events

Breaking down “our donor” barriers within nonprofits: a modest proposal

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snakes_on_a_planePeople will generally do what they are given incentives to do.  Try to curtail the snake population by putting a bounty on the heads of snakes and soon people will start raising snakes for the purpose of collecting more bounties.  Then, eliminate the bounty and people will release the multitudes of snakes, leading to the classic Samuel L Jackson gosh-darn-snakes-on-my-mother-lovin’-flying-contraption scenario. This was a real thing. 

What we’ve talked about this week are examples of incentives at work.  Direct marketers who are measured against a net budget loathe to give up “their donors” to major donor prospecting or try to drive them to events.  Events folks want their walkers, bikers, gala goers, etc. to keep walking, biking, going to galas, and et cetering with no “interference” from those who might try to turn them into institutional donors.  And major gift officers would prefer to have a clean field to solicit “their donors,” turning off the direct marketing that a hundred people choose to give to raise money from the one or two that come out of that portfolio.

We didn’t even mention the digital/non-digital divide, except to say that if your organization has a head of marketing and a head of digital marketing, one of these two people should not have a job or should be reporting to the other.

So how do you create incentives to share your toys with the other children?  The answer lies in transfer pricing.

This is a concept in the for-profit world to allow for transactions between and among business units.  Think of a large oil company, for example, as two different companies: one that finds oil and one that sells oil.*  In order to see how each business unit is doing, the overall company has to figure out the price at which a good is transferred (hence the name transfer pricing) from the exploration folks to the marketing folks.

In essence, the company is buying a good from itself in order to determine its value.  This is the source, as you might guess, of much debate because business unit success or failure is hinged on this number that gets negotiated out.

So the modest proposal for nonprofits is to establish transfer pricing among our various business units and people.  If the major donor officer wants a lead from the direct marketing database, they run the numbers and determine how much they are willing to pay for a lead.  Because this “money” goes into the direct marketing coffers, proper incentives are built up for the direct marketing folks to acquire and nurture potential major donors.

Similarly, direct marketers know to the ha’penny how much they pay for a potential acquisition candidate from an outside list.  How much are they willing to pay for an event donor to the event organizer?  Likewise, how much is the event runner willing to pay for a group of direct marketing donors who model out as likely walkers?  We could see a much more orderly market in these donors, perhaps where 100 walkers are traded for 80 telemarketing donors plus a 7th round draft pick and a ream of copy paper.

And forget about doing e-appends simply because a multichannel donor does better for your organization than a single channel donor.  Why would you do this when you charge the digital marketing manager per lead?  After all, in this brave new world, they would now want to charge you per online donor you try to get to give their next gift offline.

The great thing about this is everyone gets to see either where market value truly is or who the truly great negotiators in your organization are.  The market sets the price for the lead and you either pay it or you don’t.  And if you don’t like the price, then you can try to acquire some other organization’s donors.  After all, they may not have a cause connection to your organization, but it may be worth it to not have to try to pry potential major donors out of the iron grip of the person that runs your Charlotte fashion show event.

It’s only when donors are a commodity with a chattel price that we will understand how important they are to our organization or, more importantly, our various business units.

Because the only alternative – working together with your co-workers, realizing that your cause is a common good to which everyone should strive, and focusing on the donors’ wishes and what optimizes their experience and giving – seems really hard.  Bring on the markets!

* My wife, who is brilliant and has a master’s in oil policy, would want me to say here that everything that I’m saying about the oil business here is vastly oversimplified.  It is and there’s a reason for that: I don’t entirely know what I’m talking about.  To the extent that I do, there are details like the multiple business units of an oil conglomerate and the different types of oil and such that don’t bear on telling a decent story.  These details have been taken out back and shot.

Breaking down “our donor” barriers within nonprofits: a modest proposal

Nailing the direct marketing-event relationship

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Yesterday, I argued:

a quality direct marketing program can help increase both event and non-event giving.  Moreover, you get people who are more connected to the organization.  And when these people are already giving to 6-9 other organizations, usually through direct marketing, unilateral disarmament doesn’t seem the wisest approach.

Let’s test the three major assumptions here:

  • Event participants and donors are connected to your organization
  • Event participants and donors are likely direct marketing donors
  • Direct marketing can raise all boats

First, are event participants and donors really connected to your organization?  Yes and no.  Certainly they are willing to give money that benefits your organization.  However, let’s take a donor to a person’s walk team for your organization.  Your organization clearly isn’t repugnant to them.  However, they are likely giving more to their friend than to your organization.  So let’s say they are more likely to support you than a person off the street would be (because some of them won’t like your organization), but not much more likely than the average outside acquisition list (because you’ve chosen those lists to include people who support like-minded organizations).

fh6wo8vmcukic2qcl4p2lq Second, are event participants and donors likely direct marketing donors?  Yes and no. Yes, because they are willing to give to charity.  Gallup asked Americans if they gave to charity in the last year.  As you can see, not everyone did.

