An ode to the mostly filled thermometer

April 29, 2016May 12, 2016 nickellingerconversion, copywriting, goals, lapsed, online, psychologyLeave a comment

When was the last time you saw an analog, mercury-based thermometer? Chances are, it was in a fundraising campaign, indicating how close you were to goal. Even as thermometers go digital, their ancestors are honored through skeuomorphism* to symbolize progress.

But we come here not to bury the fundraising thermometer, but to praise it.

Specifically, we want to praise how the fundraising thermometer, or a specific state of it, can make people more likely to donate.

fundraising-thermometer-template

Cryder, Loewenstein, and Seltman took a look at how the amount toward goal already raised impacts a person’s likelihood of giving here.

They call it the goal gradient hypothesis: they think that people will be more likely to donate the closer a campaign is to goal.

So they tested this with Kiva, the microlending site that you may remember from such hits as “does being more attractive increase your chances of getting funded on Kiva”? (Yes, it does.)

They found that when an individual fundraising goal was 0-33% complete, the average hourly progress toward goal was 6.7%. When it was 33-66% complete, progress was 10.8% per hour; for the final third, it was 12.8% per hour.

So, having the thermometer partial full helped increase fundraising efforts. This would tend to make sense, since the thermometer is a measure of social proof, a potent persuader. (It’s the same reason that servers will seed a tip jar with larger denomination bills — it helps set the pressure and the anchor)

Hey, I can hear you yawning. Yes, I know you aren’t going to be going on Kiva tomorrow. But we’re just warming up. The researchers then worked with a nonprofit to mail lapsed donors. They had three separate goals that they were trying to reach and mentioned that one was 10% complete, a second was 66% complete, and the third was 80% complete. They also had control conditions where no progress was mentioned.

Sure enough, the 10% and 66% conditions were not significantly different from the no progress control. However, the 85%-to-goal piece significantly increased response rate (from .5% in the control to 1.17% in the 85%-to-goal version).

They even tested the “why” of this with donor surveys. They asked people if they would be more likely to buy candy bars from a 7th grade fundraiser if the fundraiser was two bars short of goal or 32 bars short. Two-bars-left won handily. Additionally, the donors who chose the two bars indicated they felt like they were having a bigger impact and were more satisfied with their donation.

So, since not everyone can be the donation that pushes you over the finish line, how can you use this?

One tactic is to have a silent period of a campaign. For online year-end giving, I’ve worked with organizations that will set their goal and their thermometer based on what it will take to hit goal starting from November 1, but only announce the goal and the effort on Giving Tuesday. That way, their thermometer is at least 20% full when the first donor hits the form.

Another is to ask internal audiences (especially board members) to make the first gifts. Showing them this research may help them feel like their gift is making a difference by getting others to give more freely.

Finally, you can define down your goal. The 85%-to-goal condition mentioned above was based on being 85% toward buying a GPS unit for an international relief organization. This is not a high-ticket item. By setting the goal low, they were able to talk about 85% complete easily. This type of microcampaign, repeated writ large, can help illustrate impact for your donors.

So keep those thermometers more than half full and you should be on your way to filling it up the rest of the way.
* A design based on an older version of an item to help people understand the newfangled version. It’s the reason that email programs look like folded envelopes and your video app probably features an old-school movie clapper.

Thanks to Tim Vandevall here for the thermometer image.

If you’d like more nonprofit direct marketing content like this, please subscribe to my free weekly newsletter. You’ll get all of my blog posts, plus special subscribers-only content.

When does a match light a flame?

April 28, 2016April 23, 2016 nickellingercultivation, lapsed, matching gift, psychology, reactivationLeave a comment

We’ve talked about how a lead donation can be as or more effective than a matching gift campaign and how using a lead donation can also calm the overhead related concerns of donors.

From that, it may sound like I’m anti-match.

mission2bimpossible2bfuse2blighting2bmatch2btv

(insert Lalo Schifrin score here:
BUM BUM BABA
BUM BUM BABA
WAHNAHNAAAH WAHNAHNAAAH etc.)

