Acquisition

Mail acquisition cost savings tips

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Now that you’ve driven some costs out of your mailings with postage tips from yesterday, let’s talk about driving costs out your acquisition efforts.

One of the big costs of acquisition mailings is the lists themselves.  Chances are fairly good that if a list works for you, your list works for them.  Thus, make sure you have list exchange agreements set up with these nonprofits, as you can both save each other money.

(Note: if you have a source of names that are not traditional direct mail donors, you may want to take them off of both the rental and the exchange markets.  Most donors are loyal to doing good works and perhaps less so to your organization.  However, if you had a source of donors that are loyal specifically to your organization like your most loyal volunteers, you may not want to exchange these with everyone and their brother.)

Speaking of unique sources of names, another way to save on costs are to try to “acquire” your own names.  That is, you have some lists of people who are constituents of your organization who haven’t yet donated – volunteers, advocates, white paper downloaders, service recipients, etc.  These names may not all make money on the first go-around, but you can usually acquire these at a higher response rate and/or average gift than someone off the street and there are no list costs.

While it will be an additional investment, I remember customizing your copy for that person’s status with your organization.  Indicating that you know they are a volunteer and thanking them for their service will not only cut down on your complaints; it will also very likely increase your response rate.  After all, you don’t want to do business with someone who doesn’t know who you are – why would your donors?

Even if you don’t have these names in your active acquisition efforts, be sure to keep them in your database of record.  When you rent or exchange a list with another nonprofit, it goes through a process called match back.  This is where they run your names against the incoming list – any matches are returned to the origin nonprofit and you don’t pay for them since you already had them on your file.

However, that ping from an outside list can indicate to you that the person that you hadn’t been mailing because they only downloaded one white paper three years ago is giving to other organizations and could be a quality acquisition candidate.  Thus, you can put them into acquisition at no cost.

Another source of “free” names are your lapsed donors.  You likely have a list of people whose RFM analysis (or hopefully modeling or RFM+ analysis) indicates that they shouldn’t be getting donor pieces anymore.  That’s fine and natural.  However, that doesn’t mean you should stop trying to re-acquire them.  Now they are in a limbo between donor and, as the song goes, just somebody that you used to know.

Mailing them with the same piece that attracted their attention at first can be a good way of getting them back into the swing of donating.  And it’s likely a good investment – reacquired lapsed donors tend to have better retention rates than newly acquired donors.  Just don’t take them for granted – they’ve told you with their behavior that they aren’t head over heels for you.  Once you’ve reacquired them, make sure they get your love so that they won’t lapse again.

When you do rent or exchange with outside lists, look at the many variables you can select: recency of donation, amount of donation, demographics, location, etc.  This is a case where you don’t want to scrimp on costs.  If a list is not performing for you as it had, you may want to spend more on it (counterintuitively) by asking for more recent donors, larger donors, only females (if your organization skews this way as most do), or adding a ZIP code select (asking for only donors in your top performing ZIP codes).

On the flip side, if a list is performing very well, you may be able to relax these variables, helping you get additional productive names and saving on costs.

Also, remember that just because you bought the name doesn’t mean you have to mail it.  If your analysis/modeling of an outside list name indicates that they won’t pay for themselves, don’t throw good money after bad money.  The list cost is sunk; you need not be.

It’s important you have a good relationship with your list broker.  They should know your strategy and whether you are driving for quality or quantity of donor.  Chances are if they are doing a good job for you, they will already be optimizing for many of these things, but it never hurts to ask.

Mail acquisition cost savings tips

Online-offline translation guide for acquisition

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When I was an exchange student in Japan, I carried a pocket-size English-Japanese dictionary with me.  (Pocket sized to make sure that it never had quite the word I needed, causing me to resort to “large bald person’s religion’s house” when I wanted to find the Buddhist temple.  I quite possibly offended the entire nation and thus apologize here for my adolescent self.*)

Recently witnessing a conversation between two people– one an older direct mail veteran; the other, a digital native online community builder who may never have seen a piece of paper – put me in mind of those days of mistranslation and bumbling.  They never seemed to grasp that one man’s teaser copy was another woman’s pre-header (or close enough to be getting along with).  Thus, they talked past each other and went their separate ways thinking the other was an idiot, even though they seemed to my ears to be agreeing.

Thus, this week, I’d like to try for some peace, love, and understanding between the often warring nations of offline and online.  Or at least the understanding part.

We’ll start with one of the simplest areas of cultural differences: acquisition.

