online

Judging your online file

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We’ve gone over email, Web, and constituent metrics so far — now we need to look at how your online file stacks up.

imageThe easy, and lazy, metric is file size.  There is a certain type of person — and I’m not going to name any names or get political here — that always thinks that bigger is better.  And that yuge…  I mean huge… is better than bigger.

I would be lying if I had not seen this used as a case for investment at some points.  There is no small amount of power in standing up in front of a board (which is, sadly, more older white men than we should probably have as a society at this point) and saying “your X is too small.”  That X stands for “email file size” is not entirely relevant at that point.

These people, whoever they may be, because I have too much class to single out any one particular person, are wrong.  File size is a vanity metric.  It makes you feel good (or bad) but doesn’t impact performance.

Deliverable file size is a skosh better.  Here, you subtract out people who have unsubscribed, hard bounces, people who haven’t opened an email in a significant amount of time, and other malcontents.  At least this can’t be gamed (in the long term) by going on fiverr.com and paying five bucks for thousands of email subscribers, Facebook likes, Twitter followers, etc.

But ideally, you want to take your file size and overlay your value per constituents.  If your advocacy constituents are worth $1 and your information-requesters are worth ten cents, a file that is 90,000 advocacy folks and 10,000 requesters will be worth a lot more than vice versa.  So, deliverable file size by actionable segment is probably the thing to shoot for.

But more than that, you need to look at those segments by how you get there and where you are going.  This means looking at the positive side (growth) and negative side (churn).

I’ve professed my love of the M+R metrics report here, but there’s one thing I don’t 100% agree with.  They say:

Our job is not to block the exits; our job is to throw the doors open and welcome people in.

They put this in the proper context in the next line: “You should be paying more attention to growth than churn.”  But this doesn’t mean you should be paying no attention to churn.  You want to make sure that people aren’t leaving in droves, especially if they implicate one of your acquisition strategies.  For example, if 90 percent of the people who sign a petition aren’t on your file in six months, you are either doing a bad job of retaining them or you likely didn’t want them anyway.

But, as M+R says, don’t lose a lot of sleep over churn.  The two recommendations I have are:

1) Customize your exit plans.  Many of the people who unsubscribe from you don’t want to unsubscribe as much as they want a different email relationship with you.  That may be something you are able to provide with segmented emails, fewer emails, etc.

2) Do electronic change-of-address maintenance of your file so you can recapture all of the people you want to get back.

I also like to look at online list by origin.  Sometimes, increasing online subscribers from one means of acquisition (e.g., e-append) can mask weaknesses in others (e.g., organic conversion).  There is no ideal here, but it’s good to see some diversity in origin.

Finally, make sure you are measuring the share of online revenue you get from email. You want to stay in a Goldilocks zone here.  Too little from email and your emails aren’t effective in driving people to take the most important action on your site.  Too much from email and you aren’t attracting new people to the organization.

Judging your online file

What is the value of an email address?

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There are any number of ways to acquire an email address.  Change.org or Care2 will run cost-per-acquisition campaigns with you.  You can do online advertising (paid or Google Grant-ed) that drives people to your site.  You can e-append your offline constituents in the hopes of further cultivating your relationship with them.  And there’s organic — getting people to come to your site, then getting to sign on the line that is dotted.

These all have one thing in common: they cost.  They cost in time, treasure or both.  So you need to know whether the effort is worth it.  And for that, you need to be able to put a price tag on a constituent.

This is anathema to some.  Witness our (fake) debate on whether we want more donors or better donors: there are some intangibles that are, well, intangible.

But we are judged against numbers.  Our goal is to raise money and make friends, in that order.  So let’s quantify what we can.

While we are attaching caveats to this, let’s also stipulate that you should do this exercise both for your average email address (since you won’t always know from whence your constituent came) and for as many subsegments as you can reasonable do.  The value of a Care2 advocacy person will be different from an organic advocacy person, which will be different from someone who is looking for information on your site, which will be very very different from an offline donor or a walk donor that you are working to make a multichannel or organization donor.  Each will have its own value and price.

So I’m going to describe the exercise for how you would do a generic email address; the principles are the same for any subsegment.

