Donor intelligence

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

Getting donor intelligence by asking your donors

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Yesterday, I said you can get a good idea of who your donor is through their actions.  The trick here is that you will never find donor motivations for which you aren’t already testing.  This is for the same reason that you can’t determine where to build a bridge by sitting at the river and looking for where the cars drive in trying to float across it, Oregon-Trail-style.

10-trail_208

Damn it, Oregon Trail.  The Native American guide told me to try to float it.
Don’t suppose that was his minor revenge for all that land taking and genocide?

To locate a bridge, you have to ask people to imagine where they would drive across a bridge, if there were a bridge.  This gives you good news and bad news: good news, you can get information you can’t get from observation; bad news, you get what people think they would do, rather than what they actually will do.

True story: I once asked people what they would do if they received this particular messaging in an unsolicited mail piece.  Forty-two percent said they would donate.  My conclusion — about 40% of the American public are liars — may have been a bit harsh.  What I didn’t know then but know now is that people are often spectacularly bad at predicting their own behavior, myself included.  (“I will only eat one piece of Halloween candy, even though I have a big bucket of it just sitting here.”)

There is, of course, a term for this (hedonic forecasting) and named biases in it (e.g., impact bias, empathy gap, Lombardi sweep, etc.).  But it’s important to highlight here that listening to what people think they think alone is perilous.  If you do it, you can launch the nonprofit equivalent of the next New Coke.

“The mind knows not what the tongue wants. […] If I asked all of you, for example, in this room, what you want in a coffee, you know what you’d say? Every one of you would say ‘I want a dark, rich, hearty roast.’ It’s what people always say when you ask them what they want in a coffee. What do you like? Dark, rich, hearty roast! What percentage of you actually like a dark, rich, hearty roast? According to Howard, somewhere between 25 and 27 percent of you. Most of you like milky, weak coffee. But you will never, ever say to someone who asks you what you want – that ‘I want a milky, weak coffee.’”  — Malcolm Gladwell

With those cautions in mind, let’s look at what survey and survey instruments are good for and not good for.

First, as mentioned, surveys are good for finding what people think they think.  They are not good for finding what people will do.  If you doubt this, check out Which Test Won, which shows two versions of a Web page.  Try to pick out which version of a Web page performed better.  I venture to say that anyone getting over 2/3rds of these right has been unplugged and now can see the code of the Matrix.  There is an easier and better way to find out what people will do, which is to test; surveys can give you the why.

Surveys are good for determining preferences.  They are not good for explaining those preferences.  There’s a classic study on this using strawberry jam.  When people were asked what their preferences were for jam, their rankings paralleled Consumer Reports’ rankings fairly closely.  When people were asked why they liked various jams and jellies, their preferences diverged from these expert opinions significantly.  The authors write:

“No evidence was found for the possibility that analyzing reasons moderated subjects’ judgments. Instead it changed people’s minds about how they felt, presumably because certain aspects of the jams that were not central to their initial evaluations were weighted more heavily (e.g., their chunkiness or tartness).”

This is not to say that you shouldn’t ask the question of why; it does mean you need to ask the question of why later and in a systematic way to avoid biasing your sample.

Surveys are good for both individual preferences and group preferences.  If you have individual survey data on preferences, you absolutely should append these data to your file and make sure you are customizing your reasons to give to the individual’s reason why s/he gives.  They also can tease out segments of donors you may not have known existed (and where you should build your next bridge.

Surveys are good for assessing experiences with your organization and bad for determining complex reasons for things.  If you have 18 minutes, I’d strongly recommend this video about how Operation Smile was able to increase retention by finding out what donors’ experiences were with them and which ones were important.  Well worth a watch.

If you do want it, you’ll see that they look at granular experiences rather than broad questions.  These are things like “Why did you lapse” or “are we mailing too much?”   These broad questions are too cognitively challenging and encompassing too many things.  For example, you rarely hear from a donor to send fewer personalized handwritten notes, because those are opened and sometimes treasured.  What the answer to a frequency question almost always leads to is an answer to the quality, rather than quantity, of solicitation.

