Five Dollar Failure – Testing a new idea for less than the price of a beer.

If there is one thing that I have learned from motivational posters, it’s that there appears to be money in sticking mildly inspirational quotes on largely unrelated, heavily filtered photography.  If there are two things that I have learned (luckily for this blog post, there are) it’s trying and failing is nothing to be ashamed of.  Due to limited budgets, the organisation I work for understands the need to innovate in order to provide the best returns.  Innovation will bring with it more failures than successes, the important things are to ensure that risk is limited and lessons are learned.

One recent experiment we tried was the idea of priming audiences before an upgrade call to see if we could either get them to give more or respond better. It was an unequivocal failure.  Although it did not work, we learned a great deal. It is also a strong example of how to experiment without betting the farm on a hunch.

Theory

The desired outcome of the project was to improve ROI on our phone upgrade campaign. Upgrades are a very important part of our regular giving strategy. The program we run with our phone agency works really well and his was not an attempt to fix a problem. This was an attempt to improve the already returns on an already successful program.

The concept was to prime the donors with information and actions on the same topic as their upgrade call. Theoretically, this would make them more knowledgeable and care more about the topic before they took the call. If they are more knowledgeable and more engaged then, we assumed, they are more likely to say yes to an upgrade and/or more likely to upgrade by more.

We would prime the donors in two channels.  1) An email to donors about the topic that the upgrade call would be based on and 2) Facebook adverts, targeted at the donors. Both of these communications types would ask the donor to take an action (specifically to sign a petition) related to the upgrade call topic.

Execution

It is very important to point out the assistance that our phone agency gave us putting this together and making this happen.  (I’m not naming them here, but drop me a line and I’ll happily recommend them).  With their assistance, we pulled two groups of 1000 donors out of the data set for upgrade.  These donors would be the group that we experimented on a the control.  They were designed to be as close a match to each other as possible.  They all had to have email addresses (as this was essential to the communications) and there were an equal number from each of the phone agencies internal segments.

The email was put together.  Although it contained an ask to sign a petition, the email was structured in a way that didn’t put the call to action front and center.  The focus was instead on the problems and our potential to solve them.

For Facebook we uploaded the email addresses of the donors as a custom audience. The Facebook ads were more focussed on the call to action than the email.  However rather than bidding per click as we would normally do, we optimised payment for impressions.  We also included adverts on the right hand side of the desktop screen, which literally no one clicks on. As we were more interested in eyeballs on the ad rather than clicks to the petition, these side bar ads were great opportunity to get cheap exposure.

Managing the Risk

As we were working with a program that was already working well, we wanted to mitigate the risk of alterations making it work less well. At the same time we needed enough people in the two groups to make the results significant.  1000 donors (who would be the only ones exposed to the communications) came in at about 7% of the upgrade program, meaning that even if it had a catastrophic effect on donors upgrading, we would not be worse off.  It’s also worth noting that because of the nature of communications stream, we deemed it unlikely to have a negative effect on donors.

Keeping the donors to a small test groups also kept the resources and expenditure oretty low.  The time taken to write and set up the email was the greatest time resource that came from our side.  The data wrangling on both our and the agency sides wasn’t too intensive and putting together a Facebook advert took no time at all. The total expenditure above existing charges was just under $5.

The results

As you already know, the experiment didn’t work.  There was no statistically significant effect on the donors in terms of response rate or uplift rate.  In fact if anything they were slightly less likely to upgrade if they’d been in the test group.

Although this was disappointing, I was hoping I could write an article like this on how to double your upgrade rates for less than $5, we were able to take away a number of important things.

What I learned

When there are multiple parts to a comms stream across multiple platforms, its really hard to get people to engage with all or even some of them.  From the 1000 emails we had a 26% open rate (this isn’t great but I didn’t have a big enough group to test email opens).  The immediately means that the test group were 260 people rather than 1000, making it much harder to get a statistically significant result as to whether people who opened the email were more likely to upgrade or likely to upgrade by more. As you will have noticed above we didn’t get this, but let’s continue going through the process as it’s useful.

In terms of the Facebook I could only find about 60% of the donors through their targeting system and the advert only reached a total of 262 people.  Facebook will not tell me which 600 people it could match, let alone which 262 people saw the ad, so it becomes much more difficult to draw out any findings as to the effects this had on the upgrade call.  Again, even if I could have been able to identify people who had seen the ad, the reduced sample size would have made it much harder to draw a significant conclusion.

The next part of the equation that complicates and ultimately devalues the result is that there is we are only able to have a conversation with about 50% of people.  So the group of 260 that opened the email became a group of 140 who opened an email and who were asked to upgrade.  The number who opened the email, received the Facebook post and were asked to upgrade on the phone is unknowable. If the number of people was statistically even (unlikely but possible) then it could be that only 35 out of the original cohort of 1000 donors received all three communications.

I’m actually really happy that there wasn’t a statistically significant response because the response that we did get was the opposite of my hypothesis. People in the test group were less likely to upgrade and when they did, they upgraded for less…slightly.  Knowing that the sample size and small difference in the results means that I can at least tell myself that my theory might be correct.  This means that my ego and I can sleep well at night.

However, doing this did teach me a valuable lesson.  It’s really REALLY hard to move people along a multi-channel fundraising/sales journey by just pushing stuff out to them.  Funnels and/or sieves have issues as metaphors as they cast the donor as passive. Successful sales funnels require with the potential donor responding to an offer, thereby self-identifying as someone who is more interested in the next stage than the people who didn’t respond to that offer.  Just because you gave them or even just attempted to give them the opportunity to “step up”, does not mean they are further along the funnel.  Just because you send them an email doesn’t mean they’ll open it, let alone read it and even further away react to it.  Even if they do all of that it STILL doesn’t necessarily mean that that will influence their decision on a matter further down the line.

