Online

Web metric basics

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We talked yesterday about email metrics; now it’s Web site metrics’ turn.

We start here with the most generic of all online metrics: traffic.  No less an authority that FiveThirtyEight says that we still don’t know how to measure Web traffic. The difference is how unique visitors are measured versus total visits.  If you are an advertiser, you want to make sure the 1,000,000 visits a person is claiming to her/his site aren’t just a guy hitting reload over and over again.  This can be done by cookie, by IP address.  

My advice on this is sacrilegious for a metrics guy: don’t worry too much about it as long as you are using a consistent system for measurement.  I’ve used mainly Google Analytics for this, because it’s free, but any system will have its own way of determining this.

From this number, you can derive revenue per visitor by simply dividing your annual online revenues by your number of visitors to determine revenue per visitor.  This is a nice benchmark because you can see what all of your optimization efforts add up to; everything you do to try to get someone to a donation page, what you do to convert them, your average gift tweaking, the value you derive from your email list — all of it adds up to revenue per visitor.

But more than that, revenue per visitor also allows you to see what you are willing to invest to get someone to your site.  Let’s say your revenue per visitor is right at the M+R Benchmarks Report 2016 average of $.65 per visitor.  If the average blog post you do results in an extra 1000 visitors to your site, you should in theory be willing to pay up to $650 to write, deliver, and market that blog post (because revenue per visitor is an annual figure, so acquiring someone at cost that you can then engage in the future is a beautiful thing).

I say in theory because revenue per visitor varies based on the type of content or interaction.  I’ll talk about this at the end because we need to go through the other metrics to break this down more efficiently.

A close cousin to revenue per visitor is site donation conversion rate, or how many of the people who come to your site donate.  Instead of dividing your annual online revenues by visitors, you’ll divide the number of donations by visitors.  This is one of two key inputs to revenue per visitor (the other being average gift) and is a good way of testing whether wholesale changes to your site are helping encourage people to give.  

I recently worked with someone who put a thin banner at the top of their site encouraging donation.  He was disheartened because less than half a percent of the people who came to the site clicked on the banner.  I asked him if the total clicks were additive to donation clicks (that is, they represented people who wouldn’t have clicked to donate otherwise) or substitutive (that is, total donation clicks didn’t go up; they just moved from another donate button to this bar).  We were able to tell not only because of the donation clicks went up over baseline, but because the site donation conversation rate went up.  Now we are working on a strategy to test this bar throughout the site and with different context-specific asks.

Drilling down from the site donation conversion rate is the page donation conversion rate.  This is people who donate to a donation page divided by visitors to your donation page.  It’s a standard measure of the quality of your donation page.  This and average donation on a donation page combine to create the revenue per page.  

Revenue per page is not only a good way of measuring which donation form is better — it’s a good way of getting a feel for the valuable content on your site.  See how many of the people who come to a page end up donating directly from the page (you can do sophisticated attribution models to determine this — going directly to a donation is a quick and dirty way of doing it) and what their average gift is.  Divide that by the number of visitors you have to that page and you can see what the revenue per page is on a non-donation page as well.

This is great information to have.  Let’s say the value of a visitor to your home page is 10 cents, to a program page is 20 cents, and to an advocacy page is 40 cents.  This helps you make decisions about your content.  Do you need better calls to action on your program page?  What should be your next home page feature? (Answer: probably something about advocacy)  Where should you direct the bulk of your Google Grant traffic?  Etc.

However, there is one thing missing from all of this.  You will note that I said site donation conversion rate and page donation conversion rate.  Usually metrics folks won’t put donation in there — it’s implied.

But there’s another conversion rate that’s vitally important and that’s conversion to a constituent.  Remember that the conversion to donation process often is a series of smaller steps.  You need constituents who subscribe to your email newsletter, volunteer for your activities, and read your social media posts (OK, maybe not that last one).  A person has given you permission to talk to them is a valuable thing and should not be forgotten about.

