Month: April 2016

“Our donors” and channel conflict

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According to psychological studies, human territoriality is a multifaceted concept that includes physical space, possession, defense, exclusiveness of use, markers, and personalization.   

giphyI think of Milton from Office Space.  He possesses his personalized red stapler in his tiny cubicle fortress than he does not want to leave and eventually fights to defend. 

How often are we like this with our donors?

Even the phrase “our donors” is illusory.  A donor no more belongs to your organization than I belong to Google just because I am dependent on their search engine and mail programs for even the most basic forms of knowledge seeking and human interactions, respectively.

OK, bad example.  But you get the idea.

A donor doesn’t really belong to your organization; they are free to leave at any time (and frequently do).  

And they certainly don’t belong to any one aspect of your organization.

Yet we aim to possess donors, erect walls for their defense from other types of fundraisers, even mark our territory on them.

The thing that got me thinking about this is Joshua Benton’s excellent piece with NiemanLab about NPR’s decision not to promote the NPR One app or its podcasts on its terrestrial radio stations. 

They will not ask for any downloads or mention podcast hosts in a way that would be seen as an endorsement.

Part of this is understandable.  Radio stations pay the bulk of NPR’s bills.  These stations want to hold on to their share of ear and make sure that people listen to radio stations.  They exert pressure; NPR folds.

But this feels very much like the classic Theodore Levitt article about Marketing Myopia:

 

The railroads did not stop growing because the need for passenger and freight transportation declined. That grew. The railroads are in trouble today not because that need was filled by others (cars, trucks, airplanes, and even telephones) but because it was not filled by the railroads themselves. They let others take customers away from them because they assumed themselves to be in the railroad business rather than in the transportation business. The reason they defined their industry incorrectly was that they were railroad oriented instead of transportation oriented; they were product oriented instead of customer oriented…

 

OK, a virtual show of hands.  Who thinks that NPR’s long-term future is in traditional radio-wave-based radio?  OK…  OK… thanks.  Hands down.  

Now who thinks their long-term future is in online radio, podcast, and things we haven’t even thought of yet?  OK… OK… keep them up… there are a lot of you to count…

Yep.  Exactly.  Yet because of territoriality, they mortgage the future for the present.

So what business is NPR in?  Are they in the radio business?  Or are they in the informational (or entertainment or thought-provoking) business?

The same is true for your nonprofit.  You put up barriers to protect your walk donors from being over-solicited or make sure your major donor prospect don’t get mail pieces that might soil their hands.  You make sure that national/local doesn’t get their stinkin’ mitts on “your donors” because that money should stay local/national.  As if it matters which pocket gets filled.

In what business are you in your direct marketing?  If you are not in the loving-donors-and-being-loved-by-donors business, might you be in the wrong business?  If a $20 mail donor becomes a $500 walk team captain, and that fills that donor up with warmth, do you view that as a $20 loss?  Then you are in the wrong business.

So this week, we’ll try to explode some myths about “our donors.”  They are not only your nonprofit’s donors.  They are not permanently destined to stay in a single channel.  They are not national’s or local’s.  They can be communicated with both personally and through direct marketing.  And so on.

And we’ll discuss some solutions, including a potentially radical (ironic) solution on Friday.  You won’t want to miss it.

Or, if you do want to miss it, hopefully we’ll catch you next week!

“Our donors” and channel conflict

An quick update on the science of slacktivism

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Back in January, I posted about three studies on slacktivism.  And back in March, we looked at whether people who think of themselves as good do good things.  Generally, these studies found:

  • People tend to keep their commitments and do the good things they say they are going to.
  • They do this unless they did a public pledge first.  The public pledge seemed to allow them to manage their reputation as they wished, with not as much need to follow through.
  • Social media fundraising campaigns don’t really do much unless involving buckets, ice, and/or challenges.

There’s a new study out in the March edition of Sociological Science (yes, I know, March isn’t entirely new; my copy must have been held up in the mail by the fact that I am not a subscriber) that bolsters these claims.

They went through a sample of 3500 pledges for donations made through an online social media/donation facilitation platform.  Of those pledges, 64 percent were fulfilled, 13 percent were partially fulfilled, and 16 percent were deleted. However, people who broadcast their pledges on social were more likely to delete and not fulfill their pledge donations.  This fits the thesis of people who pledge do so largely to look good and are less likely to follow through.