There are possibilities that this sort of priming does work.  I’ve heard anecdotal feedback from people who have been very supportive of the idea and have said that it’s working well.

Things we could do differently that might improve the result include:

• A greater number of email communications before the call. This would almost certainly increase the number of people who had seen the communication before they received the call.  I’m not convinced that this will revolutionise the results as even if a completely different 30% open the email, we’ll still only be looking at a total of 30% of the audience having read the email and had the call.
• A more actionable communication. Something centred on getting the donor to do something other than give money. Then finding a way to prioritise calling these people.  I’m not sure we have the CRM technology to achieve this at scale at the moment, but we might be able to run a manual process.
• Run a longer and hopefully deeper internet campaign. Although given the results from this attempt then there is not an argument for spending substantially more
• Larger test and control groups to allow for the lower than expected penetration of the priming pieces.

So… it wasn’t a conventional success, but it was a successful exercise and only cost $5.

Five things I wouldn’t have guessed about lead conversion at the start of the year.

When I last wrote about online lead conversion in January, I was coming off what seemed like an incredibly steep learning curve.  At that point I expected a levelling off of my understanding, but if anything we’re discovering more new things and more often. Some of these are obviously just further nuance to a general idea, but others are things that I would not have imagined this time last year.  This then, is a run-down of some of the most important things that have come up since then and some of the ways we’re dealing with them.

Lead source plays a significant role in retention

As a dialogue fundraiser I always assumed that the influence of the lead source would be tiny compared to the influence of the other systems.  If you consider that you’ll convert around 6% of contacted leads (I’m talking about surveys here) to regular givers, you’d expect the quality to be driven by the conversation with them rather than the criteria of initial selection.  However we’ve seen that different lead sources have a significantly better, or worse retention rate.  When comparing across all our different phone suppliers we’re seeing a difference of up to 5% on second donation. That’s a substantial  amount and will make a noticable difference to ROI to even medium term ROI.

Still not eveyone is uploading data on a daily basis

The recency with which someone has taken an action, be it a survey response or a petition ask is directly relevant to how likely they are to convert. More than one fundraising phone room looking to take on live uploads in six months’ time it seems unlikely anyone will be looking at weekly uploads. .

Older data has value too

Although the biggest and easiest wins will come from the first week after someone has responded, that is not the time to throw the data in the bin.  I’ve seen some phone rooms have success with data that’s a month or two old when using it as “filler” and, assuming that you have a decent amount of volume, asking the donor via email or other inexpensive streams can produce some exciting results.

The market hasn’t finished growing

The market has matured over the last 12 months.  Penetration and conversion results have dipped marginally, but not enough to suggest the market is full. That may change with rumours that some charities with much the bigger budgets are planning on increasing their presence. However, for the moment there seems to be plenty of room for growth.

Face to Face agencies should be worried

With the Australian face-to-face market being short of quality volume (there are some great agencies, but overall quality is dropping), lead conversion is becoming a much greater part of the fundraising mix.  Not only are ROIs and donor retention significantly better but volumes much more consistent than face-to-face as well.  With F2F (anecdotally) trending in exactly the opposite direction on all those aspects you have to if anyone is going to be growing their F2F campaigns.

(There are of course F2F agencies who have moved into the lead conversion space incredibly successfully).

How are you finding online lead conversion?  What’s surprising you?

 

Top 5 Reasons To Love Chuggers

Face to face fundraising, chugging* if you will, has been copping a battering in the Australian media of late. The criticism, as often happens has been that it’s expensive (which is incorrect), the people who do it are not Australian (partially true, but not through want of trying), and that people find it annoying. This last point is the one that really matters, it completely subjective and so requires no rationalisation. It’s also the opposite of the way people should feel about this form of fundraising. Face to face is a fantastic thing for Australia to do and have and we should be proud. So here is a quick list of the reasons why Australian’s should all love chuggers.

1) Its turned Australia into a nation of super heroes

This isn’t an exaggeration, face to face fundraising is responsible for raising billions of dollars. Those billions of dollars save lives. From malaria treatments to meningitis vaccinations. From disaster relief to campaigning against honour killings. The money that face to face fundraising has raised has enabled charities to do much, much, MUCH more good in the world.

Australia like to think of itself as a generous country, but this is because we have face to face fundraising.

In CAF’s 2013 Five year World Giving Index, Australia came second most giving nation. The index is marked on recency, frequency of participation in three categories:

• Helping a stranger
• Volunteering
• Donating money

Although Australia is a fairly good all rounder the thing that keeps us up the top of the charts is that lots and lots of us give money regularly. Lets be clear, getting this many people to give this way is ONLY possible because of face to face. In 2013 an estimated 200,000 people started giving to a charity because of F2F. That’s close to a percentage point of the population of Australia and WAY over if you consider the people face to face doesn’t ask to donate because they are too young, or not in a position to donate. That sort of growth is something that we should celebrate as a nation. Not only are we pretty bloody generous already, but we’re getting substantially more generous every year… because of face to face
Not only has face to face meant more donations to charity and more people giving, but its revolutionised the type of people who give. Before face to face most donors were around retirement age. Generationally this proved a problem as, you know, older people die sooner. Face to face starts people off as donors when they’re young and helps them engage with making the world better when they’re in their 20s. This is a fantastic sign for the future of the country. It’s habit forming if someone is engaging and donating at such a comparatively young age, they are more likely to do so when they’re older. Face to face is building a nation of people who actively contribute to making the world a better place. It also means that there’s kids today have every right to cock a snook at their parents and grandparents generation.