So there’s also a site constituent conversion rate and page constituent  conversion rate — how good are your pages at capturing people.  Only when you have this to add to your revenue per page do you have a true measure of page quality.

But wait!  How do you add people converted to revenue?

That’s the topic for tomorrow as we discuss how to value a constituent.

Web metric basics

Email metric basics

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Every field does its best to be impenetrable to outsiders and the world of online testing is no different.  We measure KPIs instead of “important things.” The differences among CPA, CPC, CPM, CPR, CTA, CTR, and CTOR are all important (for example, one of these can save your life, but isn’t an online metric) and there are TLAs* that I haven’t even talked about.

So this week I want to look at measuring online successes (and not-yet-successes), but first, we need to get our terms straight so we know what we are trying to impact, starting with email metrics.

For me, this is easiest picturing the steps that would go from email to action.  An email is:

  • Sent
  • Delivered
  • Opened
  • Clicked upon (or unsubscribed from)
  • Responsible for a completed action

Almost all of the other important metrics are ratios of the number of people who did this (or the number of unique people who did this — unique meaning the number of people who did something, not the number of total times something was done.  For example, 1000 people clicking on a link once and one person clicking on a link 1000 times will have the same click-through rate, but very different unique click-through rates).

The most important of these ratios are:

Delivery rate: emails delivered divided by emails sent.  This is inexact, as different email providers provide different levels of data back to you as to whether an email was a hard bounce (email permanently not delivered) or soft bounce (temporary deliver issues like full email box or email message too large).  But as long as you are using the same email program to send your emails, you will have consistent baselines and be able to assess whether it’s getting better or worse.

Open rate: emails opened divided by emails sent.  There are a couple minor problems with this.  First, opens can’t be calculated on text emails.  That is, only HTML emails have the tracking to determine whether they were opened or not.  Second, some email clients allow people to skim the contents of an email in a preview pane and count it as an open.  Third, some email clients don’t count an open as an open (even if the person interacts with the message) if it is only in a preview pane.  So it’s an inexact science.

However, open rates are still a good, but not perfect, measure for testing the big three things that a person sees before they open a message:

Why isn’t it a perfect measure?  Because it’s hackable.  Let’s say your control subject line is “Here’s how your gift saved a life.”  If you test the subject line “Your gift just won you a Porsche,” it might win on open rate, but you’ve lied to your donor (unless you have an astounding back-end premium program).  That will spike your unsubscribe rate and lower your click-throughs**.

So you probably want to look at this in combination with click-through rates (CTR).  This is another one of those metric pairs that prevent you from cheating the system that I love so much.  Click-through rate is number of people who clicked (assuming you are using unique click-through rate) by divided by emails sent.  It’s a good way of measuring how well your content gets people to (start to) take action.

Another good way to look at how your email content performs is click-to-open rate (CTOR).  This is number of people who clicked (assuming you are using unique CTOR) by divided by opens.  As you might guess, it fits very nicely with the previous two metrics.  Let’s say two emails both had 1% click-through rates.  One of them might have had a 20% open rate and a 5% click-to-open rate; the other might have had a 5% open rate and a 20% click-to-open rate.  In this case, you’d want to see if you could take the subject, sender, and pre-header of email #1 and combined it with the body copy of email #2.

You also need to look at unsubscribe rate (number of unsubscribes divided by number of emails sent), but not as much as many would think. If it starts going too high, you may want to worry about how you are acquiring your subscribers; likewise, it’s good to compare unsubscribe rates across types of constituents (that is, do your advocacy supporters unsubscribe faster than your white paper downloaders?  Perhaps it’s time for more segmentation and better advocacy content).  But don’t let it drive the boat.

Finally, you want to look at conversion rate: those who took the action divided by those who clicked through.  While not strictly an email metric, I include it here because a person could try the same underhanded tactic with the Porsche to boost click-through rates (to bait and switch the clicker) and because it’s so vital to be measuring and optimizing against.