Those who have been weaned on online will find the offline acquisition culture strange and terrifying.  Most notably, they trade and rent acquisition lists from each other!

For those in the offline world, don’t suggest this as a tactic for your online brethren.  Not only is it illegal (sending unsolicited emails is called spam and it’s even less appetizing than its namesake), but it is culturally not done in the online world.  (Yes, the cultural taboos are even worse than the legal ones.)

Despite, or because of, these differences, however, there is a lot that each tribe can learn from the other.

For online folks, just because you can’t and shouldn’t exchange or rent lists online doesn’t mean that you can’t create mutually beneficial relationships.  You can do this through shepherded emails.  Let’s say another nonprofit has a similar constituents or issue area to you.  You might consider sending an email to your list saying, in essence, that if you like us, you might like them.  And vice versa (of course; there is no quo within the quid).

Similarly, you might try engaging your corporate partners to see if they will run a shepherded email for you to their constituents, urging them to engage with you.  This has its own built-in incentives — the for-profit looks like the valuable philanthropic member of the community they are and you reap the list building benefits.

For offline folks who think the no-list exchange or retail rules are overly puritanical, know that an opt-in model for mail is on the visible horizon.  For those in the US, our friends in Europe are facing this by virtue of EU/UK regulations.  (How politicians justify themselves being able to send mail as they wish with opt-in only for nonprofits baffles me, but I suppose that’s what happens when you write the laws yourself.)

And opting in does provide a stronger bond between you and the donor or potential donor.  Thus, you can learn from your online partners how to build that bond.  Some tips:

  • As we’ve advocated, make sure you are setting expectations for what communications a person will receive in your welcome series.
  • Make it easy for a person to change the frequency, timing, and/or nature of their communications.  One tactic smart online folks will do is have multiple lists for which someone can subscribe.  If a communication is not to the person’s liking, they can be removed from those emailings without losing a constituent.  If a person does not want (for example) premiums, they should be able to request that and have it be honored.
  • Make it easy to opt-out with clearly visible instructions.  A person who asks to be taken off of your mailing list is doing you a favor (not as much of one as they might have done, but a favor nonetheless).  They could simply let you mail away and waste your money, but instead, they are helping you save it.  Help them help you.
  • Get your list through organic means.  Online and offline content can help you build a subscriber and constituent list.  This content marketing isn’t good for just online activation — it can be used for mailing as well.

Hopefully, these will help you discuss acquisition fluently across channels.  Tomorrow, we’ll talk about the cost implications from offline and online, using fun and exciting terms like “marginal costs.”  You won’t want to miss it.

 

* Of course, if I’m apologizing for my adolescent self, we’re talking about way more people than just the entire nation of Japan…

Online-offline translation guide for acquisition

Escaping fixed ask strings

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Most of the science of ask strings that we’ve talked about is related to variable ask strings that depend on who the potential donor is.  However, when acquiring new donors, this is often not possible, since you know little to nothing about who the person is (yet).  Thus, while we’ll talk mostly about variable ask strings or topics that apply to both fixed and variable ask strings, it’s important to discuss fixed ask strings.

Namely, don’t use them whenever possible.  Yes, they are necessary for some acquisition purposes, but the effort to customize them to even what little you know about a donor is worthwhile.  Some tips:

Online donation forms are usually customizable.  CDR Fundraising Group estimates that this simple step can increase your response rate by 50% and your average gift by 40%.  In fact, they’ve posted code for how to do this in Salsa Labs. What if you don’t use Salsa Labs?  Usually searching for “dynamic ask strings XXname of giving platformXX” will get you some tips on how to.

But if these tips are Greek to you, you can always take a shortcut: setting up multiple donation forms with different ask amounts and sending the links to customized segments of your audience.  This isn’t ideal, but it gets you most of the way there.  Even if you take a very shortcut and have a $100+ versus under $100 versions of your donation form to send, you will be customizing the experience for your online donor a little bit.

Use intelligence from your outside list selects.  If you are like many organizations, your outside list selects will feature a minimum threshold below which you won’t accept donors (often $5 or $10).  Chances are you have tested into these amounts:one list is productive without a threshold, so you haven’t incurred the cost; another had subpar performance, so you asked for a more select group of donors.

Chances are, your $10+ donors from one list will behave differently from your $5+ donors from other and from your “anything goes” donors from list number three.  Thus, you can use this threshold as a customization point for your fixed ask, making sure to ask people who give more for more.