2) It is really effective for the charity

There is really no comparison. Face to face brings in more donors, more reliably than any other form of fundraising. Advances in fundraising concepts like on line advocacy and two-step asks, we are really just playing around the margins. Face to face is the only way to get people to make a transformational difference. Some of the comments on the recent media articles have been from people working in very small organisations saying that they never pay fundraisers. Small organisations do amazing work and when I say the next sentence, it is in no way disparaging to them. However, a small organisation will only ever make small amounts of change. To scale up requires growth and that, pretty much always requires investment.

If face to face DIDN’T exist what would the alternatives be? Direct mail fundraising growing to such a level where every charity has to mail everyone they can all the time? If you consider face to face fundraising to be an annoying methodology, would you prefer to be receiving three or four letters from charities every day which you throw straight in the bin? No one has ever said “I wish I got more letters asking me for money”. As a methodology face to face has the same emotional impact, positive or negative of other forms of asking people for mone. On top of this the break even point for a donor recruited by direct mail at the moment is two and a half times as long as on the streets, more competition would only drag his out.

3) Human to human is morally the best way to fundraise

One of the arguments for Face to Face fundraising that I absolutely disagree with is that the end justifies the means. This suggests that the act of asking in person is bad. Its not, its the best way of asking.

Firstly there is the fact that the it feels great to give in this way.

When we give money, we get a great rush of endorphins that makes us less stressed, more happy and feeling A1 awesome! This is an effect best felt in the company of others and unless you plan on filling in donation forms by yourself in the middle of a mall, Face to Face offers you a chance to feel this good in public.

Secondly by having a human in front of you, you have a chance to ask questions and get the espouse in the easiest possible way. Fundraisers may not have all the answers, but they will know the many of the most common. Talking to a chugger will save you hunting round a website for it (and lets be honest, you wouldn’t get round to doing this anyway).

Thirdly, by having fundraisers out in them out in the street or coming to your door also means that you are prompted to do it. The number of people who give to charity without prompting is minuscule, less than 1% of the people who give when asked. If we relied on people’s knee jerk generosity only 1% of the good works the Australian public does would happen.

4) Paying people to raise money is an excellent thing

When I was working as a fundraiser on the streets, people would regularly shout at me to get a proper job. This always seemed an odd opinion to me. What constitutes a proper job. Admittedly face to fundraising isn’t something that requires a degree or formal apprenticeship, but there are many jobs like this. Surely objectively as an unskilled occupation raising money to make the world a better place is more noble than working at a fast food restaurant flipping burgers? As casual employment there are few things as worthy as fundraising.

Also, to counter one of the arguments that’s often levelled against it, no one does it for the money. It doesn’t pay anywhere near as well as any job that doesn’t involve the word “charity”. (I’m not going to argue the reasons why this shouldn’t matter here, instead I’ll just link to Dan Pallotta again.) And when you consider the amount of abuse people who do the job receive, they are certainly not remunerated as well as they should be for doing a good thing.

5) The worst thing you can say about it is that you don’t like it

Perhaps the most common complaints that have come up in the media or to me in person is that they just don’t like it. To be honest people are entitled to any opinion they want. All those people who smile at you and ask you to help the world out. How dare they, how DARE they. Here is a pro tip for people who don’t like face to face fundraisers, ignore them.

If you feel you are doing your part, that’s ok. Don’t stop and talk. If you feel that you’re not doing enough to make the world a better place, but really would rather not do any more, that’s ok too. Don’t stop and talk, you have lost precisely nothing. If you are someone that would like to make more of a difference in the world, but are in a hurry or a bad mood or simply not in a position to do more at the moment, it’s still ok not to stop and talk to them. But why would you want to stop people who want to give from being given the opportunity to give money. Why create a scenario where someone’s life is NOT saved because you don’t like not talking to someone.

Face to face fundraising is a wonderful thing with wonderful consequences. As a nation we should embrace it and the hard working people who do it. Stop using anti-face to face rhetoric as a way to fill slow news days and start telling stories the wonderful work done by Australian charities and NGOs. Negative media doesn’t stop people signing up, but it does make politicians think they should start talking about legislating against it. This is a real risk and one that as an industry we should take seriously. But first lets talk about why it’s fantastic, let’s celebrate the most important fundraising methodology of our time.

*I use the term chugger here in my efforts to reclaim the world. The word obviously isn’t going away. One day I hope that we can use the word “chugger” without confusing asking people for money for a good cause and physically assaulting people for personal gain.

Stupid or Smart? Asking for a donors occupation.

Occupation is field that’s appeared on 90% of RG recruitment forms since the dawn of time. It seems like a logical thing to have on there, after all surely a person’s occupation is surely an indicator of how they will perform as a donor. And on top of that all data is good data right? Spoiler Alert! It’s not. But that doesn’t mean that it’s wrong to have it on there. Let’s look at the bad and good, the stupid and the smart reasons for including an occupation field.

Stupid

Donors don’t provide good data

What do you do for a living”, . How do you answer that question?  Well I assume you’re a fundraiser otherwise you’re just here for my witty prose, which seems unlikely. But how do you describe what you do to people. Do you say you work for a charity? Or that you working in marketing? All of those are true answers. Even if you’re as specific as “fundraiser” it doesn’t tell me very much. You could be straight out of university and trying your hand at F2F or you could be running a multimillion pound capital fundraising program for a university hospital. Self-declared job titles are largely meaningless and impossible to analyse.