If you set aside that people are likely to inflate their charitable giving to pollsters, you have one out of every six people who don’t give to charity.  Clearly, you’ve weeded out this group by talking to event folks.  However, it’s likely that your event participants are different demographically from your “normal” direct marketing donors.  If you take an extreme example like walk participants versus telemarketing or mail donors, you may find that the former are demographically the sons and daughters of the latter.

Thus, as before, they are more likely than a person of the street to donate through direct marketing.  But they haven’t proven channel responsive and that could be troubling.

 

You might question, then, whether event participants and donors are good direct marketing prospects.  The answer is definitely yes.  Both Making Strides Against Breast Cancer and MS Society (this link goes to an excellent webinar on the topic) reported significant gains in both event and direct marketing revenues from adding direct marketing to their marketing mix for events.

So why?

It’s because these communications centered on the person’s previous experience.  I can support this anecdotally. I’ve both customized communications to walkers and walk donors and dropped them unprimed into an ongoing direct marketing stream.  Customized is better.

What would a program like this look like?

Recruiting people to the event: This would include inexpensive communications to your existing constituents about the event (inexpensive because the transitive property says that if your event donors are unlike your direct marketing donors, your direct marketing donors are unlike your event donors).  These could include buckslips, stories in existing donor newsletters, email communications, outbound voice mail announcements, and online co-targeting.  Using lookalike audiences and remarketing could also help bring new people to the event.

Reattracting lapsed participants: This would look very much like any other lapsed campaign you would run.

Engaging current walkers: Try new walker online welcome kits that engage walkers in the general mission.  Also, don’t forget direct marketing nudges to fundraise for the event.

Converting the event donors:  Here’s where you customize your regular communications to event participants.  You might even try “The walk is over, but the fight continues” walker specific emails and mail pieces, but mission-forward pieces and engagement opportunities like surveys, membership appeals, and the like tend to do better with this audience.  And, as any good donor steward knows, making sure these event donors get outstanding gratitude is highly predictive of future donations.  

And, as I’ve stated previously, because of the inherent national/field friction in some national organizations, I would strongly recommend running these techniques as a test in year one with sites that are willing to experiment.  Using the other sites as a control, you can then present how much better the direct marketed to walks did versus those that didn’t have the wind at their back from email, online, mail, and telemarketing.
Hopefully, this will help you acquire your own donors and cross people over into organizational/cause donors.  More importantly, I hope it helps break through the “my donor” mentality that can be so destructive to programs.

Nailing the direct marketing-event relationship

The myth that our donors are unique and special snowflakes

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Charitable people do charitable things.

Things, plural.

There’s a reason that most of the outside lists and people that you pursue to be donors to your organization aren’t from a cohort of magazine subscribers or motorcycle enthusiasts or even a political party.  They are from other nonprofits: charitable people do charitable things.

Russ Reid’s Heart of the Donor survey indicates that the average donor gives to six different nonprofits.  If anything, my experience would say that this number is a bit low.  I once modeled a list of walkers and it indicates than the median walker gave to nine other nonprofits.  It’s the same reason multis are the most profitable donors to acquire.

Charitable people do charitable things.

Yes, it’s a tautology.  But it’s one we often forget when we make our policies around fundraising, especially when we put up walls around our donors internally.

We must accept that our donors will be charitably promiscuous.  Personally, I’ve been impacted by or had family and friends impacted by Alzheimer’s, autism, cancer, depression, heart disease, kidney disease, MS, sexual assault, suicide, and more.  That’s life.  And people who give will give.

We are in that competitive environment.  And the way to differentiate ourselves is to build closer ties to our donors, not to try to build walls around them.  As French playwright Andre Gide said, “It is not enough to be loved — I wish to be preferred.”*

So why do we:

Eschew list cooperatives?  This is a way to take other organizations’ best donors and build models that allow you to get the best of the best.  If you are doing a good job of focusing on your donors, you will be able to steal them away.  If you are doing a bad job, you were going to lose those donors anyway.  You didn’t deserve them.

Not try to get donors who are uniquely tied to us?  This sounds like it contradicts the entire rest of the post.  But if you are worried about fishing in overfished waters (and you should be), you are then looking at how to bring people into your organization who may not have given to nonprofits before.  That starts with content marketing and with lead generation tools, especially online.  This is when it pays to have a strong vision of your donor and constituent journeys.

