your content.

But it all starts with the purpose of your content.  I’m going to steal the Content Marketing Institute’s definition of content marketing:

Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.

It’s obviously written more for a for-profit audience, but you can tell the why from this with those great verbs: attract, retain, and drive.

You want to attract people to your organization.  You want to drive them to take actions that help your cause, including but not limited to donating.  And you want to retain them so that they will do likewise in the future.

So the content you’ve created has to be about them, solving their problems and answering their questions.  Items about you, your mission, your board members, your big check photo, etc., will not fly.

Once you have that content that is valuable and relevant, you need to:

Have one clear call to action.  One.  This eliminates two types of content that don’t convert:

  • Content with zero calls to action.  These are informational pieces that are up on your site because people thought constituents would like the information.  Or discussions of your programs.  Or whatever.  The bottom line is that everything you create should have a point of driving a conversation forward, even if it is only a little bit.
  • Content with various calls to action.  Let’s assume you have helped solve someone’s problem who came to your site.  They are ready for their social mandated moment of reciprocity.  And you give them “You can donate.  Or you can volunteer.  And we have action alerts.  And you can join us on FacebookTwitterInstagramPinterestMySpaceTinderGooglePlusYouTube.”

The advantage of one clear call to action is that you can spend time in the piece setting it up.  If you are educating the reader about how to check their insurance to see what autism treatments it covers, it is a natural segue to ask the person to email their legislator about insurance parity regulation for autism therapies.  A donation ask may be a little clunky there, but you’ve solved the problem and given them a solution that adds to the solution that they wanted when they came to the site: advocating for social change that would also help them.

You can not effectively set up five different asks in your content.

Report back content.  If you are asking people what they want and you give it to them, you need to let them know that it was by their popular demand.  “You asked us for X.  Here’s X” is a great opening to a conversation and your one call to action as a part of X should be very popular.

Make it shareable.  Sharing is often the ask after the conversion that’s forgotten.  Person has read about autism insurance: check.  Person has emailed legislators: check.  What is next for that constituent?  Potentially donating — not the worst idea in the world.  But this person is likely looking for this content for a reason.  And it’s likely that his/her network of close friends would like to be able to to help him with this issue.

So if s/he can say “I emailed my legislator about this and I’d like you to also, because my son is two and isn’t speaking and isn’t making eye contact and insurance doesn’t want to pay for any help,” people who care about this person are going to want to help.

That’s the genesis of a walk team or peer-to-peer fundraising activity right there; it’s just that none of them know it because they are busy solving their problem together.

Other shares, especially for lighter fare like quizzes, are more about the joy of sharing fun content.  Few people will be retweeting the American Constitution Society’s “32 Ways to Live a More Constitutional Life.”

But announcing the results of your “Which Founding Father are You?” (I’m totally a John Adams: single-minded, effective, orator, necessary, incompetent fighter, a bit arrogant, and not nearly cool enough to be in an incredible hip-hop musical.) quiz on Facebook — that could be a way of building interest, then lists.

BTW, American Constitution Society: email me at nick@directtodonor.com: I have this great idea…

Finally, set up the conversion after this one.  There will be another ask, or at least there should be.  Think of every content interaction as a way to get to another content interaction.  Using the change one thing maximum idea, if someone is interested in advocacy, they can get a drip campaign of things around their particular issue, leading them ever closer to the day that they will voluntarily walk up to you and give you the contents of their wallet.

Actually, you will probably have to ask them, but when you have a great converting content strategy, joyful giving can be in your future.

Always Be Converting Content

Marketing your content

nickellinger, , , Leave a comment

Field of Dreams lied to us.  A generation of people were told that if you build it, people will come.  A lie by lying liars.

fieldofdreamsmay06

Also, Iowa, while very nice, is theologically not all that close to heaven.

Similarly, we were told a better mousetrap would cause a stampede of purchasers.  Yet there’s still the one that threatens to sever a digit every time I try to set it.

This is not to say that quality doesn’t matter.  That’s too cynical even for me.  But quality content with marketing will beat quality content without marketing just as surely as a Smith and Wesson beats four aces.

So, how do you market your content?

Search engine optimization.  If you write your content, then sit down to do your search engine marketing, you’ve already lost.  Ideally, you will have already looked through what people are looking for in your category, as we recommended Tuesday.  You will have woven those terms and phrases into your content.  Now, you have a platform from which to further optimize.  Make sure your partners are linking to your content, as link popularity is still a key indicator of quality.  

Similarly, I like to go to other people’s content that is related and complementary to my own and comment on the piece, complementing their content and linking to my own.  Always practice good etiquette when doing this: you want to make sure you are doing as much to promote the person you are commenting on as you are getting, including linking to them from your own content.