Make sure your ask string testing doesn’t select just one winner.  When you test an ask string in acquisition, there’s a temptation to treat it like a traditional control and test, where a winner is chosen and rolled out with.  Here, however, you may find that even though the majority of lists performed best with your control ask string, there were a few lists that had demonstrably better results with your test version.  Since different lists have different donor characteristics, you may get better results by keeping with an ask string that better fits those donors.

Use modeling to determine your ask.  List cooperatives will be only too happy to create models for you.  Chances are, they can do a response model that maximizes response and another that maximizes average gift.  The folly is when both of these groups get the same ask strings when they were set up with different goals in mind.

However, you don’t have to use a co-op or pay a PhD to run a basic model.  Simply take the average gifts from your current donors at acquisition by ZIP code, standardize them (rounding to the nearest five or ten for fluency), and use that as the basis for your fixed ask strings.  After all, there’s no reason you have to treat 90210 as the same as 48208 in Detroit.

Make sure you are using information from multichannel giving when running a conversion program.  Sadly, walkers, event donors, volunteers, online donors, and e-newsletter subscribers are often dropped into an offline acquisition with nary a thought as to ask string.  Please don’t do this.  You could be asking your $500 online donor or your gala chair to sign a $20 check.  It’s debatable whether it would be worse if they didn’t give a gift or if they did.

Instead, make sure all giving, not just channel-specific giving, is taken into account when formulating your asks.  Additionally, even if someone has not given, you can apply filters like ZIP code or historical data (e.g., last time, your volunteers’ average donation was twice that of your e-newsletter subscribers; why not ask for twice as much?) to your ask string.
Hopefully, these tips help make even your fixed ask string more customized.

This is a special bonus Sunday blog post.  As I was writing my mini-book on ask strings, I realized this was a topic I hadn’t covered yet on the blog, so I’m putting up a draft version of the content here.  Please let me know what you think at nick@directtodonor.com so I can improve it.  And, if you would like a free copy of the book when it is ready, sign up for my weekly newsletter here.

Escaping fixed ask strings

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?

Learning from political fundraising: chip in change for change

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You’ve seen the headlines: “Americans more divided than ever”, “Gridlock reaching threat level crimson, which is worse than red somehow”, and “Pelosi-McConnell dancing knife fight leaves two dead.”*

Seemingly, parties can’t agree on anything.

But here’s a ray of hope.  They can agree on donors chipping in:

Martin O’Malley:

chipinomalley

Rand Paul:

chipinrandpaul

Bobby Jindal:

chipinjindal

DCCC:

chipindccc

RNC:

chipinnrcc

Jeb Bush:

chipinbush

Bernie Sanders and MoveOn:

chipinsanders

John Kasich:

chipinkasich

Marco Rubio:

chipinrubio

Hillary Clinton:

chipinclinton

I’ll be honest: usually my research for this blog is harder than this.  The hardest parts of finding these were:

  1. Remembering who had been running for president.  For example, it turns out Lincoln Chafee is not a model of car.
  2. Finding photographic from former campaign sites.  There’s evidence that Scott Walker, Chris Christie, Mike Huckabee, and others used chip-in language, but couldn’t find them online.  So passes away the glory of a presidential campaign.

But nonprofits don’t seem to be using “chip in” much.  Yet.  I think BirdConservancy.org was the largest organization I could find in my Googling.

So why do political organizations almost unanimously use “chip in”?  Here are my theories:

  • “Chip in” sounds very small. Giving permission for small donations increases the likelihood of giving. This is probably part of the appeal.  This extends to the standard ask strings.  Clinton, Cruz, Kasich, Rubio, Sanders, and the current Republican frontrunner (since I pledged I wouldn’t use his name as a cheap SEO play) all start their asks at $3-25.  In fact, if you take out Kasich, the highest initial ask is $15 (ironically, for Bernie Sanders).
  • Making a cost sound small also decreases the amount of pain that someone feels from making a purchase/donation. 
  • The value of a name in political spheres far exceeds just their donation value.  A $3 donor is also a voter at worst and perhaps a volunteer or district captain.  And of course, they may be able to give more in the future.  A $2,700 donor is these things, plus someone who may be able to attract like-minded funders at a max level.