But I’m not. It’s a widely used tool that I’ve found to be effective in several cases and, unlike most tactics, the donors I talk to also seem to enjoy matching campaigns.

Some research can help shed some light on when to use a match and when not to. Karlan, List, and Shafir published a study in the Journal of Public Economics (and who doesn’t pick that up for a little beach reading over the summer) looking at match rates.

Normal studies tend to focus on whether the match works overall: yes it does or no it doesn’t. This study, however, gives some guidance on when to deploy a match. It also cross-deployed the match with a test of urgency, which is one of the building blocks of influence.

So there were four test conditions:

Matching gift with urgency (with a reply device and PS that said things like “NOW IS THE TIME TO JOIN THE FIGHT!”; you can tell it’s urgent because it’s in ALL CAPS!).
Matching gift without urgency
Control with urgency
Control without urgency

And they did a bunch of other stuff also that is not relevant for our purposes here, including testing different match sizes and timings and such.

The authors found that urgency actually hurt the appeal in many cases (probably, they hypothesize, because there was no particular reason given for the urgency; when it was combined with a match deadline, this negative effect disappeared).

As for the matching gift, there was evidence that it worked, but it only worked for donors who had made their previous gift in the past year. These donors were 3.2% more likely to donate with a match in place and their average gift went up. On the flip side, donors who had last given more than 12 months prior had their response rate drop when the match condition was in place.

I mentioned earlier that the donors with whom I spoke seemed to like the tactic and that seems to be supported by this study: active donors do like a match. However, it seems to bump into trouble when the person has not donated re anecdotal cently.

There’s likely one exception to this (and this is based only on anecdotal evidence, so take this with an appropriate-sized amount of salt).

I have found that people who have given to a match before are more likely to give to a match again. Thus, if you are suppressing out 13+ month donors from your match campaign, I’d counsel you to leave the ones who have shown the tactic has worked for them.

Want more studies and analysis like this? Please sign up for my free enewsletter.

Ask strings and $100: It’s all about the Benjamins, maybe

April 27, 2016May 2, 2016 nickellingerask strings, copywriting, fluency, psychologyLeave a comment

I, like many, am currently obsessed with Hamilton despite the minor handicap of not having seen it or likely being able to see it in the near future. (Not shockingly, the idea of someone writing like they’re running out of time appeals to me.) But the Founding Father most relevant to our work is still likely Ben Franklin.

usdollar100front

Do not reproduce.

In nonprofit work, we tend to view the $100 level as a bit magical. Once someone makes the psychological jump to three figures, they are likely weighing the effectiveness of your nonprofit and not just the emotion. Additionally, when someone is giving in the same number of digits, it’s easier to upgrade. That is, the jump from $100 to $200 seems easier for donors to make than $50 to $100, even though it’s more money to increase. And $100 donors in acquisition are instant candidates for high-touch treatment, as they are showing significant support of your organization from the start.

There’s a lesser known place where $100 is magic: in your ask string.

Reiley and Samek did a study in which they tried two different ask strings). The first was $35, $50, $75, $95, $250, and other. The second was the same as the first, but with $100 swapped in for the $95.

Revenue per solicitation went up 29%. Average gift went up almost 20% and response rate went up 7.6%. Let me repeat that: the ask string with the higher gift amount in it also had a higher response rate. This is a rare thing.

The major reason for this, they hypothesize (and I agree), is fluency. As I wrote in the piece on word choice:

People tend to prefer things, people, objects, etc. that are easy for them to understand. (study here). This is known as the fluency bias. There’s a reason that only eight names cover more than half of our presidents (James, John, William, George, Thomas, Andrew, and Franklin (which used to be a lot more popular than it is now)). Names that are more common help people rise faster in occupations. Believe it or not, stocks that have ticker symbols that can be pronounced as words outperform stocks that can’t be.

So, you would think logically that $100 isn’t the only fluent number. And you would be right. Another study looked at whether people were more likely to give $20 or a strange amount like $20.03 (if they graduated from the college in question in 2003). People were less likely to give the strange amount (although this was not statistically significant at the .05 level).