Search engine marketing.  If your content is converting well, add it to your Google Grant under all of your relevant search terms.  You want to make sure that people who are looking for your type of content are able to find your specific content.

Social media. Yes, I said yesterday not to create content for social media.  I meant that you shouldn’t only be posting things on Facebook or LinkedIn, where the rules and the audience are not your own.  But as long as you have friends/connections on these platforms, be sure to post your content here, linking through to your own site and resources.

Other content. As you become an effective content creator, you’ll notice that your podcast promotes your blog, your blog promotes your newsletter, your newsletter has a video in it, and that video asks people to subscribe to your podcast.  This is not only natural, but meritorious.  If you’ve taken the idea of fractal content creation, your topics will be related to each other enough that you can legitimately say “if you liked this blog post on conflict diamonds, you might also like to download our white paper on the largest offenders.”

One of the underrated ways for getting nonprofit donations is filling a need for your potential donor.  If, each day, you are only getting donations from the people who intended to give you money at the beginning of that day, you are missing out on significant opportunities.

Rather, a person will come to your site wanting to see if their spouse has the disease your cause is trying to cure.  You will help diagnose the disease.  You offer a brochure about dealing with that disease and the person accepts.  You email them the brochure.  Then, as part of your welcome, you check in with them to see if they need anything else.  They look for, and find, specialists in their area.  Then, after you’ve helped them get what they need, them making a donation to you seems like the most natural thing in the world.

Your content is its own journey: you want to take people through journeys one step at a time.  You can try to plan them, but people will likely choose large parts of it themselves.

To the point we made yesterday, blogs of 400+ posts get more traffic because content supports content.  In the publishing world, when an author has a new book (or in the case of James Patterson, ten new books), sales of their previous books increase because more people are discovering the old books.  So the best part of content marketing is that your content will help your content succeed.

But we also need to make sure your content helps you reach your goal.  We’ll complete our (first) content marketing journey tomorrow, with how to create content that converts.  After all, it’s great that content supports content, but someone has to pay the light bill and vacuum out the Internet tubes every so often.

Marketing your content

Choosing your content marketing media

nickellinger, , , , , , , , Leave a comment

I’m a baaaaad example of content marketing media.  I have a face for radio and a voice for print, so you’ll notice there aren’t videos, Webinars or podcasts here yet.  I have less than no artistic talent, so infographics are well beyond me (for now; one can always learn).  Don’t believe me?  Here’s the cover I designed for my book:

 

underling

I suppose I could do slideshows, but since I started this blog in part to improve my writing, I’ve been a strictly one medium guy.

But you can’t be.  There are a whole work of ways to reach an audience today and depending on your mission, some, many, or all of them may work well for you.  However, each one takes a toll of time and effort.  It is better to be the master of one medium than a jack of all of them.

Blog posts

Advantages:

  • I would argue that this is the easiest entry point.  You need to write a story.  That’s it.
  • A great way of (as I mentioned yesterday) figuring out what your audience(s) is/are interested in.
  • Can serve as a host and/or a marketing platform for your other content marketing.

Disadvantages:

  • Difficult to capture an audience.  Sure, you can have an awesome weekly newsletter than anyone can sign up for here, but no matter how blatantly you name check it in the middle of a blog post, most people read blog posts individually rather in binge reading.
  • Need to do it regularly enough that people can expect new content from you.
  • Need it do it often enough to be successful.  Hubspot has some great data here that show that posting 16+ times per month gets you the most traffic:

blog_monthly_traffic

 

Furthermore, having 400+ blog posts significantly increases your traffic as well:

 

blog_total_leads

Podcasting

Advantages:

  • Good for when you have two personalities that can play off of each other.
  • Excellent way to incorporate guest contributors.
  • A very popular medium right now.

Disadvantages:

  • Take whatever time you think it will take to edit the audio for your first podcast and multiply it by ten.
  • Very production-value-dependent.  It used to be that people will put up with poor audio quality to get good content.  This is less and less true.
  • Needs to be even more regular than blogging.
  • Difficult to capture an audience, as you don’t have a record of who subscribes to your podcast.

Video

Advantages:

  • Great for people with compelling visuals.
  • You can repurpose existing assets with a little bit of editing and voice over.
  • Guest appearances become a bit easier; there’s something about a video camera that makes everyone want to be on TV.
  • YouTube is a valuable quasi-social network that allows you to be discovered by people who might not come to your site.

Disadvantages:

  • It requires some editing skill and expertise (compared with blogs, which any idiot can write)
  • A talking head looking into the camera is the most common and most boring possible video.  Sometimes it’s necessary, but hopefully you can surpass that.
  • You may do 100 videos that have almost no views; it may be that 101st that gets an audience.