They also found from using Facebook ads and other social media techniques, and I’m going to just let them tell this part from their abstract:

The experiment also shows that, although the campaigns reached approximately 6.4 million users and generated considerable attention in the form of clicks and “likes,” only 30 donations were made.

Please print out this quote and point to it every time someone says mail is dead because of low response rates.

So, to replay the recommendations from advocacy campaigns:

  • Do them.  A properly run advocacy campaign can increase the likelihood that someone will donate and take other actions for your organization.
  • Make them private.  Public petitions appear to satisfy a person’s desire to manage their reputation, so they were less willing to take other actions.
  • By extension, don’t do them on social networks.  Not only are they not public, but you do not have the easy wherewithal to communicate with them to get the first gift or convert to other activities.
  • Make the ask.  It can be as easy as having an ask for the donation on the confirmation page or receipt for a petition.  Folks who take private actions want to help and are in a mindset of helping.  I personally have seen advocacy campaigns with a soft ask after taking the petition raise more money than a hard ask to a full list.  Crazy, but true.

Thanks.  This is my first shorter weekend content.  Let me know if you liked or didn’t like at nick@directtodonor.com.  I saw the story and wanted to get the word out, but want to know from you, the reader, if this is valuable.

An quick update on the science of slacktivism

Implications of more donors versus better donors

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Let’s say you’ve organizationally had the debate that we’ve been following the past three days and you have come down on the side of better donors: you’ve taken into account all of the long-time and non-financial benefits of lower-dollar donors and still can’t make the average $10 or less donor work for you organizationally.

Here are the steps you can take in your program to skew your results toward getting fewer, better donors.  Note that if you decide the other way — neither of these approaches are right or wrong — just do the opposite of everything listed below.

Up your ask strings.  As we’ve seen in two different studies of ask strings (here and here), increasing the bottom number on your ask string increases average gift.  If you are in a Pareto efficient model like we talked about on Monday, there will likely be a resultant decrease in response rate.  

Like this study indicates, I would do this with single donors and not try to get my multi-donors to elevate when they aren’t ready to.  There, I think you would be wise to keep the highest previous contribution as the base donation, but increase your multiply.

Change your defaults.  This can be the default online (where you have the radio button start on $50 instead of $25) or the amount you circle on a direct mail piece with the social proof “Most people give X”.  Moving the default up should get you fewer higher-value donors.

Move up your list selects.  When you rent or exchange with outside lists, even if a list works well for you with no qualifier on it, you can request only $5+ or $10+ donors to that organization.  It will cost a little bit more to get that list, but you will be able to cut some of the potential tippers out of your program.

Incidentally, there is a trick you can do here with a list that performs well and offers a higher-value list select (say, $50+): rent the list twice.  Once, rent it with a $10+ select and the other with a $50+ select.  Then, you can separate out your ask strings to those two lists and mail the $50+ list twice (like multis) with an appropriate ask string.

Work with your modeling agencies and coops.  They will be more than happy to build you a model that maximizes gift instead of maximizes response rates.

Invest in telemarketing upgrades.  Upgrading seems to work better when people talk with other people.  I would counsel doing this with a monthly giving ask with the appropriate audience — it’s literally the gift that keeps on giving.

Shift your lapsed reacquisition selects.  Because you “own” those names, you have the most freedom to play around with who you are trying to reacquire.  You may be able to change the complexion of your file by communicating less deeply (say, moving from 12 months to six months) among under $10 and more deeply (say, moving from 36 months to 48 months) among your $50+ donors.

Use ZIP modeling.  This can work with both acquisition and donor communications.  In both cases, you can get more aggressive about your ask strings with wealthy ZIP codes.  In acquisition, you may even choose to omit the bottom half (or whatever) percent of ZIP codes from some lists.  As with tighter donation selects, you will pay a bit more for those names, but you will get higher average gifts.

Invest in your second gift apparatus.  This is probably a good idea regardless, but if you are going to bleeding donors intentionally, you are going to need a way to make sure you are converting those you do bring on.  This may be an investment you only make for $20+ donors or the like, but a welcome series for this audience will help you keep the donors you want to keep.

Thanks for reading.  Be sure to sign up for my newsletter to keep up with the latest debate.