So remember to create round numbers in your ask strings unless you have a really good reason to: the ease of recognizing and using these amounts will benefit your organization and get you more of those elusive Benjamins.

When you can, see if you can get the $100 into your ask string. It increases your response rate with no loss in average gifts. Wins like that don’t come along every day.

I’m working on a book on ask strings. My goal is to make it free to subscribers of my newsletter here. So if a round-up of the science and psychology of donation amounts sounds interesting, please sign up today.

PPS. Tomorrow would also be fine, as I won’t be done with the book tomorrow, but that lacks urgency, don’t you think?

Building awareness versus actually doing something

April 26, 2016April 23, 2016 nickellingeracquisition, awareness, copywriting, cultivation, psychology, story tellingLeave a comment

OK, that headline is harsher than I meant it. Awareness is a necessary and useful precondition for many nonprofits. Using an example I know well, drunk driving was a late-night joke just a few decades ago. It took awareness activities to alert a nation to the fact that it is an unnecessary, tragic, and violent crime.

But does raising awareness sell? That is, do people want to donate money to raise awareness about an issue or organization? Or do they want to fund efforts to remediate wrongs directly? Robert Smith and Norbert Schwarz wanted to find out.

Actually, being good scientists, they wanted to analyze donor’s metacognition about awareness activities vis-à-vis whether the cause was already in the donor consideration set. Which means the same thing when you translate it into English.

They found three major things:

When people knew more about a charity and its work, they were more likely to donate to it and the more they were likely to donate. The researchers actually manipulated this knowledge in a cool way. They asked subjects questions about what they had read about a charity, but there were two sets of questions: an easy one and a hard one. The people who got the easy set of questions and thus thought they knew more about the subject were more likely to donate.
This result reversed when the charity was engaging in awareness activities. That is, if people thought they knew all about the charity and its aims (that is, they got the easy questions), they were less likely to want to invest in the charity’s efforts to raise awareness.
Looking at actual donations (not just intent to give), people gave far more to help than to raise awareness when they knew a lot about a cause. They gave slightly more to help raise awareness when they didn’t think they knew a lot about a cause.

This makes a good bit of sense. If you think the average person (which people usually consider to be a slightly dumber version of themselves) knows about something, why would donate money to raise awareness? On the flip side, if you felt there was a story that was undertold, that people needed to hear, you might ante up.

This has a major implication for nonprofits as they mature: what got you here won’t get you where you are going. In the infancy stage of a nonprofit, it is acceptable simply to point at a problem and say “this is a problem; we need to get more people like you to acknowledge the problem.” However, as nonprofits mature and people are aware of the issue the cause represents, it needs either to adjust its fundraising efforts to focus on what it is doing to solve the problem or to find more obscure areas of its cause to reenergize its donor base.

This also has implications for donor communications: there’s a difference between what you talk about to acquire a donor and to retain one. That is, people who are your supporters know you and your issues (or, at least, think they do). They don’t want to support awareness activities for things they think people already know about. On the other hand, people who are new to your organization may be willing to chip in to help spread the word.

So remember your audience when you are pitching both helping and awareness activities for greater results.

Time value of donations: I would gladly pay you Tuesday for a warm feeling today

April 25, 2016April 23, 2016 nickellingermonthly giving, psychology, telemarketing, upgradingLeave a comment

Are you ready to increase your monthly donations? Can you wait until two months from now?

It’s time for a week of studies of nonprofit direct marketing. This has quickly become one of the favorite types of post on the blog, so if you don’t want to miss the entries later in the week on ask strings, matching gifts, when to ask to support awareness activities and more, please sign up for my free weekly newsletter.

Today’s study comes to us from Anna Breman of the Stockholm School of Economics (it’s not actually a great school of economics, but the longer they keep you there, the more you believe it is*).

In it, she tries a unique approach to increasing monthly donations that, since the title of the paper is Give More Tomorrow, you can probably guess worked.