Infographics

Advantages:

  • Great way to communicate complex concepts.
  • Very shareable.
  • Good adjunct to other content (e.g., if you have a complex white paper and are trying to pitch media, an infographic can help with the pitch to explain to people whose journalism majors did not cover microbiology or environmental sciences or whatever (of course, neither did my poli sci degree, so I can’t talk))
  • Who doesn’t love a picture?

Disadvantages:

  • Some infographics are now just numbers with a circle around them or some other gussying up.  Steer clear of the infographic if the pictures aren’t going to add value to the story.  Sometimes a pie chart is just a pie chart.
  • Requires graphic design knowledge.
  • Lacks interactivity and, usually, emotional content.  All of the other media can bring you to tears or to donate.  Infographics are good for the brain, but usually not good for the heart.  And the heart is what donates most of the time.

Quizzes

Advantages:

  • Fun for the whole family
  • Very shareable, especially if you make it so that people can be competitive.
  • Who knows?  Someone might learn something.
  • Can pique interest and encourage someone to learn more.

Disadvantages:

  • A bit fluffy for content — can’t get deep into an issue (which is probably OK; that’s not why someone takes a quiz)
  • Doesn’t convert particularly well.

Whitepapers:

Advantages

  • As mentioned yesterday, they are easy to create from existing content.
  • Excellent for lead generation, because you can email gate them.
  • Demonstrates subject mastery, whether justified or not.

Disadvantages:

  • Can be a bit dry when done poorly
  • More difficult to incorporate emotional content.

Print:

Advantages:

  • Not dead
  • Less competition, because people don’t believe the first bullet
  • More engaging than online content
  • Can engage in conversations, rather than dialogues
  • Can effectively get donations

Disadvantages:

  • Have to explain to people print isn’t dead
  • Cost
  • Less ability to track and capture interactions

And here are a couple I recommend against.

Slideshows:  A lot of folks do these.  I have to admit, I don’t get it.  It’s certainly easy to do, as you have the slideshow in the can already.  It’s good for a business audience, who is used to the format, and gets a lot of data out quickly.

However, it requires someone to want to sit through a PowerPoint presentation without the entertaining audio.  There’s not usually a good conversion mechanism.  And, as you know, the worst live presentations are the ones where people have all of their words on a slide and have to read them off.  These are, ironically, the only decent slideshows, because if someone relied on funny images for their original presentation, it won’t read without audio.

For my money, these are better done as a white paper if you have a dry topic (because you can get email addresses) or a video if you have a lively one.

Social media: By this, I mean posting on Facebook or LinkedIn or what-have-you, so that they own your content.  Don’t do this.  It’s all fine and dandy until someone changes the algorithm or your rules for sharing or your organic reach and your so-called strategy is lost.

Actually, it’s not fine and dandy, because even when things are going well, you are building an audience for that social network, not for yourself or your organization.  Social media is a fine place to link, but I wouldn’t want to live there.

So those are the basic media.  But once you build it, they won’t necessarily come, so you will need some good marketing strategies for your content marketing.  We’ll cover that tomorrow.

Choosing your content marketing media

Selecting your content marketing topics

nickellinger, , , , Leave a comment

The enemy of any writer or content marketer is the empty sheet of paper.  It taunts you with its blankness, telling you that your last idea was, in fact, your last idea: you have nothing more to give.

Or you have ideas, but have no idea whether anyone will want to read/interact with/donate to them.  Here are some tips to get your focus.

Check what people are searching for in your market.  Yes, keyword research: it’s not just for search engine marketing any more.  Check out what people are looking for around your issues and see if you have content to match (that has calls to action around the content.  You aren’t just doing content for charity.  Actually, you are.  But you know what I mean).  

Also, search for some of these terms yourself. You will likely see some search terms where the person who searched for that item probably didn’t find what they were looking for.  You can be what they were looking for.

Conversely, you’ll find that some of the content is pretty darn good.  If you can’t improve on it, don’t tackle it in the same format.  But if you see that the blog posts are good, but there are no videos on the topic, then a video it is.  We’ll talk a bit more about media tomorrow.

Check what people are searching for to find you.  In your Google Analytics or equivalent, you can see how people came to your site and what they searched for.  This can be illuminating.  I worked with one nonprofit that went through this analysis and found that most people that found them through search were looking for one of their tertiary services — one that they rarely talked about or promoted.  What’s more, their content on it was scattered incoherently throughout their site.

Working together, we centralized their content into one coherent page that then linked out to the various locations where this service could be found, making it much easier to find.  We also increased the fee for this fee-for-service part of their mission, figuring that good marketing could increase participation.  That was, in fact, the case and that part of their mission now accounts for a more substantial part of their revenues.