But that’s another post.

If you want to benchmark your metrics, I strongly recommend M+R’s benchmarks study here.  And please sign up for my free newsletter here.  We have strong metrics (40% open rates and 8% click-throughs) so others are (hopefully) finding it to be useful nonprofit direct marketing content.
* Three-letter acronyms

** Also, it’s wrong.  Don’t do it.

Email metric basics

An ode to the mostly filled thermometer

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

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

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

fundraising-thermometer-template

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks to Tim Vandevall here for the thermometer image.

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An ode to the mostly filled thermometer

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

Let’s get small: microseconds

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You haven’t got long.

We’re on to the next email, text, phone call, app.

Literally milliseconds.

What you have to do:

Make the first online images count. People know what they think of a site faster than they blink.  That impression carries over.  It impacts content, action, and donation.

Make the first words count.  Average reading speed is about 140 WPM.  Average subject line is about 7 words? (makes math easy)  Ergo, subject line = 3 seconds.  That is, if you are reading and not skimming.  You are skimming.  So’s your audience.  Be sure to use pre-headers as well.  I’ll talk about those next week.  Subscribe here to get an email when it’s up.

Evoke emotion.  Emotion hits the brain 3000X faster than rational thought.  Reason hasn’t got a chance to set the hook.

Load quickly on mobile.  Only 11% of people expect content to be much slower on their phones.   One additional second = 7% decrease in conversions.  One. Bleedin’.  Second.

Send those thank you’s quickly.  Thank you speed is among the best predictors of retention.  Long-term and short-term.

Don’t wait for your mail testing.  Test to your mail audience online.  Facebook and Google ads = messaging tests.  Subject lines = teaser copy.  It’s not entirely representative.  But it will predict disasters well.

Make the ask.  The act should be in the first three paragraphs of the letter.  They need to know why you are writing.

Flood the zone.  They pitched your letter?  Even after you did outbound voice mail to let them know it’s coming?  You’ll get them in the email.  

Didn’t open the email?  We resend those to people who don’t open.

Still didn’t?  We have ads that follow them around the Web.  Then we’ll call; can’t escape just by going offline.

Multichannel is the way to get in the impressions.  Impressions are the way to get a message through.  Message is the way to get the donation.

Spend time where it counts.  Some donors actually want to read a 12-page letter.  But only if it’s written well.  Not Shakespeare well.  Not James Joyce well.  Da Vinci Code well.  Tom Clancy well.  The kind of letter that forces you to read to find out what’s next .

Sign up for my newsletter.  I won’t waste your time.  Promise.

Let’s get small: microseconds

Let’s get small: micromoments

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41sazggrh3l
This week, I’m going to talk about microthings with macroimpacts.

As so many good things of this world, this inspiration came from Angie Moore of Eleventy Marketing.  Her NonProfit Pro piece, which I recommend heartily, talks about Google’s discussion of how we live our lives in micromoments.  Their Think With Google piece talks about how with mobile devices, we are constantly acting on our needs at and in the moment.

I found this rung true for me.  When was the last time you wondered who that actress is and what you knew her from*?  When that happened, were you content to just not know?

No.  Not knowing is so ’90s.

So are not comparison shopping, not buying, not getting what you buy for weeks, not hearing about your donation, not being able to reach the person you want to reach.

And these micromoments come and go so quickly.  I remember vividly Googling how to give CPR to a dog.  I had never needed that information before and hope never to again.  In that moment, however, that question was my world.

As Google says, “Our preferences and purchases are shaped in these micro-moments. Ultimately, the brands that do the best job of addressing our needs in each moment will win.”  We are the sum of these moments individuals and we are the sum of these moments to those we wish to reach for donations and support.

 

Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
— T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.

 

So I’m going to try to cover this without covering what Angie did, which is excellent, by focusing on intent.