902c6dab495a1c8af2faa5e05e67428b

Wimpy, Patron Saint of the Time Value of Money

The experiment takes advantage of one of those cognitive biases or heuristics we are always yammering on about (explanation of heuristics here). In this case, being human means that you prefer immediate benefits and delayed costs. This is why diets start tomorrow, plasma TVs trump retirement savings, and dentists ask you to commit to a time to come back rather than trusting that one day you will feel like a dentist visit. It’s also why, in a famous experiment with children, the pull of one marshmallow now is strong even when there is a promise of two marshmallows later.

So what if you could commit future-you to making a monthly donation, but present-you doesn’t have to feel the pain? It makes a lot of sense, given Benartzi and Thaler’s experience with a Save More Tomorrow plan that successfully asked employees to commit a portion of their future pay raises to savings.

Breman worked with a Swedish charity Diakonia** and their existing bank of monthly donors. In one group, they asked their sustainers to increase their monthly donation now. In the other, they asked sustainers to increase their monthly donation in two months.

The increase in donations was 32% more in the group asked to increase their donations in two months. Part of this was an increase in average donation (19%) and part was an increase in the frequency of donation rate (11%).

And, looking back, the treatment donors were no more likely to cancel or decrease their monthly donation than the control group. In fact, the long-run effect was slightly higher than the short-run effect.

This seems like a tactic that is easily implemented on the phone. It would be harder online if you are using an out-of-the-box online solution. I won’t mention any names (*cough*cough*BlackbaudLuminate*cough*cough*), but some programs are so inflexible you can’t even schedule monthly donations to be processed on a specific date each month, as is common practice for monthly donations.

While the study did not ask this question, I would also wager than donors who increased their giving months down the road were also happier with their decision as a result. It’s quite common to have stress reactions to charitable asks (even when one wants to give) and knowing that you don’t have to give now in order to have the impact that you want could be soothing.

The next test, I would argue, for academia is whether this technique also works for monthly donor acquisition/conversion. It would seem that the same logic would apply, but I don’t know of anyone who has tested it.

So, if you are among the bold and fortunate few, can I prevail upon you to share your experience in the comments or to email me at nick@directtodonor.com so that I might illuminate your fellow readers (and myself)? Thanks in advance and hope you enjoyed reading.

* I just couldn’t help myself for this joke. I apologize for that joke to you the audience, Anna Breman, the Stockholm School of Economics, any former or current hostages, the people of Stockholm and Sweden, people of Scandinavian extraction, and people who drive Volvos or have Ikea furniture. Also to Tom Hanks. He knows why.

** I should also apologize to Diakonia, which does really good work on sustainable development around the world.

Breaking down “our donor” barriers within nonprofits: a modest proposal

April 22, 2016April 13, 2016 nickellingerconversion, events, transfer pricing, walksLeave a comment

snakes_on_a_plane People will generally do what they are given incentives to do. Try to curtail the snake population by putting a bounty on the heads of snakes and soon people will start raising snakes for the purpose of collecting more bounties. Then, eliminate the bounty and people will release the multitudes of snakes, leading to the classic Samuel L Jackson gosh-darn-snakes-on-my-mother-lovin’-flying-contraption scenario. This was a real thing.

What we’ve talked about this week are examples of incentives at work. Direct marketers who are measured against a net budget loathe to give up “their donors” to major donor prospecting or try to drive them to events. Events folks want their walkers, bikers, gala goers, etc. to keep walking, biking, going to galas, and et cetering with no “interference” from those who might try to turn them into institutional donors. And major gift officers would prefer to have a clean field to solicit “their donors,” turning off the direct marketing that a hundred people choose to give to raise money from the one or two that come out of that portfolio.

We didn’t even mention the digital/non-digital divide, except to say that if your organization has a head of marketing and a head of digital marketing, one of these two people should not have a job or should be reporting to the other.

So how do you create incentives to share your toys with the other children? The answer lies in transfer pricing.