    I say this is in political spheres.  But isn’t this true for your nonprofit as well?  You want that $3 donor as a volunteer, walker, bequest donor, monthly donor, etc.  And yet we generally have higher online ask thresholds. 
  • “Chip in” implies that others are doing the same.  In fact, Oxford Dictionaries defines “chip in” as “contribute something as one’s share of a joint activity, cost, etc.”  Social proof is a powerful persuasive force and knowing that others are doing it and are counting on you too can greatly influence decisions. 
  • People like to be a part of something bigger than themselves.  This is especially true for causes, political or non-profit.  The ability to make something part of your identity that ties you into a larger in-group can be very powerful.

So I’d encourage you to try chipping in as part of your emailing strategy (and, if it works, test elsewhere) as a way of pulling these cognitive levers.

A post-script: after I drafted this piece, this came in from the Clinton campaign:

unnamed

 

* I will offer a free signed book (in that I will print out any one of my ebooks , sign it, and mail it to you) for the first person who can do a Photoshop of this based on West Side Story.

 

Learning from political fundraising: chip in change for change

Welcome step four: Setting up your systems

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So you have your plan for your welcome series.  It is somewhere between 1 and n number of communications, depending on the person.  It crosses media where possible.  It thanks, learns, teaches, and asks.  And it honors the gift the person has given, while letting them know they can still be a bigger part of the change they seek to make in the world.

And it is worth nothing unless it is written down.

eyrha

You are working with a process that likely has:

  • At least three media (email, mail, phone) and perhaps more (mobile/texting, addressable ads, video, events)
  • Multiple vendors/systems involved (including caging, database, mail house, telemarketers, online communication systems)
  • Multiple points of differentiation, including medium, message, and high-touch v low-touch
  • Multiple people at your organization (you, donor relations staff, executives)
  • Intricate timelines.  For example, if you have three communications that you want in the order of thank you, learning about you/you learning about us, and ask, you really, really don’t want them to happen in the reverse order.  Also, every time you suppress someone from anything, things get complex.

This is not something that can be informal. In order for these systems to work together, you need to write out how.

Which does not mean you should write it in stone.  The basic principles should be (thank as quickly as possible, customize communications to the person receiving them, include both gratitude for what the person has done and opportunity to do more).  But how you accomplish them should be fluid with your testing regime.

I would say that the easiest way to create your process is to start with the simplest case and work your way up.  In this case, we have the rare example where ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny*.  So here’s how to build your program and your welcome/acknowledgment flowchart.

  1. Start with the most basic thank you by medium.  For an online gift, this is an email thank you; for an offline one, it is a mailed thank you.  Figure out how to get it out as soon as possible. 
  2. Customize those communications to the reason for giving.  A simple way to do this is to have a paragraph in the communication that changes based on the appeal to which the person gave their initial gift (since that’s usually the only information you have about the person at this point). 
  3. Create a special high-touch way to reach out to higher-potential-value donors.  This could be a policy of thanking all sustaining donors by phone or thanking all $100+ new donors and $1000+ existing donors with a handwritten card — whatever you are capable of doing.  This should be added to, not in place of, other thank yous. 
  4. Explore ways to break down your acknowledgement silos and thank people in different ways.  Put those that work into your process. 
  5. Add in a customized ask.  Yes, we’ve gotten this far before adding in an ask.  My thought is that a well-thanked donor is more likely to give to a regular-communication-stream ask than a poorly thanked one is to give to a specialized communication.  Also, you’ll note that this comes before creating a gap in communications (there likely already is one  that you can take advantage of) or learning about/educating your donor (I would rather have a less-educated donor who makes a second gift than a more-educated one who hasn’t).  This ask will be a bit more generic than we would like at this point, but you crawl before you walk. 
  6. Create your communication(s) to learn about your constituents.  These will usually be, but don’t necessarily have to be, separate communications from your acknowledgement and/or ask. 
  7. Create your if/then tree for customization from these learning communications.  That is, you should have something that says “if they are interested in advocacy, send them X paragraph in the ask; if they are interested in conservation, send them Y; if we don’t know, send them Z.” 
  8. Create the systems by which these changes will be implemented both for the ask as part of the welcome series and for all future communications. 
  9. Add communications from other media to the mix. 
  10. Create your timing for all of these communications, expressed in number of dates from the receipt of the gift.  I would encourage you to do a range, rather than an exact date for these communications — you may want to avoid having people telemarketed to on Christmas or on Sundays, for example.