One of the things that Google talks about is how intent eats demographics for dinner.  You might think, for example, that the people searching for video games are 18-34-year-old males.  Only 31% of them are.  So by targeting people who are looking for video game content, rather than a demographic segment, you can get the people that advertising on Spike won’t get you.

The same is true for the nonprofit world, except that the need that people have is rarely to donate.  At best, they may have a need to make a difference, but more often, they want to learn more about something or verify something they’ve heard or take action on an issue they’ve heard about right-flippin’-now.

So, as we’ve preached, you need to be consistently creating content and doing so for the things that people care about.

But more than that, it needs to convert.  Once someone has fulfilled their desire to learn, verify, do, etc., and only then, you can make the turn to make an ask.  This ask needs to be quick and it needs to be tied directly to what they just did.  If it was emailing their congressperson about global warming, the confirmation page should thank them for taking action and ask for a donation to help the nonprofit advocate more effectively to stem the tide of global warming.

In the micromoment world, you don’t get this chance again, so you need to be there, fulfill the desire, and tie the ask to the desire.

Tomorrow, we’ll talk about microbudgets — how do you act when the amount allocated for your budget is $0.

 

* If you are like me, the answer is probably a Jerry-Orbach-era Law and Order episode.

Let’s get small: micromoments

Learning from political fundraising: the eyes have it

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This week, we’ll look at some of the lessons we in the nonprofit world can learn from those in the political world.

Wait!  Don’t leave!

I know I said that I would be counterprogramming to the blogs that turn out 7 Vital Marketing Lessons from This Year’s Oscar Winners topical content.  But:

  1. There are actually lessons that we can take from the political realm.  If you haven’t read The Victory Lab or Rick Perry and His Eggheads, I strongly recommend them as valuable insights into another industry that relies on donations for its livelihood.
  2. Political fundraising has to be crazy fast and efficient.  Imagine if in November, your nonprofit was going to either win or lose: accomplish all of your goals or cease to exist.  When the stakes are that high, there are distilled lessons that we can benefit from.
  3. It’s only going to get worse and I can’t stomach putting this topic off until December.

So how about this: I will not mention the current (as of this writing) Republican frontrunner despite the potential clickbait. Instead, I’ll try for a nonpartisan look at some items that may be helpful for we nonprofits.

The first one is relatively brief.  In looking at campaign Web sites, take a look at what the candidates’ eyes are doing.  Here’s Hillary Clinton’s Web site — an older version:

hillary-clinton-2016-campaign-website-600

 

And here’s Bernie Sanders.

berniesmall

What do you notice in common?

The eyes of the candidate are looking at what they want you look at.  This isn’t true in all or even most candidates’ cases: many of them are looking right at the camera or staring off into the future.

But those are missed opportunities.  Studies show that humans automatically look a few discrete places: where arrows or people point* and where other people’s eyes are looking (one such study is here )

Kissmetrics shows a great heat map of where people look when a photo is looking at the camera. 

7-baby-face

Because the baby is looking at the user, users get locked up in the baby’s eyes with no indication of where they should next look.

Now, take a look where people look when the baby is looking at the text:

8-baby-face-eye-tracking

Here’s another good example from QuickSprout.  Looking at the camera:

sunsilk-uncued

And looking toward the product:

sunsilk-cued
So, when Hillary or Bernie are looking at where you put in your email address, guess what the next action is they want you do to.

Now, take a look at your home page.  Where are your pictures looking?  And where do you want people to look?

 

* Where arrows point: what, you thought this from Clinton’s site is a coincidence?

arrows

Learning from political fundraising: the eyes have it

Converting advocates to donors

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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

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.

If you would like more tips like this one, please sign up for our weekly newsletter. There you will get to pick new topics for the blog, see related content to what you get on Direct to Donor, and get a TL;DR version of the week’s news.  Thanks!

Acquiring new advocates in (and for) direct marketing