Donor services at the speed of instant

June 21, 2016June 18, 2016 nickellingerdonor services, donorcentricity, Facebook, social mediaLeave a comment

On June 1, Meeker put out her Internet Trends report, highlighting the evolution of the sector. You can see the full report here. These online reports have key lessons for us as a sector, one of the big ones having to do with customer/donor services.

One of the challenges we have as an industry is delivering timely donor services in the preferred channel of our donor. We have all seen the Facebook exchange that goes something like:

Them: how do I stop you from mailing me?

You: Thank you for letting us know that you would like to stop receiving mail from us or reduce the amount of mail you receive. To do so, please call our free donor help line at 877-DONT-CARE.

There are several problems with this, not the least of which is that your boilerplate sounds like it was written by a robot who desperately wanted to fail the Turing test. But another one is: if they wanted to call you, they would have called you.

Instead, they went on Facebook.

Now you definitely don’t want to feed the trolls excessively. You generally don’t want to do more than two back-and-forths out on Facebook publicly. But there has to be a better way to meet donors’ needs without scaring away other potential donors.

Enter slide 104 of Meeker’s presentation. (I told you it was comprehensive; we read these things so you don’t have to.) She’s led up to this point talking about the growth of messaging with WhatsApp having 1 billion monthly active users, Facebook Messenger having 800 million, and three other messaging platforms having more monthly active users than there are people in the United States.

So on slide 104, she talks about how Hyatt and Rogers Communications launched Facebook Messenger customer service in November and December respectively. Within one month, Hyatt had a 20X increase in the number of messages they received. Rogers Communications’ users report a 65% increase in satisfaction and a 65% decrease in customer complaints.

Now, think about the most common donor interaction people have with your organization. If you have anything under a 50% retention of new donors rate, and chances are you do, along with everyone else in the sector, that most common interactions is:

Someone makes a donation
You talk to them some more and ask for donations again
You don’t hear from that donor again

What is it worth to you to be able to address any questions, doubts, problems, etc., that these donors are having?

Two comments on customer services that you hear over and over are:

For every person who complains, there are X more who were as ticked off, but didn’t complain.
A dissatisfied person who you have the opportunity to satisfy will be a better customer/donor for you than a person you didn’t dissatisfy to begin with.

So instead of hiding your donor service phone number, show it proudly. If a person is online, see if you can do a live chat with them to address their concern. And, yes, if they are on social media, actively solicit and take care of donor concerns, as quickly as you can.

The coming battles for donors will be fought over experiences. What experience can you offer?

The science of slacktivism

January 26, 2016January 23, 2016 nickellingeradvocacy, Facebook, research, science, slacktivism, social mediaLeave a comment

Online advocacy has a bad name. Specifically: slacktivism (or clicktivism). Seth Meyers put the prevailing opinion into funny words on SNL:

“Look, if you make a Facebook page we will “like” it—it’s the least we can do.
But it’s also the most we can do.”

This frames the debate well. Some think that online activism is a prelude to future action — a way people signal they are interested in your cause and are working to do more. Others think it is a way for people (and here they will often say Millennials — check out my posts from a couple weeks ago as to why this is bull) to feel good about themselves while doing very little.

So what does science say?

I’ll give you the TL;DR version now: campaigns that are good help future action; campaigns that suck don’t.

OK, perhaps that wasn’t all that satisfying. But you wanted to read about the science anyway, right?

There are three interesting studies on this that I wanted to highlight. The first is from Lee and Hsieh here. They found that people who signed a petition were more likely to donate to a related nonprofit afterward. This makes sense given what we know about the importance of consistency in persuasion.

The more interesting part of the study is that they also found that people who didn’t take the advocacy action were more likely donate to another unrelated nonprofit thereafter. They call this moral balancing. The idea is that people feel a bit guilty that they didn’t take a pro-social action, so they want to balance this with an unrelated prosocial action. I’m not sure yet what practical effect this has (unless I can rent a list of another nonprofit’s non-petition signers), but it’s interesting and it shows that people perceive an online petition as a positive thing that they generally should be doing.

The second study I would recommend is from Kristofferson, White, and Peloza. They come right to the question of whether a token action leads to greater action in the future with five different studies. My favorite, and the easiest to explain, is one where had three groups: one who were given a poppy to wear in honor of veterans, one who were given that same poppy in an envelope so it would be for private support, and one who were given nothing. At the end of the hallway, the groups were asked to donate. Those who showed private support (poppy in the envelope) gave an average of $.86, public supporters gave $.34, and the control gave $.15. They further refined this study in other ways and found that generally, people who gave private support were more likely to support in the future; people who gave public support were either no more likely or less likely to support the cause than those who did nothing.

