multichannel

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

Hitting your direct marketing budget 84% of the time

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Much virtual ink has been spilt discussing why the housing market, then the US economy, crumbled like a Barbie chair under a sumo wrestler in 2008.  (My favorite account is Michael Lewis’s The Big Short; the book is excellent and now I’m looking forward to the movie)

In the end, through all the discussions of things like collateralized debt obligations, mortgage-based securities, and tranches, you could describe the problem as:

People assumed that stuff that would naturally all go wrong at once
wouldn’t go wrong all at once.

In this case, it was home mortgages.  Mortgages were looked at as individual special unique snowflakes, when in reality, the things that would make for one person to default on their mortgage (bad economy, failures of certain types of sectors or jobs, taking on too much debt, unregulated and unjustified lending) would make for a bunch of people defaulting on their loans.

By now, you are probably wondering what my point is.  My point is:

It’s reasonable to assume that which goes wrong goes wrong simultaneously in your direct marketing budget.

Yes, there are things that can affect individual communications that are not replicable.  But there are a number of scenarios that can be systemic, whether it is the failure of the economy, a messaging issue, or that viral video of your executive director riding a stolen police horse naked down a major highway.

(That is, the executive director is naked, not the horse, although that last part could really go either way or both.)

Traditionally, direct marketing budgeting and budgeting in general is not like this.  You set the budget for what you believe you can achieve based on previous years’ results and all of the things we’ve discussed this week.  You assume that the good and the bad will balance each other out – that your good tests will pay for your bad ones and that yours learning throughout the year will help expand things a bit beyond your budget.

But when you assume that the success of a communication doesn’t correlate with the next communication or the last one, you make the same mistake as those people who wrecked the economy.

Thus I would recommend setting a high, medium, and low scenario for each communication in your direct marketing plan.  Medium is what you believe is most likely based on your experience.  High and low are one standard deviation away from your plan; you budget for the low scenario.

It need not necessarily be one standard deviation – you can change based on your and your organization’s risk tolerance – but one standard deviation ensures that there’s at least an 84% chance that each communication will be at or better than budget.  If you have total correlation among your various communications (a worst case scenario), that means that you will only be under budget one out of every six years.

Ideally speaking, your budgeted scenario should have at least file replenishment level acquisition and reacquisition – that is, you should plan to end the year with as many or more donors than you started it with.

By budgeting for your “low” scenario budget, you’ve made your finance department happy (or at least less unhappy).  And you have the opportunity to trim out your investment as the year goes on, which I’ll discuss tomorrow.

Hitting your direct marketing budget 84% of the time

Setting your direct marketing budget anti-goals

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Yesterday, I argued that the three things that matter in your budget are net revenue, file/program health, and cross channel/multichannel/omnichannel health (how much are you contributing to other fundraising and non-fundraising efforts.

That ignores some key traditional metrics.  And that’s intentional.  Here’s why:

Costs.  Many nonprofits look to minimize their overall costs (and believe you me, I have seen some nonprofits transcend lean and mean and become emaciated and ticked off).  But this is a fallacy in direct marketing.

Let’s picture direct marketing once again as if it were a magic box that you put costs into and got revenue out of.

If an additional $100 in the magic box brings you an additional $150 in revenue today, you should do that.  That’s covered by net revenue.

If an additional $100 in the magic box brings you an extra $200 next year, you should do that (unless you are in a hyperinflationary market).  That’s covered by program health.

If an additional $100 in the magic box brings you an additional .5% chance of a $100,000+ bequest (crosschannel health), you should do that.  That’s covered by crosschannel health.

The problem with overall cost as something you look to minimize is that it could ignore these three investment opportunities.  Don’t do that.

Gross revenue.  If the impacts on file and crosschannel health were the same, would you rather spend $2 million to make $4 million or $3 million to make $5 million?  Clearly the former, as you can getting more return on your investment.

Yet some nonprofits have a goal of “we will increase our revenues to X” instead of “we will increase our revenues to Y, net of direct marketing costs.”  The former gives an incentive to overspend at the expense of net revenue, program health, and crosschannel health.

