Multichannel

Let’s get small: microimprovements

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

402px-david_von_michelangeloThere is a story, perhaps apocryphal, that someone watched Michelangelo retouching every inch of one of this statues.  The bystander asked him why he bothered with such trifles; the artist replied “Trifles make perfection. And perfection is no trifle.”

In the direct marketing world, it’s difficult to say that there is such a thing as perfection.  You will likely never see, in any quantity, a 100% response rate or open rate.  But our goal is to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

There rarely is an idea that you have that will double the completion of your online donation page.  But you can find 16 ideas that each get you five percent better, each one compounding to double your response.

So without further ago, a few small ideas that may make small (or big) differences.  In no particular order:

Change the color of your donate button to something not approved in your brand guidelines.  It will stick out.  Good.  Things that stick out get clicked on.  When this starts to lose its effectiveness, change it again.

Reduce the size of your download.  A Sprint phone downloads an average of 11 MB per second on 4G .  We can easily design pages with enough extra code and random things to download to cost an extra second.  One second lost means 7% fewer conversions.

That’s probably why water.org has their homepage look like this:

water

But their donation page looks like this:

 

waterdonationpage

Increase customization by a variable.  If you do name, do name and location.  If you do name and location, add in donation history.  Et cetera.  These are more than 5% tactics. 

Add a small donate bar at the top of your site.  Human Rights Watch reported (at DMA’s DC nonprofit conference) that the below orange bar and a larger orange footer on their site increased donations from the home page by 256%.  Many days, I’d settle for 2.56%.

Go into Google AdWords.  And do what it says to do.  If it recommends splitting up your keywords, it probably knows that doing so will allow you to customize your copy.  Punctuate your headline properly.  It knows that increases click-throughs.  And so on.  It will keep bringing up these opportunities; you just have to act on them.

Try adding a picture.  Not necessarily guaranteed, but a quality picture will usually improve a home page, mailpiece, donation page, content marketing, etc.  I’ve found a significant difference in the traffic I get from blog posts with pictures over those without.  Hence David hanging out at the top of this one.

Call some donors.  Ideally some of your best, but these thank you’s will both help with the donor’s loyalty and give you ideas for things you can try (or stop).

Take some fields off of your donation form.  Phone number?  Ask for that afterward.  If you have the ability to divine city and state from ZIP on your form, go for it.  You are looking to streamline this process.

Similarly, reduce the clicks to get to the donation form.  Hopefully, it’s one or zero (that is, you can start entering info on the Web page).

Remove the navigation from your donation page.  Now is not the time for someone to want to look at your executive’s pictures.  Four tests show improvements from the tiny to the oh-my-goodness here.  

Run a test.  Are those ask amounts correct?  How do you know?  If you are mailing, emailing, or calling with the same thing for 100% of your communications, you are missing out on your 5% opportunities.

Hopefully, one of these gets you 5%.  If it does, please leave it in the comments.  If it doesn’t, please let us know in the comments what did.

Let’s get small: microimprovements

Converting advocates to donors

nickellinger, , , , , , Leave a comment

Let’s say you did the calculation of the value of an online advocate yesterday and it came out to thirty cents per.  Thirty measly cents.

After all the work you put into making sure every advocacy action was liked and retweeted and forwarded to friends.  You’d checked your bucket for holes and plugged them.  You’d dedicated real estate on your site and in your emails to the advocacy action.

But those darn advocates aren’t converting to donors.

Part of it may be your advocacy actions.  Remember the research from Tuesday: actions taken privately convert far better than public declarations that can be used as Facebook aren’t-I-a-good-person-today-so-I-guess-I’ll-have-that-brownie wallpaper.

But more often, the problem is that the communication stream for your advocates looks exactly like your communication stream for everyone else.  Remember our “change one thing” philosophy of expanding constituent horizons: if someone tells you that they like doing advocacy petitions online, your best bets for their next actions are going to be:

  • Doing advocacy petitions online
  • Doing other interactions online
  • Doing other advocacy efforts besides petitions
  • Doing advocacy petitions in other media

The next logical actions are not mailing in a check to support your annual fund or taking a call from a telemarketer who don’t know anything about the constituent or even joining your walk coming up in 42 short days.