Surveys are good when they are well crafted and bad when they are poorly crafted.  I know this sounds obvious, but there are crimes against surveys committed every day.  I recently took a survey of employee engagement that was trying to assess whether our voice was heard in an organization.  The question was phrased something like “How likely do you think it is that your survey will lead to change?”

This is what I’d call a hidden two-tail question.  A person could answer no because they are completely checked out at work and fatalistic about management.  Or a person could answer no, because they were delighted to be working there, loved their job, and wanted nothing to change.

Survey design is a science, not an art.  If you have not been trained in it, either get someone who is trained in it to help you, or learn how to do it yourself.  If you are interested in the latter, Coursera has a free online course on questionnaire design here that helped me review my own training (it is more focused on social survey design, but the concepts work similarly).

You’ll notice I haven’t mentioned focus groups.  Focus groups are good for… well, I’m not actually sure what focus groups are good for.  They layer all of the individual biases of group members together, stir them with group dynamic biases like groupthink, unwillingness to express opinions contrary to the group, and the desire to be liked, season them with observer biases and the inherent human nature to guide discussions toward preconceived notions, then serve.

Notice there was no cooking in the instructions.  This is because I’ve yet to see a focus group that is more than half-baked. (rim shot)

My advice if you are considering a focus group: take half of the money you were going to spend on the focus group, set it on fire, inhale the smoke, and write down the “insights” you had while inhaling the money smoke.  You will have the same level of validity in your results for half the costs.

Also, perhaps more helpful, take the time that you would have spent talking to people in a group and talk to them individually.  You won’t get any interference from outside people on their opinions, introverts will open up a bit more in a more comfortable setting and (who knows) they may even like you better at the end of it.  Or if you hire me as a consultant, I do these great things with entrails and the bumps on donors’ heads.

So which do you want to use: surveys or behavior?  Both. Surveys can sometimes come up with ideas that work in theory, but not in practice, as people have ideas of what they might do that aren’t true.  Behavior can show you how things work in practice, but it can be difficult to divine deep insights that generalize to other packages and communications and strategies.  They are the warp and weft of donor insights.

Getting donor intelligence by asking your donors

And you shall know your constituents by their deeds

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There are two ways to know your constituents better: listening to what they do and asking them what they think. Today, I’ll talk about the former; tomorrow, the latter.

Yesterday’s piece talked about how you can roughly define an individual’s responsiveness by medium, message, and action.  The trick is that we often segment by only one, possibly two, of these.  We have medium covered: most large-scale programs of my acquaintance distinguish among people who are mail, telemarketing, online, multichannel, etc. responders.  And many small-scale programs haven’t begun to integrate medium, so in a way this is its own segmentation.

Sometimes, we will use action as a determiner.  We’ll take our online advocates segment and drop it into one of our better-performing donor mail pieces (frequently not customizing the message to advocacy, more’s the pity).

We rarely segment by message, even though picking something that people care about is the most basic precondition of the three.  After all, you may not like telefundraising, but you’d at least listen if it was immediately and urgent about something that you care about.  And it’s much easier to get someone to do something they haven’t done before for a cause they believe in than to get them to do something they’ve done many times if they don’t believe in the message.

The good news is that you have your constituents’ voting records, of a sort.  Consider each donation to a communication a vote for that communication and each non-donation (or, if you can get it from email, non-open or non-clickthrough) as a vote against that communication.