Also, I’d appreciate it if you’d let me know at nick@directtodonor.com if you like the debate format.  If so, we can try this with some other hot topics in nonprofit direct marketing.  If not, then we need never speak of this again.

Implications of more donors versus better donors

Round 3 of the more donors versus better donors debate: intangibles

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For our viewers joining the program already in progress, for the past two days, Betty (arguing in favor of better donors over more donors) and Mo (arguing in favor of more donors over better donors) have been debating.  Today, the final round of the debate: intangibles.

Mo: The implications of focusing on fewer donors scares me.  My thinking is that you will draw the line at five dollar donors and cut quantity and donor volume accordingly.  Then, when you have fewer people on file and higher per piece costs, you’ll have to move that line up to ten dollars.  And so on down a death spiral.

Betty: As we’ve established, the amount that I’ll save by not having to have expensive means of communication to donors that aren’t going to pay back helps our bottom line.  If anything, focusing on higher-value donors is a way of getting out of a death spiral by cutting out the people who helped us get there.

And we know that number of donors on file is a false metric.  It ignores that some people are worth inherently more to the organization than others.

My concern is that there’s only so much time and attention you can give to a direct marketing program.  Too much of it goes to the Sisyphean task of trying to get $5 donors to become profitable.  Why not focus on what matters?

Mo: Because bulk matters too.  When we go to lobby for legislation, officials ask how many members we have.  They notice if we are a force.

And upgrading got us where we are.  Look at your current high-value donors.  They were $5 donors 20 years ago.  It was cultivation and upgrade strategies that made us what we are.

Betty: That’s fine and dandy back when acquisition could turn a profit.  But every year, acquisition becomes a little harder and a little more expensive.  This isn’t kindergarten where everyone has to have a turn.  We are accountable to all of the donors that we have that we use their donations wisely.  If we aren’t getting net money from a person, we owe it to all of our donors to let them go.

Mo: Why not just customize your donor stream for them where you can make a profit?

Betty: You should if you can, but you can’t always.  And keeping them in the mail stream does something else: it starts making your pieces that win in tests the ones that are tailored toward a lower common denominator.  That’s the death spiral you should worry about: the temptation to cut costs by doing things like not personalizing pieces that don’t matter as much to the most marginal segments of your file.

Verdict: I’d like to know what you think at nick@directtodonor.com.  Personally, I buy some of Betty’s arguments here.  There always is a threshold at which you need to cut some donors off.  Rationally, then, it seems like there should be a threshold at which you should try not to acquire them.  What that threshold is will vary from organization to organization.

So tomorrow, we’ll talk about the implications of if and where you choose to draw the line.

Round 3 of the more donors versus better donors debate: intangibles

More donors versus better donors: long-term and external benefits

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To review, yesterday, Betty (arguing in favor of better donors over more donors) won a slight victory over Mo (arguing in favor of more donors over better donors) in talking about costs of fundraising.  Today, they will debate again: this time on the topic of external benefits of donors.

Mo: The case here is manifest.  To put a value on a constituent that comes only from what they give through direct marketing is myopic.  Having more donors means having more people that support you and having more people that support you means:

  • More awareness of your mission in the community
  • More volunteers
  • More advocates

Betty: It’s nice to believe that there are something things you can’t put a price on, but you can.  You can get awareness with PSAs and earned media. You can advertise for volunteers (and incidentally, thinking someone who gives $5 at time is dedicated enough to your mission to be your top volunteer is wishful at best.)  And you can get online advocates for $1.50 a pop from Care2 or Change.org.  If you want real change, the high-dollar donors in a congressperson’s district will hold more sway; they are who you get through consciously soliciting for value.

Mo: That works for some districts, but if you are doing the things that you need to do to get high-value only donors like zip selects, you are going to be ignoring a lot of districts that are just plain poor.  And you are going to be ignoring them with your message, mission, awareness, and advocacy.

But if you want to boil it down to dollars and cents, let’s go there.  Some smaller donors make for extremely effective peer-to-peer fundraisers.  You rarely know who is a deacon at the church and can pass the hat at the plant.  And casting your net broadly gives you a greater opportunity to get those types of donors.

Betty: You may have a point on peer-to-peer fundraising, but low-dollar peer-to-peer fundraisers are likely to bring in more low-dollar donors.  Now you have twice the problem.