And yet that is frequently our next action as nonprofits.  We want to expose people to so many different aspects of our nonprofits we might as well wear a sign that says

This organization doesn’t know who you are
or what you care about,
but they want your money.

A singularly unappealing message.

So how do you convert your advocates?  A few thoughts:

Strike while the iron is hot.  Quick, remember what the last survey you took online was about.  Unless it was in the past week, remembering the when or the what is probably not happening.  The same holds true for online advocacy — people are busy and may not remember they took an action a week later unless the issue is really important to them.

Thus, your communications to them need to start with the confirmation email and take advantages of those first few weeks where they remember you who are and what you do.  This will be easier if you…

Playback their action to them.  This shouldn’t take the form of (I swear I’ve seen this) “thank you for emailing your legislator about the importance of K-12 swimming education on Monday, January 13, 2013 at 8:43 PM.”  This is a conversation — play it just a little bit cool and bring it back to why they did what they did: “Thank you for helping protect kids from drowning by emailing your legislators.”

This playback reminds them that they did act with your organization and primes them for consistency influence: “I am the type of person who does things to protect kids from drowning.  Therefore, I should take this other action to do likewise.”

Report back on their action.  The best thing you can do to keep someone engaged is to make your action more than just a one-time event.  If someone emails their assemblyperson to pass a bill out of committee, let them know when the bill gets a hearing (with that picture of your organization testifying) and when it passes out of committee.  Now, you need that same person’s help to get it passed through the full Assembly.  You are able to get that passed, thanks to this wonderful person and people just like them all across the state.  Now, we need to get the Senate to act: would you email your senator as well?

And so on.  Most actions aren’t a one-time thing (or don’t have to me).  Reporting back on that action lets a person know that their action wasn’t wasted — they are helping to make a difference.  And asking again to help make the same or similarly things happen in multiple ways helps build a pattern: take an action, feel good about yourself, hear that it made a difference, feel good about yourself, take another action, feel good about yourself again…

At that point, it isn’t that big a leap for the final email in that series to say “your support helped pass the Zebra Endangered Animal Law (or ZEAL, because every bill has to spell something now).  Now we need to make sure that judges enforce the laws in place.  Your $17 monthly donation, in honor of the 17 zebras you will be helping to save, will monitor the courts to make sure that zebras will not be poached in our state.”

This leads into…

Customize the ask.  When you ask for a donation, the donation should be to help achieve the same ends that they took an advocacy action about.  If they wanted to save zebra habitats, don’t ask them to stop cosmetics testing on rabbits.

Go multichannel.  A simple campaign that I’ve seen work is mailing online advocates an offline petition for a similar action that they’d taken online, then doing an outbound voice mail campaign to let them know to watch their mailboxes for the petition.  They also received an online version of the same petition and both the offline and online petition asks also asked for a donation to support advocacy efforts.  This tight package can help bolster all efforts.  Similarly, some organizations have seen success telemarketing to advocates post-action thanking them for their action and asking for a monthly donation conversion.  This ties together the idea of a customized ask and striking while the iron is hot.

Any other best practices you have seen for advocate conversion?  Please let us know in the comments or email me at nick@directtodonor.com.  I’d love to publish your success story, whether anonymously or to your greater glory.

Converting advocates to donors

A direct marketing bridge to… events

nickellinger, , , , Leave a comment

Direct marketing for nonprofits is usually a tool to get a donation.  This week, I’m going to look at the ways you can build bridges to other development areas to help that famous rising tide lift all boats.

I’ll start with peer-to-peer fundraising events, in part because of the degree of difficulty.  Event participants and event donors are notoriously difficult to convert to other forms of giving.  Event participants feel like they gave as part of the event (and they did); event donors are giving more to their friends than they are to the cause.  And the vice is versa’ed – demographically, your average direct mail donor is not likely to want to do your endurance three-day, less she break a hip.

True story: I once participated in a charity 5K that started and ended on Federal Hill in Baltimore.  Here is the view from the top of Federal Hill where we started the walk:

250px-federalhillpark

And here is the view from the bottom of Federal Hill up to the top:

mount_kilimanjaro

Hat tip to wikimedia.org for the images

We had a lot of people stop at the 4.9K mark that day.

Where was I?  Oh, yeah.  Walkers don’t convert well.  But in acquisition, we are certainly reaching out to less likely prospects.  With walkers, you know they know who you are and believe in the mission.  You may even know a bit about why they are walking.