This is yet another reason why Charity Navigator’s financial rates are so very, very flawed and actively counterproductive.  They have cost of fundraising in their model so that a 10% drop in ROI could cost you 2.5 points (out of 100 (actually 70 because they spot you 30 points)).

However, if that turns your organization into one that is growing substantially in income and program expenses as a result, instead of shrinking, you get an additionally 20 points (because revenue growth and program expense growth are two 10 points categories.  This is why Charity Navigator rated an active cancer charity scam three stars – because it was growing.  If you doubt me, here’s their rating from the handy dandy Internet archive.

Conversely, a charity that has encountered tough times will get zero points out of ten on both of these growth indicators, giving them two stars on financials or less, hurting that struggling charity in its efforts to work its way out of the hole.  I will at some point dedicate a week to the perverse incentives of Charity Navigator, which sets itself up as a watchdog but instead chews up your shoes and poops on your carpet.

Return on investment is important.  But it should be strived for, not budgeted for.  Later this week, you’ll see why, as we look to get to our optimal program.

So tomorrow, I’ll talk about the nuts and bolts of budgeting and some pitfalls to watch out for.

Setting your direct marketing budget anti-goals

A direct marketing bridge to… monthly giving

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

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

 

2000px-target_logo-svg

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A direct marketing bridge to… monthly giving

A direct marketing bridge to… major gifts

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Direct marketing specialists and major gift specialists seem to be opposites in style and approach.  One is impersonal, mass-market, with knowledge of the aggregate not the specific – the marketing equivalent of the Air Force; the other is all about personal relationships, forged one on one, with intimate knowledge of that one person you are pitching – the equivalent of boots on the ground Army or Marines.  This can often cause them to be rivals in the same ways the service branches are; they can also work together to accomplish a mission together like the service branches.

As a direct marketer, developing a small budget to a major gifts program is part defensive.  I once worked with a major gift officer who would mark a donor as no mail, no phone, and no email the moment they got on her radar screen.  Not only did this deprive us of the only real source of revenue we had from these donors, but it also deprive the donor of the information that was tethering them to the mission and tugging at their heart strings.  And when she left, we had no way of differentiating real unsubscribes from these unsubscribes of pseudo-convenience.

This is going to happen if you can’t create a positive experience for potential major donors in your direct marketing program.  Yet it can happen and it can cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for the nonprofit.  There are only two reasons to stop communications with your potential major donors in this way: 1) if they ask you to or 2) you have a relationship with that donor to the point that there is a substitute communications strategy and ask framework in place.

So your role in direct marketing is to build the relationship with the donor over time.  This doesn’t necessarily mean a slower cadence; rather, it means different types of pieces, including a donor newsletter telling them about their accomplishments – the true impact of their giving.  It can also include higher-touch, higher-value communications – handwritten notes or cards, invitations to special events or briefings, or the like.  These can enter the communication stream gradually as your relationship builds.

Direct marketing is also a great vehicle – in fact, a primary vehicle – for identifying those donors who may be receptive to a major donor ask.  While some amount of wealth is certainly a necessary condition for a person to be able to make a major donation, the more important thing to the organization is the tie to the organization.  People often forget this.  If I had a nickel for every time a nonprofit brainstorming potential targets thought of hitting up Bill Gates or his foundation because of a friend of a friend, I would be blogging about what yachts are the most fun to waterski behind.

bill_gates_july_2014

If this man is your major donor strategy,
you do not have a major donor strategy.

What you are looking for is:

  • Giving history – long, repeated, multiple gifts per year, and increasing gift amounts
  • Participation – telling a story, coming to an event, volunteering
  • A clear passion for at least one aspect of your mission either from his/her giving history or participation

The one exception to this is people who make unusually high (whatever this is for your organization – probably between $100 and $1000) first gifts.  This is probably a person who has been interested in your cause for a while or has an important reason to start giving now – they may be ripe for personal interactions as much as your loyal long-term donors.

Looking at this compact list, you can see that you can not only help solicit major donor prospects, you can help create them.  This is by incorporating upgrade strategies into your communications.  If you have well-defined recognition for different levels of giving (and you should), you can make those aspirational, especially for those on the cusp of reaching them, by making the ask for the next highest level of recognition.  Those recognition levels should also be a prominent part of your mail, phone, and online communications, as well as your acknowledgments for these donors.