Someone who gives more money at the outset is also likely to give more outside of a traditional single-channel direct marketing program.  They are the ones who will become the multichannel givers, major donors, and monthly givers.

Mo: Yes, if you go exclusively for the people who eat with multiple forks and pinkies out, you will get more of those high-value upgrades.

But you will rarely get bequests.  There is a great case study from the ASPCA.   Because they had focused on higher-value donors, they were not getting as many bequests.  In fact, they were excluding the 70+-year-old, $10 and under givers that were their best planned giving prospects.  So they made a conscious choice to go back and reacquire these donors, sending them (only) the best house mailings and working to upgrade them to bequest giving.

The verdict: Have to give this one to Mo on points.  A traditional lifetime value calculation ignores the value of donors as volunteers and advocates, which do have their own quasi-monetary value.  And bequest giving often comes from “tippers” on your direct marketing file of a certain age who give to help you in their lifetime, but are saving a nest egg for donation at the end of their lives.

This is certainly not to say that higher-average-gift donors don’t have greater major donor prospects; it’s just saying that a portfolio approach of quantity will have hidden benefits that should be uncovered.

More donors versus better donors: long-term and external benefits

More donors versus better donors: cost of fundraising

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Previously on Direct to Donor…  the question was raised as to whether it is better to have fewer, better (that is, higher value) donors or more, lower value donors.  And now, today’s episode…

point counterpointWe’ll try this debate style.  Betty will be arguing for our better, fewer donor model (aka the Ravenclaw strategy) and Mo will be arguing for our more donors regardless of how much they give (aka the Hufflepuff strategy).

Betty:  Simply put, many donors just don’t pay for themselves.  Let’s say you have a robust multichannel solicitation program that costs you about $5 per person to run.  If your $10 donors don’t average more than a half a gift year (which may be pushing it, assuming that a healthy portion of them are first-time donors), these donors are literally losing you money every time you communicate with them.

Mo: Then don’t mail them so much.  Solicitation costs are something that are under your control.  Lower-dollar donors don’t have to have the same cadence as a higher-dollar donor.  Nor do you have to send the same packages or use more expensive means like telemarketing to keep your lower-dollar donors.  Try to convert them to less expensive means like giving online.

In fact, because volume is a big predictor of communication costs for means like direct mail, you save money on all segments by having more people on file.

Betty: First, let’s dispense with the notion that a $8 offline donor is suddenly going to become a $50 online donor.  Honestly, at that level, you wouldn’t even pay to e-append them.

Second, bulk of donors will save you per piece, but only by a couple cents per piece.  That doesn’t compensate for the vast differences in net per piece value from a strong donor.  In fact, that’s why you can communicate much deeper into your file with higher-dollar donors; even a small chance of getting a gift from a $100+ donor is better than a good chance of getting a gift from a $5 donor.  

And in very strong average gift segments, you can be making over a dollar, two dollars, five dollars, or more per communication to your strong segments, a virtual impossibility with lower dollar segments.  So your fundraising efficiency is much greater.

Mo: Fundraising efficiency should not be a metric.  You can tell it’s unimportant and misleading because Charity Navigator measures it. (rim shot)  What you want is to be able to maximize the net revenue you can deliver to the mission of the organization.  And thus you want to have these donors.  There are some segments of donors that like to give $5 at a time, but they will do it to every other or every third communication you send them.  While it’s not a home run, getting on base often means something.

And these donors are much cheaper to get.  Sometimes they are half of the cost of acquiring a larger-average gift donor.

Betty: But because they make smaller gifts and usually have smaller response rates, they are far less able to make back the investment.  A quality donor is a gift that keeps on giving and lower quality donors simply aren’t.

Mo: But you don’t know the hidden gems when you acquire them.  Having more donors is likely panning for gold.  And so you want quantity.

Betty: That would be true if donors generally upgraded.  However, if someone gives you the same amount three times, chances are you are going to be getting that amount for the rest of their useful donor life.  Upgrading is good to try to do, but you can’t count on it for the bulk of your audience.  And loyalty goes up as average gift goes up, so you really can tell from average gift whether someone is more likely to become a good donor for you.

The verdict: This one is a split decision.  The case for more donors makes some good points and you should be doing whatever you can do to minimize your costs with low-dollar audiences.

