acknowledgment

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

Influence in direct marketing: liking at work

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you-like-meHat tip to The Interview Guys for the image

Liking sounds like it is exclusively the property of face-to-face asks, where you work to be liked so as to directly solicit a gift.  There’s a reason that we direct marketers stay behind a desk while our glad-handling extrovert brethren ask for major gifts. (In my case, it’s introversion, a love of numbers, and a face most suitable for print.)

Did that self-deprecating humor make you like me more?  Good!  Then we can continue with the post.  (Also probably for the best that you think it is self-deprecating; there’s a reason this blog has no picture of me.)

There are three major areas in which the psychology of liking can give us a significant advantage, even when we aren’t physically with a person.

The first is in persona.  Not the hip marketing term where you put a name, face, and demographic/psychographic profile of your constituents, also that’s a bit of the idea.  Rather, it’s who the virtual faces to your brands are in your various communications.

In The Audacity to Win, David Plouffe talked about their digital strategy for fundraising and who quality signers were for various content:

To keep things fresh, we varied the length and tone of the messages–some were long and informative, others quite short and informal. Perhaps most important, we learned that people responded very well to e-mails from Michelle Obama and that we needed to use Barack somewhat sparingly–when he signed an e-mail it always produced by far the biggest response, but we did not want this to become a stale event. So many of the e-mails came from me, though when we needed a big response to an ask–for money, volunteer time, or to watch an event–we made sure the e-mails came from the Obamas.

To me, this speaks to a compartmentalization of voice: Barack Obama was the primary persona in the campaign, used for speeches, policy positions, debates, etc. etc.  Because he was everywhere and in every media, a communication needed to feel special.  However, Michelle Obama did not present in the same way.  A communication from her was able to touch different emotions, make different points, and, frankly, be liked in a way that you can’t like a person that you agree with even 90% of the time, because that 10% will always be in the way.

So who are the different voices in your organization and how do you use them?  I would recommend an inventory of people and uses.  For some, a victim/survivor is one certain type of voice.  A head of policy or government affairs can be the attack dog that your advocacy supporters and donors want to hear from.  A development staff member or volunteer can be used for institutional appeals – renewals of membership or reminders to fulfill pledges – so that your passionate voices aren’t drawn into this bureaucracy.  A celebrity can bring in his/her followers to the fold, even if they are loosely affiliated at first.

And so on.  Some even might want to transcend the human – would an animal charity want to have an official spokesdog?  I recommend using a person as a mouthpiece for a specific type of communication to a specific type of person who wants to receive that communication and will like the person who is the messenger. 

Don’t have institutional messages that aren’t from someone.  So many e-newsletters fall into this  trap.  They are from the National Conglomeration for the Amelioration of Sesquipedalianism, when they could be from Rachael.  I don’t know Rachael, but because she’s a human, people will generally like her more than the monolithic NCAS.

The second is in being liked by liking.  As with consistency, praise for past actions will get you everywhere.  People generally like people who like them.  Similarly, flattering works and since I mentioned that yesterday, here’s another study that shows this, lest I not be giving you sufficient value.

The third major impact of liking is that people are more likely to like people like them.  I’ve seen a 30%+ increase in response rate to a communication when people were told that the story they were hearing happened in their own state – and that includes states like California or Texas, where the case may not have even been within a full day’s drive.

Similarly, people reaction better to communications from, and about, people of similar age, background, religious persuasion, racial or ethnic breakdown, educational background, and so on and so on.  This is not to say that you should go out and create “the Hispanic mail package.”  In fact, please don’t.  But customization can help you talk about how the problem you are trying to solve affects the people like the person you are talking to.

These rich details given a good picture of a person and the more someone can picture a person, the more they like and empathize with that person.

So these help your communications make your voices, and you, more liked and bring in donations.  After Christmas, we’ll talk a bit about authority in influence.

Influence in direct marketing: liking at work

Influence in direct marketing: commitment and consistency

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Just like people tend to do what other people do, people also tend to do what they themselves have done in the past.

Emerson said famously that “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.”  Of course, that’s probably what he always said.

Our mind is wired to think we were right more often than we actually were.  Moreover, we have cognitive dissonance as a tool to help us justify these feelings.  So if we are right all the time, then why wouldn’t we keep doing what we are doing?

This is especially true for older supporters.  A study called “Evidence of a Positive Relationship between Age and Preference for Consistency” (with Cialdini as a co-author – he shows up a lot of different places) found that as we get older, we tend to want to have consistent thoughts, people in our lives, and patterns.  Since a large portion of most nonprofit direct marketing audiences skew older, this is particularly salient for us.