Finally, remember to thank extremely well.  If you are at lost as to how, check out 50 ways to thank your donors.  Some are usual, some are a bit nutty, but they may spark some ideas to giving your major donors and potential major donors the love they deserve.

A direct marketing bridge to… major gifts

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

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

Testing beyond individual communications

nickellinger, , Leave a comment

So far, the testing that I’ve discussed is how to optimize a communication or overall messaging.  The next step is trying to answer fundamental questions about the nature of your program – things like how many times to communicate and through what means.

There is a pretty good chance that you are not communicating enough to many of your constituents.

But wait, you say.  We send out a mail piece a month, have multiple telemarketing cycles per year, and have both a monthly e-newsletter and semi-frequent emails on other topics.  Our board members and staff who are on our seed lists are consistently on me, you say, that we are communicating too much.  And we get donors who complain that they are getting a mail piece before their last one was acknowledged.

However, remember in the discussion of segmentation that more donors are saying their nonprofits are undercommunicating, not over. That means that the average number profit needs to be communicating more than it is.

And the concern that you are annoying people with asking for money comes from an oft-quoted and concerning inferiority complex from the nonprofit.  We have to believe that we are good enough to merit a gift and making an appropriate ask to be effective.  We want to give our donors an opportunity to be a part of something powerful and transformative.  Remember that if we do our jobs well, donating to our organization is a positive experience.

So how would you test whether you are communicating often enough/too often?  The first step is to figure out where you are as a control with a cross-medium communications calendar.  This is easy said than done, but it’s a necessary first step.  This need not be perfect; as you are going to want to have some communications that are timely and focused on current events, you may have to have some placeholders in place that simply indicates “we’re going to email something here.”

Then split test your file and test, so that part of your file gets X communications and another gets X plus or minus 1.  I’d suggest plus.  Then measure the total success of the communications.

I once helped lead a test where we took mail pieces out of our schedule during membership recruitment.  We would send a piece or two, then wait to see if those donors would donate before sending to them against to make sure that we were addressing them properly as either a renewed donor or as someone who has not yet renewed.  Each individual piece in the resting membership series had a significantly better ROI and better net than the more consistent appeal series.

Yet the appeal series brought in more money for the organization and the mission overall.  I would argue, as I did at the time, this is the actual important metric.  If you want to look at metrics like ROI or response rate, your best opportunity is to send one letter to your single best donor – you’ll get a 100% response rate and ROI percentages in the tens of thousands or more.

But for real life, the goal is more money for more mission.  So overall net is the metric of choice.

The easiest campaigns to add to are the ones that already have a multistage component.  Let’s say you have a matching gift campaign that goes mail piece 1, email 1, mail piece 2, email 2 (with two weeks between each).  A way of testing up would be to look at doing mail piece 1, email 1 + mail piece 1.5, mail piece 2 + email 1.5, email 2 (so there’s still two weeks between each set of communications, but they double up in the middle).  That would be adding a mail piece and an email and if you test both of these with net as your goal, you will have a better framework for the campaign in the following year as well as for additional testing throughout the year.

With email only campaigns, there’s another way of checking whether you are over-emailing your file – looking to see if your total opens and clicks fall.  There is a point at which open rates and click rates will begin to fall; however, you shouldn’t worry too much until adding another email not only lowers your open and click rates but lowers your total number of opens and clicks (similar to a focus on total net, rather than net per piece).

This tipping point in email is probably well past where you think it is.  Hubspot did a study of emails per month on both open and click-through rates.  The sweet spot with the highest open and click rates was between 15 and 30 email per month.

That’s right – opens and clicks went up until you got in the range of daily emails.  Things went downhill after 30 days.  So if you are sending more than daily emails (on any day but December 31 or the last day of a matching opportunity), you might be emailing too much – so take that as a cautionary tale for the .0001% of you who are doing this.  For the other 99.9999%, hopefully this will give support for the business case for testing up on your emails.