The first step is to determine the lifetime value of the person’s online donations.  Again, I’m going to eschew attribution modeling as very complex — do it if you can, but if you can’t, you are in the right place.

denslows_three_bears_pg_3

You might think, as I once did, that the way to determine this is to take the online donations you have for a year and divide by the number of email addresses.  However, this ignores that many of your donations are made by people who are not online constituents (and may never be).  So this estimate will be far too high.

You might think, as others I’ve seen do, that you can derive this by totalling the amount given by the amount given to ask emails throughout the year.  However, this ignores that your email may stimulate a desire to give that is fulfilled on another device, another day, and even by another method (more on that later).  Counting just donations given directly to emails will give you an estimate that is too low.

So those are the Papa Bear and the Mama Bear solutions; what does Baby Bear say is just right?  I would argue that you should count the donations given online by those who were signed up for and receiving emails at the time of their online gift.  This too will be an overestimate — you might have received some of those gifts if you didn’t have those folks as constituents.  However, it’s much closer than the Papa Bear model and, as you will see from having run your numbers on revenue per page from yesterday, a constituent gift is far more likely than a person-off-the-street gift.

You also need to factor in the lift that online gives to other channels.  I recently saw an analysis of an e-append that still has double-digit increases in both response rate and average gift of the mail donors four years later.  And this included people who had since unsubscribed.  So properly written and targeted emails can be a strong retention tool.

You can look at your file and see what the offline donation and retention rates are for people for whom you have email addresses and those who don’t.  The challenge is that these are likely to be different types of people.  You ideally want to compare someone to themselves before you had their email address as well as a control audience.

That’s why I like to look at e-appends of the past for this.  You can determine:

  • Value of average donor before e-append who got appended
  • Value of average donor before e-append who didn’t appended
  • Value of average donor after e-append who got appended
  • Value of average donor after e-append who didn’t appended

From that, you should be able to derive the lift that email itself gave.  (If you need the formula, email me at nick@directtodonor.com; it’s a bit boring to go through in detail here.)

Similarly, for events with online registration, the good news is that a lot of walkers fake their email addresses or don’t give you one.  How is that good news?  It gives you a nice experiment.  Take the people who gave you their emails versus those who don’t and their return rates and gifts given/raised amounts.  My guess is that being on your email list should increase both retention and value.  These too can go into the lifetime value hopper.

Now you have a formula to got back to your analysis of pages.  Maybe those advocacy participants of today are likely to be your donors of tomorrow.  Or maybe your Change.org advocates didn’t convert the way you would like in the long-term.  These will help you make choices around investments, pages, and people.  Hope it helps!

What is the value of an email address?

Web metric basics

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We talked yesterday about email metrics; now it’s Web site metrics’ turn.

We start here with the most generic of all online metrics: traffic.  No less an authority that FiveThirtyEight says that we still don’t know how to measure Web traffic. The difference is how unique visitors are measured versus total visits.  If you are an advertiser, you want to make sure the 1,000,000 visits a person is claiming to her/his site aren’t just a guy hitting reload over and over again.  This can be done by cookie, by IP address.  

My advice on this is sacrilegious for a metrics guy: don’t worry too much about it as long as you are using a consistent system for measurement.  I’ve used mainly Google Analytics for this, because it’s free, but any system will have its own way of determining this.

From this number, you can derive revenue per visitor by simply dividing your annual online revenues by your number of visitors to determine revenue per visitor.  This is a nice benchmark because you can see what all of your optimization efforts add up to; everything you do to try to get someone to a donation page, what you do to convert them, your average gift tweaking, the value you derive from your email list — all of it adds up to revenue per visitor.

But more than that, revenue per visitor also allows you to see what you are willing to invest to get someone to your site.  Let’s say your revenue per visitor is right at the M+R Benchmarks Report 2016 average of $.65 per visitor.  If the average blog post you do results in an extra 1000 visitors to your site, you should in theory be willing to pay up to $650 to write, deliver, and market that blog post (because revenue per visitor is an annual figure, so acquiring someone at cost that you can then engage in the future is a beautiful thing).

I say in theory because revenue per visitor varies based on the type of content or interaction.  I’ll talk about this at the end because we need to go through the other metrics to break this down more efficiently.