[tangent] This is also a helpful technique for when your executive director comes into your office and says “I’ve had five calls today from people who aren’t happy about [insert name of communication here].”  If you reframe it as five people voted against it by calling and five thousand people voted for it by donating, the noisy few are not nearly as concerning.[/tangent]

A proper modeler would use the data from these votes to run a Bayesian model to update continually the priors on whether or not someone would respond to a piece.  As you can probably tell, I’m not a proper modeler.  I prefer my models fast, free, and explainable.  So here’s how I’d use this voting data:

  • Take all of your communications over a 3-5 year period and code them by message.  So for our hypothetical wetlands organization from yesterday, this might be education, research, and conservation.  Hopefully, you don’t have too many communications that mix your messages (people donate to causes, not lists), but if you do, either take it by the primary focus or code it to both messages.
  • Determine the mix of your communications.  Let’s say that over five years this wetlands organization did 25 conservation appeals, 15 education appeals, and 10 research appeals.  This makes the mix 50% conservation, 30% education, and 20% research.
  • Take your donor file and pull out only those people who donated an average of at least once per year over that 3-5 year period.  This will ensure you are looking only at those people who have even close to sufficient data to draw conclusions.
  • Take the coding of communications you have and apply it to the pieces to which the person donated.  Generate a response rate for each type of message for each person on your file.
  • Now, study that list.

In studying that list, you are probably going to find some interesting results:

  • There are going to be some people (a minority of your file but likely a healthy segment) that only gave to one type of message.  And you’ll see the pattern immediately.  Someone who gave eight times over five years to education appeals and never to conservation or research appeals is clearly an education donor.  You will look at all of the other communications you sent this person and all of the people like her in the X-issue-only segments and you will weep a little.  But weep not.  You can now save your costs and these people’s irritation in the future by sending them only the communications about their issue area (with the occasional test to see if their preferences have changed).  It’s only a mistake unless you don’t learn from it; if you do learn from it, it’s called testing.
  • You can also probably lump people who gave rarely to other messages in with the X-issue only people.  So if someone gave to nine of the ten research appeals and to only one each of education and conservation, they clearly have a strong research preference.  This is why it’s helpful to look at these data by response rates — you can see where people have ebbs and flows in their support.
  • You will also see people who like two messages, but not a third (or fourth or however many you have; I will warn you to minimize the number of buckets, as you will not have a large enough sample size without).  So if someone gave five times, three to education appeals and two to research appeals, education and research both appeal to this person with a 20% response rate.  However, conservation doesn’t apparently appeal to them, so you can reduce communications in this realm.
  • You’ll also see a contingent of folks who donate to communications in roughly the same proportion that you send them out.  These people can probably be classified as organizational or institutional donors.  It will take far more digging than mere file analysis to figure out what makes this donor tick.

This leads into an important point: these will not get you to why.  Even things like how often a person gives for how long or Target Analytics Group’s Loyalty Insights, which can show if the person is giving uniquely to you or to others, are transactional data.  While useful proxies, they can’t tell you the depth of feeling that someone has for an organization or let you know what ties bind them to you.  To do that, you must ask.  That’s what I’ll cover tomorrow.  But hopefully this gets a little closer to information that will help you customize your donor’s experiences.

 

And you shall know your constituents by their deeds

Learn about your donors by changing one thing

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Congratulations!  A constituent joined your organization!  Now what?  

Welcome series!  Then what?

Well, of course, you drop them into the communication channel of their origin right?

As our Direct Marketing Master Yoda* would say:

6a90683cc161c525f9fbc01036b2c5b6

No. No. No.  Quicker, easier, more seductive.

But in this case, not ideal.  It’s not ideal for the constituent and it’s not ideal for learning more about what this person actually wants — you may be freezing what this person “is” before you’ve had a chance to find out.

The person has already told you that they are responsive to three things:

  • Medium: If they respond to a mail piece, for example, they do not hate mail pieces. It may not be their only, or even their favorite means of communication, but it is one to which they respond.
  • Message: Your mission probably entails multiple things.  Your goal may be wetlands preservation and you work to accomplish this through education, research, and direct conservation.  If someone downloaded your white paper on the current state of wetlands research and your additional research goals, you know that they are responsive to that research message.  It may not be their only or favorite message, but they respond.
  • Action: If someone donates, they are willing to donate.  If they sign a petition, they are willing to petition.  You can guess the rest of this about them perhaps being willing to do other things.