Try to protect our event donors from becoming organizational donors?  This confounds me, because a quality direct marketing program can help increase both event and non-event giving.  Moreover, you get people who are more connected to the organization.  And when these people are already giving to 6-9 other organizations, usually through direct marketing, unilateral disarmament doesn’t seem the wisest approach.

We’ll talk more about the data on this tomorrow.

 

* No, I haven’t ever read any of Andre Gide’s plays or really know who he is.  He was quoted in I’m With Stupid, a book that while not on the same intellectual level, is waaaaay funnier.

The myth that our donors are unique and special snowflakes

Mental accounting and the exception expense loophole

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We’ve gone through a lot of cognitive biases recently, but one we haven’t talked about is the idea of mental accounting or budgeting.  The idea here is that dollars are fungible: your picture of a dead president and/or founding father on special paper can be exchanged for rent, coffee, donations, whatever.  In fact, money says that right on it: THIS NOTE IS LEGAL TENDER FOR ALL DEBTS, PUBLIC AND PRIVATE.

Onedolar2009series

Image credit. Dollah dollah bills, yo.

But that’s not how we think about money.  In our minds, we have special categories for each type of expense.  Think of it as separate jars into which we are putting our invoice: $1400 for the mortgage, $800 for food, etc.  We experience mental pain every time we have to rob from one cookie jar in order to put it into another, so we try not to do it.

Picture how you think of money; it probably is something like this.  In fact, some budgeting software (we use You Need A Budget at Direct-to-Donor Manor*) formalizes this process to make sure you don’t overspend in a category.  We get comfort from knowing that each month, there is $X set aside for eating out.

Your donors think this way also.  Somewhere in their minds, there are mental Mason jars with “CHARITY” written on them.  There may even be several such jars: one for each organization they support.

If you think of how your donors mentally account, the implications ripple outward.  This is part of why:

So how do we diminish the pain that a donor feels from robbing from their “movie” or “eating out” or “savings” mental accounts to give to us?  Part of this, as mentioned previously, can be framing the gift against the frivolous.  But another technique that breaks through mental accounting is framing your ask as an exception expense.

One quirk of mental accounting is usually there is an “incidentals” budget.  This is a “what happens if my 2003 Saturn Ion** chooses to give up the ghost today” contingency fund that we can dip into.

One study changed the frame on their annual event.  Instead of talking about their walk as an annual event that happens every year, they talked about it as an event that only happens once per year.

You have to admit, there is hardly any difference between the two of these phrases (and it’s always nice to run a test that will slip unseen past your Brand Police).

Yet the results were impressive.  By running Google Adwords with the new, unique, once-per-year framing, study participants said they would participate in the exception version at a 46% rate, compared with 35% for the annual framing.  When they ran the ad for real, people were 11% more likely to click on the exception framing ad.

Similarly, in the mail:

“This mailing is part of a special charity drive that happens only once a year. Alex’s Lemonade Stand is requesting only one donation a year going forward.”

Beat:

“This mailing is part of a regular charity drive that happens annually. The charity is requesting a donation every year going forward.”

Some implications of this research:

  • This can help immensely with your event advertising (and you are trying to get your direct marketing donors to your events and vice versa, right?).  But for us, we also are testing removing things like “10th annual” from the press activities around an event.  The idea of themes could also be potent as a way of differentiating this year’s event as its own unique snowflake.
  • This could explain part of the effectiveness of techniques like a membership campaign and a better way to frame said campaign: “this is the one special time of the year we ask all supporters to make their membership gift.”
  • This may explain as to why scarcity, urgency, and uniqueness are effective persuasive levers.  It’s challenging to use this framing if you are sending four to 24 letters per year, and your donor knows that.  However, techniques that increase urgency or uniqueness like matching/lead gifts, deadlines, urgent petitions, etc. can help give a reason to open the piggy bank.

This may seem to contradict the idea of consistency – that people give to the same campaign year after year.  I would argue that they complement each other.  If you are trying to get someone to do what they’ve done before, play back their previous history and lean into the fact that you and they have a history.  If you are trying to get someone to try something new, you have to figure out for them which jar to take it out of and why.

So go forth and be unique in your messaging; it seems to be a better strategy that appealing from the tried and true.

 

* I have received no endorsement money or considerations from You Need A Budget. But I’m open to it!

** This is absolutely your author’s ride of choice.  As I mentioned in the post where I outed myself as overhead, the life of a nonprofit person should be neither Bentleys or ramen.