There are four key ways that consistency can work well for you in your direct marketing efforts:

  1. Getting your foot in the door. A small act toward your cause can cause a person to believe that they are the type of person who supports your cause.  This can be an email to their legislator putting up a sign of support, or downloading your materials.  Any small step can be referenced in asks for further, difference, and more valuable asks.  One of the executives I’ve had the honor of working with and for says “if you want to get money, ask for advice; if you want to get advice, ask for money.”There is a concern among some that so-called slactivism – taking on issues online by the least time-consuming means possible hurts “real” efforts.  I would argue that not only have well-run online campaigns changed hearts, minds, and/or votes, but also that these campaigns lend themselves to commitment-based follow-ups with language like “you’ve stood with us before; will you stand with us again” that uses commitment tactics.
  2. Flattery.  This should be easy, in that your donors and supporters are the people who make your valuable mission possible.  Telling them that, however, is not done often enough.  There was a recent quality study that looked at how recalling good deeds affected giving.  They found that when the study subjects primed themselves by recalling their past good deeds and perceive themselves as strongly moral people, they gave twice as many charitable donations as participants who recalled bad deeds.
  3. Playing back consistency. This can be as simple as variable copy letting the person know you know how long they have been giving.  After all, if you are told that “for 14 years, you have stood alongside poor suffering discarded stuffed animals,” who can resist a 15th year?
  4. Honoring consistency. Sending a communication on the anniversary of someone’s initiation with an organization not only gives them a nice feeling, it also reinforces that they are the type of person who gives to organizations like you.  Similarly, published donor rolls are both a great recognition tool and an advertisement on behalf of that’s person’s donation to you.

You should not rest exclusively on consistency’s laurels – expecting someone to give to you just because they have always given is a fool’s errand.  However, you probably noticed that many of the above techniques mix the reminder of the consistency with a reminder of the impact that someone is having or how good it feels to give.  That’s a good way to mix consistency with liking, which is what we’ll talk about tomorrow.

Influence in direct marketing: commitment and consistency

Influence in direct marketing: reciprocity at work

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As direct marketers, we gradually become experts in why and how our donors give.  But sometimes, we can get into the weeds of control communications (“this matching gift appeal works; let’s send it again”) and forget the mechanisms by which communications work.  At least I’ve done this; your mileage may vary.

So, I’ve found it to be helpful to delve back into first principles periodically.  One of my favorite resources for this is Robert Cialdini’s Influence.  As an insight into why people do what they do, there are few better (although David McRaney’s You Are Not So Smart and You Are Now Less Dumb are great looks into cognitive biases that are a fun read and thus I will get to in other posts).

For the TL: DR version of this book, there’s an HBR summary of it here .  Cialdini articulates six principles of influence that are both core and common across cultures:

  • Reciprocity
  • Authority
  • Social proof
  • Consistency
  • Liking
  • Scarcity

Think of each of these as a way to make yourself more persuasive and have more influence that you can incorporate into your causes’ way of talking with your constituents.

I’ll take each of these in turn to give my thoughts on how these levers can be used in old and new ways.  And, since there are six of them, I’m going to use this as an opportunity to test writing on the weekends.  So for those avid followers of this blog (thanks, mom and dad!), I’ll be skipping Christmas and writing on Saturday and Sunday this week.  We’ll see how it goes.

I’ll start with reciprocity – the idea that doing something for someone makes them more likely to do something for you.  I’m starting here because this was the first one I encountered in spades in my first nonprofit direct marketing program.  In fact, it’s what many people think of when they think of direct marketing solicitations: premiums.  Whether it’s a front-end premium of labels, calendars, address books, pins, or whatever tchotchkes we can figure out how to flatpack in an envelope, or the back-end premiums exemplified by the donate-to-PBS-get-a-totebag model, these have become ubiquitous.

This is because they work; the principle of reciprocity is such that if we are given a gift, we feel obliged to respond in kind.  Add a well-thought out premium to an acquisition package and you will likely see a jump in your response rate.  In fact, this jump will be highly correlated with the perceived value of that premium.  While there are a thousand studies of this hidden behind all of our nonprofits’ firewalls, there’s a good published one here.  It shows a 17% increase in giving when a person is given a small gift and a 75% increase when they are given a large one.