A close cousin to revenue per visitor is site donation conversion rate, or how many of the people who come to your site donate.  Instead of dividing your annual online revenues by visitors, you’ll divide the number of donations by visitors.  This is one of two key inputs to revenue per visitor (the other being average gift) and is a good way of testing whether wholesale changes to your site are helping encourage people to give.  

I recently worked with someone who put a thin banner at the top of their site encouraging donation.  He was disheartened because less than half a percent of the people who came to the site clicked on the banner.  I asked him if the total clicks were additive to donation clicks (that is, they represented people who wouldn’t have clicked to donate otherwise) or substitutive (that is, total donation clicks didn’t go up; they just moved from another donate button to this bar).  We were able to tell not only because of the donation clicks went up over baseline, but because the site donation conversation rate went up.  Now we are working on a strategy to test this bar throughout the site and with different context-specific asks.

Drilling down from the site donation conversion rate is the page donation conversion rate.  This is people who donate to a donation page divided by visitors to your donation page.  It’s a standard measure of the quality of your donation page.  This and average donation on a donation page combine to create the revenue per page.  

Revenue per page is not only a good way of measuring which donation form is better — it’s a good way of getting a feel for the valuable content on your site.  See how many of the people who come to a page end up donating directly from the page (you can do sophisticated attribution models to determine this — going directly to a donation is a quick and dirty way of doing it) and what their average gift is.  Divide that by the number of visitors you have to that page and you can see what the revenue per page is on a non-donation page as well.

This is great information to have.  Let’s say the value of a visitor to your home page is 10 cents, to a program page is 20 cents, and to an advocacy page is 40 cents.  This helps you make decisions about your content.  Do you need better calls to action on your program page?  What should be your next home page feature? (Answer: probably something about advocacy)  Where should you direct the bulk of your Google Grant traffic?  Etc.

However, there is one thing missing from all of this.  You will note that I said site donation conversion rate and page donation conversion rate.  Usually metrics folks won’t put donation in there — it’s implied.

But there’s another conversion rate that’s vitally important and that’s conversion to a constituent.  Remember that the conversion to donation process often is a series of smaller steps.  You need constituents who subscribe to your email newsletter, volunteer for your activities, and read your social media posts (OK, maybe not that last one).  A person has given you permission to talk to them is a valuable thing and should not be forgotten about.

So there’s also a site constituent conversion rate and page constituent  conversion rate — how good are your pages at capturing people.  Only when you have this to add to your revenue per page do you have a true measure of page quality.

But wait!  How do you add people converted to revenue?

That’s the topic for tomorrow as we discuss how to value a constituent.

Web metric basics

Email metric basics

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Every field does its best to be impenetrable to outsiders and the world of online testing is no different.  We measure KPIs instead of “important things.” The differences among CPA, CPC, CPM, CPR, CTA, CTR, and CTOR are all important (for example, one of these can save your life, but isn’t an online metric) and there are TLAs* that I haven’t even talked about.

So this week I want to look at measuring online successes (and not-yet-successes), but first, we need to get our terms straight so we know what we are trying to impact, starting with email metrics.

For me, this is easiest picturing the steps that would go from email to action.  An email is:

  • Sent
  • Delivered
  • Opened
  • Clicked upon (or unsubscribed from)
  • Responsible for a completed action

Almost all of the other important metrics are ratios of the number of people who did this (or the number of unique people who did this — unique meaning the number of people who did something, not the number of total times something was done.  For example, 1000 people clicking on a link once and one person clicking on a link 1000 times will have the same click-through rate, but very different unique click-through rates).

The most important of these ratios are:

Delivery rate: emails delivered divided by emails sent.  This is inexact, as different email providers provide different levels of data back to you as to whether an email was a hard bounce (email permanently not delivered) or soft bounce (temporary deliver issues like full email box or email message too large).  But as long as you are using the same email program to send your emails, you will have consistent baselines and be able to assess whether it’s getting better or worse.