The third study, from Lewis, Gray, and Meierhenrich, found similarly — that Facebook activism (perhaps because it is public) doesn’t often translate to any further activity. Looking at a Save Darfur campaign, 99.7% of people did not make a donation and 72.2% didn’t recruit anyone else. Of those who donated, 95% did only once and of those who recruited, 45% recruited only one other person. Hardly a sustainable effort. The authors hypothesize that this is because Facebook is full of both strong and weak social ties, so you want to advertise your best self to this group.

However, there was a committed group of people on Facebook: it was just very small. The top one percent of advocates made the 80-20 rule turn away in shame, responsible as they were for 63% of membership recruitment and 47% of donations. The study also found that recruits were more likely to donate and donors more like to recruit. So once you got someone over a very high threshold, some people would work wonders, but these were unicorns in a world of horses.

So here are the implications that I see for advocacy campaigns:

Do them. A properly run advocacy campaign can increase the likelihood that someone will donate and take other actions for your organization.
Make them private. Public petitions appear to satisfy a person’s desire to manage their reputation, so they were less willing to take other actions.
By extension, don’t do them on social networks. Not only are they not public, but you do not have the easy wherewithal to communicate with them to get the first gift or convert to other activities.
Make the ask. It can be as easy as having an ask for the donation on the confirmation page or receipt for a petition. Folks who take private actions want to help and are in a mindset of helping. I personally have seen advocacy campaigns with a soft ask after taking the petition raise more money than a hard ask to a full list. Crazy, but true.

Hopefully, this has given you the data to incorporate advocacy into your campaigns the right way. For the rest of the week, I’ll be talking about how to incorporate in the mail, acquiring online advocates, and converting advocates to donors.

If you’d like a weekly digest of these and other topics, please sign up for the weekly newsletter here. It’s short and has a couple of features that aren’t included on the blog for subscribers only.

Understanding and using Facebook’s algorithm

January 8, 2016January 8, 2016 nickellingeracquisition, addressable media, advertising, conversion, CPC, cultivation, Facebook, online, social mediaLeave a comment

Facebook is the nexus of a lot of debate as to how best to incorporate social media into other marketing efforts. My argument will be there is a twofold Facebook strategy: 1) using organic content to engage your superfans and 2) using addressable media to reach everyone else.

500 million users. How quaint.

Like Google, the base of the Facebook algorithm (EdgeRank) is fairly easy:

Affinity: How close the person creating the content is to the person receiving it.
Weight: How much the post has been interacted with it, with deeper interactions counting more
Time decay: How long it has been since it has been posted.

These interactions are multiplied together and summed, roughly.

Like Google, however, it has been altered over time significantly. There are now significant machine learning components baked in that help with spam detection and bias toward quality content. Additionally, now users can prioritize their News Feeds themselves. Finally, because of the sheer amount of content available, the organic reach of an average post is single digit percentages or below, meaning that if you have 100,000 likes, maybe 2,000 people will see your average post.

The implications of this base algorithms are stark:

Organic reach on Facebook is for the people who really love you. Many people think of Facebook as a new constituent acquisition system. However, people who come in dry will almost never see your posts.
Consequently, only things that connect with your core will have any broader distribution. Think of who is in the top two percent of your constituents: employees, top volunteers, board members, and that may be about it. If those people don’t give the post weight, no one outside of this group will see it.
What you have done for them lately has outsized weight. Research into Facebook interactions shows that Facebook gives outsized weight to what a person as interacted with in their last 50 interactions.
Facebook is not for logorrhea like Twitter. Think of your posts as a currency you spend each time. If your post gets above average interactions, you will move your average up and interact with more people; if not, your reach will lose. Posting too many times (which varies from organization to organization) will diminish your audience as average reach will decline). Additionally, all of the things you have to post for organizational reasons (e.g., sponsor thank yous) are spending your audience and you have to assess how much you are willing to spend to fulfill those objectives.
This all adds up to the uber-rule: Facebook is for things your core supporters will interact with quickly. If they don’t, it won’t reach your more distant supporters and it will lessen the likelihood that your next post will reach them as well.
It also relates to the second uber-rule: because Facebook can change its algorithm as it wishes, you should not build your house on rented land. The best thing you can do with your interactions is to direct them to your site, to engage your content and sign up for your list.

This all sounds a bit dire, so I should also highlight how to reach the other 98%(ish) of your Facebook audience as well as some of your non-Facebook audience on Facebook: addressable media.

Facebook allows you to upload a list of your supporters and target advertising to them specifically whether or not they are current Facebook likers of you. You can learn more about this on my CPC ads post here. This also goes into lookalike audiences, a way of getting people who aren’t who you talk to currently, but look a lot like them, a nifty acquisition trick. Since organic reach won’t get you to these loosely and non-affiliated people, this is the only way to achieve that reach. And, since it is cost-per-click, you can control your investment and your results.