Look at what content has worked in the past.  A peek behind the Direct to Donor curtain for a moment.  Since starting this, I’ve written over one hundred blog posts.  Yet two of these blog posts, The Science of Ask Strings and Anchoring, Ask Strings, and the Psychology of First Impressions are responsible for more than 10% of the traffic to the site.  In my world of topics, ask strings are Gladys Knight and each other topic I write on is a Pip.

pips

So while I continue to write on various topics to diversify, I will likely be returning to the topic of ask strings sooner and regularly.  In fact, I’m looking to collect enough content on the topic to do my first white paper.  And what better topic than one that I know readers will appreciate?

Likewise, look at what people are clicking on in your newsletters and in social media.  While this won’t get you outside of the types of posts you’ve already been doing, it will help you find some guaranteed crowd pleasers.

Embrace content fractals.  If you really have a serious case of empty-page-itis, try rereading some of your previous strong efforts.

My theory is that every paragraph in a blog post could be its own blog post.  Take the “Now, start up your email newsletter” post I mentioned yesterday.  Obviously, starting up an email newsletter could be its own post (and will at some point).  One of the points in starting your e-newsletter will be choosing who your newsletter is from.  This idea of an online persona can make for its own post (in fact, I’ve talked about it in my post on liking as an influence point).  In it, I refer to the success of the Obama campaign in using different people for different ask.  Hey, that would make for a great topic about the success of the Obama campaigns and the lessons we can draw from that!  One of those lessons would be selling goods associated with your organization as a list building strategy.

And so on.  When you think you “don’t have any good ideas,” look at your previous content and dive deeper into one of your important points.  My post tomorrow is on the best type of content for each media type.  In writing it, I realized there’s a place for a whole post on each content type and what works there.  If these content marketing posts prove popular, expect that to be coming down the pipe.

Repurpose your content.

  • Three blog posts = an enewsletter.
  • Nine blog posts = white paper.
  • One white paper = one slideshow
  • One slideshow slide + verbiosity = blog post.
  • Your boss who loves to talk about her favorite program your nonprofit does + camera = video.
  • Your enewsletter + editing = donor newsletter

And so on.  People mind if you rip other people off.  People don’t mind if you rip yourself off.

Ask.  There’s a reason I’m writing about my process for writing, even though I feel I have a long way to go: people asked me.  There’s also a reason why I ask people to email me at nick@directtodonor.com or hit me up on Twitter at @nickellinger: I want more ideas for content.  There’s a rule for complaints that for every one person who complains, there’s nine more who didn’t.  I think suggesting content is the same way: if someone wants it, ten people probably want it.

Take from recent or upcoming events.  I personally try to stay counter-programming, but there is a great deal of content created about things like a new Star Wars movie, the NFL Championship, and Donald Trump to try to stay topical.

Now that you know the topics for your content marketing effort, how will you take advantage of it?  Tomorrow, we’ll talk about media and maximizing your topic advantage.

Selecting your content marketing topics

Creating Content Consistently and Constantly

nickellinger, , Leave a comment

The question I’ve gotten most often after starting this blog is how I write a blog post every working day. My answer is “not well.” I mean, have you seen some of my posts? There’s one in here that is a fake-PSA for data hygiene, for goodness sake. In 50 Ways to Thank Your Donors, I tortured rhyme schemes so much, they confessed to smuggling WMDs.

Then people clarify and ask how I find time to write a blog post every day. Ah. That’s something I can help with.

And, since I’m on the record as taking whatever topics you ask of me in the comments section or at nick@directtodonor.com, it looks like we are doing this thing. But let’s broaden it out a bit more to:

How do you create content consistently?

Since that will be of more use to more people. Today, I’ll describe my process, such as it is. Then, this week, I’ll cover topic, medium, marketing, and conversion strategies.

I should mention that an actual specialist on this, Kivi Leroux Miller, has written a full book on content marketing for nonprofits here. I’ve not yet read it, but I’ve read some of her other work and if it is half as good as those things, it’s still worth a read.

So, to the question of how I do whatever it is I’m doing here, here goes:

Write every day. Every single day. Even if it’s just for a few minutes. Jerry Seinfeld talks about how he puts an X on every day when he has done his writing. His goal is not to break the chain of Xs (that probably goes back for years). Since part of my goal for this was to improve my writing quality, this exercise is little different from working out every day to stay in shape.

better-writer

Thanks to Brian Clark and Copyblogger.

I know. Sometimes life gets busy. But we all have some cognitive surplus time.

Ideally, you could get 25 minutes of uninterrupted time to work on it (aka a pomodoro technique). This should be a findable about of time. I cut my video game intake for part of it; I also work between when my daughter gets me up and when I would actually get up in an ideal world.