But, by a nose, we have to give this to the case for better donors.  There is a point in every file where donors just stop being profitable.  For some, it’s at $5; for some, it’s at $15.  At that point, you don’t have a good way to make money for your mission from them.  And when you can’t fund your mission from them, you should aim not to acquire them.

“But wait!” Mo says.  “What about the non-monetary benefits of having more donors?”  Well, that will be tomorrow’s debate.

More donors versus better donors: cost of fundraising

The choice: more donors or better donors?

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There is a forthcoming study in the Journal of Marketing Research looking at the choice of defaults in donation asks (e.g., which radio button you have auto-clicked on your Website for donation level).

One of the findings was that for many scenarios, changing this default impacted average gift and response rate, but didn’t change revenue.  That is, the average gift and response rate moved in exactly offsetting ways.  So which is the winner?  

Let’s leave aside the fact that there is an obvious correct answer to this*.  It brings up an interesting conundrum: all other things being equal, would you rather have fewer, better (which we will operationalize to higher average gift) donors or more, lesser donors (lower average gift)?

So, let’s say your campaign is bringing in $100,000: would you rather have 2,000 $50 donors or 5,000 $20 donors or some other scenario?

This is a realistic question.  If you graph out your acquisition success by outside list that you are using, chances are you will get something like this:

paretoefficiency

This is actually a good sign.  It means that you are using the best lists, as you are approaching something close to the Pareto efficient frontier (a fancy way of saying you can’t grow any more; you can only make tradeoffs).  After all, if there were a list that was in the upper right here — high response rate and high average gift — you’d be doubling down on that.  But since there isn’t, do you invest more in the upper left or lower right?

This has far-reaching implications.  For example, what metric do you use to determine the success or failure of an acquisition piece?

Yes, in a perfect world, you would use lifetime value.  But we don’t live in a perfect world (if you doubt this, watch a presidential debate at random; this could make Dr. Pangloss open a vein).  Lifetime value takes time to manifest and you need to know what you are making a decision on tomorrow.

So, for your preliminary work, do you go toward net cost to acquire a donor, which will reward getting a large number of smaller donors?  Or do you go to something like net per piece, which will reward fewer larger donors?

(Or, as I’m starting to do, do you look at the donors that a campaign is bringing in and their initial give, then projecting out their average gifting as a poor man’s model for lifetime value?  This is a better solution, but again, don’t let logic get in the way of a good thought experiment.)

This week, I’d like to explore this thought experiment in some detail (in part because it’s something I’m struggling with as well), laying out the case for both approaches and seeing what the implications of this are.
* The correct answer is to set up ask strings and defaults based on previous giving history and/or modeling; customization cuts this particular Gordian knot.

The choice: more donors or better donors?

Using your real estate better: online images

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As we discussed in the stop doing giant wads of text post, it’s a good idea to break up your text with images.  But too often online images stop at the first level of work for you: they show the problem or make the donor feel better or the like, but don’t do anything else.

We’re going to put pictures to work for us to do second and third level duty.  Here’s how.

Follow the eyes.  We discussed this a bit in what we can learn from political campaigns.  It’s one of my top 200 blog posts so far, so I’d recommend a read, but the TL;DR version is that we follow where people’s eyes are looking or where they are pointing.  Since having a homepage image of people pointing to your donate button is a little on the noise, having your image subject looking at the donate button can do this work for you.  Here’s a heat map sample from that earlier post:

Engage the multichannel donor.  It is well into 2016, which means not only am I no longer writing 2015 on my checks; I’m no longer writing checks.  Another implication of it being 2016 is that people are going to go to your Website to see what you are doing before donating.

So it’s to your advantage to tie the solution you telling on your site and in your offline communications together with the use of images.  If your mail piece tells the story of the impact of your mission on a child, it’s great to have a further picture of that child on your homepage with a link to the story and the ability to donate.  While you should have a personalized URL in your piece, a person may not be sitting down at their computer (laptop, phone, tablet, watch, etc.) with that mail piece in hand.

Insert key messaging.  And only key messaging.  Take a look at charity.water’s homepage monthly giving ask.  Very few words — just the essentials.  

water

 

Embed your ask in the picture.  You’ll note in the heat map above that even before we look at eyes, we seek out faces.

If the image is where people are going to be looking on your site anyway, where better to begin your ask?  If that ask is an email sign-up, you can probably do all of that in the same picture (as you only need first name, last name, email address, and maybe state or zip code.  What?  You are asking for more information on your email sign-up?  Have you tried asking for less and seeing what the difference is?  You can always ask for more in the welcome series.)