Worse still if you try to coral the donor’s information into sectors or guide them towards certain answers you will still end up with information that is just as inaccurate (again, how would you categorise fundraiser), but this time with the added issue of putting people into a category. People don’t want to be stereotyped, they don’t want to be classified. Telling them they work in marketing when they have given up that job and moved to the charity sector in order to use their powers for good is not going to win you any favours

The Fundraiser’s can make the problem worse

There was a stage when I was monitoring quality F2F programs where we had a spate of people who put their occupation down as “superhero”. As we didn’t have road trips going our to Metropolis or Gotham city, its pretty safe to assume that the fundraisers were prompting the donors what to say.  Although superhero may be an extreme example, it’s a demonstration that as part of  what can happen when two people try collect free text data.  A fundraiser may prompt the donor to give  for purely innocent reasons. For example if they’re studying law, the fundraiser may put down “lawyer”. The issue here is in analysis down the line. If they sign a thousand law students who you think are lawyers, you may find yourself wondering why the legal profession were so bad at sticking to RGs. It could come from a more sinister place. If, for example, employment is mandatory criteria for a valid pledge. a fundraiser may alter to add to the recruitment form in order for it to count. This is why, when occupation is mandatory, a water tight welcome call is needed to ensure that fundraisers know that they cannot do this.

It makes the donor think that it’s being used, when it’s not.

When you ask for data of any kind, you’re entering into a pact with the donor (or er… data giver… there’s probably a term for that). They are telling you something about themselves and they are asking you to keep it safe and use if for a good purpose. Although not using data you’ve collected may not be bad as loosing or abusing it, I would still be pretty miffed if someone asked me something personal under the guise of requiring data and then didn’t do anything with it. If someone tells you they’re an emu farmer, then calls you just after the bottom drops out of the emu egg market, they may be upset you don’t have the details in front of them.

But it’s not all bad, there are a couple of reasons why it can be useful to collect occupation.

Smart

It helps the fundraiser establish a donor’s ability to give.

Prompting the fundraisers to ask what the donor does gives the fundraiser an opportunity to  ensure they donor is in a position to give long-term  and at an appropriate level. If the donor says they’re a student and wants to give $50 per month, the good fundraiser may find themselves talking the donor down to a gift size that more affordable in the long term. It’s far from watertight, as mentioned above the answer is not reliable, but as a guide it can be handy.

It helps build rapport.

Filling out a donation form can be a little stressful. You are asked for a number of very personal details and that can put you on edge. Asking for occupation can be used by a great fundraiser to get the donor to talk about themselves a bit. This can help avoid both the donor getting too stressed by the situation during sign up and also after the sign up.  Although many people can have difficulty defining what they do, most people feel comfortable talking about their job.  This is why it’s often the default first question at dinner parties.

What are your thoughts? Have you found a way to make good use out of the occupation field from a data perspective? Have you sworn off using in data collection after you signed up your 900th caped crusader? How do you explain what you do for a living? Everyone reading this blog is interested to know what you think, join the conversation by commenting below.

 

10 Quick Tips for a Gold Standard Welcome Call Program

Not long after I started Face to Face fundraising I visited “the office”. I give it s quotation marks to make it clear that although it may conjure up visions of a highly professional inner city space, it was in fact a friendly but slightly dingy space above an old  theatre. I was told that the people here conducted the “welcome calling”- calling the people who I had signed up and making sure that I hadn’t forced them into it. I’m not sure if this was intended as a shock tactic, but it worked as one. Welcome calling probably started as a reactive measure; a relatively cheap but effective way to weed out the worst of the pledges before they go to the client. But the best welcome calling programs use it to do drive improvements in their face to face programs. I’ve seen slight improvements on the welcome call produce significant culture changes and retention improvements very quickly. In the post below I’ve collected the 10 most important elements from the different programs I’ve seen over the years.

1. Get the right people calling

Here’s a universal truth for you. Hire the right people for the job. (I promise the insights will become more er…insightful after this one).  Rather than high turn over of F2F staff,  the best welcome call rooms not only have had leaders/managers who have lasted for years but the callers as well. Hiring is obviously a great skill to have, but look at your call centre team as an afterthought. HINT! Ex face to facers can be a good starting point.

2. Prepare them in the right way

Make them love the fundraisers and the charity. The callers need to understand how F2F works in full. They have to know the difference between a fundraiser convincing and a fundraiser pushing someone to sign up. They need to know that the fundraisers are good people doing great work while also recognising that the charities have longevity requirements to make this form of fundraising work.  Give them the same level of charity training you would give to the fundraisers (and make sure that the charity training them know what they do) and get them trained by the fundraisers to know what’s happening.

3. Time it right

Don’t be too soon or too late after sign up. The worst welcome call program I ever seen was based around the fundraisers calling into a phone room at point of sign up. Imagine standing there with a fundraiser while on the phone to his “head office”. Would you be able to give them an honest answer about your commitment? Receiving the call 2-10 days later gives the donor a chance to think about it. If they’re given the time for their initial enthusiasm to die down and they still want to donate, you have a much better chance of having a long term giver. Conversely if you leave it too long, their connection to the emotions you felt at sign up are less like to be as fresh. They might not even remember signing up.

4. Maximise Penetration

It’s important to try and speak to as many people as possible. The effectiveness of your welcome call is directly proportionate to the number of sign ups you speak to. If you consistently speak to 20% of your signed up donors, your fundraisers will know that they can get away with doing the wrong thing 50% of the time and never be found out. You need to create a panopticon to make this work.

5. Frame it as a real welcome

Some people may think that the only thing the donor gets out of the welcome call is a chance to change their mind,. but it can be so much more. This is a real opportunity to make them feel amazing about a donation. Tell them they are awesome. Tell them how big a difference they are making. Celebrate the donation and the donor.

