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.

 

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.

Analysing Cancelation Reasons

A couple of posts ago I looked at donor’s pathway to cancelling. The next stage to look at the reasons they give us for cancelling and what that tells us about our program.   One issue with this is that people don’t always tell you the real reason why they cancel.  We know this because we never get told that they’re cancelling because I’ve never seen the cancellation reason “Thinking about it for a while because I doesn’t really feel that inspired, then got out of bed on the wrong side and opened an electricity bill.” People tell us what they feel ok with telling us. Its not often that they feel ok with telling us that they don’t really care anymore.

But although they may feel bad about telling us the whole truth, we should never judge them for the reasons they stop giving.  People do not cancel because they have suddenly turned evil. There are influences that have lead to this cancellation which are within your control (change these), and there influences that are outside of your control (don’t sweat about these). Never get upset with ex donors. Its not their fault

Anyway, here’s an interpretation of cancellation reasons and what they might be saying about your program.

“My financial circumstances have changed” – 90% of the time their financial circumstances have not changed, the donor is just trying to let you down gently.  It’s the RG version of “its not you, its me”, in that it’s very definitely you, they just don’t want to break your heart by telling you you’re boring or your breath smells.  What that generally equates to in charity terms is that they don’t think you’re worth the money their giving you.  If your getting a large number of people cancelling early for this reasons tends to mean that they didn’t really want to give to you in the first place and you should look at your recruitment channels. Maybe F2F fundraisers are not engaging people enough or worse, signing up people who don’t really want to give. If people are still dropping off in big numbers after the first few months it means that you’re not communicating with them well enough.  You need to tell them how great they are, how much of a difference they are making and do it more frequently.  Incidentally this accounts for a large percentage of most cancellations files across most charities I’ve seen.  It’s terrifying to know that we are loosing people because of reasons which are relatively easily fixed.

“I’m a Student/Pensioner” – A more specific reason, and likely to be true, but not necessarily telling you what you need to know. It’s easy to make the leap to thinking that they shouldn’t have been recruited, but that’s not quite the case.  It means that they were being recruited in a way which didn’t make them feel the program was right for them.  It could be that they were recruited at a donation level that was too high, or they felt that their donation was too small to make a difference.  It could be that, as with the “financial circumstances” they weren’t engaged enough. Again this could be a reason with the recruitment channel, but it might not be as simple as bringing on the wrong people, they might be bringing them on in the wrong way.

“I’ve just become unemployed/I’m going traveling for a year” – This is completely out of your control sadly, but it if it’s any consolation getting this means that your doing your job.  By telling you that it’s a limited period of time that they wont be able to give for, they  are keeping the door open for giving to you in the future. Invite them to stay on email lists and certainly flag them for reactivation programs.

“I don’t like this thing your organisation did” – Going back to the Buckaroo theory of cancellation, this must have been the last of several straws.   Komen for the Cure’s withdrawal of support for Programs with Planned Parenthood programs  is a recent and well known example of this. When decisions are made  that move away from an organisations’ normal operations or values, they are usually made at high level and with the understanding that this will upset some of your supporter base.  This hopefully gives you time to plan a clear and concise explanation of the charities actions that can be communicated to supporters.   The other side of the coin is if people are coming into your organisation with false expectations about what you are or what you does. One of the reasons why clarity of message is so important in the recruitment process.

Terrible ideas for Face to Face programs thought up by people who clearly have never done any face to face

During my time as an account manager for a face to face agency I learned that all new client contacts would go through a similar journey at the start of their tenure.  They would start off over compensating for their initial discomfort in working with F2F. They would eulogise about the benefits and even offer to go out and campaign with the team (although when push came to shove this rarely happened). This enthusiasm is really positive and should only be encouraged, but the stage that followed was just a little awkward.

After 3-6 months they would often try to start suggesting “innovations” to the program.  There is nothing wrong with innovation, but the issue was that these “improvements” would never make sense to anyone with any experience of the practicalities of running a team of Fundraisers on the street. Oddly their seemed to be a psychic connection between these clients that forced them to suggest the same ideas one after the other.  So if you are new to your job running an F2F program, please take note not to suggest the ideas below, this will save you uncomfortable exasperated conversations with you account managers.