Open rate: emails opened divided by emails sent.  There are a couple minor problems with this.  First, opens can’t be calculated on text emails.  That is, only HTML emails have the tracking to determine whether they were opened or not.  Second, some email clients allow people to skim the contents of an email in a preview pane and count it as an open.  Third, some email clients don’t count an open as an open (even if the person interacts with the message) if it is only in a preview pane.  So it’s an inexact science.

However, open rates are still a good, but not perfect, measure for testing the big three things that a person sees before they open a message:

Why isn’t it a perfect measure?  Because it’s hackable.  Let’s say your control subject line is “Here’s how your gift saved a life.”  If you test the subject line “Your gift just won you a Porsche,” it might win on open rate, but you’ve lied to your donor (unless you have an astounding back-end premium program).  That will spike your unsubscribe rate and lower your click-throughs**.

So you probably want to look at this in combination with click-through rates (CTR).  This is another one of those metric pairs that prevent you from cheating the system that I love so much.  Click-through rate is number of people who clicked (assuming you are using unique click-through rate) by divided by emails sent.  It’s a good way of measuring how well your content gets people to (start to) take action.

Another good way to look at how your email content performs is click-to-open rate (CTOR).  This is number of people who clicked (assuming you are using unique CTOR) by divided by opens.  As you might guess, it fits very nicely with the previous two metrics.  Let’s say two emails both had 1% click-through rates.  One of them might have had a 20% open rate and a 5% click-to-open rate; the other might have had a 5% open rate and a 20% click-to-open rate.  In this case, you’d want to see if you could take the subject, sender, and pre-header of email #1 and combined it with the body copy of email #2.

You also need to look at unsubscribe rate (number of unsubscribes divided by number of emails sent), but not as much as many would think. If it starts going too high, you may want to worry about how you are acquiring your subscribers; likewise, it’s good to compare unsubscribe rates across types of constituents (that is, do your advocacy supporters unsubscribe faster than your white paper downloaders?  Perhaps it’s time for more segmentation and better advocacy content).  But don’t let it drive the boat.

Finally, you want to look at conversion rate: those who took the action divided by those who clicked through.  While not strictly an email metric, I include it here because a person could try the same underhanded tactic with the Porsche to boost click-through rates (to bait and switch the clicker) and because it’s so vital to be measuring and optimizing against.

But that’s another post.

If you want to benchmark your metrics, I strongly recommend M+R’s benchmarks study here.  And please sign up for my free newsletter here.  We have strong metrics (40% open rates and 8% click-throughs) so others are (hopefully) finding it to be useful nonprofit direct marketing content.
* Three-letter acronyms

** Also, it’s wrong.  Don’t do it.

Email metric basics

Using non-donor knowledge to enhance segmentation

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Yesterday, we introduced you to two special people that a traditional RFM analysis would group as 4-6 month $25-49.99 multis.  To wit:

Since Sandy first donated to your organization in 1992, she’s given over 100 gifts.  Nothing exorbitant – she’s now giving $30 every three or four months – but she also has volunteered, come to three walks, signed up for emails, and taken almost every advocacy action you offer.

On the other hand, you acquired Miriam from an outside list in 2012.  She gave $25, but nothing since then.  You don’t have her email or phone number, but a last chance lapsed package piqued her interest four months ago and she gave another $25.

We talked about how their donation history can and should differentiate them.  There are additional indicators here, however, that can also enhance your messaging and segmentation:

Online interactions.  If someone is active online, it’s relatively simple to group their interests by their activity – what they click on, look at, and interact with.  (Actually, technically, interact with is the easiest, click on is slightly harder, and look at can be a bear with some online tools.)

With Sandy, she is an advocate for you and doesn’t seem to require premiums to donate – perhaps you can replace the labels in that upcoming package with a paper version of an action alert – cheaper, and likely more effective.

Other organizational interactions.  Sandy has been a walker – do you want to mention that your walk is coming up in 90 days in the PS or in a buckslip?  Similarly, you should probably customize the messaging to acknowledge that she has given her time as well as her donations.  Making her feel known will only help her loyalty.

Outside data.  Getting outside data on your donors can help you adapt your tactics.  If you find out that Miriam does all of her banking online, perhaps she’s a better target for an EFT-based monthly gift than you thought (with the right messaging).

