Yes, wherefore.  As long as we are starting from first principles, we can go a little bit Elizabethan.  In the one and only famous “wherefore” quote, Juliet isn’t asking where Romeo is (below the balcony).  Hers are existential questions – for what reason does Romeo exist and what cruel twist of fate made him a Montague, her family’s mortal enemy?

For more of this, check out my likely-never-going-to-be-written book The Bard Does Nonprofit Direct Marketing (All’s Well that Ends with a Donation).

But wherefore segmentation – why does it exist?  We covered a lot of this in the last post, but we’re going to be going into them more granular than that as to who gets what communication when.  Why are we doing this?

The simple answer is “to maximize revenue.”  In this world, every mail piece would be opened and responded to, every phone call answered, every email and online ad clicked upon and donated to.

In this world, the ideal model would be one that gets this 100% response rate – it would read people’s minds and get them the lowest possible cost means of communication to get the maximum gift at the precise right moment.

This is not a horrid definition and, in fact, that would be a really cool (if magical) model to apply.

But it ignores two things: how people give and what your goals are.

Let’s say you have a person who, every year, like clockwork, gives to your membership mail appeal every January.  She’s on your email list, gets your e-newsletter, and a number of other mail pieces each year, but only gives to that one membership mail pieces every single year.

Do you think she would still give to you if that was the only communication she got from you throughout the year?

Probably not. I once walked each year for an organization that will remain nameless.  Every year, I started getting emails from them a couple months before the walk encouraging me to walk (whether I’d already signed up or not) and I would stop hearing from them after the final walk email for another 10 months.

Please notice I say I “once” walked for this organization, not that I still do that.

The bottom line is that even the most loyal of donors (especially the most loyal of donors!) want to hear from you.  Look at Professor Adrian Sergeant’s surveyed reasons why someone stopped giving to an organization:

The full study is here; it’s real and it’s spectacular.

Many of these involve someone not being communicated with enough (not acknowledging support, don’t recall supporting, no longer needs my support) or not being communicated with effectively (other causes more deserving, not informing how money was used).  Now look at the bugaboo of many an ED or board member: inappropriate communications is less than 4%.  More people defect because we don’t talk to them than defect because we talk to them too much.  So we can’t do just the pieces that “work” for a person without cutting the heart out of our communications.

As mentioned earlier, it also ignores other goals you have for your direct marketing program.  In a classic, Mal Warwick’s The Five Strategies for Fundraising Success articulates there are five goals you can set:  Growth, Involvement, Visibility, Efficiency, and Stability (GIVES).  He further says these are to a large extent mutually exclusive.

I’m not going to ruin the book for you, but this is just to say that there are things you want beyond maximizing short-term revenue.  You may want to get long-term revenue, volunteers, advocates, awareness of your causes, and more.

So how do we restate our goal?  How about:

The goal of the direct marketing program is to maximize the lifetime value of each of your constituents.

This isn’t just financial lifetime value if you have other non-financial goals, but it likely helpful to help quantify what you are willing to pay to get, for example, an advocate in order to put everything on the same scale.

This is important to have as a definition because it will help you transcend many obstacles.  When should your direct marketing donors get a major gift officer working with them?  When it will increase the donors’ lifetime value (and shame on you for saying “your donors” – donors belong to no individual within an organization). Should your national office or field offices do communications to donors?  Well, which mix will maximize lifetime value? These will likely need to be tested, but won’t it be nice to have an objective answer to some of these?

We’re going to initially talk about RFM analysis, which takes a look at which donors should get which communications.  This is absolutely necessary as a baseline.  However, if you are looking to maximize the lifetime value of each constituent, you will have to look at things differently.  It’s a minor difference, but you will need to think of “should this donor and donors like them receive this communication?” rather than “who should this communication go to?”.  It’s when you get to the point of thinking about donors first and make your communication vehicles reflect that rather than taking your communications and seeing to whom they should go.