Balloons and/or sweets

A fairly innocuous one to start with. The idea behind it seems to be a way of attracting children to a shopping Centre stall.  If the children are there then they surely the parents will want to stick around, listen to the pitch and sign up. The first comes from the assumption that parents want their children to accept candy from strangers, generally the opposite is advised. Accusations of bribery are also likely to follow and you’ll be lucky to find a shopping centre that wants its aisles covered in deflated balloons or sweet wrappers. Last but not least, public liability insurers tend to look unfavourably on the use of compressed gas and choking hazards around members of the public.

Thank you for listening cards

There is some logic behind this.  It’s certainly true that a large number of people ask for more information on the streets and so giving them a reminder pointing them to a website might work.  Sadly though, of the people who ask for more information, most are just doing it to politely get out of the conversation and have no intention of ever giving to your charity. Of the rest some will want to sign up when given a little more information from the fundraiser and those with a genuine desire to do some deep research will do so without a card to remind them.  What the thank you for listening card does do is give the fundraiser, especially a new one, a false sense of success. When asked how they’re doing, they tell you that they’ve had a brilliant day because although they haven’t signed anyone up, eh have given out 400 cards.  Thank you for listening cards do have a couple of great uses however; for handing to people who are inappropriate to sign up while leaving them on a good note and for getting rid of time wasters

Funky pitch cards

Pitch cards, for those who don’t know, are an A3 or A4 laminated cards used help Fundraisers out when they can’t remember what they’re supposed to say next or to point at for emphasis. They’re simplicity sadly makes them ripe for pointless reinvention attempts.  There have been a variety of things tried which remind me of early attempts to redesign airplanes, you know the ones that have 14 sets of wings stacked on top of each other and look really impressive for 3 seconds before they crash and burn killing all on board. To my knowledge no ones ever been killed by a pitch card, but the heroic failure can’t be counted, even with my socks off.  I’ve seen pitch cards with intricate folding mechanisms that make it impossible for the fundraiser to open.  I’ve seen pitch booklets that allow the fundraiser to choose a variety of topics to talk about, if they can convince the donor to stick around long enough for them to find the write page. Pitch cards with interchangeable sheets sounded like a cost effective way of keeping them up to date before it was realised that interchangeable was a synonym for easily losable.

Other innovations that crop up quite frequently include getting the agency to Fundraisers “interesting” locations like music festivals (the people who chose talking to fundraisers over spending time with their friends or watching band are rarely sober or serious).  Suggesting changes to the agency’s payment model that would see the agency go under in a week while favouring the client.  One of the few ideas from a client I really liked was when a client told me that account manager role we were recruiting for was drastically underpaid and we wouldn’t find anyone decent for that salary. Although on second thoughts this was maybe a comment on my skills.

There is also a special place in hell left for the client who revises their “product” without warning or consultation, but that in itself will get its own post.

As mentioned at the top of the article, innovation is a good thing, as is that naive optimism that generated these is also to be encouraged.  It only becomes a problem when the client enforces a bad idea on an agency.  Working collaboratively with them will see much better results for all involved.

In-House Vs Agency

Due to the high cost of recruitment  a suggestion often made by senior management is to bring a Face to Face fundraising program in house.  The general conversation seems to run along the lines of “hire some back packers, get them out on the street and it’ll be as good as what we have at the moment but cheaper, more reliable and we’ll have more control over it”. This argument is flawed in a very large number of ways, as well as being really quite disrespectful to the people who have devoted their careers to making F2F work. In case you’re ever in a position where someone in your senior management team suggests bringing the program in house, keep this guide handy so you can smack their arguments down quickly and efficiently.

Recruiting Fundraisers is hugely difficult

Let’s say you’re lucky enough to have recruited a person to who is experienced enough to run your team but not so burnt out  that the thought of ever asking someone for money again terrifies the hell out of them. The first thing you’re going to have to do is find someone for them to work with. Recruiting new fundraisers is one of the most frustrating things in the universe. Very few people wake up in the morning and decide that they’re going to apply for F2F fundraising jobs that day. You have to sell the idea to them in the advert. When you find an advert that seems gets respondents, the respondents will often turn out to be unsuitable. When you find an advert that gets decent respondents one week, you can run it again the following week and no one will respond.  Also be prepared to do this in perpetuity. If you ever get to a point where you think that you have “enough” Fundraisers, you’ll still need to recruit or you will find that the on you had have suddenly all gone and you have no one again.  This process will cost you lots more money than you realise and far more heartache than you ever thought necessary.