If that ask is an online donation, you might as well as for some of the starting information in the picture.  Most often, you can get someone to pre-select their donation amount in the initial image.

One of the cardinal rules for donation forms for a number of years has been to minimize the number of clicks necessary to complete the form.  Recent tests that I’ve seen may indicate this is no longer the case.  I hypothesize a few reasons for this:

  • We humans have a poor understanding of sunk costs.  A multistage donation form, then, gets people to take the first few steps quickly and then asks for more, getting the person to think “well, I’ve come this far.”
  • Multistage donation forms can often render better in mobile devices with smaller screens (and worse keyboards).
  • E-commerce has taught us how to use multistage forms.  Think of the arrows at the top of your Amazon order page telling you what step you are on and how much further you have to go.  The fact that you can probably picture an Amazon order page shows how common this has become.  (I’m not judging – I’m surprised it’s not burned onto my retinae).

Anyway, getting the person to give you the amount first asks as a commitment device and pre-checks the “sunk cost” box.  And you are saving a step: rather than clicking on donate, then putting in the amount, they are able to combine these.

Using your real estate better: online images

Using your real estate better: post-donation interaction

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Online and telemarketing donations have a unique feature that few other direct marketing interactions have: you are still communicating with them once they have made their donation.

Obviously, a large part of this post-donation interaction should be aimed at confirming that the donation was made and sincerely thanking the person for contributing to the cause.

But there is a unique opportunity in these interactions to get additional value from and give additional value to your donors; it’s the time between donation and processing.  A person has selected an amount, given their credit card (or EFT) information, and decided to make the donation (whether online or by phone).  But the person or the series of tubes has not yet processed the credit card.

You may not even have known there was a time in between donation and processing; I know it took me years before realizing this.  But you can put a shadowbox on your donation page immediately after someone hits “Submit” (or hopefully a more creative button like “Save Lives Now!”).  For telemarketers, it’s just a part of the script.

Since the donor is unlikely to turn back at this point, it’s an ideal time to explore an additional option with them (and I do mean “an” in the sense of “one and only one” – we do not want to turn off the donor).  There are two goals you can have for this: upgrade in amount or upgrade in kind.

If you are looking to upgrade in amount, I would suggest:

  • Selecting a small amount – something that is 10% or less of your normal donation in the medium.
  • Tying it directly to a tangible and immediate win for the donor – e.g., “if you add $3 to your donation right now, you’ll be feeding a child three healthy, lifesaving meals in war-torn Freedonia tomorrow.”
  • Making it very easy to say no and move on with the original donation.  This is not a circumstance to let the better be the enemy of the good.

Because of the limited upside of this tactic, I would suggest the second option: aiming for an upgrade in kind.  This will almost always be trying to upgrade to a monthly gift.  Some tips on this upgrade:

Don’t get greedy.  One of the more frequent upgrade strategies attempted online is a check box that says “repeat this gift on a monthly basis” as part of the donation form.  There are three problems with this:

  1. It explains none of the reasons why you would want to do such a thing
  2. It’s stilted, non-donor-friendly language
  3. It’s before the donation is attempted.  In this case, if the donor is turned off by this half-asked ask, there is no donation.

You want to make the donation ask small enough that it seems like a similar amount of money to what they have already pledged to give.  While you will want to test what this amount is for your organization, I’d advocate a rule of thumb that you’d want to start at about a quarter, plus or minus, of what a person has pledged to give.  Thus, if someone wanted to make a $100 gift, ask them if they would like to make a $25 monthly donation instead.

It doesn’t take a rocket surgeon or a brain scientist to see that this will take at least four months to pay off.  But the average monthly donor is far more loyal than the average one-time donor and will likely extend out past this four-month mark.  And, since we humans value present money more than future money (witness the exchange rate we are taught between birds-in-hand and birds-in-bush), this seems reasonable-ish to the prospective donor.

Explain the benefits of the upgrade to the organization. Your donor has already made the tough decision: to donate to you in order to help people.  If there is a way that they can be more effective in their giving, they are more receptive to it at this point than almost any other (and, at the very least, are not that likely to be turned off by it).  So let them know that giving a smaller amount per month helps even more, because it’s predictable revenue that helps you get through lean times together.  You’ll also likely want to have some strong social math here (what does their $10/month do in terms of tangible benefit) as well as positioning against a hedonic good (“that’s the price of a cup of coffee each day”) to help you win the upgrade.