6. Verify as much as possible

There is an admin side to the call. For people with oddly spelled names this is their opportunity to make sure they are not referred to as Mr Dgunan for their donation lifetime. Also make sure you have the email address spelled correctly, they’re correct postal address and date of birth. Even though these things aren’t the most emotional topic, they will help you connected with your donors in the future.

7. Ask… don’t tell

Please, in this situations let’s agree that “… and the fundraiser told you that you should be giving for the next two years” will tell you much less than “did the fundraiser talk to you about how long you should give for”?

8. Be prepared to loose sign ups

Post-sales dissonance is a thing. Accept that many people will change their mind for no real reason other than that they changed their mind. The cancellations you receive will ultimately improve the quality of the gifts you export.

9. Follow up the scientific and the anecdotal

If done properly, the welcome call will get rid of the worst 10% of donors from any given file. This is obviously a step in the right direction as it will improve the donor retention statistics. But there is so much data you are collecting from a program like this it shocks me how few organisations just leave it there. There are two ways in which you’ll learn from welcome calling. Firstly the scientific. If a fundraiser has a lot of cancels at welcome call, you should probably have a talk to them. This is a data driven (ie GREAT!) way of learning. But there’s more, the anecdotal, you will be amazed how much information the question “how was the fundraiser” gets you. On it’s own it may not prove a fundraiser is a wrong ‘un, but it will give you more training tips than you can imagine and leader the fundraiser to improve.

10. The Greater the Transparency, The better the result

If you were to describe any successful F2F fundraiser I would be shocked if “competitive” didn’t come up in the first couple of words you used. Embrace this. If they can see what people are saying about them and their colleagues, they will want to be the best. Highlight the good, highlight the bad and show it to everyone. Almost immediately s they’ll be competing to outdo each other for the best representative (if they don’t, fire them). It will also remind them that their interactions with the public are checked out, thus improving their compliance.

Top 5 Questions to Ask Before starting an Regular Giving Program

Over the past few months I’ve been talking to a few different people from smaller organisations about regular giving.  As the advantages of an RG program as opposed to just cash gifts are clear, adding the option rightly comes up quite early in the life cycle of an organisation. So how do you know if you’re ready and what should you look into early on?  Here are the most basic questions I think you should ask yourself:

1)      Can we run an RG program? This is perhaps the most obvious point, but an incredibly important one.  Really it comes down to two things, capabilities and capacity.  You don’t want to be in a position that you’re trying to play catch up with systems when you’re already going.   My short and non-comprehensive check list of the basics would read.

• Capabilities: Do your systems allow for people to give reoccurring gifts? Can you track who has made them and who has not?  Can you give accurate tax receipts to people?  Is this an incredibly manual process that is going to take up all your time and stop your organisation achieving its main goals?
• People: Do you have the resources to administer it.  Related to the above point, most technology will require some level of human processing. In addition a regular donor is likely to feel more involved with your organisation and will have the right to have any questions or enquiries answered in a timely fashion.  Generally speaking the bigger and or newer the the program the more incoming issues your likely to have. So don’t try to grow too quickly.

2)      Do we have a decent proposition to recruit people as regular givers?  This isn’t necessarily hard to figure out, it can be your ongoing work and overall goals, just make sure it isn’t timed or too specific. A good formula to think of is “support x so we can y in years to come”, rather than “support x so we can z next year”.  Also work out how you’re going to communicate with your donors, if you don’t tell them how awesome they are and how much their money is helping, then they won’t give it to you for very long.

3)      What’s out recruitment strategy? I’m going to help you with this one, because the answer is always the same, start small and grow slowly.  If you grow slowly then you have the opportunity to work the teething problems you will inevitably encounter while they remain small in volume.  Secondly think about who  you are going to ask and when?  I’m also going to help you with this one.  Ask the people closest to you first then work your way out. Realistically the best people to ask to become Regular Givers are the ones who are already giving to you in some way.  Ask them in the most personal way in which you have capacity for. In the smallest of programs this could be a phone call from you. I know that you’re awesome so you’ll be really successful.  Then when you’ve asked the people who you know best, try some of the people who you know a bit, they might have asked for information from you but not given you money, most people won’t give until you ask them, so ask them. When you’ve exhausted everyone you know then you might want to think about recruiting people you don’t know.

4)      What should our recruitment budget be? Before answering this, go back to the previous questions and answer that.  Don’t be concerned with having a “budget” of any sort before you’ve tried all the stuff that’s essentially free. Then when those people have been exhausted work your way through all the cheaper stuff with a slightly wider circle of people who know you fairly well and when you are absolutely ready start speaking to people outside your circles.  Speak to a few agencies, because if you’re at a stage where you have to describe yourself as small in any sense you’re probably not going to be able to run a program in house. Get a few quotes and find someone you want to work with and who wants works with you. If you’re thinking of getting into F2F make sure you have a lot of money to invest (an excellent presentation by friend of the Blog Peter Coleman of Public Outreach Australia and new friend of the blog Alice suggested $300,000 as the minimum spend – which seems a valid figure, but understand that that doesn’t include what you would be laying out in resources on your own end and you will need to be planning to spend that year on year to make it really work).  Given this, it would be a really unusual circumstance where you’re looking to start F2F in the first few years you’ve been running regular giving.

5)      Am I holding back without good reason?  The biggest thing stopping us from pushing forward our programs is often our own fear of change.  A regular giving program will almost certainly give your organisation a huge amount of benefits, predictable income,  steady growth and so on.  However RG will not be the right decision and and for many more now will not be the right time. That said if you can see a glimmer of hope that you can make it work, stop reading this blog and start putting the pieces together to make it happen. A solid regular giving program is a wonderful thing.