The only organisations who have made an in house fundraising team work in Australia to scale are ones that have in-built or adoped recruitment mechanisms for recruiting fundraisers. Greenpeace, The Wilderness Society and UNHCR have all succeeded done this in Australia, for different reasons.  Greenpeace and TWS have a cultural cache built from their public engagement for the last few decades. UNHCR have understandably strong connections to refugee and recent immigrant communities who often face a lot of prejudice when looking for employment. This means that their F2F team often pick up highly intelligent and incredibly skilled people who may have struggled to find work in more conventional sectors.  I’m sure this alone doesn’t make their recruitment a walk in the park, but it helps. Another overseas example of an in house success story was started when one of the charity’s main suppliers going under and the charity hired the entire work force. They were such a large organisation that they were able to sustain the recruitment costs needed to keep a team.

Managing an F2F team is REALLY hard

When you have some fundraisers on board, do not underestimate how much time, effort and pain will be required to keep them out there signing people up. F2F has a ridiculous staff turnover for a reason. The Fundraisers will spend all day in rain, sleet, heat, hail and wind being told “no”.  This means they either resign soon after they start or they are crazy. Crazy is perhaps a little harsh, but in order to survive they will need the following qualities

• Headstrong (this means they will only do what you ask them to if they agree with it)
•  Excellent negotiation skills (they will practice this by negotiating every single possible issue with you)
•  Passionate about the cause (if they are passionate about the cause they tend to be passionate about everything in their life, to the extent that their results will stop should at the slightest thing happen in their personal lives. E.g. One fundraiser stopped getting results because he couldn’t decide what he wanted to get his girlfriend for a birthday present)
• Inspirational (they affect other people, not just when they’re pitching either. If one person is having a bad day, it’s likely everyone will have a bad day

It’s not just about the Fundraisers

If you are running an in house program purely for financial reasons, it’s unlikely that you have taken into account what goes on in the background. Before the Fundraisers go out they’ll need locations and permits booked.  You’ll need staff to enter the data or at least verify it. You’ll want welcome calls meaning more cost internally or outsourced.

You’ll loose flexibility

One of the great advantages of an agency is that when things aren’t going well, they’re likely to be able to move capacity onto you campaign from somewhere else.  If you have an in-house program you’ll never have this option.  You can increase your recruitment budget, but that doesn’t guarantee an increase in recruitment.

It’s not likely to solve your problem

This is the real kicker.  There are plenty of good reasons for starting an in house team, (some willing subjects with which to test new methodologies, a gang of experienced F2fFers knocking down your door in a desperate need to work for you) but they’re rarely themain reason for starting one. More often than not it’s to substitute for a lack of available capacity or a need for more consistency in results. In house teams provide no guarantee of this. This isn’t to say that they can’t be found in an in house team, but there no correlation with their in-house/outsources status. Good teams are good teams no matter who employs them. The main difference is that an agency is far more likely to be able to deliver you a good team in less time than starting one yourself, completely from scratch.

Balancing average pledge

As a fundraiser working for an agency I was very concerned with retention.  Our efforts for recruiting a higher percentage led us to looking at the effects of pledge amount.  We found what most of you reading would expect, that generally. The more you give, the more likely you are to cancel sooner. As we prided ourselves on giving our donors the best return on their investment we then worked hard and successfully on reducing our average pledge.  The followed a positive impact on retention and our clients were generally happy; on top of the improved retention a drop in average place in F2F generally also means a cheaper cost per donor.

However one thing that I didn’t realise at the time was medium term effect of a lower average pledge. The first, most important and perhaps most surprising that a lower average pledge means it takes longer to break even on a cohort of donors. There are a number of assumptions that are involved in this statement, and feel free to challenge any of them, but the evidence I’ve seen for myself plus the anecdotal evidence, backs it up. Assuming that the recruitment cost is based on donation amounts with a retention clawback or built in, assumed discount. Assuming that the reduced gift means that there is a relatively consistent attrition level across all donation rates. And assuming that the improved attrition isn’t more than say 10% better at year one. The reason for this is that there is less money coming in in “profit” from the donors who passed the break even point. The reduction in pledge is necessarily caused by a lowers targets across the board, meaning it stops donors signing up for more than they can afford or care to give, but it also lowers the amount that people who could afford to give more, give less.