List co-operative data may indicate that that she gives to nine other charities far more often and more generously than to you.  Perhaps she’s just not that into you and you might want to cut your losses soon than you might have thought.

You may find out she does a lot of business on the telephone and find that it isn’t your organization that wasn’t lighting her up; it was the means by which you were approaching her.

All this and more can come from data appends.  And you can try to get that email address and engage her online, so hopefully you can learn more about her.

All of this – donor and non-donor interactions – are masked by an overarching RFM category.  But what if we could dispense with RFM categories altogether?  We’ll talk about that Friday; if you don’t want to miss it, or any of our Direct to Donor posts, please sign up for our free weekly newsletter.

Using non-donor knowledge to enhance segmentation

Cognitive fluency, your brain, and direct marketing

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“Cognitive fluency” means brains like things easy.  Easy things make brains happy.  Happy brains make people do things we want them to do (proof is here). 

Options of three things are easy.  Brains Goldlocks it and pick the one in the middle – not too much, not too little.  There’s a study that shows this. 

Repeating things makes them easier.  Seeing something once makes you more likely to like it a second time.  Thrice is even better.  Even if it is nonsense, you like it because you’ve seen it.  

The easier something is, the more it convinces.  That’s also been shown.

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Image credit: The Boston Globe.

For example, reading Arial makes us think doing something will be easy.  Reading a script font makes us think it will be hard.  The study is here.  

Simply named stocks do better than tough ones.  Simply named people become president.  More info here.

Also, repeating things makes them easier.

So make it easy for your donors.

Have people looking at your donate button.

Repeat things.  Because repeating things makes them easier.

Build up to your ask.  Small steps like email petitions increase donations.  

Tell people what other people are doing.  That’s social proof.  Brains like social proof because it makes things easy.

Just like repetition does.

Make your text a very different color from the background.  Because this stinks.  If it’s too close, it blends in.  Blending is bad.  Reading easily is good.  

Bigger fonts are also better.

Write at the lowest grade level you can without sounding Dick and Jane.  Jeff Brooks, in his very good book, recommends 4th to 6th grade level.

Some may call this stupid.  But it’s not dumbing down.  It speeds your donor up.  It makes it easy for their brain.  And that makes you more persuasive.

So, small words.  Short sentences.  Fragments of sentences, even.

Your high school English teacher might disagree.  If s/he wants a say, s/he needs to donate.

Please make your donors’ brains happy.  Make it easy for them.  Then they will make it easy for you.

Cognitive fluency, your brain, and direct marketing

This is your brain on direct mail

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Readers of a certain age (namely, around my own) will recognize the 80’s era PSA that taught a generation of Americans about proper egg cookery.

But the truth is that your brain is awash in drugs constantly.  They just happen to be of your body’s own making.

So this week, I want to take a look at how people’s brains receive our direct marketing communications and how it should influence our efforts.

Three caveats:

  1. I am not a brain scientist.
  2. Neuromarketing is still in its infancy.  It’s difficult to tell whether what is lighting up on an fMRI is a cause or an effect.  To a large extent, we are still black boxes, where we can observe what’s going in and coming out, but only guess at what happens in the middle.  There’s also a great deal of hucksterism in the community because of the newness.
  3. If #2 were wrong, I wouldn’t necessarily know it because of #1.

Now, if you are still with me, I’d like to talk about how the brain processes tangible marketing (e.g., mail) versus non-tangible marketing (e.g., online).

Temple University (at the request of the Postal Service Inspector General, so not the purest possible study) looked at how the brain processes mail versus online. 

They showed subjects a mix of 40 postcards and emails and monitored them through eye tracking (for visual attention), fingertip sensors for heart rate, breathing, sweating (for emotional engagement), and MRIs (for brain activity).  

Online efforts were distinctly better in one thing: focusing attention.  On the other hand, print won in terms of emotional interaction/arousal, engagement time, desirability for the things in the ads and recall.  The two means tied for memory recall and information processing.

Specifically, the researchers found greater activity in the hippocampus and areas around the hippocampus for physical ads than in digital ads.  The hippocampus is associated with memory formation and retrieval, meaning that participants could remember a greater context for their paper-based stimuli.