This is a concept in the for-profit world to allow for transactions between and among business units. Think of a large oil company, for example, as two different companies: one that finds oil and one that sells oil.* In order to see how each business unit is doing, the overall company has to figure out the price at which a good is transferred (hence the name transfer pricing) from the exploration folks to the marketing folks.

In essence, the company is buying a good from itself in order to determine its value. This is the source, as you might guess, of much debate because business unit success or failure is hinged on this number that gets negotiated out.

So the modest proposal for nonprofits is to establish transfer pricing among our various business units and people. If the major donor officer wants a lead from the direct marketing database, they run the numbers and determine how much they are willing to pay for a lead. Because this “money” goes into the direct marketing coffers, proper incentives are built up for the direct marketing folks to acquire and nurture potential major donors.

Similarly, direct marketers know to the ha’penny how much they pay for a potential acquisition candidate from an outside list. How much are they willing to pay for an event donor to the event organizer? Likewise, how much is the event runner willing to pay for a group of direct marketing donors who model out as likely walkers? We could see a much more orderly market in these donors, perhaps where 100 walkers are traded for 80 telemarketing donors plus a 7th round draft pick and a ream of copy paper.

And forget about doing e-appends simply because a multichannel donor does better for your organization than a single channel donor. Why would you do this when you charge the digital marketing manager per lead? After all, in this brave new world, they would now want to charge you per online donor you try to get to give their next gift offline.

The great thing about this is everyone gets to see either where market value truly is or who the truly great negotiators in your organization are. The market sets the price for the lead and you either pay it or you don’t. And if you don’t like the price, then you can try to acquire some other organization’s donors. After all, they may not have a cause connection to your organization, but it may be worth it to not have to try to pry potential major donors out of the iron grip of the person that runs your Charlotte fashion show event.

It’s only when donors are a commodity with a chattel price that we will understand how important they are to our organization or, more importantly, our various business units.

Because the only alternative – working together with your co-workers, realizing that your cause is a common good to which everyone should strive, and focusing on the donors’ wishes and what optimizes their experience and giving – seems really hard. Bring on the markets!

* My wife, who is brilliant and has a master’s in oil policy, would want me to say here that everything that I’m saying about the oil business here is vastly oversimplified. It is and there’s a reason for that: I don’t entirely know what I’m talking about. To the extent that I do, there are details like the multiple business units of an oil conglomerate and the different types of oil and such that don’t bear on telling a decent story. These details have been taken out back and shot.

Breaking down the “my donor” mentality between direct marketing and major gifts

April 21, 2016April 13, 2016 nickellingeracknowledgment, cultivation, high value donors, major donor, major giving, mid major, newsletterLeave a comment

The first thing that many major gift officers will instinctively do when they see their donor portfolio is to shut down direct marketing efforts to those donors. After all, you want the donor to take your call and don’t want them mistaking you for a telemarketer.

Imagine if you tried this in any other walk of life. Imagine going to Jeff Bezos and saying “this person has been buying a lot of stuff from us on Amazon. Let’s make sure they never get another email from us, because I really think that I can sell them the Lladro Niagara chandelier for $100,000 (plus $4.49 shipping, which is either far too much for shipping or far too little).”

bond_villain He would laugh at you until he got stomach cramps. Or he would have an underling, possibly with a mechanical arm, throw you in a vat of piranhas while he stroked a cat. All depends on the mood.

Bottom line, it’s silly to take someone who has been donating routinely by one means and, by all available evidence, been satisfied with it and cut them off from that means in the hope they might give more. You should only change this if the donor asks you to (in which case, you should do so immediately, while smiling) or if you have a relationship with the donor to the point that there’s an alternate communication strategy in place.

That said, the major gift officer is right. You don’t want to treat a potential donor the same way as a potential $10 donor. This is not a defense of sending someone with the capacity to give a transformative gift the same 12-mail-pieces-and-a-cloud-of-dust approach that everyone else gets. It means:

A donor newsletter. You hopefully are doing this already. And you hopefully are basing it on Tom Ahern’s Making Money With Donor Newsletters. In case you aren’t, your donor newsletter should:

Focus on “you” — you being the donor
Focus on what “you” did — progress updates and impacts
Have short articles
Be written for skimmers — white space, bullets, and compelling headlines and images
Have a return envelope but not be as “ask forward” as a traditional mail piece.