For you, it may be something different. Property Brothers is a great show, but if you want to get 25 minutes to write, here’s how that episode begins:

  • Brothers take couple to a house.
  • Couple can’t afford it.
  • Somehow, this is the brothers’ fault.
  • But don’t worry; they can make a fixer upper just like this house.
  • Montage of house shopping at worse houses.

See? It’s like you are right there watching it. When in reality, you are writing your content.

It doesn’t necessarily need to be writing to paper, either.

a6862217a

TOBY: You want to play?

CHARLIE: Aren’t you supposed to be writing?

TOBY: I am writing.

CHARLIE: I don’t see paper.

TOBY: “We can sit back and admit with grave sensitivity that life isn’t fair and the less-advantaged are destined to their lot in life and the problems of those on the other side of the world should stay there, that our leaders are cynical and can never be an instrument to change, but that, my friends, is not worthy of you, it’s not worthy of the President, it’s not worthy of a great nation, it’s not worthy of America!” Paper’s for wimps. Wanna play?  — The West Wing

Even if it is organizing your thoughts for a future blog post while indisposed or showering or what-have-you, this is a conscious effort that you want to build into a habit.

And writing is a fundamental part of any content strategy. Yes, even if it’s for a podcast, infographic, or video: you are going to want a written script or outline. It’s harder to write short than long, so you may find yourself spending more time to come up with the 17 perfect words to go alongside your home page image than a journal article.

My tools of choice:

  • Google Drive for writing. It’s stripped down with few distractions and you can access it wherever.
  • Hemingway to help edit and cut my adverb usage.
  • Grammarly for proofreading.
  • WordPress for posting.

Read every day. There have been a few pieces floating around the Internet of late about how to read a book a week or similar advice. I don’t really get these; for me, an equally useful article would be “Why You Should Try Breathing.” But there are some for whom this isn’t a habit and I don’t know how you would create good content without it. You will get ideas and inspiration and rage-face from the things you read and it will inform your content.

My tools of choice:

  • Feedly for aggregating blog posts.
  • Pocket for saving things that I’ll want to refer back to. Other people like Evernote.
  • Audible for audiobooks. If you are going to be reading every day, you can’t just read books.
  • PodCruncher for podcasts. Ditto

Embrace suck. My first blog post actually contains the line “Now, start up your email newsletter.” Oh, I’ll just spit that out then, shall I? No directions on how to do that?

You are never going to get to the good stuff until you get through this. Write, post, get comments, revise. Suck a tiny bit less next time.

Take breaks. I sometimes have the opportunity to write for hours straight (read: I sometimes am on airplanes and arrive the day before the conference/meeting). Even when this happens, I take short breaks every 25 minutes per the pomodoro method and long breaks after two hours. During long breaks, I find activities like showering and exercising (not in that order) help, because I’m alone and able to edit or outline the next piece in my head.

Ask people to become a part of your family. For me, it’s asking people to sign up for my weekly newsletter. What’s yours?

Creating Content Consistently and Constantly

It’s time to stop… sugarcoating our issues

nickellinger, , 1 Comment

The other day, I was looking for studies that had been done on what type of images are effective in use in nonprofit direct marketing.  So I headed over to Google Scholar and searched for “use pictures fundraising appeals.”

You would have thought I was searching for snuff films.  Here are some of the titles of journal articles that faced me:

  • The pornography of poverty: A cautionary fundraising tale
  • Pictures of me: user views on their representation in homelessness fundraising appeals
  • Imaging Humanitarianism: NGO Identity and the Iconography of Childhood
  • Fundraising portrayals of people with disabilities: Donations and attitudes.

That’s just on the first page.  Apparently, some academics do not like us using pictures of the suffering we are looking to alleviate in fundraising materials.

This was a strange place for me.  I’m rarely in conversations where I’m not the pointy-headed intellectual.  One of my tenets of this blog is to use the scientific method to improve our fundraising.

And yet as I delved deeper, the articles seemed hand-wringy and nihilistic, in that they didn’t care whether or not money was raised to solve a problem as long as these pictures weren’t used.

I’m all for getting permission from people before their stories and pictures are used.  Ideally, the subject of a piece will welcome it as a way of their story being told.

But I also hear stories of brand guidelines or boards getting involved to say that only smiling happy children should be used in fundraising pieces.  This is dissonant to a donor.  They are being told about a problem and they want to help, but the children are already happy and getting well water.

So sugarcoating our issues is going to be our final (for now) Thing to Stop Doing.

It isn’t just pictures either.  How many appeals do you see or hear with underserved people?  One gets the idea that the person is a thermometer and with just a little bit more of the nonprofit’s program, they can be filled all the way up to whatever the correct level of service is.  Or, worse, one sees underserved and reads undeserved.  That one makes a big difference, but can be easily missed when reading quickly.