There are three tricks to cross-platform testing:

  1. There is a whole science of attribution testing. If you have the ability to look at this literature and your data systems will support this, go for it.  However, most organizations of my experience don’t have all of their data in the same place initially, making this exceedingly hard.  Thus, this sort of testing up/down for cadence should look at sources of revenue by audience test panel rather than through what medium the donation is made.  You may be surprised how much adding a mail piece increases your online revenue or adding a telemarketing cycle boosts the mail piece.
  2. Unlike with strictly piece-based attributes, I’d argue you have to test every cell here because there are interactions among the means of communication. It may be that mail + mail is better than mail and mail + phone is better than mail, but that when you have mail + phone + mail, you have diminishing returns that don’t compensate for doing both mail pieces.
  3. You will have to be vigilant about the creation of your testing cells. ft_15-07-23_notonline_200pxAs much as you would like to call everyone who has a phone number or email everyone who has an email address, and use those who don’t have a phone number or email on file as a control audience, those are different types of donors.  Pew has a great summary of the non-Internet users of the US at right.  Even if you looked just at the age and income variables, you can see how this would make your control audience look very different from your non-control.In reverse, 66% of 25-29 year olds live in houses where there is no landline, compared with 14% of 65+ year olds, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.

    So, if you think of the average person for whom you have a phone number, but not an email address, that person looks very different from the one where you have an email address, but not a phone number.  Thus, you have to either control for all demographic variables in your assessment (hard) or split test people by means of communication that you have available. (marginally easier)

Thanks for reading and be sure to let me know at nick@directtodonor.com what future topics you’d like to see.

Testing beyond individual communications

Your trapezoid zero database – a spreadsheet

nickellinger, , , , Leave a comment

Why trapezoid zero? Because square one is too dignified.

If you are like most nonprofit direct marketers, you have one true donor database that filters in all of the data you need from various applications, gives you a view into what every constituent needs and wants, and allows you to segment and communicate with them instantly.

Then you wake up from your dream. You perform requisite amounts of personal grooming, cover your dirty shameful bits with clothing sufficiently uncomfortable to convey gravitas, go to work, and stare at the latest list you have pulled in Excel.

Excel is not a bad program per se and has gotten even better since Clippy was taken out for some cannoli in downtown Redmond and never heard from again.  The trick is that it is not intended to do what we do with it for address lists and the like.  For that, Microsoft created Access, which is actually a bad program per se.

I promise to talk about using Excel for its intended purpose, but first, here’s how to manage your lists in Excel, starting with basic deduplication.

edharris

Deduplication could effectively be called Sisyphean except some is pushing the blinkered rock down as you are trying to push up. You are never, never done deduplicating, especially given that the most common records for deduplication are your best supporters (given that they will be engaging the organization from all angles).

So let’s assume you have a very simple list.  You want to remove duplicates from an email list.  Specifically, you are looking for exact duplicates – you don’t mind emailing the same email twice as long as it is for different names and you don’t mind emailing the same person twice as long as it is at two separate addresses.  Here’s your list:

firstexcellist

As you can see, there are a few Blofelds in there to get rid of.  Your list will be longer and less menacing.

  1. Select all by hitting Ctrl + A
  2. Go to Data > Sort
  3. Sort by all three fields in any order
  4. Now, you are going to compare each row to the one below it. Go to the top row and the first empty column and put in =A2=A3.  This creates a TRUE/FALSE statement where anything that comes back TRUE is identical.
  5. Drag the lower right corner of the cell you just created down so it covers all rows and over to the right so it covers as many columns as you have. It will look something like this:
  6. Highlight the TRUE/FALSE columns, hit Ctrl + C to copy the columns, then right-click on the same columns to bring up the special menu. Select Paste Values.  What you are doing here is replacing your TRUE/FALSE statements with the results of those statements.  Because you are going to be sorting by these, you don’t want Excel recalculating.
  7. Select all by hitting Ctrl + A
  8. Go to Data > Sort
  9. Sort by the three TRUE/FALSE columns. The output will look something like this.

    secondexcellist
    As you can see, there are two records in rows 14 and 15 that were exact matches for other records in the database, since they have three columns of TRUE.  Those are your duplicates and you can delete them.  One might say you have a license to delete them.

That works fine for simple data.  But how often does that happen?  Tomorrow will be some advanced tips for deduplication in Excel.

Your trapezoid zero database – a spreadsheet