There are cautionary notes to strike, however.  A program build on premiums – back or front – can become a one-note piano.  Ideally, you have a broad mix of communication types and influence levers with your constituents.  Some of the people you will acquire from premiums will be responsive only to those premiums and value your organization only for the things they get from you.  This can preclude effective upgrade and bridging strategies.  Additionally, the donors you get from these efforts can be attracted to other organizations by other premiums (or the same premium as you send).  As a result, they may become prolific tippers of nonprofits.

As a result, a program build on premiums and premiums alone will tend to have lower average gifts, lower retention rates, and a great challenge trying to kick the addiction they and their donors have to these gifts.  This is by no means to say premiums have no place in a nonprofit program, but that it’s best of they are one of the many things you do to attract and retain donors, rather than the sole one.

Cialdini says it well in his HBR article: “Ultimately, though, gift giving is one of the cruder applications of the rule of reciprocity.”

There are higher value forms of reciprocity to be had in your direct marketing program, beyond the labels and the notepads.  The first is that value does not have to be measured monetarily.  As I’ll talk about in the post on scarcity, exclusive information can be something of great perceived value that a person would want to reciprocate (a note here that these forms of influence almost always work better together than alone).  Similarly, a paper clip on a mail piece is an interesting signifier that human hands have touched the mail piece.  This human touch means that a mere machine didn’t just pre-digest this mail piece and spew it out to you; this signifier can be something that helps bring people to you.

It’s also important to look at reciprocity from the donors’ perspectives.  Sometimes you will get gifts that are a perceived payback from a donor, whether they were directly touched by your services or indirectly.  One key point here is to try to capture what a person’s connection is to your cause and customize to this.  It’s important that the principle of reciprocity says that this is something that something people want to do; the need to have our ledgers square is hardwired into us.  You can help these folks given back in the way they want to and thank them for it.

Thank you’s are also an important part of reciprocity.  Research shows that people give to causes not because they expect anything concrete in return.  Rather, they build up two expectations over time.  One is recognition for their gift, whether publicly or not.  This is a reciprocity that the donor will expect of you.  The other is performance – that you will use their donation to make the impact they would like to make.  If either of these comes as a surprise, please read my post on why we thank everyone for their gift.

We started with premiums and that’s the primary reciprocity lever at work in most nonprofits.  But it’s important to remember that just as we give gifts to people in the hopes they will reciprocate, they also expect that we will reciprocate when they give us a gift.

Influence in direct marketing: reciprocity at work

A direct marketing bridge to… monthly giving

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I had the pleasure of hearing a speaker from Greenpeace talk about how you should never ask for a one-time gift.  In fact, he went so far as to say that you should turn down the one-time gift if offered because it is the wrong response.

I loved this talk, but I will freely admit that I lack the intestinal fortitude and the spinal integrity (guts and backbone) to try this approach.  Monthly giving is certainly more and more popular and more accepted in the United States, both with credit cards and with EFTs.  Electronic banking has helped with this; hacking scandals hurt, as you force everyone who shopped at Target (a purely hypothetical example) to change their credit card on your site.

 

2000px-target_logo-svg

I can’t imagine why hackers would aim for this company…

But it still seems like we have at least one technological generation of people to go before every gift will be a monthly gift (Greenpeace, with a substantially younger supporter base than the average nonprofit, may already be there).

So I will confess that this is the wimp’s guide to getting into monthly giving.

First, as with planned giving yesterday, plan out your systems.  Part of this is the giving society you have for monthly giving (and benefit levels, if you choose to have them or incorporate a membership concept).  But the major part is managing exceptions.

You want to have a plan when credit cards are declined to try them again, potentially twice.  Then, you want to have a plan to reach out to that donor to attempt to obtain their new credit card information and a continued gift (telemarketing and email, not in that order, are preferred for speed).  Failing all attempts to get them into a monthly cycle again, you want to restart the appeal process, ideally to rejoin the monthly giving society.

The best way to do this is to charge all of your credit cards on one day a month.  Which is another way of saying “don’t use Luminate CRM for your monthly gifts.”  I had the pleasure of meeting with my then Convio, now Blackbaud, rep about one time per year and every time I would ask them to create the ability to charge all on one day so you can automate the recapture process and coordinate it with offline monthly donors.  They would look at me with the same expression that a Labrador retriever would use to regard the space shuttle and say they had never heard of something so absurd and no one else in history would ask for such a thing.

While just meant that I talked to more of their customers than they did because most people I talked to bemoaned the lack of single day processing.

So you want an online and an offline system for processing your cards and EFTs in place and a system for following up on declines.