This more cultivating newsletter will help you make money from these donors. But it also creates a holding pattern for your major gift officer. You’ve already made the segue to what impact the person can have, leading to a more natural conversation when the officer is able to get in front of the donor.

Higher-touch communications. This can be simple things like crossing out the impersonal salutation on a letter and writing in “Dear Nancy,”. Paperclips in your mail pieces show that the piece has been touched by human heads. First-class postage is a nice touch, as is expedited postage to get the mail piece to the donor. One nonprofit of my acquaintance has their CEO write a holiday letter in blue ink, then copies it on the color copier for a handwritten appearance. These are techniques that can segue naturally to higher-value communications with a major gift officer.

Higher-value communications. We’ve discussed the supreme value of exclusivity. A major donor may want to be able to get a sneak preview of your upcoming report or have an exclusive briefing call with your head of government affairs. These types of velvet rope communications can build to events where major gift officers can meet with them face to face. Once natural enemies, direct marketing can set up the major gift relationship.

Helping define the major gift portfolio: You are looking for one of two things: a long giving history with multiple gifts per year, increasing gift amounts, and participation in the mission or someone who makes an unusually high first gift. Usually the first group will be better prospects.

Thank extremely well. Have you ever heard a potential major donor consider not making a major gift because they were thanked too well or too often? Me neither.

Overall, you are looking to create a spirit of cultivation with these donors. And you should give of your donors to your major gift officers. By being a strong resource for them, you prevent them from trying the nuclear suppression strategy with you, allowing you to maximize revenue from these donors over time.

Nailing the direct marketing-event relationship

April 20, 2016April 24, 2016 nickellingerbuckslips, conversion, customization, events, lapsed, online, walksLeave a comment

Yesterday, I argued:

a quality direct marketing program can help increase both event and non-event giving. Moreover, you get people who are more connected to the organization. And when these people are already giving to 6-9 other organizations, usually through direct marketing, unilateral disarmament doesn’t seem the wisest approach.

Let’s test the three major assumptions here:

Event participants and donors are connected to your organization
Event participants and donors are likely direct marketing donors
Direct marketing can raise all boats

First, are event participants and donors really connected to your organization? Yes and no. Certainly they are willing to give money that benefits your organization. However, let’s take a donor to a person’s walk team for your organization. Your organization clearly isn’t repugnant to them. However, they are likely giving more to their friend than to your organization. So let’s say they are more likely to support you than a person off the street would be (because some of them won’t like your organization), but not much more likely than the average outside acquisition list (because you’ve chosen those lists to include people who support like-minded organizations).

fh6wo8vmcukic2qcl4p2lq Second, are event participants and donors likely direct marketing donors? Yes and no. Yes, because they are willing to give to charity. Gallup asked Americans if they gave to charity in the last year. As you can see, not everyone did.

If you set aside that people are likely to inflate their charitable giving to pollsters, you have one out of every six people who don’t give to charity. Clearly, you’ve weeded out this group by talking to event folks. However, it’s likely that your event participants are different demographically from your “normal” direct marketing donors. If you take an extreme example like walk participants versus telemarketing or mail donors, you may find that the former are demographically the sons and daughters of the latter.

Thus, as before, they are more likely than a person of the street to donate through direct marketing. But they haven’t proven channel responsive and that could be troubling.

You might question, then, whether event participants and donors are good direct marketing prospects. The answer is definitely yes. Both Making Strides Against Breast Cancer and MS Society (this link goes to an excellent webinar on the topic) reported significant gains in both event and direct marketing revenues from adding direct marketing to their marketing mix for events.

So why?

It’s because these communications centered on the person’s previous experience. I can support this anecdotally. I’ve both customized communications to walkers and walk donors and dropped them unprimed into an ongoing direct marketing stream. Customized is better.

