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Do do-gooders do good deeds?

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Good deeds are an odd thing.  You would normally think that a moral choice would make one more likely to follow the path of virtue in the future.  And research has shown that that when people are told they are good people, they do good things.

On the flip side, researchers describe the licensing effect — the thought that a good act gives you the license to do a bad thing and still be balanced. .  

This is well described in a New York Times piece creatively entitled “How Salad Makes Us Fat.”

Researchers tracked shopping carts and found that selecting a virtuous product make one more likely to subsequently pick a “bad” product.  

strawberry_26_apple_salad

This is your meal? Clearly, you are going to hell.

Other studies have shown that people who have eaten something indulgent are more likely to do good deeds — compensation in both directions.

How can both of these be true?  Would you rather catch your donors coming back from the gym or the Krispy Kreme?  And is it better to remind your donors that they are good people, or remind them that it’s been awhile since they last gave?

One study has worked to reconcile these in the context of donor communications.  

In the study, people were sorted into three groups.  One group was asked to write about good deeds they’d done.  A second group was asked to write about bad things they’d done.  And, not surprisingly, the third group was asked to write about neutral things.  Then they were asked whether they would like to donate a part of their fee for participating in the study to charity.

Significantly more people donated, and donated more, from the people who were asked to think of good deeds than either bad deeds or neutral things.

This is consistent with the idea that people who think of themselves as good people are more likely to do good things.  People act in relation to their self-conception.  But how does this explain moral licensing?

The study discusses this as well.  It finds that more licensing happens mostly not when we see ourselves as good or bad, but when others see us as good or bad.  For example, in the study of shopping carts discussed above, we would be judged by the person checking us out.  And if you think this doesn’t happen, you have never worked at a grocery store.

This fits with our study on slacktivism: people who did good things to help people are more likely to donate; people who did good things to get recognition as a good person are less likely to donate.

This can be well summarized in the old saw “I’m not a racist — I have plenty of friends who are [name of target group].  But…”  The person is working to establish positive external conception before saying whatever is going to follow.

(Fun fact: in the history of humankind — literally tens of thousands of years of human speech — not one thing that came after the phrase “I’m not a racist, but…” has ever been good.)

So, in an ideal world, when your donor receives your communication, they would feel like they are a good person, but feel like everyone else thought they were a bad person.  A tough balance to achieve.

I believe this comes down on the side of reminding donors not only of the good they have done in the past, but also tying it directly to the good they aimed to do.  So it would never be “you’ve given to be a part of our Founders Circle;” it would be “you’ve given to save lives and help people.”  You are telling them that they only did it to do good, not for any greater glory.

Similarly, in your lapsed communications, you would be better off establishing that clearly the donor is the type of person who gives to appeals like this one than you would be reminding them that they had lapsed.

Thus, this framing isn’t of donations like the previous few; it’s a framing of the donors that can help your appeals.

Do do-gooders do good deeds?

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

Mailing the humble outbound petition

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Yesterday, I mentioned how allowing people to take private advocacy actions for your cause helps them take additional actions like donating.

You can think of it as a foot-in-the-door technique if you’d like, but prefer to think of it as a valuable part of cultivation.  If there are people who believe in the rightness of what you do, you are providing them and those you serve a benefit by allowing them to take action in an easy and organized way.

And you can see the planets of social influence aligning in a petitioning strategy.  You are triggering:

  • Consistency by asking people to put their money where their advocacy is
  • Scarcity of time, as petitions frequently have a due-by date to them (e.g., “while the legislature is still in session”, “before we testify on the bill”, “so we can present the petitions at our national conference”).
  • Authority, as you will have to be presenting a strong case for your legislation or action
  • Social proof, as you can talk about the thousands who have already taken an action.

So how can you mail a petition to maximum effect?  Here are some tips:

  • To maximize social proof, you can run an online campaign first, so you can honestly talk about how many have taken action already.  In fact, you can think of it like you would structure a matching gift campaign (or, if you read the study on matching gifts, perhaps a lead gift campaign): we have X petitions already; we want Y to have maximum impact; please send your petition by Z along with your most generous donation.
  • Petitions can be a strong way of driving your offline donors online, so be sure to include a URL where the person can learn more about the issue, take the petition action online, and donate.  After all, if you are building urgency properly, they may want their action to happen now.
  • Let your donors exactly what you are going to do with the petitions.  This concreteness will build trust.
  • Actually do what you say you are going to do with the petitions.  So much the better if you can get a picture of the stack of petitions you are delivering to the governor/senator/congressperson/delegate/etc. and report back to the donor with the impact their voice had.  This can be done through a caging vendor if you wish.
  • Avoid policy speak. I have had the pleasure of working on the US highway bill in years past.  When writing about this, it’s tempting to use the language policymakers use for the bill: e.g., “we don’t want another continuing resolution.  We need to get the authorization through the conference committee, so we can then appropriate the money to the program and distribute the Section 402 funds to the states.”  Here’s what your constituent hears:

    smurf
    If they didn’t cover it on Schoolhouse Rock, don’t expect the person to know it.  Remember, your donor/advocate is likely looking for impact, rather than the minutia.
  • Customize your petition to appeal to opinion leaders.  Let’s say your goal is to get Senate cosponsors for a federal bill.  If you have 12 already, you should ask your advocates for those senators to thank their senators for taking the action you want, rather than sending them the same “do this action” petition everyone else gets.  This helps your organization’s credibility.  And since thanking officials is infrequent, you will get a positive reputation that will help you in the future.
  • Make sure your donation ask is tied to your advocacy ask.  You can get specific here — send in your petition to pass this bill and donate to help us advocate for this and other vital legislation.  Those people who are advocates know that advocacy is important and thus are likely willing to donate to support it.
  • Make this one of your conversion efforts for your online advocates.  This fits with the idea of the “one change at a time” conversion effort I advocated recently.

How have petitions worked for you as an organization?  Please let us know in the comments.

Mailing the humble outbound petition

Increasing your non-electronic mail open rates

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These direct marketing kids today, with their emails and analytics and the Facebook — they don’t know how hard it used to be.  Back in my day, we sent people letters.  You couldn’t measure open rates!  You’d just see if they sent back their check and hoped they opened it!  And the mail carrier walked uphill both ways.

The problem is that my day was yesterday.  We still can’t tell if people are opening our envelopes.  Given the amount of testing of colors and windows and teaser copy that goes into this area that can only be measured tertiarily, this is a pity.

Today’s study doesn’t entirely solve this but takes a nice step forward in understanding what gets people to open and react to envelopes.

[TANGENT]

I know I shouldn’t be talking about this right now — I should be writing about direct marketing New Year’s Resolutions, just like I should have done the year in review last week, Star Wars content the week before that, and preparing for year-end giving content in November.

And maybe I’ll do that some day, but for right now, I’m going to try to remain counterprogramming.  Think of me as the nonprofit direct marketing Puppy Bowl — if you tire of zigging, come over here and I’ll probably be zagging.

puppybowl

As Chekov said, if you mention the Puppy Bowl in Act 1,
you must show an image of it in Act 3.

[/TANGENT]

To test envelopes, GfK has a panel of German households who give GfK the direct mail pieces they do not want at the end of each month, either opened or unopened.  The study authors (Feld et al) then looked at the impact of envelopes on the open rate and keeping rate of the mail pieces.  They looked at 68 attributes of 36 design characteristics across almost 400 nonprofit campaigns.  You can get the whole study here if you want the full list, but suffice it to say that when you are looking at what percentage of the response device in an envelope is colored and have five different segments for this, you are doing a pretty comprehensive look at the piece.

The first big result to note is that the open rate did not correlate to the keeping rate. I’ve seen this personally — when an envelope promises something the contents do not deliver, the piece is shredded with extreme prejudice.  Now on the nitty-gritty:

  • Colored envelopes decreased open rates.  I know, it’s difficult to cut through the clutter, but that apparently isn’t the way to do it.
  • Larger envelopes, questioning teasers, and a promotional design on the envelope back all increase open rates.  I would go one step further and advocate for questions that can’t be answered with a yes/no and that elicit curiosity.  While you could put “What is the capital of North Dakota?”* on your envelope, I wouldn’t recommend it.
  • Pre-stamped return envelopes increase keeping rate; postage paid on the outside envelope decreases open rates.  These may seem obvious, but you will have to assess whether the cost involved is worth the increases, as both will increase your cost per piece.
  • A testimonial from a helper increases keeping rates.  It seems like I’ve been talking about variants of these for the past couple of weeks — how social proof and authority can help your appeals, as well as how information can enhance persuasiveness among high-dollar donors.
  • Premiums can work, but expensive ones decrease keeping rates.  People like to receive things (reciprocity at work), but the idea that the nonprofit is spending more on the premium than on the mission is a significant turnoff.
  • Efforts to recruit new members decrease keeping rates. My guess here is that it’s too much too soon.  I’ve seen membership efforts do very well to existing donors (who likely want a sense of belonging), but for new supporters, it might be like proposing marriage on the first date.
  • In the letter, logos and fax numbers increase keeping rates.  Yes, fax numbers.  It also appears that having the phone number decreases keeping rates.  I have no idea why this would be.  If you do, please leave it in the comments to help illuminate us.
  • People kept letters more closer to the end of the month.  Perhaps a “more disposable income” effect at the end of the month?  I’m not sure here either.

Finally, longer letters and personalization increase keeping rates.  I’ve talked about personalization helping your efforts.  Longer, in this case, means more than one page of letter, but my guess is that there may be a sweet spot after that in the 2-4 page range.

We hear about information overload, but I would argue that there is mostly an overload of bad content generated by the same people who created Mad Libs (e.g., [number] ways to [verb] your [noun]; [number] videos that will keep you [verb]ing: number [number] will blow your mind).