So they are an audience worth reaching out to, both to garner additional donors, and to improve their retention for future year’s walks.  Some of these ideas will be applauded by your walk managers as helping them do their jobs; some will have you burned in effigy for trying to “steal” “their” donors.  The trick is to do enough of the former that they will forgive you for the latter.  Here goes:

  • New walker welcome kits (online or off). With most walks, your immediate communications are “thank you for signing up; here’s how you can make money for us.”  This would help mix in messages that welcome the person to the mission of your organization beyond welcoming them to the walk.
  • Similarly, during the walk process, mix in other topics like advocacy alerts to deepen engagement to the organization.
  • Try a telemarketing cycle to your walkers well after the walk is completed. This can both ask for a donation and announce the day and time of the next year’s walk.
  • Addressable media to past participants. Remarketing, cotargeting, and like audiences can be a good way of retaining old walkers and bringing in new ones.  If you don’t know what I mean, I highly recommend Friday’s post on just this topic.
  • Throughout the year, you should try mailing walkers to become offline donors. Ideally, this would feature walker specific messaging and incorporate what you know of why they chose to walk.  Strong techniques could include a walk survey to gather data on your walkers (and to act as a reply device) and a save the date lift note for the next year’s walk.

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.

A direct marketing bridge to… events

Breaking down your thank you silos

nickellinger, , , , , Leave a comment

As mentioned on Wednesday, there are a few different ways to thank your donors.   Thanking donors well, as we know, increases retention, average giving, and good karma in the world.

That said, we too often treat the way someone came into our organization, or the way they made their gift this most recent time, as the entirety of who a person is and how they are going to interact with our organizations.

Most donors have some combination of a mail box, an email box, a phone, a mobile phone, social media accounts, and more.  Yet we insist on assume that mail donors gonna mail checks, walkers gonna walk, phone-ees gonna give over the phone, and haters gonna hate.

If I were to create the stone tablets of nonprofit direct marketing, “Origin ≠ destiny” would be only slightly below “test everything” on the list of commandments.  Of course, I’m not going to create stone tablets, because we tested out of that in ancient Egypt.

It is certainly true that someone who started by donating through the mail is more likely to donate through the mail than someone who has only donated online.  This is because these two people have proven responsive to these two media.  However, it is not true that the mail donor will donate only through the mail.  It’s not even true that the mail donor prefers to donate through the mail – their origin may just have been how you reached out to her first.

Much is invested in creating multichannel donors – e-appends, email captures, telemarketing campaigns, mail conversion series, etc.  Yet we continue to acknowledge offline gifts offline and online gifts online and rarely the twain shall meet.

This is a pity because, while you will receive phone calls if someone is oversolicited by channels they didn’t want to be solicited through, you will rarely receive angry calls resulting from thanking someone too much.  Try to count the number of times someone has yelled at you “YOU ARE BEING TOO DAMN APPRECIATIVE OF MY SUPPORT!”.  If that number is existent, it’s at maximum finger-countable.

So I’ve just started trying some of these and while the juries are still out, early results are showing that they are bearing fruit.  This is in part because some of these are so darn low cost, if you can get the system right up front:

Thank your mail donors by email when you have the email.  I mentioned on Tuesday that speed of thank you is a key predictor of future support.  Let’s say that you are working with a caging vendor that will get acknowledgments out the day after the gift is received.  Chances are you aren’t going to improve significantly on that.  While neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from their appointed rounds, neither will these or any other disaster or incentive get them to speed up.

But what if at the same time as your caging vendor sent the letter, they also triggered an email to the donor that said “[Name], thank you so much for your [amount] gift.  We just got it and you are already [the great thing your cause does].  You are going to get your official receipt and thank you in the mail in a couple days, but I couldn’t wait to tell you how much your support means to all of us here at [organization].”

Send an outbound voice mail as a thank you for online and mail gifts.  This is another way to get thank you’s out quickly when you have a phone number for the donor.  This also works for event donors.

Have a mail-based welcome series for online donors and/or constituents. There’s no reason a thank you and welcome needs to stop at the edge of the Internet.

Send a post-event package or series for your event participants.  This will help those participants go beyond donating just to the event and forging a deeper tie with your organization.