Explain the benefits of the upgrade to the donor.  Of course, to some extent, being able to help more people is a benefit to the donor – that was their goal going in and they are able to do more of it.  However, there are also tangible benefits as well:

  • Ease.  No more forgetting a donation the donor might want to make.
  • Budgeting.  The donor would be able to budget for donations on a monthly basis, which is how our mental accounting systems usually work.
  • The donor will be able to cancel at any time.  This is critical in the pitch.  You want people to know that you want only 100% satisfied* donors and thus want them to have freedom in their donation.  This is also because one of the primary mental objections to setting a monthly donation is “what if I change my mind?” (and its close cousin, “what if the organization does something I don’t like?”).

You can also put in whatever benefits your organization has for monthly donors (e.g., special member card, donor newsletter, etc.), but I would test it both with and without.  You might find your donors are more drawn in by the mission and the impact they are having and don’t want that special relationship cheapened.

Speaking of special relationships, I’d like to have one with you through our weekly newsletter.  You can sign up here and get the week’s updates in digest form, along with late-breaking thoughts and information.  Thanks for reading!

* Perhaps even donors who are 110% satisfied, for those direct marketers who are bad at math.

Using your real estate better: post-donation interaction

Using your real estate better: preheaders

nickellinger, , , , , , 3 Comments

You have your subject line science down — you do an A/B test in the morning and you roll out with the test in the afternoon.  You ask questions to entice someone to open.  You create urgency.  And you are still seeing your open rates going down.

Maybe it’s that right after your subject line, people see “To view this email in your browser, click here” instead something of interest.

Gone are the days where the subject line was all that mattered.  The first lines of your email now matter, because in many email clients, they are shown alongside the subject line.  This verbiage is called the preheader and it’s valuable real estate that many otherwise really strong marketers ignore.  For example, here are my last few emails from Home Depot as I write this:

home depot

If you thought that these were the first emails I ran to open, you would be incorrect.

Not only to preheaders show up in this way, but they also travel with the subject line to show up in the lower-right corners of Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook accounts.  Additionally, the preheader can entice someone to read the email (gasp!), not just open it.

So what do you want to do with this to draw your readers in?  Some ideas:

Keep it relatively short.  Not subject line short, but make sure that it gets your point across in the first 75 characters or so, so mobile email clients will show what you want shown.

Tag team with your subject line.  My best email newsletter open and click performance was on the same email.  (Hey, if you thought we were getting through a post on email pre-headers without me plugging that you can sign up for my free weekly e-newsletter, which gives the story version of the week’s blog posts plus super secret extra benefits, you were sorely mistaken.)

The subject line was “Lead gifts and priming and men, oh my.”  The pre-header was “And the details on how social proof works in direct marketing and the power of hedonic good comparisons, but that made for a really long subject line…”

If you have only 75 characters, you get the gist of what the email is going to be about.  And if you have more, it’s a paired attempt at humor.  This had an 80%+ open rate and 40%+ click-through rate.

Another good tactic here is to ask a question in the subject line that you begin to answer in the pre-header.

Personalize.  A pre-header can start with “Dear Mary,”.  (This, of course, only works if the recipient’s name is Mary.  If it’s Vlad, you may be in trouble.)  Anyway, this pre-header establishes that you know the person’s name.  This, sadly, differentiates it from many other emails that don’t know your name, so it’s more likely to get opened.

Tell them what’s in the tin.  If you have a video in your email that thanks the person for being a supporter, your preheader may not have to be any fancier than something like “Watch a thank-you video from our president.”  If you don’t have content that is worthy of being in the pre-header, rewrite the email.

Make the call-to-action.  Not “Donate now!”  I haven’t tested that as the beginning of a pre-header only because I anticipate it would go down in flames.  But “Today, you can save a life with one minute and two clicks.” does a nice tease of the content as well as creating urgency and timeliness.

So make sure you are testing this valuable real estate.  And when you do get that email from someone who just has their logo’s alt text as the pre-header, forward them this email if you like the organization (and if you don’t, prepare to steal their donors).

Using your real estate better: preheaders