If you are a fan of Sherlock, as I am, or the book Hannibal (eh…) you know about the memory technique known as a mind palace — associating things you want to remember with physical locations.  Part of the reason this works is that tangible things are, well, more tangible and easier to retrieve out of memory.

As a result, a week later, subjects showed greater emotional memory for print.

This was replicated in a UK study and a Canadian study. Specifically, with print, more processing took place in the right retrosplenial cortex, which I had never heard of before this paper.  Apparently, this is involved in processing emotional cues and helping them get into memory.

So, in our first foray into brain science, we can say that while people may focus more on online images (in part because it is a more structured environment; life is rarely so structured outside of a computer screen), they forge greater bonds with mail.

The one caveat to this is that mail versus print ads misses the interactivity that is possible online.  It didn’t test video, or click-throughs, or quizzes: just static online ads.  So, just as we shouldn’t trumpet the death of direct mail, neither should we dismiss online as mere ephemera.  There’s more to learn here.

And we’ll do some of that tomorrow with the role of dopamine in nonprofit direct marketing.

This is your brain on direct mail

Escaping fixed ask strings

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Most of the science of ask strings that we’ve talked about is related to variable ask strings that depend on who the potential donor is.  However, when acquiring new donors, this is often not possible, since you know little to nothing about who the person is (yet).  Thus, while we’ll talk mostly about variable ask strings or topics that apply to both fixed and variable ask strings, it’s important to discuss fixed ask strings.

Namely, don’t use them whenever possible.  Yes, they are necessary for some acquisition purposes, but the effort to customize them to even what little you know about a donor is worthwhile.  Some tips:

Online donation forms are usually customizable.  CDR Fundraising Group estimates that this simple step can increase your response rate by 50% and your average gift by 40%.  In fact, they’ve posted code for how to do this in Salsa Labs. What if you don’t use Salsa Labs?  Usually searching for “dynamic ask strings XXname of giving platformXX” will get you some tips on how to.

But if these tips are Greek to you, you can always take a shortcut: setting up multiple donation forms with different ask amounts and sending the links to customized segments of your audience.  This isn’t ideal, but it gets you most of the way there.  Even if you take a very shortcut and have a $100+ versus under $100 versions of your donation form to send, you will be customizing the experience for your online donor a little bit.

Use intelligence from your outside list selects.  If you are like many organizations, your outside list selects will feature a minimum threshold below which you won’t accept donors (often $5 or $10).  Chances are you have tested into these amounts:one list is productive without a threshold, so you haven’t incurred the cost; another had subpar performance, so you asked for a more select group of donors.

Chances are, your $10+ donors from one list will behave differently from your $5+ donors from other and from your “anything goes” donors from list number three.  Thus, you can use this threshold as a customization point for your fixed ask, making sure to ask people who give more for more.

Make sure your ask string testing doesn’t select just one winner.  When you test an ask string in acquisition, there’s a temptation to treat it like a traditional control and test, where a winner is chosen and rolled out with.  Here, however, you may find that even though the majority of lists performed best with your control ask string, there were a few lists that had demonstrably better results with your test version.  Since different lists have different donor characteristics, you may get better results by keeping with an ask string that better fits those donors.

Use modeling to determine your ask.  List cooperatives will be only too happy to create models for you.  Chances are, they can do a response model that maximizes response and another that maximizes average gift.  The folly is when both of these groups get the same ask strings when they were set up with different goals in mind.

However, you don’t have to use a co-op or pay a PhD to run a basic model.  Simply take the average gifts from your current donors at acquisition by ZIP code, standardize them (rounding to the nearest five or ten for fluency), and use that as the basis for your fixed ask strings.  After all, there’s no reason you have to treat 90210 as the same as 48208 in Detroit.

Make sure you are using information from multichannel giving when running a conversion program.  Sadly, walkers, event donors, volunteers, online donors, and e-newsletter subscribers are often dropped into an offline acquisition with nary a thought as to ask string.  Please don’t do this.  You could be asking your $500 online donor or your gala chair to sign a $20 check.  It’s debatable whether it would be worse if they didn’t give a gift or if they did.