Most times, underserved people are poor.  People with food security issues are hungry.  People who have been impacted by violent crime are victims (if they choose to so classify).  We can tell the story plainly and evocatively.

Likewise, things aren’t challenging.  They aren’t suboptimal.  They are bad.  They are hard.  If you are talking to the right audience, they might even suck.

We’ve talked about how readability impacts our fundraising.  The easier something is to scan and get the emotional essence of, the more likely someone is to donate to it.

And that’s the goal.  We need to touch hearts and mind.  We can’t do this with phrases written by a committee.  We should be bold.  We need to preach reality.

It’s time to stop… sugarcoating our issues

It’s time to stop… dense wads of text only

nickellinger, , , Leave a comment

I’m going to be a bit of a hypocrite here, as giant, dense wads of text are kinda my specialty.  But it’s also something we need to stop doing.

This is because dense text is hard to read and understand.  One study (that I couldn’t find live, but here it is in the Internet archive) shows this clearly.  There are a few key points:

  • Bullet points help break up text and make it more readable.  Hence why I’m doing them here.
  • Space between lines makes text more readable
  • White space around text makes it more readable
  • Good margins are key

This is all the same content.  It’s just a matter of how it’s presented that makes it understandable.

That makes me think that if they did those dense Russian novels in a children’s book format with a sentence on each page, more people would get through them than in the current 8-point font printed on a brick with pages.

But maybe this is just because I would love to see what Dr. Seuss would draw next to “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

Anyway, readability is important because it’s more retainable and persuasive.  Since we are in the business of persuasion, getting our readability up and the pain that people have in reading our materials down is vital.  One study found specifically that bulleted lists specifically help increase readability and average gift.  It also found that only 19% of letters used this technique, so bullet away!

The big point here is ignore readability at your peril — it helps cause people to give.  That includes white space and that includes pictures.

Humans seek out faces and we seek out eyes specifically.  There’s a reason that people think there’s a man in the moon — our pattern recognition systems see two circles and a line and assume it’s a face.

Pictures of what you are doing can have a significant impact on the emotional state of your potential donor (as well as breaking up big blocks of text…)

Like this picture of a kitten.

Come and meet Maggie!

Anyway, because of our fixation on eyes, there is a particular trick you can use online, which is to have the picture of your person looking at or pointing at your donate button.  If you heat map your site, you will generally see people look at the eyes of the pictures of people, then look automatically to see what they are pointing at.  A seemingly random trick, but it works.

(If I were smart, I would have this kitten looking at the isign-up for the weekly e-newsletter here.  But there’s only so much Googling of kitten pictures I’m going to do today.)

So make sure that when you design, you are incorporating space, using bullets, using photos — almost anything to avoid making your letter or email look like a wall of text.  Like, for example, this post.

It’s time to stop… dense wads of text only

It’s time to stop… the big check photo

nickellinger, , , Leave a comment

Every nonprofit has a photo like this somewhere:

ansari_x-prize_check

It’s not necessarily a bad thing to do.  It’s a photo that your corporate partner can use on their Web site or in their annual report as a way of showing their commitment to the community.  And, among a still-sadly-plurality-older-white-male business community, the big check sends the message to other business people in the audience:

Your check is too small.

And this, to stereotype broadly, is not an audience that wants their anything to be too small.

But for goodness sakes: do not put this big check picture in your donor communications.

Ever.

Because it sends the message “your check is too small.”  This is sometimes a message you want to send.  We’ve talked about social proof nudges like “the average donor gives $X” as an upgrade strategy for people who don’t know what the socially acceptable amount is.  (Side note: can any of my readers let me know what the proper amount is to tip a shared-ride (Uber, Lyft, Sidecar, etc.) driver?)

But that is usually trying to get a person to increase their gift by double or less.  What you are saying with the big check is:

  • “What you are giving is 1/10000th of what this person is giving”
  • “This is how we treat people who give us things like this: note that we look to be dressed nicely at what appears to be a fancy hotel and really yucking it up with each other.”
  • “This is how we treat people who give us what you give: we send them this letter.”

Needless to say, this is not a response rate booster.  And, since the amount is so far off from not only what they give, but what they could possibly give, it is not an effective anchor for a higher gift.

It also indicates that this type of thing is what you do with your time as nonprofit employees.  This doesn’t help us dispel the overhead myth that we should have Robin Leach narrating the story of our non-profit; it reinforces it.

But the most grievous sin the picture has (and this goes for award pictures and ribbon cutting ceremonies): it’s not about the donor.  Remember that for the donor, you are a means to the end that they are hoping to create in the world.  The opportunity cost of that photo is immense when you could be showing visual proof of the impact the donor is having on the world.