A well-written letter, by contrast, can be a beautiful and effective thing.

So, the idea mail piece in this study (were cost no object) would be a larger than average white envelope.  It would not use the impersonal “postage paid” indicia, would ask an enticing question to get the potential reader interested, and the reverse would feature a strong offer.  A letter with your logo and fax number (for now, don’t question it — just go with it) that is more than one page would be on the inside, featuring a testimonial from a helper.  And your return envelope would be prestamped.

Nothing completely earth-shattering here, I would say, but these are some very solid tips for making your pieces more effective.


* It’s a trick question — both the N and the D are capitals.

Increasing your non-electronic mail open rates

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

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

Why “mail everyone” is never the answer

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I’ve had my first request – to talk about the basics of segmentation. Thanks and keep them coming!

The question will eventually come, if it hasn’t already: “how many people are on our list?”.  The answer?

The-Meaning-Of-Life

For those who may not get the reference, it’s from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  When assigned to find the Ultimate Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything, the computer Deep Thought ponders this for 7.5 million years and comes up with the answer 42.  It then says that:

“I checked it very thoroughly … and that quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you’ve never actually known what the question is.”

The question of how many people are on our list or in our database is similarly ill-formulated.  You may have a list of X people, but are you really going to ask for a donation the person who called your executive director a [redacting] [redacter] at the gala 11 years ago and never corresponded with your organization thereafter? So your list is X-1.  How about dead people?  You need them in your database so you know not to solicit them.  And so on.

Every time you communicate with these folks, you are losing something.  Usually, for methods like mail and telemarketing, there is an additional marginal cost for each person reached.  With email, there isn’t, so email tends to be the least segmented direct marketing method.  This, however, ignores that there is a cost for not segmenting an email file; the less people open your emails (and especially in cases where you are emailing an account that no longer exists or is checked), the more likely systems are to think you are a dirty dirty spammer and cast you down into the ranks of personal attribute enhancers, Nigerian princes, and your great-aunt who thinks that you absolutely need to know about the ecstasy-lased gummy bears “epidemic.”

The bottom line is that even when you aren’t paying the bill, you have every incentive to make sure your list is as trim as possible.  That means not communicating with the deceased, opt-outs, those with incorrect communication data (although you should be doing NCOA (national change of address), eCOA (electronic change of address), and corrective phone appends on those people you would still like to talk to), and those who have opted out of the medium (e.g., email opt-outs) or message (e.g., solicitation opt-outs).

You may think that once you clear those people out of your list, you should have a defined number.  However, different people are at different stages of interaction with your organization.  Here are a few:

  • Some guy (aka suspect)
  • Prospect
  • One-time giver
  • Multi giver
  • Sustainer
  • Mid-major donors
  • Major donor
  • Planned giving donor

These are frequently presented in a pyramid because there are only so many easy-to-use graphics in PowerPoint.  Some may say it’s because suspects and prospects are the base of the program and they grow from there in smaller and smaller numbers, but you and I know the truth.

The truth is that these are like the stages of grief, in that they don’t always apply, don’t often go in order, and abstract over significant parts of the donor journey. For example, take a look at the types of retention you should be measuring and you’ll see that there are categories – first-year, but not first-time, givers and reactivated lapsed – that this pyramid doesn’t take into account.  Similarly, you will see people who are major donors on their first gift, people who you didn’t know about who leave support to you in their will, and the former sustainer who no longer wants to support your organization.

I take inspiration from Stephen Jay Gould, who critiques in many discussions of evolution the ideal of progress or, worse, inevitability:

Progress is not merely a deep cultural bias of Western thought…it is also…the explicit expectation of all deterministic theories of evolutionary mechanism that have ever achieved any popularity, from Darwinian selection to Lamarckism to orthogenesis. I do not, of course, mean progress as an unreversed, unilinear march up the chain of being; Darwin did away with this silly notion forever. But even Darwinism anticipates that an imperfect, irregular, but general ascent should emerge from all the backing and forthing inherent in a theory based on a principle of local adaption to changing circumstances.

Stephen Jay Gould, “The Paradox of the First Tier.”

In reality, the donor journey isn’t a net gradual march from suspect to prospect to one-time donor, to multi-donor, and so on.  But the general theme of this – that you should treat different types of donor different based on what you want them to do for the organization, what they want to do for the organization, and their means and interest – is a good one.  A suspect and a potential major donor are very unlikely to want the same communication in the same way.

So there are some folks you may want to get some communications, but never others.  Other such groups:

  • Board members
  • Organizations
  • Recent donors
  • The people you serve
  • Public officials and opinion leaders
  • People who have requested a certain number of communications each year

That’s the broadest type of segmentation – what type of people do we want to include?  But we’ll want to increase revenues and save costs by sending the most effective communication possible. So in this week of segmentation, we’ll talk about the philosophy of segmentation, then start with a basic segmentation – RFM analysis – and build from there.

Why “mail everyone” is never the answer