Then, test the everlovin’ crud out of the system.  You are looking to break your system and then make it stronger at the broken places.  Some common things to test:

  • Do you have a plan, and only one plan, for every giving amount?  I’ve seen plans that say that donors over $100 get this communication and donors under $100 get this other communication.  They forget that a computer is going to be looking at this and ignoring people who give exactly $100. 
  • Do you have a plan for defaults?  Remember in most cases, you are not going to have additional information from the donor when you make your welcome series ask.  You want to make sure there isn’t a big blank space where paragraph three should be. 
  • What happens to your system if someone miskeys a code? 
  • What does your flowchart look like if someone does everything?  That is, you have paragraphs for people who are interested in various particular diseases, want to do advocacy, or have a personal connection to the mission.  What if they are all three, and they are a high-dollar donor?  The goal here would be to make sure you have prioritization and that you are not inundated with communications.  Remember that one of the priorities with your welcome series is to help the donor understand what to expect from you.  This should not be “I will expect to be annoyed.” 
  • How do your dates line up?  If you are integrating multiple messages and channels, you want to make sure that a person doesn’t get a phone call, mail piece, and email all exactly 21 days after their gift. 
  • How are you going to be able to handle the load?  That is, if you are going to be sending a getting to know you email seven days after the gift, will you be able to handle that on January 7th given your December 31st volume?  What?  You don’t have huge December 31st volume?  Let’s do a week on year-end fundraising at some point.

And you want to be vigilant to potential leaks even when you have this written down.  I have the privilege of working with a great donor relations person who keeps me apprised of the tone, tenor, and quantity of calls we get.  From this, she was able to discern that we were getting people calling (from a pattern of three people — like I said, she’s good) that already existing donors were getting member cards, something we include in our getting-to-know-you section of our welcome series.

What had happened was that our caging vendor had had instructions to send the new donor welcome letter to people who came in from acquisition mailings.  Since acquisition mailings often have lapsed donors in them that you are looking to reacquire, there were people who had donated for over 20 years who were being treated as if they were brand new to the organization.

Sovigilance

Image credit.

I will say that I have entirely failed to set up a welcome series for the weekly newsletter companion to this blog.  If you were to sign up for the newsletter here, what would you like to see?  Email me at nick@directtodonor.com; I’d love to use this as a test case.


* “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” is the (mistaken) idea that we go through all of the stages of our biological evolution in development of our embryos.  The catchiest treatment of this I’ve seen is in Stephen Jay Gould’s I Have Landed, where he talks about how the drawings that supposedly prove this theory (like the allegation that we have gill slits at a point in the womb) persist in science textbooks.  It’s also the theme of his first book, which is a technical book and thus one I haven’t read.  In any case, I doubt his first book has any essays on Gilbert and Sullivan, which I Have Landed does, so that’s another point for the latter work.

Welcome step four: Setting up your systems

Welcome step three: Ask again

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Now you have thanked someone for their gift, you’ve used both asking and revealed preferences to learn about your donor, and you have given your donor opportunities to learn about you.  Once all of this is established, you should ask again.

I’ve said earlier that the welcome series time doesn’t matter too much to me, as long as you are accomplishing all of these objectives.  I’m going to give lie to that here to say that you should be trying to get to this point fairly soon (within 15-30 days online; within 30-60 days offline).  Contrary to your intuition and the indignant cries of your board members that they would never give again so soon after making a first gift, this window is actually your best opportunity for getting that second gift.

And it is critical to get that second gift, for a couple of reasons:

  • Your likelihood of retaining a donor goes up significantly after a second gift.  This is why I advocate not looking at a monolithic retention rate.  Instead, it’s best to break down into retention among new, first-year, lapsed reinstated, and multiyear donors; the retention rates among these are really that different.  Indeed, that’s why on Monday I said that a one-time giver is not really a donor.  Retention rates after first gift are really that low.

  • The second gift sets the tone for the rest of their relationship with you.  Looking at one of the studies we’ve discussed on ask strings, you can see that first-time donors are fluid in terms of their giving. They are in a place where it is literally better to ask them for anything but what they gave previously.  Multidonors, on the other hand, need to be asked for what they were asked for previously.  Ask them for too little and they will downgrade; too much and they will not give.

1280px-Blacksmith_workingImage source here.
It’s a metaphor for a reason: cool metal hardens — only when it is hot is it pliable.

If you have done your welcome series/letter/email/whatever well, this ask should be natural.  You’ve learned about them, you’ve customized your ask to specifically what they want to hear about and who they are, and you know that what you are asking them for is something they will support.

Because of this, and because of the fluidity of first-time donors, I strongly advocate that this second ask be an upgrade in amount or degree.

After all, your ask now should be improved from your semi-blind graspings in acquisition, where your goal was to cast your net far and wide.