RG Lead Generation and Conversion 101

Probably the biggest development in Australian Regular Giving in the 2010s and certainly has been lead generation and conversion.  In fact I’m happy to blame a lot of the absence of blog posts on the effort I’ve expended on getting this to work for my organisation. (I may be happy to do that, but it’s probably not correct).  Generating warm lists of potential donors, calling them and converting them into regular donors hardly reinventing of the wheel, but the growth of lead generation sources over the last couple of years has turned it into a viable recruitment model, not just in terms of ROI, but  also in terms of volume.  Given that here are some of the basics I’ve learned about LGAC (does anyone have a snappy name for this yet?).

Lead Generation

What sources are there?

Lots.. from pre-transactional grids, to bespoke survey questions, through petition sites, onto giveaways and post transactional surveys.  There’s a lot out there.

Which source is best?

This is the most obvious question, but also the wrong one.  All sources will work to a greater or lesser extent.  The important thing is to work out the cost of acquisition including conversion.  The only real way to find out is this is to trial it.

How much should a lead cost?

About the length of a piece of string. Some are incredibly cheap, less than an Australian dollar.  Some can be over $10.

Are all leads created equal?

No, of course not  As different leads are produced in  different ways, the have different levels of engagement. If someone has opted into calling you because they started filling out a survey because they wanted to win a car, half way through that survey they are given 5 different charities to opt into and you’re one of the three they tick, they won’t have made the same amount of investment in opting in as someone who’s seen a petition related to the cause your organisation works, signed it then seen an opportunity to opt in to hear from you. That level of emotional investment during the lead recruitment will be a big part of how the lead performs later on.

How much incorrect data should I expect?

Again it depends on the lead source. If it’s expensive data then you should expect them to have systems of checks and balances that clean the data before you see it.  If it’s cheap as chips then don’t be surprised if you call centre is going to report a high number of wrong numbers or people named Seymour Butts.

Lead Conversion

How soon should the lead be called?

I’m yet to find too short a time.  It’s pretty much accepted that the leads decay incredibly quickly.

What is decay?

Decay is the idea that the longer the amount of time from when the donor opting in to be being called until you actually getting on the phone, the less likely they are to become a donor.

Why do leads decay?

Many reasons, firstly when they opted in to be contacted they were at a peak on interest in being contacted, although it’s not a guarantee that they’ll be less interested when you ring, you will be further removed from that moment and it will be harder for them to recall that they really wanted to hear from you. Also unless the lead is exclusive to you then they will have had calls from other telemarketers even from other charities.  They’ll be less likely to pick up the phone if you’re their 50th call from a number you don’t know and they’ll be less likely to convert if they’ve signed up to another charity or decided to have solar panels fitted in the last week.

Do leads decay at different rates?

Absolutely.  They are effected by many things.  The level of engagement people had when opting in.  The number of other things that they opted in to hear about at the same time as you and a host of other things.  The best way to establish how the lead will perform is really to try them out.

How do these donors stay on board?

A very good question, there isn’t nearly as much data as F2F donors.  They appear to have slightly fewer donor driven cancellations early on than face to face but slightly more than conventional (whatever that means) telephone recruitment.

What’s the deal with capacity?

It’s important to balance the number of leads you have coming in with the amount of leads your suppliers can call quickly. This is one of the hardest things to manage day to day.  If your phone provider is flooded with more leads than they can call the leads will decay.  However at the same time you don’t want them to bring in more callers than they have work for. The only most effective way of manage it is to spread the load across a few sources and providers.  This also has the benefit of meaning you can see if different providers perform better with certain lead sources.

What are the figures I should be looking at in a providers performance?

Well I haven’t seen any proper bench marking so it’s a bit hard to judge.  I always believe in judging the provider against their own targets.  As long as the supplier’s targets provide a good cost per donor then go with them.  Look at the penetration and conversion rate the supplier expects, calculate that against the costs of buying the data and doing the calling and you’ll find your expected cost per donor.  Roughly speaking should probably be a bit cheaper than face to face.

Getting Advocacy and Fundraising Propositions To Play Nice

For some organisations, training phone or F2F teams on a proposition is comparatively easy. They have a simple idea which will work pretty much forever; give us $25 p/m and we’ll save someone’s sight each month or $30 month buys rations  for a family in an disaster area. Campaigning organisations however are often working on things that have a time defined outcome. Maybe they are campaigning to free a prisoner of conscience or stop a liquefied natural gas hub being built on one of the most beautiful parts of the world.  There are a number of potential benefits with mixing advocacy and dialogue fundrasing, increased media exposure and public knowledge, greater urgency in the ask, but there are just as many potential pitfalls.

So how do you choose what to get them to talk about?  Here are 5 simple rules to help you decide on what you should guide your dialogue fundraisers to.

Do People Care

The first thing to think about is how good the story is. There needs to be something in danger, it needs to be a thing that a lot of people will care about (no one would give to a campaign to save the plastic tags on loaves of bread) and the donor needs to be the hero of the story.

Simplicity

Fundraisers will need to explain the issue in simple terms and very quickly. I care passionately about the role new economics plays in creating a better future, but I can’t explain sufficiently to get people to care about it in less than half an hour. Ideally you want a story that can be told in 30 second.

Consistency

It’s common for advocacy campaigns have a lot of two-ing and froing, highs, lows, victories and setbacks all the way throughout their life cycles. Sadly for fundraising purposes this is a pain in the bum.  If a campaign is going to be evolving every month, the fundraisers will have to write a new script every month.  This makes it harder for them to hone it down and easier to loose track of what they’re supposed to be saying.