On top of this, the reduced pledge means reduced overall income and, to rub salt into the wound, less financial gain from upgrades.  As an RG fundraiser, the frustration felt from these issues is only topped by the knowledge that this is only a medium term problem and you’re actually getting better value for money. Regular giving is all about the long term. It may take you six months longer to break even and be running a $10,000 under budget, but you know in two years time this will have paid off, probably several times over.

So what’s more important here? Higher initial income or more donors down the track. The slightly dull answer is somewhere that you need to find balance that works for you and you’re suppliers. They know that a high average pledge will mean higher attrition and less work for them in the long run, so they’re likely to work with you to try and keep it in boundaries that work for both you and them. It’s also important to remember that constantly pushing the pledge amounts down won’t increase retention after a certain point.

The Do’s and Don’ts of Framing Donation

Creating a connection between donor and charities is the greatest influencer of retention at point of recruitment. But not far behind that lies the way in which that donation is framed. The language used during recruitment, qualifications used to select donors and the way any longevity objections are handled directly influence how far along the bell curve of attachment a donor sits. Here are some of Dos and don’ts of donation frames.

Do – Get the donor to sign some sort of commitment to longevity at point if recruitment. A common example of this is the commitment on a F2F form where a donor signs a pledge to give for at least two years. It’s not a contract but it gets the donor to think about the donation in terms which turn a decent return for the charity. Also it should reduce the number of people who sign up with the idea of only giving for a short while.

Don’t – Limit the donation length with this commitment. Sadly it’s really easy to frame the commitment in a limiting way. Phrases such as “you only have to give for two years” or “it’s just a two year donation” make it sound as if it is a burden that the donor will only have to endure for a relatively short period of time. After that, the world will be saved and the donor has “done their bit”. It’s the opposite of what their RG should be; it’s a joyful contribution to a cause the donor believes in and the languages used should reinforce this framing  In addition by suggesting that the gift only goes on for a limited time, cancelling becomes a question of when, rather than if.

Do – Frame the case for support as something won’t that be solved overnight. Although its important to use pressing cases and current issues to encourage people to  join  today rather than putting it off, any such examples must be put in context of the wider work your organisation does. For instance if there has been a recent disaster your charity has responded to explain the work that you did but be clear that you’ve responded to that disaster; what you need is money for future disasters whenever they arrive.

Don’t – Let people off when they say they’d like to give for a limited amount of time. In one to one recruitment it’s common for people to let the recruiter know they’re going to cancel before the pledge breaks even. It could be that they’re an International student, people they change charities every year or they just aren’t that into your cause. Although the minimum term commitment will catch most of these it’s sadly relatively easy for a fundraiser to get around it, if their unscrupulous enough.

Do – Counter the above objections. If someone does not have the ability to give long term, direct them to other forms of donation.  If they are wavering whether or not they really care enough, put them on the spot.  Be clear your looking for long term supporters, ones there for the long haul.

Don’t – Say cancel. Ever. It’s the original sin of fundraising. It primes a donor to do just that, quickly and without caring for the repercussions

The Bell Curve of Giving A Toss

The most important metrics in regular giving are retention percentages.  They determine ROI, income, donor numbers and pretty therefore pretty much what your organisation is going to be able to achieve in the next few years.   The biggest single influence on attrition rates is recruitment source.  Sadly, a lot of internal NGO conversation seems to stop there.  However F2F teams and agencies the world over, have spent enormous amounts of time and resourcing trying to work out why this is.  The main answer that they seem to come up with is that source reflects and/or influences donors engagement with the organisaion.  

Ability and Desire… again

You may have read in a previous post that a bit too much attention is paid towards demographics of the donors being recruited. Income, age and location do carry some weight. But the reality of the situation is the number of people who cancelling because they really cannot afford to give any donation to you is very small.  What’s much more important is how much they care about the work you do. 