Other than welcome series, which I’ll talk about at another time, you are trying to sail between the Scylla of sending the same thing over and over again and the Charybdis of bombarding people with different, alien messages, media, and asks.

Thus, I would recommend what I’d call the bowling alley approach in honor of Geoffrey Moore, who advocated for a similar approach to entering new markets in his for-profit entrepreneurial classic Crossing the Chasm. 

The idea in the for-profit world is that you enter with one market with one product.  Once you have a foothold, you try to see that same market a different product and a different market your original product, in the same way that hitting a front bowling pin works to knock down the two behind it.

Here, we play three-dimensional bowling**. The idea behind the non-profit bowling alley, or change one, approach is that you should change only one aspect at a time of your medium, message, and action.

Let’s take our wetlands organization as an example — they work to educate, research, and conserve.  They have people who download white papers and informational packets, people who take advocacy actions, and donors.  And their means of communication are mail, phone, and online.

Let’s further take a person who downloads a white paper on research online and provides her mail and email address.  The usual temptation would be to drop her into the regular email newsletter and into the warm lead acquisition mail stream (and maybe to even do a phone append to call her).

But this would not be the best approach: you would be taking someone who, for all you know, is interested only in one medium, message, and action and asking them for something completely different.

Rather, it would be better if at first you probe other areas of interest.  Ideally, you would ask her:

  • Online for downloading additional information about research (same medium, message, and action)
  • Online for advocacy actions and donations related to research (same medium and message; different action)
  • Online for downloading information about education and conservation (same medium and action; different message)
  • In the mail and on the phone for getting additional information about research (same message and action; different medium)

Obviously, this last part is not practical; mail and phone are too expensive to not have a donation ask involved. However, you could make the mail and phone asks specific to “we need your help to help make our research resources available not just to you, but to policymakers across the country” — tying it as directly as possible to where their known area of interest.

Over time, you should get a strong picture of this person.  Maybe they are willing to do anything for your organization by any means as long as it is focus on your research initiatives.  Maybe they are willing to engage with you about anything, as long as it is only online.  And maybe they like research and conservation, but not education; online and mail, but not phone; and getting information and donating, but not engaging their representatives.

Taking it one step at a time not only helps you learn this over time, but also helps you learn it without culture shock.  If someone downloads a white paper and you ask them to take an advocacy action on that same issue online, they may not be interested, but they likely see the throughline to the action they took.  If they download a white paper and get a phone call for an unrelated action, they likely will not.

It’s the difference between a donor response of “I can see why you’d think that, but no thanks” and “what the hell?” (followed by the constituent equivalent of getting a drink thrown in your face).

It’s also why I recommend going back to the original communication mechanism for lapsed donors in the lapsed donor reactivation post.  In that case, it may be literally the one and only thing you know that works.

You may say that you don’t have the resources to do five different versions of each mail piece or telephone script.  But you can do this inexpensively if you are varying your mail messages throughout the year.  For a warm lead acquisition strategy, simply make sure the advocacy people get the advocacy mail piece and not the others for now.  If you find out some of them are responsive to a mail donation ask, you can ramp up cadence later, but for now, your slower cultivation and learning strategy can pay dividends.

This also helps prevent a common mistake: creating groups like “online advocates,” “white paper downloaders,” etc. and then mailing them without cross-suppression.  If you send each of three groups a monthly mail piece and someone is in all three groups, they may end up getting 36 mail pieces if you don’t cross-suppression (so that these groups are prioritized into like packages instead of everyone in a group getting everything).

Tomorrow, we’ll talk about how to get this type of intelligence from what you’ve already done.

* Don’t believe me?  Check Yoda’s outstanding donor newsletter here. 

** Science fiction always has people playing three-dimensional chess, but not three-dimensional bowling.  Why or why not?  Discuss.