Time

A paradox exists that when campaigns come closer to their point of victory or defeat (hopefully victory) the greater the urgency proposition and the more successful it will be in winning people over. However, once the victory has been won, donor can loose a little of their anchor to the organisation.  If you’re looking for a long term gift then this presents a problem.  On top of this, you’ll have to largely tear up the script that your fundraisers have been using, which will frustrate the hell out of them and can hurt results.

Similarity to Other Work

If the topic you pick is similar to other projects your organisation works on then it should be easier to transition the dialogue teams and the donors to the new topic. Pick something that has transferable themes and aligns strongly with your core values.

Do The Fundraisers Care?

Perhaps above all else you need to make sure that the fundraisers care about what they’re talking about.  All dialogue fundraising works because the fundraiser is using their enthusiasm to build enthusiasm in the potential donor.  Your organisation may see one campaign as a priority, you may think that its something that resonates with donors, but if the people actually doing the asking don’t care, your fundraising campaign will be dead in the water.

Getting fundraising and advocacy to be nice to each other is possible and it can be very successful, but remember that the fundraisers priority needs to be raising the funds.

Give More Tomorrow

The last post talked about the vital financial impact that an Opt Out Auto-Upgrade can have on an organisations finances, and the potential bad feeling that can arise from them. I also mentioned that I’d talk about alternatives, better ways of maintaining the value of your data base, so I better keep my promise.

One of the biggest innovations in this space over the last few years has been the variations on the donor opting in to an Auto-Upgrade. At some point, often the point of recruitment, the donor makes a pledge that their donation will increase by x amount at y point. The y could be either 12 months from now or a specific month; the x comes from a number of potential systems of which I’ll outline some below. Before that lets look at why it works so well.

–          It means that they know their gift will retain its power in relative terms over the length of the donation.  Without prompting, most people won’t think about their gift loosing impact over the years, but if you suggest it to them, most will easily understand this.

–          Delaying the increase appeals to people’s knowledge of their own procrastination. In the main people know their lazy, this is a way of giving people the nudge to their future selves to do something their future selves will like, but which they wouldn’t get around to off their own back.

–          As long as they are not a born pessimist, people tend  think that they’ll be in a better position this time next year than they are today (note, I’m basing this on the sunny outlook of Australians). They are likely to get a pay rise of some sort,  they may think they’re in line for a promotion, they may have paid off a bit more of their mortgage etc… A delayed increase works with enthusiasm for the future.

–          It gives the donor control.  They may be a pessimist, they may be thinking of retiring the beauty of the opt in auto upgrade means that the opt in allows for people to be individuals. There is very little chance that the donor will feel negatively toward the organisation as a result.

–          For the charity receiving the increase, not only is there the increase in monthly revenue, but also this is predictable.  You can predict with greater certainty what the monthly income will be.

For the donor and the charity, there are very few negatives.  However, public facing fundraisers and agencies will need to do some extra work.  It takes time to explain the donation increase and to collect the data and to train on doing these things. .  Most cases I’ve seen have not involved an extra payment for asking for an opt in Auto Upgrade. Mainly this is because it would mean paying for something speculative rather than easily quantifiable (the donor could cancel the donation or the upgrade). Even if the increase does eventuate there will be no return on investment for over a year.  In addition any reward passed down to the public facing fundraiser would mean that the PFF is more likely to talk people into doing it who don’t really want to, thus skewing and success rate/ROI estimate. That said, keeping an agency too accountable for something that you don’t directly reward them for  is both difficult and questionable.  Uptake rates in particular are hard to manage if you can’t provide a financial incentive.  For any agencies reading this though, especially those I work with, I would make the point that the increased revenue and ROI is only going to be positive for them in the future.

In terms of what this increase is, a number of approaches are being used. The initial idea was to link the yearly opt in upgrade to the rate of inflation. This is certainly the clearest way of demonstrating that a donation needs to increase to retain its impact, it’s also the most future proof allowing for any unexpected inflation levels.  The unusual the amount by which it increases lends itself to a rounding when the donor is asked for a one off upgrade (eg. If they are increasing their donation from $25 to $25.78, why not just increase it to $26?)  There are some issues with this approach.  Firstly, not everyone finds it easy to understand.  Although the idea of inflation is generally understood, explaining it comprehensively and accurately can prove harder especially in the brief amount of time we get with donors at point of recruitment.

A second idea of an opt in auto upgrade was to have a set amount that the gift increases by each year.  Say a dollar or two.  This is certainly easier to communicate at point of recruitment, but it suffers in that it doesn’t take into account the initial pledge level – a dollar on $30 is half the percentage increase that a dollar on $15.

My personal preference is to allow the PFF negotiate an increase with the donor, this gives them control of the upgrade as well as ownership of it. If pitched correctly, this should not only minimize the number of people who get annoyed by the increase, but potentially also maximise the amount by which they upgrade. One of the added bonuses of this final method is that many donors are actually suggesting they increase their donation by more than inflation.  If they are optimistic about their personal circumstances and believe they will be better off in 12 months, especially those who have recently finished studying. Many will pledge 15-20% increases in the future and it perversely becomes important to limit the uplift amounts to ensure they don’t let themselves in for a nasty shock in three or four years time.

The opt in approach to an Auto Upgrade will always give you a lower uptake level than the opt out approach.  Although there isn’t any clear data to benchmark, figures I’ve seen have varied there has been anything from two thirds opting in to just 20%. Although product and proposition play a role here, by far the biggest influence on uptake seems to be making sure everyone gets asked. But it contains far less risk both in terms of both retention and reputation.  It also should not replace the specific upgrade ask (by phone or DM) as this gives a greater increase per donor and hypothetically better retention.  However due to it’s balance of cost efficiency, low risk and high potency, it’s seems likely to be a part of many RG programs moving forward.