And you can drastically increase the value of your donor (to you and hopefully to them) by upgrading them to a monthly giver.

There are some who advocate for acquiring with a monthly giving ask (and, in fact, acquiring with only a monthly giving ask).  As I’ve mentioned, I don’t have the guts to try this yet, other than in means like DRTV where the medium is too expensive to try anything else.  (If you’ve done this, please write in the comments or to nick@directtodonor.com.  I would love to share your experiences with the readers of this blog and/or to read them myself).

But post-acquisition, you may have the perfect storm of factors to lead someone to become a monthly giver:

  • They are still in the glow of their first gift
  • You’ve created a customized experience for them
  • They have not yet become set in their ways of how they give to you.  We’ll talk more about mental accounting at some point, but suffice it to say that people have different boxes of finances in their heads.  Once you are in a box, it is difficult to break out of it unless the person’s finances or perceptions of you change.

We’ll dedicate a week to monthly giving, but you’ve already seen some of the tactics you can bring to bear in this upgrade ask:

It’s definitely worth testing against a more traditional upgrade strategy that would ask for a larger one-time gift.  So test away, but make sure both versions incorporate what you know about the donor.

Welcome step three: Ask again

Welcome step two: Learn more about your donors and engage them

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You’ve now created a gap between now and your normal communication stream for your new donor.  What do you do next?  As any Londoner can tell you, you now need to

bakerloo_line_-_waterloo_-_mind_the_gap

We know in case after case that personalization increases the effectiveness of direct marketing.  And not just making sure the person’s name is spelled correctly: it’s about making sure you know why they are giving and are thanking and soliciting them under those auspices.

With a new donor, you will have a single data point with which to start.  They responded to theme A through medium B.  You can leg your way into donor knowledge as we recommend by changing one thing at a time, but that won’t help you get that second gift.  And even if you are doing well, 60-70% of the time, you won’t get that gift.

Previously, I’d talked about the two ways of getting information about your supporters: watching their behavior and asking them.  It turns out those are the two things you should be doing in your welcome communications as well.

The critical step, and the one most often missed, is setting up opportunities for behavior watching and for feedback.  Or sometimes we go to the opposite extreme and send an email for every little bit of our mission we can think of, drowning the donor or prospect with a deluge of did-you-knows.

The way to maintain that balance with your supporters is to give them three major opportunities:

  • To use you as a resource.  People are more likely to support organizations that solve their problem.  This can range from “I want to eat more sustainably but I’m drowning in a sea of cage-free, organic, cruelty-free, etc. labels and don’t know how” to “I donated to suicide prevention because a friend committed suicide, but now I’m having these thoughts…”.  We nonprofits are (or should be) experts in our area and we can help in these areas.  And, as a much secondary effect, it allows us to see our supporter as a person. 
  • To use you as means to accomplish their goal.  If they donated to a particular issue, they may also want to write their legislator about it — that may give them the same (or similar) warm feeling that donating did.  Or they may want to volunteer in a very specific way that helps them achieve the same end their donation did.

 

  • To learn what they think.  You want to know how you can serve them better.  This can be through a survey or an open-ended question.  Or this can be an opportunity to bring in a different medium by having a human call them, thank them, and ask for why they gave and why to you.

The larger point here is that these should be framed in how they help the donor or cause, not how they help you.  It’s amazing how much of a difference there is between “We are also on social media, so like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter!” and “Our Facebook community helps parents of children with autism support each other, so please join in if you’d like to hear from others who have been where you are.”

It goes without saying that you should track these activities.  If someone sends back the petition in their mail package, advocacy is something that appeals to them.  Thus, the way to get them to be a higher value donor may not be to get a second gift through the mail (although you should try); it may be to get them to be a frequent online advocate, then ask them after an online petition to become a monthly giver to support the specific advocacy activities they enjoy.

It’s even easier online.  If someone clicks on your link for more information for parents of kids with autism, you know they almost certain fall into this category themselves.  This is a programmatic opportunity as well as a fundraising one, but all boats will lift if you have this information and use it to help the person in question.  Links that you send should be trackable and appended to each supporter’s record so you can customize your messaging.  

The alternative is to become the cable company that asks you for your phone number with their automated system, then has a person ask you for it, even though caller ID is a thing that has existed for a while in this universe.  If someone tells you something, they will expect that you know it.  And clicks are, believe it or not, communication.