Now, as for getting monthly donations, you should definitely have monthly giving incorporated into your online strategy and as much a focus of your donation forms as you can without giving away net.  You should also have it mentioned in direct mail pieces, especially in acknowledgment follow-ups (a good opportunity for a buckslip for the people who aren’t getting the planned giving one) and donor newsletters.

But telemarketing is the best means I have seen of getting a bulk audience of monthly giving donors.  Modeling your donors helps immensely. Your donors who already use online banking, who are receptive to telemarketing, and/or who do frequent online ordering are going to be good targets for this. Also, your telemarketing vendor should have a history of who paid by credit card in the past.  I’m not saying the people who send checks in for a pledge will be entirely useless for monthly giving, but I will say they will be mostly useless (for this; they are lovely people who are doing great work through great causes).

Since I’ve been critical of Blackbaud above with my Luminate ravings, I will say that I’ve had good experience with the Target Analytics Group’s telemarketing receptivity index.  I’ve found that it does a good job of separating out among people who haven’t given by telemarketing to find who is most likely to (that said, everyone who had given a gift in telemarketing before outpaces everyone who hasn’t in terms of calling).

One weird data anomaly – when I did sustainer calling, the best performing group were the people who had given through telemarketing to us, but rated low on the TAG telemarketing index.  We hypothesize that these were our special little snowflakes who we knew gave through the phone, but no-one else did.

Use a follow-up ask in traditional telemarketing. While you can and possibly should do telemarketing strictly for monthly givers, you can work with your callers to ask for a monthly gift after they have the credit card information from a donor.  The script would go something like “Thank you, Mr. Hinx, for your donation of $40 today.  Before I process that, would you like to be part of our [name of monthly giving society]?  It’s for especially loyal donors who make a gift each month on your credit card that you can cancel at any time.  I could set you up for a donation of $10 a month instead of your $40 donation today?”

The divide by 3-5 to get the monthly gift is a pretty good rule of thumb.  Before I had a lot of online giving experience, I took our average offline gift, which was about $28 at the time, divided it by 12 to get $2, then set up an ask string of $2, $4, and $8 for a monthly gift.  The average monthly donation on that form was almost $10 – the first and only time I’ve had the average gift be higher than anything on the ask string.  So learn from my idiocy.

In fact, if I had to rename this blog today, I could do far worse than LearnFromMyIdiocy.com.  It is available, but at some point, I’m going to have to blog about how rebranding is almost never the answer to a fundraising question, so Direct to Donor it is.

Thank you for reading once again.  Please let me know what you’d like me to cover next at nick@directtodonor.com or in the comments below!

A direct marketing bridge to… monthly giving

Breaking down your thank you silos

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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

Thank you to the bloggers who showed me how it’s done

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I’m absolutely forgetting people, but here are some of the ones to thank:

Have a happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Thank you to the bloggers who showed me how it’s done

There must be 50 ways to thank your donors

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  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

5 simple rules of thanking donors

nickellinger, , , , , 2 Comments

Your acknowledgment/thank you’s should be:

For everyone.  E-very-one.  I once worked with a nonprofit that thanked everyone who gave $250+ on letterhead, $10-249 on copy paper, and under $10 not at all.  My first step was to thank everyone.  I know that the love discussion from yesterday can come under pressure when finances are tight.  But as an exercise, go back and look at the first donors of your last ten large bequests.  My guess is that the majority were under $20 and some under $10.  Thanking everyone is not only right and polite; it is a great investment in your long term.

That doesn’t mean that you have to ask for a $2 gift again, or in the same way.  You still have a responsibility to maximize your contribution toward your cause. But you do have to be grateful that they gave a gift.

mayathanks2

That doesn’t all mean that you shouldn’t differentiate your thank you’s.

Differentiated by reason for giving. Part of making people feel special is to treat them specially.*

Your different types of donors are supporting different types of things for different reasons.  Your monthly sustaining donors are giving, presumably, because of appeals you have make about the need for steady, predictable income.  Your advocacy donors – those who donated in conjunction with an urgent appeal for change – are going to be the exact opposite.  They will be looking to support the urgent rather than the constant need.  Thus, the messaging should be dissimilar for these.

Differentiated by lifecycle.  If someone is a lapsed donor who is reactivating, remember the prodigal son.  Now is the time to kill the metaphorical fatted calf and welcome them back and letting them know you appreciate that they are coming back, especially if you had been using lapsed-type “why has thou forsaken us?” language to get them back.