Giving a Toss

It’s the amount of love, not the amount of money that a donor is giving that determines their how long they’re likely to give for.  If they really care about what you do then when they decide to start saving for a home, they’ll make room for the $25 a month in their budget.  If they loose their job then they’ll reduce or put their donation on hold while they look around for a new position if they value their donation to your organisation highly enough.

Bellcurve

Everyone is an individual and so everyone who responds to recruitment ask will therefore respond in a different way.  This means that every recruitment methodology is likely to recruit a cohort of donors whose engagement with your organisation looks a little like a bell.  There will be a small amount who care a lot, a small amount who hardly care at all (I have no idea why these people sign up, but they always seem to) and a big chunk of people in the middle.  The exact contours of your bell curve will vary depending on source, but they will probably all take a similar shape.

Prove It

I can’t.  And this is the most difficult thing basing a concept on something as unmeasureable as emotion.  Like a black whole, you can see the effects of it (on retention rather than gravitational pull), but you can’t actually see the thing itself. If demonstrating it to yourself is impossible, then imagine how hard it’s going to be to the board.

So why bother with it at all.

Because even if you can’t base budgets around it, it gives you a framework for strategies to retain people.   If you know source a (green) has better retention than source b (blue) you can start to work out where along the bell curve you want to focus your attention.  Do you want to focus your communications streams on the less engaged donors, the very engaged donors or somewhere in the middle (hint, its the latter answer, the question is where in the middle).  We’ll look at the bell curve again in the near future as were only scrapping the surface of what it can tell you.

Do Demographics Really Matter?

As an RG fundraiser, there are certain characteristics you are convinced you want to see more of in your database because conventional wisdom tells you that they will give for longer.  For example, you want to more people over the age of 30.  You want to see more people with an occupation listed as some thing like manager, rather than someone who’s listed as “student” or  “unemployed”.     There’s a clear logic behind this, that’s strongly backed up by data so really there shouldn’t be any room for a headline a contrary as I’ve put above.  But there is another side to the story, at least to a limited extent.

Logic

The logical viewpoint on this states that greater ability someone has to give; the greater the likelihood that they will give for longer. If someone is a manager of, say a paper supply company, in their mid 30s, it’s reasonable to assume that they are going to have more disposable income than a 21 year old student. It’s therefore reasonable to draw the conclusion that they won’t notice their donations to your organisations as much and are therefore less likely to cancel. It would therefore be logical to try and recruit more managers at paper supply companies than students.

Ability vs. Desire

Even though this logic is correct there is a danger that in looking at ability to give, we ignore a much greater factor in the likelihood someone will keep on giving; their desire to give.  The greatest influence on retention short, medium and long term is source.  Be it one F2F agency producing a much higher quality of donors than another, or one time cash donors becoming  amazing RGs, 2-step donors out performing one step, this plays a far greater roll than any demographic information you can attribute to an RG donor.

Demographic Squeezing

The danger of being entirely demographic focussed is that it can be used to white wash underlying issues.  If a face to face agency has bad attrition, the temptation is to tell them to recruit less of donors in some demographics or to stop recruiting those sort of donors altogether.  Although there may be some small short term pay offs with this, its won’t fix the issue. Bad retention is caused by donors who are less engaged with the charity than they should be.  When there is a trigger that asks if they really want to keep giving, their thought process is more likely to swing towards not giving to the organisation you really care about. This is why more of these donors will cancel sooner. .  Having more donors at a certain age, won’t make them more engaged. In fact, the fundraisers may try so hard on the donors in that demographic that they sign up more people who less engaged. As they would normally be, meaning your retention becomes lower.

So completely useless then?

Well no, there are excellent uses for using demographics in improving retention.  You may be able to see issues of ability to give that need to be addressed.  For example, if there were a high proportion of people being signed up then cancelling early in traditionally lower income areas, you may want to make sure less recruitment happens there… if feasible.  Just don’t tell your fundraisers only to go to the well off areas as they will burn these out more quickly, receive more complaints and probably wont improve you’re retention at all.

Demographics do matter; but you probably wouldn’t have read the article if that had been the title You can find things from them that give you a great deal of insight into how your program is tracking and to a certain extent why its tracking that way.  But donors are human beings are too complex to be defined by one characteristic.  Treat them as people, individuals and not as herds.