Thank you for reading.  Please leave other ideas for multichannel thank you’s in the comments, so we can all learn from each other.

Breaking down your thank you silos

There must be 50 ways to thank your donors

nickellinger, , , , , Leave a comment
  1. Write them a letter, Eddie Vetter.
  2. Send them a birthday card, Renard.
  3. Remember them on important holidays, Rutherford B Hayes.
  4. Acknowledge their support on important dates like their first gift’s anniversary, Mercy.
  5. Thank them with a prerecorded outbound voice message, Fezzig. (If you can’t tell already, not all of these rhymes are going to be winners…)
  6. Try that prerecorded outbound voice message to see if it will increase fulfillment rates among your telemarketing pledgers, Medgar Evers.
  7. Handwrite them a note, billy goat.
  8. Send them a copy of your annual report with a kind note and their name circled, Erkel.
  9. Make a personal call, Saul.
  10. Ask them to volunteer, dear. (Yes, really, some of your donors may want to become more involved in your organization)
  11. Thank them in person, Orson.
  12. Have a special area/table/zone for them at your next event, Clark Kent.
  13. Send them a member card, Jean-Luc Picard.
  14. Invite them to special briefings that are only for a member, December.
  15. Create a specialized donor thank you newsletter, Irish setter.
  16. Send them a copy of a book written by one of your in-house experts, Howard Kurtz.
  17. Create a year-end statement of their giving and the impact it has made, Sade.
  18. Use a survey to get their thoughts, Don Knotts.
  19. Ask your ED or another luminary to write a card in blue ink, then to make it look handwritten in bulk on a budget, run copies of it on the color printer, Harold Pinter.
  20. Conduct donor telephone calls in a town hall style, Kyle.
  21. Write quality stories, Jason Vorhees.
  22. Make high-quality and personalized online after-action pages and automated emails, Outlaw Josey Wales.
  23. Send them a staff white paper, Don Draper.
  24. Create a personalized support statement in infographic form, Norm. (NORM! How’s it going out there, Norm? It’s a dog eat dog world and I’m wearing Milkbone underwear (laughter from studio audience))
  25. Have excellent donor service, Neal Purvis (screenwriter on six James Bond movies. If you already knew that, you might be interested in one of my books here).
  26. Write them memos about the impact they’ve made and what is left to be done, hon.
  27. Send them pictures about the impact they are making and not of someone handing someone else a giant check, Beck.
  28. Welcome them strategically with a cross-channel series, Aries.
  29. Invite them to share their personal story, Rory (aka Mr. Amy Pond).
  30. Ask for why they give and personalize your thanks to what meaning to them, Clem.
  31. DM them on Twitter, Senator Vitter.
  32. Send them a letter that is written by someone whose life they’ve changed, Danny Ainge.
  33. Wish that the song was about 30 ways to leave your lover, Crispin Glover.
  34. Shoot a thank you video, Hideo.
  35. Throw a donor and volunteer appreciation party, Aarti (Sequeira of Food Network fame, of course).
  36. Ask them to vote on issues where you can live with any of the selections like member card design, Robert Irvine.
  37. Have a donor appreciation wall at your headquarter, Michael Porter.
  38. Message them on Facebook, Captain Hook.
  39. Make it easy for them to tell others about their support, Queen Consort.
  40. Honor and make sure they know you honor their particular and individual connection to your cause, Santa Claus.
  41. Have a phone bank thankathon from your employees and volunteers, Mouseketeers.
  42. Talk to them about the meaning they are giving to people’s lives, Douglas Adams.
  43. Call them for their opinion, Virginian.
  44. Send them an impact-focused news clipping, Rudyard Kipling. (Do you like Kipling? I don’t know; I’ve never kippled.)
  45. Invite them to hear, online or in-person, a guest speaker, Bunson and Beaker.
  46. Thank them with a celebrity if you have one connected to your nonprofit, Stephen Moffit (again, if you know who this is, one of my books might be up your alley).
  47. Reach out on Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, and/or Grandparent’s Day, depending on their gender and age, Larry Page.
  48. Send a February 14th valentine to the donors you love, turtle dove.
  49. Allow virtual access to whatever form of annual meeting you have, be it a conference, jamboree, or lobby day, Auntie May.
  50. Above all, write from, and to, the heart, Bart.
There must be 50 ways to thank your donors