PS.  As fundraisers I’m pretty sure you’ll all be reading this PS. I really appreciate all the feedback from the last article, on my Facebook page, through email and especially from those of you I don’t know well in the comments section.  It’s obvious that opt out upgrades are still controversial and stir up a lot of passions. I welcome any thoughts or comments you have, wether you agree with me or not so please don’t be shy: Comment below, share on your networks drop me a line.

PPS. Apologies for the more irregular updates of late.  A heady combination of End of the Financial Year workload, moving house etc… has held me back.  I look forward to being more regular in the future (I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to make that joke).

Why I stopped hating the opt out Upgrade (and why I probably won’t be doing it again)

A few years ago a fellow fundraiser told me a horror story.  He had heard that another charity had just increased all their donors’ regular gifts without asking them. I was appalled as I liked this charity, but I made a mental note never to support them.  Flash forward a few years and it turns out , that like all good horror stories, although there was some basis in fact most of what my friend told me was not really true.  What the charity had done was an opt out upgrade, sometimes called an auto-upgrade.  They had informed a number of their donors that their monthly donation would increase, unless they asked them not to, then increased the donation of all the non-responders.

Although this may have been the first opt out upgrade conducted by a charity in Australia, its certainly not the last. But even with a number of organisations conducting these programs over the years, it remains one of the most controversial tactics  of Regular Giving programs. When discussed among fundraisers a good proportion of them believe opt out upgrades to be the work of the devil whilst a similar number believe it to be literally a life saving retaining value against inflation.  Personally I started out being extremely against the idea, but over the last year or so I have changed my mind.   Although I didn’t initiate the first one, the program I look after has run several opt out upgrades.  I’ve run a couple of these programs now  I’ve seen the outcomes first hand.

Before I give you the reasons why I’ve come around to the idea of opt out upgrades  I’d like you to ask yourself a couple of questions.

1. If you were to die unexpectedly and your heart to be used to save someone else’s life, would you agree to the transplant?
2. Are you registered as an organ donor?

The difference in the number of people who respond positively to these questions tells you why opt out upgrades have a place in fundraising.  I consider myself to be an engaged, organised and responsible person, but I am also one hell of a procrastinator.  Anyone who’s seen the half finished planter boxes in my back yard can attest to this.  Most people won’t make these decisions unless they either really, REALLY  care about the outcome or they are put on the spot. To continue with the organ donor analogy above, Germany has an opt in system of organ donation, and around 12% of their population have agreed to save someone’s life after they die. Austria on the other hand has and opt out consent to organ donation, meaning that  that 99.98% have agreed to give their organs after death.  I’ve known enough Austrians and Germans to realise that they are not exactly the same, but there aren’t 87 degrees of altruism between them either.  By contacting donors and telling them that their donations will increase if they do not contact you, then you are asking them to say if they really care enough NOT to upgrade.  If they do then they will tell you. If you phrase it correctly, they are unlikely to be angry with you.  An opt out upgrade is not an increase in the gift whether the donor likes it or not, but it is making sure the question is heard and asking if they really don’t want to increase their gift.

The ethical arguments against an opt out upgrade are usually around idea that it’s removing the donor’s choice. But asking them to opt out, still gives them a choice which we are not usually granted in other areas of our lives.  My electricity company doesn’t give me the opportunity to opt out of their price increases. The government doesn’t ask me to contact them if I choose not to increase my taxes.  Cooper’s brewery are yet to give me a heads up about the increase in beer prices and give me the chance not to pay extra if I don’t want to. The option of opting out keeps the choice  in the donors hands, which in turn reflects the optional nature of a donation.

One flaw in this theory is that there will always be a number of people who you haven’t see your communication and therefore are unaware that they had the option not to increase the donation.  They only see that it has increased when they look at their statement. There are two basic situations where this could have arisen.  It could either be because they received, but chose not to read the email or letter or you have their details wrong and they didn’t receive it.

A number of these people will be upset at the increase and a number will tell your incoming call team in no uncertain terms how upset they are. The percentage of these people is comparatively small, but they more than make up for it in their volume. The important thing, as with any complaint, is to listen to them and explain what has happened. Be ready to offer refunds at the drop of a hat. Tell them that you’re sorry that they feel that way, that they have missed the communication or that you didn’t have their correct details. You shouldn’t be sorry for the program of opt out increases.

All of the stats evaluations that I’ve seen on opt out increases show that the increased income far out-weighs the slight increase in attrition. This can be improved by making intelligent who is upgraded based on tenure, gift, age etc…  So  there can be no question that it is very effective and ethical, but I am unlikely to run an opt out upgrade again.

The problem with an opt out upgrade is that some people, even if they understand it, will not necessarily like it.  They won’t cancel their donation, certainly not immediately.  They won’t call you and tell you that they’re upset, but there will be a feeling of negativity there. Fundraising works on a very base level; it’s all about emotions and our lizard brain. If there is a feeling of negativity then there it makes getting people to agree to things later on, much harder.  They may say no rather than yes when you next ask them to upgrade. They may be more likely to cancel when that big bill comes in or that holiday comes up.  We’re not talking about big swings in emotion here, but they may only be 3% more likely to say “no”.  But a successful RG or indeed any wide scale fundraising program is about getting as many of the small percentages work in your favor.

The problem is now you’re aware that there’s one way of making an RG database retain it’s value at low cost, there must be another way which doesn’t colour you negatively.

I’ll save those ideas until the next post.