There is a lot of ink and virtual ink used on how many emails or mail pieces you should have in a welcome series, how long it should last, etc.  You’ll notice that I don’t cover any of that here, because I don’t find it to be all that important.  If you can accomplish the thank you, learning, and engagement all in one communication, go for it.  On the flip side, as long as a welcome series is about supporters’ interests, it’s difficult to say that it is going on too long.

Welcome step two: Learn more about your donors and engage them

Why welcome your donors?

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I’ve read a lot about online and offline welcome kits, packages, and series.  These are almost always treated in separate articles by separate people in separate universes.  If your organization is sufficiently large, chances are they are written by separate people; if it’s even larger, they are written by separate people in separate departments.

In studying, I’ve found one deep and profound difference between welcoming donors and constituents online versus offline:

One is made of dead trees; the other is made of electrons in tubes.

Other than that, not much difference.  There are four major purposes for welcoming someone:

  1. To appreciate them in a way that makes them like you.  Online, there’s research from Powerthru Consulting from their work with Environmental Action that is worth a read.  They found that everyone who opened an email from their welcome series, it increased their likelihood of opening an email over the next six months by 20%.  Further, it increased their likelihood of opening all of the emails over the next six months by 1-3%.

    Welcoming emails also are well-opened and clicked on, far more than regular emails, according to MarketingSherpa. 

    It’s more difficult to get such data on mail pieces, but I’d wager they run the same way.  This first post-thank you mail piece is going to be (if you are doing it right) in the honeymoon phase of the relationship and thus affect the trajectory from there.

  2. To learn about the person and engage with them.  If you doubt why should know about your donors, sneak over to my Winter is Coming end-of-times prediction about nonprofits who do not know their donors.  Suffice it to say, your best chance of getting future donations from someone are by making sure you are customizing your asks to their desires.  You won’t know how to do that if you don’t know them.

  3. To allow them to learn about and engage with you.  In this honeymoon period, you are still a bit new to them as well.  Maybe they are actually more interested in something that you do than the one they donated to.  Maybe they are interested in advocacy, volunteering, downloading materials — who knows at this point?

  4. To get another gift, perhaps an upgraded one.  A one-time giver is not really a donor.  About a quarter will give another gift.  While this is better odds than putting your finger on a name in the phonebook (side note: we really need a new analogy for this), it’s not someone who is committed to the organization.  Double this for online donors, who are even more fickle on average.

    A donor who gives a second gift early in the process is more than twice as likely to retain as a long-term donor than someone who waits.  Do not be in the “oh, they just gave; let’s not ask them” crowd that does not strike hot iron.  The debate over whether or not to ask in thank you’s is a legitimate debate (I say you should, but other smart people say no), but not asking in the welcome series at some point is simply incorrect.

This should not be restricted by medium.  I’ve already talked about this extensively in the post on breaking down your thank you silos.  So, I’ll just add two quick things here:

  • You usually will have someone’s mail address when they donate online, but not their online address when they donate through the mail, so this is easier to do from online to mail.
  • fMRI studies show that reading from dead trees causes more emotional processing than reading from electrons.  Roger Dooley and his Neuromarketing team have the story here.  So there probably is greater applicability of these techniques going from online to mail.

This week, I’ll go through each of these purposes in turn for a welcome strategy that is medium-agnostic.  Personally, I view hitting all of these points as more important than whether you send two emails or five or the exact timing of when the mail gets out, so we will focus on technique and usable tips.

Why welcome your donors?

Acquiring new advocates in (and for) direct marketing

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There are several services now set up to bring advocates into your organization on a cost-per-acquisition basis. Care2, Change.org, and CQ Roll Call are the main ones that have come across my desk.

In full disclosure, I have not yet tried these services. I hope that anyone who has can tell about their experience in the comments (or contact me at nick@directtodonor.com; I’d love to set up a guest blog opportunity to help correct my vast areas of ignorance).

But I do know what would be required for me to participate in these types of campaigns:

  • Maximizing free/content marketing efforts
  • Optimized advocacy forms and efforts
  • Strong knowledge of the value of each advocate and a strong projection of the value of these externally acquired advocates versus internally acquired ones.

I’ll go through each of these in turn, as these would be valuable whether or not you decide to invest in cost-per-acquisition campaigns.

Maximizing free/content marketing efforts

First, get your Google Grant.  I know, I’ve said it before, but some of you still don’t have one.  So get it.  Consider it free traffic to your advocacy efforts.

Speaking of, after donation forms, advocacy activities are the best thing you can direct search traffic to, as they convert very well.  It’s usually a safe bet that the person searching for “email congress seal clubbing” wants to email their elected officials about seal clubbing.  And if they click through on your ad, they are probably on the con side.