Learn about your donors by changing one thing

Getting to the Truth of one database

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the-one-ring

One Database to rule them all.
One Database to find them.
One Database to bring them all
And in the darkness bind them.*

A beloved former boss of mine once asked the best question I’ve even heard and may ever hear about databases: “Which database is going to be the Truth?”

Others may call this the database of record, but the Truth is far more evocative.  It encompasses “which database will have all of our people?”, “which database will have all of our donations regardless of source?”, and “which database will be the arbiter and tie-breaker for all constituent record issues?”

This is a necessary pre-condition of donor knowledge.  You will not have true knowledge of a constituent of all of your data isn’t all in one place.  And working on donor information without the backend systems to back it up could be a waste of time and effort.

If you are like most nonprofits, you are either laughing or crying at the discussion of one database.  You likely have a few different donor databases by donation type.  Then you have records of people you serve, your email list, your event attendees, and so on.

And, sadly, some of them are necessary.  Some databases do things that other databases will not do.  You may not be able to run your direct mail program out of your online database or vice versa.

So here are some steps you can take to get all of your information in one Truth even if there are multiple databases behind it:

Purge unnecessary databases.  And I mean purge them. Ideally it should be as if your unnecessary database displeased Stalin: it just disappears from history, incorporated into other people’s stories.  To do that:

  • Ask whether another database can do what this database does.  If so, bring the data over and train the relevant parties.  The good news is that often the rogue database in question is just an Excel spreadsheet that can be directly imported into your database of choice.
  • Ask whether another database can do what this database does with modifications.  Rarely is something perfect initially.  You will likely have to create reports for people that they are used to running, but if you are bringing them into a good database, that’s a matter of business rules and set-up, rather than technical fixes.
  • If not, ask if the person can do without what the database can’t do.  You’d be surprised how many things are done because they have been done rather than for any rational reason.

Assuming that you have some databases that can’t be replicated in one big happy database, decide what database is going to be the Truth.  This should have the capacity to store all of your fields, run reports, and do basic data entry.  If you are keeping your direct marketing database, it doesn’t need to be able to run a direct marketing program.  But it does need to have the capacity to do the basic functions.

You may say that you don’t have a database that can fulfill this function.  In that case, I would recommend what I call a Traffic Cop database.  This is a database that you can inexpensively put in the center of multiple databases and get data to and from the other databases.  It’s job is to make sure every database knows what every other database is doing and existing to pull out duplicates and host change management.

Now, sync the databases to the Truth database.  Sometimes you may be fortunate and be using a database that has existing linkages.  For example, if you have decided that SalesForce is going to be your Truth, there are some pre-existing syncs you can get from their apps.  If not:

  • Start by syncing manually.  That is, export a report from one database and import it into the other.  Then, reverse (if you keeping a database, syncing it has to go both ways).  This will allow you to figure out what fields go where and more importantly how to translate from one database to the other (e.g., some databases want the date to be formatted 01/18/2016 and woe be unto you if you forget the zero before the one; others may not having a leading zero or have month and date as separate fields or the like).
  • After you have your process down, you can automate.  This can happen one of two ways: through the database’s APIs or through an automated report from one database that uploads to a location followed by an automated import from the other database.  Both are viable solutions — you would generally prefer the API solution, but you do what you have to do.
  • Make sure you have an effective deduplication process.  It almost goes without saying (and if it doesn’t, check out our PSA for data hygiene here), but data can get messy quickly if you don’t have these in place.

Here are some of those common objections and the easiest replies:

  • Cost: “how can we afford to take on a database project?”  Answer: how can we afford not to?  The lost donations from people calling you up asking for a refund and you have to look through five different databases to see where they donate.  The extra time to try to reconcile your donor database and financial systems.  The data that you won’t be able to get or use for your direct marketing and the lost revenues from that.
  • No direct marketing constituents: “I don’t want X (usually the people we serve) to get hit up for donations.”  Answer: We won’t be able to guarantee they won’t get a solicitation unless we know who they are.  We rent acquisition lists all the time and these people could be on there.
  • We’ve already invested in this other database: Answer: point them to this Wikipedia page.  It’s easier than trying to explain sunk costs on your own.
  • Provincialism: “We have database X and it works fine for us.” Answer: actually there are three answers for this one.  First, start elsewhere.  Usually, someone will have a database that isn’t working for them and better you start with them, who will then start singing the praises of both you and the Truth, than with the people who like where they are currently.  Second, usually, there is an “I wish we could do X” list somewhere that will make it worth this person’s time to switch.  Third, go to the highers-up with your business case.  By this time, you hopefully have some happy converters and some results from your direct marketing program (e.g., “we can put the year someone started with us on their member card now!”) to share.

Hopefully, this helps you get to your own version of the Truth.  Now that you have it, let’s talk about what to put in there.  That’s our charter for the rest of the week.

* Since we started with Game of Thrones yesterday, we have to do Lord of the Rings today…

Getting to the Truth of one database

Why know about your donors?

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Winter is coming to nonprofits. Unnamed, faceless, cold, sparse, biting, relentless, gnawing winter. And not all of us will survive.

sean-bean

There are more nonprofits than ever before and that number is increasing.

The pie of charitable giving is expanding, but not as a percentage of GDP and not as a much as the number of nonprofits are expanding. Thus, the average nonprofit’s funding will be going down.

Retention rates (when controlling for lifecycle as advocated here) are at best flat and often down. Online donor retention rates are particularly alarming.

And it is becoming more expensive to retain donors. In order to hit net revenue budgets, nonprofits increase the number of communications sent. Communications increase in quantity and decrease in quality of results for each piece.

As retention drops, the need for additional acquisition increases, further increasing donor-by-donor pressure to give broadly and shallowly.

Nonprofits flee to what they believe is quality, recapitulating what has worked for others. Donors see the playbook, whether it is address labels or a compelling story.

Everyone has a story and most can be told compellingly. So we do. But it’s enough less and less of the time.

Most nonprofits do most of their acquisition from lists of people who give to other nonprofits. Few bring in new people to the idea of philanthropy, considering it is easier to get the philanthropic to give more.

The tragedy of the commons plays out in a million different households. Maybe ten million. To give to one is to be solicited by that one and by the many.

The donor pool is now an apt analogy, as we are polluting and overfishing these same waters without restocking.

Winter is coming. So what needs to be done first?

One might say let’s prevent winter. One would be correct. It is necessary for our long-term survival. We will talk about converting people into the idea of giving at another time — it would be called stimulating primary demand in the for-profit world.

But one must survive the short term to get to the long term. And thus, there is something we need to do first.

One might say to be donor-centric and to love our donors. One would be correct. The ones who will make it through this winter will be the ones that have stood out from the crowd. Their envelopes will be opened, possibly partly for the free gift, but mostly for the joy they create and reinforce. Their emails will be read possibly partly for a nifty subject line, but mostly for a human connection that they forge. Their calls will be answered because they thanked and thanked well.

But there is a precondition for donor-centric treatment. And thus, there is something we need to do first.

The first thing is to know. We must know who donates. Yes, we need to know their demographics, but also far beyond that. We need to know the world they dream of creating. And we need to tell them about how they are helping to create that world.

These wonderful people are planting seeds. They are planning them so kids have a place to swing, so there is shade, so that people can breathe easier, so we can have apples. We owe it to apple people to know they in it for the apples. We owe it to them to tell them about neither the tire swing nor the shade if they don’t care. Our story to them will be the deep moist flesh that children will pick from their tree and the juices that will stay on their cheeks until banished by a shirt sleeve. We will speak of shade to shade people and breathing to those who value breathing most.

To do this, we need to know.

This week will be focused on how to know. I’ll go into the sausage-making that is gaining donor intelligence. But it’s important we start with the why.

It’s because winter is coming. Only those provisioned with true friends will make it through.

The good news is that we are nonprofits. We face down demons worse than winter.

Why know about your donors?