But like discussed above, these campaigns should be to build your relationship to people outside of Facebook. For the same reason companies advertising on CBS don’t work to build a greater relationship to CBS, but rather to the advertising companies, your advertising on Facebook shouldn’t be aimed at getting Mark Zuckerberg et al more friends — they have over a billion of them already.

Semi-advanced direct marketing Excel statistics

November 6, 2015November 5, 2015 nickellingerblog, Excel, Facebook, social media, statisticsLeave a comment

In addition to not being a database, Excel is also not a statistics package. If you are going to do anything advanced, I highly recommend R. The programming language, not the John-Cleese-played Q replacement in The World is not Enough and Die Another Day.

Cheer up! Yes, it’s a lesser part in lesser Bond movies.
You, John Cleese, are still an international treasure.

Anyway, stats in Excel. We’ll start with correlations, as they can give us some insight into blog and Facebook traffic and interactions.

Wait, you argue – Facebook is not direct marketing. First, yes, you are correct. Second, no, you are wrong; there is a way that you can use Facebook as a direct marketer. I’ll talk about this more when I do a whole social media week (don’t worry, folks, I promise to spend time deflating the hype and hopefully producing things you can print out and get to board members and say “See? Let’s put money in places where it will make money!”). Third, because Facebook has limited value (but not zero) as a direct marketing vehicle, you can test things on there to see how they resonate with your audience. Granted, your Facebook audience and direct mail audience will probably be fairly dissimilar, but your online audience is probably similar to your Facebook audience. And what you are looking for is what makes compelling online content for you. So this is a way to make Facebook your testing ground before you put it on to a real platform (i.e., your Web site, your emails).

I’m going to demonstrate this on this blog’s stats because I have the data available. However, I’ve also done this with Facebook posts very successful. The prep work you will have to do for either blog posts or Facebook posts is to record your outcomes (view, likes, shares, and/or comments), to code the subject matter of each post, and to put in any other variables like day of the week that may be relevant. Here’s my version of this:

I have my blog posts on the left and the various factors on the right (and there are more tags, but I need to cut it off at some point to display it. Yes, I have a blog post that has zero views. If you would like to break the seal on a blog post about why we do segmentation, it’s here; I’m sure it would appreciate a visit.

I then went through this and deleted tags that only applied to a single post. Then I ran a correlation for each individual variable to page views. The correlation function looks like

=CORREL($B2:$B20,I2:I20)

And is expressed from 1 to -1.

Here’s what that looks like. Let’s look at the days of the week first, because there appears to be an effect here — Monday content has been king, with a strong correlation to page views. It will be interesting going forward to see in the long term whether that is the nature of the content (I’ve been trying to put introduction content on Mondays and get progressively more involved throughout the week) or that people are more interested in reading blog posts on Mondays. Nevertheless, I can probably do a better job of setting up the rest of the week as must-see content, since Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday are all a bit negative.

Images tend to correlate well to views as well, probably because they show better in social media. I’d been noticing this from just a glance as well, so you will probably be seeing more images here in the weeks to come. They will also be less boring images, since some of the lower performers were images of equations and Excel sheets. It is not coincidence that the tallest Python led this blog post.

And it looks like cultivation and multichannel efforts are winning while conversion, lifetime value, and personalization are not as strong, with negative correlations to page views. I won’t be acting on this immediately, but keeping an eye on it. And I do have a multichannel week planned in the near future, so we’ll be able to test whether that’s an artifact in the data.

However, you might notice that the reason cultivation is ranked so highly is that it is in the two top performing posts, which are Monday posts. Is it the topic or the day that made those strong? For this, you need regression.

Normally, you wouldn’t do this after only 20 blog posts. We are not going to be able to draw any statistically significant conclusions, but I do want to show you how it’s done.

Go to Data > Data Analysis > Regression
Select the range from your outcome variable as your Y range and the range of the independent variables you want to test in the X range like so:
Hit OK. You’ll get something that looks like this. In my case, it’s a really, really bad regression:

Yuck. The things you would normally be looking for are:

in R-squared, you are looking for as close to 1 as possible. One would mean your model is totally predictive. Zero means it predicts nothing at all.
In P-value per variable, you are looking for less than .05. That would show if there is a statistically significant relationship between any of the variables and your output. In this case, there isn’t and we can pretty much throw out the whole thing.
If there is a relationship, you want to look at the coefficient for two things:
- Is it positive or negative? Positive is good things; negative is bad things.
- How big is the relationship? In this one, if these were significant, it would be a bad idea to post about personalization again, as posting about it reducing views by 7. But it isn’t significant, so I’m not yet worried.

Hope this helps you with the stats side of Excel. Tune in next week, when we look at some of the things that Excel is actually good at.

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