(A note: as of this writing, there are no nonprofit ads for the term “seal clubbing,” but Humane Society and PETA are on the first page of search results.  Opportunity?)

And, as we mentioned last week, now you know something about your constituent’s interest as you work to, one change at a time, probe their interests and convert them to a donor.

That’s on the search engine side, but the more important part is to make advocacy a part of your communications. The more you talk about activities and activations in your blog, enewsletter, social media, and Web site, the more people will interact with it.  Here are some potential topics:

  • Highlight news stories about your issue.
  • And don’t just retweet that article about your issue; add the note that that’s why we have to pass HB1489 (or whatever) with a link for people to take action.
  • Blog a first-person account from one of your volunteers who lobbied legislators and how rewarding it was.
  • Talk about your lobby day (state or national) and invite your constituents to be a part of a virtual lobby day online.
  • Honor legislators who have been champions of your cause.
  • Tell success stories of passed legislation (since you should be doing these for your online and offline petition signers anyway).
  • Post a legislative agenda for the year and report back on it with the legislature(s) is/are closed.

Hopefully, these will increase interests in your petitions or emails to legislators.

Optimize advocacy forms and efforts.  I probably should have mentioned earlier that you need a platform for emailing legislators that allows you to own the constituent, not whatever petition service you are working.  These can range from setting up your own form on your site to ones that come with your CRM to paid solutions of all stripes.  If there’s enough interest (you can let me know by emailing me at nick@directtodonor.com), I can review these solutions in a future post.  For now, suffice it to say that the value in advocacy online is to whom the constituent belongs.  If it’s you, you can ask for future actions — advocacy and otherwise; if it’s someone else, you are helping them build their house, not yours.

Once you have these forms, it’s important that you treat your advocacy form like a donation form (if possible), where you are continually testing and refining your system.  For example, if you are doing a national petition, you may just ask for name and email address in order to maximize form completion.  I would advocate also asking for zip code; if you are going to be asking people to participate in other advocacy efforts, you will have to know in which districts they fall.  That may be it in order to get people into your organization.  Physical address may impair your form activation rates to the point that it is more profitable (side note: we need a term for profitable, but for non-profits; non-profitable sounds like the opposite of what it is) to leave that off and either ask for or append (or, more likely, both) the data afterward.

Further, there are all the usual things to test:

  • Does your petition work better at left or right?
  • Pictures on the page or spartan?
  • One-step action or multi-step?
  • How much copy to sell the petition action?
  • And so on

You definitely want this tested before trying any sort of paid campaign so you are not pouring water into a bucket without a bottom.

You also want to put similar rigor behind what communications you send advocates after their advocacy.  This would include a customized advocate welcome series, what (if any) is the first mailing they would get, what other actions you ask them to take, etc.  More on this tomorrow.

These are significant determinants of lifetime value, so you want these well in place before…

Determining the value of an advocate

For some organizations, having an advocate is its own reward.  For most, however, it’s also an activity on which you will want to break at least even.  Unfortunately, lifetime value is hard and multichannel attribution is its own week of blog posts at some point.  So here’s a quick and dirty hack for figuring out how much you should be willing to invest to get an advocate:

  1. Pull a list of everyone who came into your online database via advocacy action.
  2. Pull a list of the donations these people made online over the past year.
  3. Average the sum of the donations by the number of people in your database via advocacy action to find the one year value of an advocate.

That’s it.

I can hear purists out there screaming at me: “what about future year revenues from an advocate?”, “what about the value these constituents have in recruiting other constituents?”, “what about the gifts made in other channels?”, etc.

I agree: this is not the best way to pull an average advocate’s lifetime value.  It is, however, a quick one.  And it sets a baseline: if you know the average advocate is going to pay for themselves in 12 months, all of their other activities will be gravy.

That is, if you work this equation and it says the average advocate on your file gave you $3 last year, you know that acquiring an advocate for up to three dollars is valuable.  If your advocacy page converts at 10%, you know that you can put up CPC ads on search networks and pay up to $.30 per click.  You can experiment with online petition sites, which charge at least $1.50 per advocate (in my experience).  And you can value your online communications that bring in new advocates versus those that bring in new donors.

So this dart throw, primitive though it may be, can help you determine your communications mix and investment.  Not back for something you can do in Excel in 15 minutes.

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Acquiring new advocates in (and for) direct marketing