It is a cultural shift because the big check photo is one of those things that is done.  But it shouldn’t be.

Instead, ask if you could also get photos of your corporate partner, grantor, or their employees doing some of your mission work.  Someone in a logoed polo shirt planting a tree or serving on your crisis phone line or reading a story to children is something you can use in your communications.  And it helps cement the bond between you and the person who gave you the big check.  Because they are (hopefully) in it for the impact as well and having a photo of trees, services, or kids is a far better reminder of that than phony grins and foam core.

It’s time to stop… the big check photo

It’s time to stop… vanity metrics

nickellinger, , , , , 1 Comment

I’m writing this during the South Carolina Republican primary.  The votes haven’t started being counted yet, but I know who is going to win.  Because I know that Ben Carson has 35% of the Facebook likes among GOP contenders in the state; Trump is second at 25%.  Thus, Carson will get approximately 35% of the vote.

What?  Doesn’t it work that way?  Facebook likes aren’t a reliable indicator of support, donations, interest, or almost anything else?

The bitter truth: Facebook likes are a vanity metric.  They have little to do with your ultimate goal of constituent acquisition, donor conversion, and world domination, yet people will still ask what that number is.  And when they hear it, they will nod, say that that’s a good number, and ask what we can do to increase it.

That’s when a tiny little part of you dies.

So, in our Things To Stop Doing, we have vanity metrics.  These metrics may make you feel good.  They may be easy to measure.  And some of them may feel like a victory.  But they bring you little closer to your goals.  We are creatures of finite capacity and time, so the act of measuring them, talking about them, or (worst of all) striving for them drains from things that actually matter.

Facebook likes and Twitter followers are probably some of the better-known vanity metrics.  But they are far from the only ones.  And while some of these are partly useful (e.g., Facebook likes is an indicator of a warm lead repository for marketing on the platform), there’s almost always a better measure.

Because it always comes back to what your goals are.  Usually, that goal is to get people to take an action. Your metrics should be close to that action or the action itself.

Without further ado, some metrics to stop measuring.

Web site visits.  Yes, really.  This is for a couple of reasons:

  1. Not all visitors are quality visitors.  If you’ve been using Web site visits as a useful metric, and wish to depress yourself, go to Google Analytics (or your comparable platform) and see how long visitors spend on your site.  Generally, you’ll find that half or more of your users are on your site for more than 30 seconds.  Are 30 seconds long enough for people to take the action you want them to take on your site?  Not usually (except for email subscribes).

  2. Not all visitors are created equal.  Let’s say you find that people coming to your site looking for a particular advocacy action sign up for emails 10% of the time; those who come looking for information about a disease sign up 5% of the time; those who look for top-line statistics sign up 1% of the time.  Which of these is the most valuable visitor?

    This isn’t a trick question.  You would rather have one person looking for advocacy actions than nine people looking for stats.  Except that the metric of Web site visits lumps them all into one big, not-very-useful bucket.

These are both symptoms of the larger problem, which is that if you had to choose between two million visitors, of whom 1% convert, and one million visitors, of whom 3% convert, you’d choose the latter.  Thus, potential replacements for this metrics are visits to particular pages on the Website where you have a good idea of the conversion rates, weighted Web traffic, and (most simply) conversions.

Mail acquisition volume.  You get the question a lot – how many pieces are we sending in acquisition?  Is it more or less than last year?  And it’s not a bad estimate as to a few different things about a mail program: are they committed to investing in mail donors?  Is the program growing or shrinking?  What are their acquisition costs?

But from a practical perspective, all of these things could be better answered by the number of donors acquired (and even better by a weighted average of newly acquired donors’ projected lifetime values, estimated from initiation amount and historical second gift and longer-term amounts, but that’s tougher).  A good rule of thumb is:

Never measure a metric that someone could easily game with a counterproductive action.

And you can do that with mail acquisition volume by going on a spending spree.  Of course, you can also do that with donors acquired, but it will spike your cost per donor acquired, which you are hopefully pairing with the number of donors acquired like we recommend in our pairing metrics post.

Time on site.  You notice that people are only spending an average of 1:30 on your Web site, so you do a redesign to make your site and content stickier.  Congratulations – you got your time on site up to 2:00!

Someone else notices that people are spending 2:00 on your Web site.  They work to streamline content, make it faster loading, and give people bite-sized information rather than downloading PDFs and such.  Congratulations – you got your time on site down to 1:30!

Therein lies the problem with time on site – whatever movement it makes is framed as positive when it could be random noise.  Or worse.  Your sticky site may just be slower loading and your bite-sized content may just be decreasing conversion.

So another rule of good metrics:

Only measure metrics where movement in a direction can be viewed as good or bad, not either/both.