Similarly, new donors should have a whole new set of acknowledgment and onboarding messages.  I won’t repeat my blog post on onboarding for new donors and supporters, except to commend that piece to you.

Differentiated by amount given/quality of supporter.  This in part pragmatic – you want to invest more in keeping your better donors.  But it is oft said that smaller gifts are given from the heart and major gifts are given from the brain.  This is partly misleading, in that you have to engage the heart of your major donors first, but the pitch that you make to a major donor is more about the long-term impact that they are going to make with their investment.  Similar language just isn’t appropriate for a $10 donor, who is helping your mission, but not because of a transformative legacy they are looking to leave.  There too is a difference in messaging necessitated by a difference in reasoning.

And then there’s the obvious part – your largest donors should have higher touch acknowledgments.  That includes handwritten notes, personal phone calls, cards for special occasions like birthdays or holidays.  The key that many, many organizations forget is not to let high touch get in the way of a timely thank you.  If you normally send out thank you letters every day, but your high dollar donors get a letter from your ED that s/he sends out every 1-2 weeks, you are falling into this trap.  You are essentially differentiating backwards – your best donors are receiving the worst donor service.

The way to avoid this is to get the standard receipt and thank you immediately as you normally would do, then to follow up with your high-touch thank yous.  Few will mind if you say “I know you got our standard thank you last week, but I wanted to personally reach out to tell you how much your gift meant to me.”  Rather the opposite in most case.

This is imperative because one of the best predictors of whether someone will give again is how quickly and well they are thanked.  So, the final rule is:

Timely.  Get your receipts out as soon as you can, because of the impact on the next gift.  If it’s for a high-dollar donor, consider differentiating even on timeliness, with first-class postage on those thank yous.  Take a look at Blackbaud’s mystery shopper experience here.  Your donors are used to get receipts in week one (for the above average) or week two (for the just average).  You want to be above average to get those additional donations.

Thank you for reading.  Tomorrow, we’ll talk about different ways to thank your donors: some that are a bit nonstandard, all of which help express your gratitude.

* It’s statements like that that are the reason I make the big bucks.

5 simple rules of thanking donors

Why say thank you?

nickellinger, Leave a comment

Since this is the week of Thanksgiving here in the United States, I thought it would be fitting to do a week on thanking donors for their support.

Also, since I’m nothing if not data-driven, I didn’t call this blog post “Wherefore thank yous” because my previous attempt to go Shakespeare – Wherefore segmentation –  was one of my least trafficked posts so far.  So I’m going to have to get my fix some other way.

shakespearethanks

So, why do we say thank you to our donors and supporters?

If you just said because there is a legal requirement to do so know that I am virtually very disappointed in you.

As nonprofit marketers, love is our business.  Our goal is to have people who fall in love with our causes, who are interested to read our next mail piece or email, watch our next video, or take our next advocacy action.  For these people, the people who love us, donating is a pleasurable experience, connecting them to something they care about.

You may remember upwards of two things* from your freshman year Econ class:

  1. Something about supply and demand
  2. Individuals act to maximize their individual utility rationally.

Donating to a nonprofit does not fit the second one.  If we were logical, coldly rational beings, we wouldn’t donate to charity any more than we would appreciate a sunset, cry with our friends for their losses, and know that our children are the cutest of all possible children**.

Thank goodness people aren’t like this.  Thank goodness we give to those we don’t know, care for people we’ll never meet, and plant trees who will give shade to someone else’s grandkids.

As I write this, well in advance of its publication, Americans are caring about the people of a nation that many were so mad at a while back that they renamed potato side dishes to avoid using that country’s name.  Here you see both sides of the coin – the maddening demons in human nature exploding violently on to the innocent versus the millions better angels of our natures working together to heal, repair, and care.

My point, and I do have one, is that giving is an irrational act in the absolutely best possible meaning of the word irrational.  People love our causes.  In return, it is vital that we love them back.  Saying thank you is part of the social contract of giving and even if it were not, we would still do it because we are as good or aspire to be as good as those who are giving of themselves to our causes.

So was a little bit more flowery than I had intended.  Let me assure you, tomorrow, we’re going to get back to how acknowledgments can help us raise net revenues again.  Because make no mistake, a quality acknowledgment program can and should net additional money in the long term.  Just because it is the right thing to do doesn’t mean it will require sacrifice.

* I hate to brag, but I was an Econ minor, so I remember a third thing: “Something about inflation.”

** Clearly, this is wrong, because mine are and everyone else’s are competing for second.

Why say thank you?