 

Mental accounting and the exception expense loophole

Influence in direct marketing: scarcity at work

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Scarcity as an influencer should be of no surprise to those who know basic economic theory – as a good gets more scarce, assuming demand remains the same, the price will rise.

Given this, you might think it has no impact on nonprofits, as we sell no goods.  Even the corollary to the supply and demand argument – the idea that there is a psychological fear of missing out that makes people want an item more – doesn’t work for nonprofits, given that one person’s donation makes you no less able to donate.

And yet scarcity can be a powerful motivator in nonprofit direct marketing when harnessed correctly.  Here are five ways how:

Back-end premiums.  This is a way of mixing scarcity with reciprocity.  In the reciprocity piece, I mentioned that back-end premiums (aka the public radio tote bag model) can help increase your donations.  Now, what if there were only so many of those tote bags, calendars, or whatever other premium you have available to go around?  By limiting the premium to only the first X number of people who donate (or take whatever other action you are aiming for), you can have scarcity working for you.

I would recommend layering on a third influencer – social proof – and setting the number of giveaways above what you would expect to get in terms of actions.  This not only mitigates the likelihood that people will take your action and not get the potential reward.  It also has the benefit of making it seem like many people will be taking this action.

Matching gifts.  A matching gift deadline can create scarcity of time – by limiting the amount of time someone has to make a gift in order for it to double, you create urgency in the desire to give that gift.

Exclusivity of information.  In reciprocity, I mentioned that giving someone information that they wouldn’t be able to get elsewhere is a good way of creating the desire in them to reciprocate.  The key part of this is that the information must be scarce – giving someone something that the general public would or could know does not trigger the desire to reciprocate.

Done well, you can also build in authority and/or social proof to this.  Let’s say you do a conference call with a select group of high-dollar donors (scarcity).  The lead speaker is an expert on the harm that your cause is trying to end (authority); supporters can ask questions of him/her (reciprocity and scarcity, as you are providing a unique experience for them) and hear that there are other interested donors on the call (social proof).  Then you follow-up with a transcript of the call for everyone who was invited but couldn’t attend to make sure they can this important information.

Exclusivity of opportunity.  This can also work well with social proof.  Which one of these volunteer opportunities is more appealing:

  • We desperately need more people to help serve lunches this week to the homeless.
  • There are only six slots left to help serve lunches this week; we may have more opportunities available next month, but it is first come, first serve.

Through a reframing, you have turned your lack of volunteers into an exclusive experience for those people looking to help.

Event exclusivity.  Many of your high-end type events are exclusive in terms of guest list, but there are opportunities for exclusive beyond just this velvet rope effect.  Table sponsorships are one: as you will only have so many tables, you can advertise the number left (and, if you are doing well, ask sponsors to reserve their spots for the following year).

Then there are auction items. In a traditional (non-Dutch) auction, auction winners are like the Highlander: there can be only one.  The exclusivity of a package leads to higher prices as both the auction structure, which economics shows is the way to get the good to the person willing to pay the most, and the fear of missing out on an exclusive good conspire to maximize the price achieved.  The best nonprofit auction images are experiential items that cannot easily be purchased on Amazon – this exclusivity makes it so that only one person can possibly get the item.

The exception to this was a nonprofit I worked with that had an auction item go far beyond the expected price.  Apparently, while the bidding was ever-increasing, they were able to talk with the person providing the experience and negotiate another package.  Thus, at the end, they were able to provide a package to the second-place bidder as well, doubling their rewards.  This was a brilliant strategy – using exclusivity to get the maximum possible price, then expanding the pool (only slightly, so as not to cause regret among the first-place bidder) to maximize returns.

This week has been dedicated to the idea of major influence levels you can use in your direct marketing and development areas.  I would be remiss if I didn’t once again recommend the original book itself, as it has examples behind what I’ve provided here.  Thanks for reading and I’d love to hear examples you have from influence in the comments section or (if you are willing) in a guest blog post – just email me at nick@directtodonor.com if you’d like to post your success story.

Influence in direct marketing: scarcity at work

A direct marketing bridge to… events

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

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

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

250px-federalhillpark

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

mount_kilimanjaro

Hat tip to wikimedia.org for the images

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

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

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

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

Because of the inherent national/field friction in some national organizations, I would strongly recommend running these techniques as a test in year one with sites that are willing to experiment.  Using the other sites as a control, you can then present how much better the direct marketed to walks did versus those that didn’t have the wind at their back from email, online, mail, and telemarketing.

A direct marketing bridge to… events