Here again, conversions are the thing to measure.  You want people to spend the right amount of time on your site, able to get what they want and get on with their lives.  That Goldilocks zone is probably different for different people.

Email list size.  While you totally want to promote this in social proof (like we talked about with McDonalds trying to get cows to surrender), you actually likely want to be measuring a better metrics of active email subscribers, along the lines of people who have opened an email from you in the past six months.  These are the people you are really trying to reach with your messaging.

When you remove metrics like these from your reporting or, at least, downplay them, you will have fewer conversions with your bosses that ask you to focus on things that don’t matter.  That’s a win for them and a win for you.

I should mention that I am trying to build my active weekly newsletter subscribers.  Right now, we have an open rate of 70% and click-through rates of 20%+, so it seems (so far) to be content that people are enjoying (or morbidly curious about).  So I’m hoping you will join here and let me know what you think.

 

It’s time to stop… vanity metrics

It’s time to stop… the donor pyramid

nickellinger, , , , , Leave a comment

All pyramids are lies.They have a dishonest scheme named after them.  They will not keep your razor blades sharp or apples fresh.  They messed up the four food groups.  Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs isn’t really true (in the sense that there are fundamental needs, but there isn’t a hierarchy).  Even the Egyptian pyramids were really built by aliens.  I know that last one is true because I saw it on the History Channel and you can’t have lies in history.

They have a dishonest scheme named after them.  They will not keep your razor blades sharp or apples fresh.  They messed up the four food groups.  Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs isn’t really true (in the sense that there are fundamental needs, but there isn’t a hierarchy).  Even the Egyptian pyramids were really built by aliens.  I know that last one is true because I saw it on the History Channel and you can’t have lies in history.

i-am-not-saying

It’s time to give up the donor pyramid as yet another three-dimensional-triangle lie, something that desperate presenters shove into PowerPoint slides to give the illusion of intelligence.  (See also: clipart of stick figures doing things, photos of people shaking hands, any time arrows make a circle.)

So let’s see and know the enemy:

pyramid-12

It looks innocent enough.  But do not be drawn in by its tetrahedral lies.  These include, but are not limited to:

Steady steps up the pyramid.  Some illustrations even have a person climbing up the side of the donor pyramid like Yodeling Guy from The Price Is Right (I’m sure Yodeling Guy has a canonical name and such, but hopefully the description suffices).  In reality, steps are so frequently skipped as to render the metaphor useless.  Think of the little old lady who gave your organization $10 each year at Christmas, then left you a bequest of $400,000.  She skipped all of the steps.  You didn’t even try to get her to be a monthly donor, because your modeling indicated that she probably refers to going online as “The Google.”  And major donor?  Fuhgeddaboutit.  $10 per year.  She was probably the last person you were going to ask.  Literally, the last person.

I will bet the contents of my wallet (two dollars cash and seven receipts from my trip to DMA) that this experience happens more often than someone stopping at every step of the so-called donor pyramid.  At the point that the worst-case scenario for your metaphor is more common than your best-case, you have a metaphor problem.

More mundanely, it’s probably counterproductive to think that you are moving someone up one step at a time.  Take a look at monthly givers versus major givers.  Yes, you are probably going to invite your monthly donors to make major givers.  But if someone is giving you a thousand dollars through the mail and comes in high on wealth screening and affinity, you are going to start personal cultivation with that person (while not removing them from direct marketing, because you are not an idiot).  That will come at the expense of, and rightly so, an invitation to, and stop off in, monthly donor land.

The donor experience pinnacle is death.  If this is true for your organization, take a good long look at your donor relations processes.

Progress.  The donor pyramid has never heard of a lapsed donor.  When the donor pyramid thinks someone is about to say “lapsed donor,” it sticks its fingers in its ears* and says “lalalalalalalalalala” like a recalcitrant seven-year-old.**  The idea that you would have to get a donor back doesn’t occur to this pyramid – its donors are too busy ascending.

Meanwhile, in reality, lapsed donors are valuable.  They are less valuable than multi-donors, but more valuable than person-off-the-street.  But they don’t fit into the pyramid power’s progress.  So they are left aside.

This last point also shines the way to the better analogy: the donor flowchart.  It isn’t as aesthetically pleasing, but it is true.  In being true, it also helps us better conceptualize our process.  We need to differentiate major donor versus monthly donor asks.  We need to try to get our lapsing donors back.  And death is not the only way the donor story ends.

So congratulations, donor pyramid.  You make our list of Things to Stop Doing.  Now, if someone asks where your donor pyramid slide is, let them know that aliens took it.  After all, aliens are far more plausible than the pyramid-y version of the donor story.

* Yes, in this analogy, pyramids have fingers and ears.

** This author has a seven-year-old and knows of what he speaks.

It’s time to stop… the donor pyramid