Instead, make sure all giving, not just channel-specific giving, is taken into account when formulating your asks.  Additionally, even if someone has not given, you can apply filters like ZIP code or historical data (e.g., last time, your volunteers’ average donation was twice that of your e-newsletter subscribers; why not ask for twice as much?) to your ask string.
Hopefully, these tips help make even your fixed ask string more customized.

This is a special bonus Sunday blog post.  As I was writing my mini-book on ask strings, I realized this was a topic I hadn’t covered yet on the blog, so I’m putting up a draft version of the content here.  Please let me know what you think at nick@directtodonor.com so I can improve it.  And, if you would like a free copy of the book when it is ready, sign up for my weekly newsletter here.

Escaping fixed ask strings

An ode to the mostly filled thermometer

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When was the last time you saw an analog, mercury-based thermometer?  Chances are, it was in a fundraising campaign, indicating how close you were to goal.  Even as thermometers go digital, their ancestors are honored through skeuomorphism* to symbolize progress.

But we come here not to bury the fundraising thermometer, but to praise it.

Specifically, we want to praise how the fundraising thermometer, or a specific state of it, can make people more likely to donate.

fundraising-thermometer-template

Cryder, Loewenstein, and Seltman took a look at how the amount toward goal already raised impacts a person’s likelihood of giving here.

They call it the goal gradient hypothesis: they think that people will be more likely to donate the closer a campaign is to goal.

So they tested this with Kiva, the microlending site that you may remember from such hits as “does being more attractive increase your chances of getting funded on Kiva”?  (Yes, it does.)

They found that when an individual fundraising goal was 0-33% complete, the average hourly progress toward goal was 6.7%.  When it was 33-66% complete, progress was 10.8% per hour; for the final third, it was 12.8% per hour.

So, having the thermometer partial full helped increase fundraising efforts.  This would tend to make sense, since the thermometer is a measure of social proof, a potent persuader.  (It’s the same reason that servers will seed a tip jar with larger denomination bills — it helps set the pressure and the anchor)

Hey, I can hear you yawning.  Yes, I know you aren’t going to be going on Kiva tomorrow.  But we’re just warming up.  The researchers then worked with a nonprofit to mail lapsed donors.  They had three separate goals that they were trying to reach and mentioned that one was 10% complete, a second was 66% complete, and the third was 80% complete.  They also had control conditions where no progress was mentioned.

Sure enough, the 10% and 66% conditions were not significantly different from the no progress control.  However, the 85%-to-goal piece significantly increased response rate (from .5% in the control to 1.17% in the 85%-to-goal version).

They even tested the “why” of this with donor surveys.  They asked people if they would be more likely to buy candy bars from a 7th grade fundraiser if the fundraiser was two bars short of goal or 32 bars short.  Two-bars-left won handily.  Additionally, the donors who chose the two bars indicated they felt like they were having a bigger impact and were more satisfied with their donation.

So, since not everyone can be the donation that pushes you over the finish line, how can you use this?

One tactic is to have a silent period of a campaign.  For online year-end giving, I’ve worked with organizations that will set their goal and their thermometer based on what it will take to hit goal starting from November 1, but only announce the goal and the effort on Giving Tuesday.  That way, their thermometer is at least 20% full when the first donor hits the form.

Another is to ask internal audiences (especially board members) to make the first gifts.  Showing them this research may help them feel like their gift is making a difference by getting others to give more freely.

Finally, you can define down your goal.  The 85%-to-goal condition mentioned above was based on being 85% toward buying a GPS unit for an international relief organization.  This is not a high-ticket item.  By setting the goal low, they were able to talk about 85% complete easily.  This type of microcampaign, repeated writ large, can help illustrate impact for your donors.

So keep those thermometers more than half full and you should be on your way to filling it up the rest of the way.
* A design based on an older version of an item to help people understand the newfangled version.  It’s the reason that email programs look like folded envelopes and your video app probably features an old-school movie clapper.

Thanks to Tim Vandevall here for the thermometer image.

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An ode to the mostly filled thermometer

Nailing the direct marketing-event relationship

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Yesterday, I argued:

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

Let’s test the three major assumptions here:

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

So why?

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

What would a program like this look like?

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

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

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

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

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

Nailing the direct marketing-event relationship