What would a program like this look like?

Recruiting people to the event: This would include inexpensive communications to your existing constituents about the event (inexpensive because the transitive property says that if your event donors are unlike your direct marketing donors, your direct marketing donors are unlike your event donors). These could include buckslips, stories in existing donor newsletters, email communications, outbound voice mail announcements, and online co-targeting. Using lookalike audiences and remarketing could also help bring new people to the event.

Reattracting lapsed participants: This would look very much like any other lapsed campaign you would run.

Engaging current walkers: Try new walker online welcome kits that engage walkers in the general mission. Also, don’t forget direct marketing nudges to fundraise for the event.

Converting the event donors: Here’s where you customize your regular communications to event participants. You might even try “The walk is over, but the fight continues” walker specific emails and mail pieces, but mission-forward pieces and engagement opportunities like surveys, membership appeals, and the like tend to do better with this audience. And, as any good donor steward knows, making sure these event donors get outstanding gratitude is highly predictive of future donations.

And, as I’ve stated previously, because of the inherent national/field friction in some national organizations, I would strongly recommend running these techniques as a test in year one with sites that are willing to experiment. Using the other sites as a control, you can then present how much better the direct marketed to walks did versus those that didn’t have the wind at their back from email, online, mail, and telemarketing.
Hopefully, this will help you acquire your own donors and cross people over into organizational/cause donors. More importantly, I hope it helps break through the “my donor” mentality that can be so destructive to programs.

The myth that our donors are unique and special snowflakes

April 19, 2016April 13, 2016 nickellingerconversion, events, list cooperatives, list rental, walksLeave a comment

Charitable people do charitable things.

Things, plural.

There’s a reason that most of the outside lists and people that you pursue to be donors to your organization aren’t from a cohort of magazine subscribers or motorcycle enthusiasts or even a political party. They are from other nonprofits: charitable people do charitable things.

Russ Reid’s Heart of the Donor survey indicates that the average donor gives to six different nonprofits. If anything, my experience would say that this number is a bit low. I once modeled a list of walkers and it indicates than the median walker gave to nine other nonprofits. It’s the same reason multis are the most profitable donors to acquire.

Charitable people do charitable things.

Yes, it’s a tautology. But it’s one we often forget when we make our policies around fundraising, especially when we put up walls around our donors internally.

We must accept that our donors will be charitably promiscuous. Personally, I’ve been impacted by or had family and friends impacted by Alzheimer’s, autism, cancer, depression, heart disease, kidney disease, MS, sexual assault, suicide, and more. That’s life. And people who give will give.

We are in that competitive environment. And the way to differentiate ourselves is to build closer ties to our donors, not to try to build walls around them. As French playwright Andre Gide said, “It is not enough to be loved — I wish to be preferred.”*

So why do we:

Eschew list cooperatives? This is a way to take other organizations’ best donors and build models that allow you to get the best of the best. If you are doing a good job of focusing on your donors, you will be able to steal them away. If you are doing a bad job, you were going to lose those donors anyway. You didn’t deserve them.

Not try to get donors who are uniquely tied to us? This sounds like it contradicts the entire rest of the post. But if you are worried about fishing in overfished waters (and you should be), you are then looking at how to bring people into your organization who may not have given to nonprofits before. That starts with content marketing and with lead generation tools, especially online. This is when it pays to have a strong vision of your donor and constituent journeys.

Try to protect our event donors from becoming organizational donors? This confounds me, because a quality direct marketing program can help increase both event and non-event giving. Moreover, you get people who are more connected to the organization. And when these people are already giving to 6-9 other organizations, usually through direct marketing, unilateral disarmament doesn’t seem the wisest approach.

We’ll talk more about the data on this tomorrow.

* No, I haven’t ever read any of Andre Gide’s plays or really know who he is. He was quoted in I’m With Stupid, a book that while not on the same intellectual level, is waaaaay funnier.

Direct to Donor

Direct marketing tips for the modern nonprofit

Menu

Month: April 2016