Fundraising Detective

If you don't have a dream, how you gonna have a dream come true?

This post is my submission to the January edition of the Non-Profit Blog carnival. This month’s carnival is being hosted by Nancy Schwartz of the Getting Attention blog.

Most non-profits were built on a dream. An aspiration. A vision for the future.

Just take a second to think of the non-profits you support. What is the dream that you are buying into that makes you give?

Winning the fight against cancer.

Eradicating poverty.

Ending child abuse.

Whatever it is, it is likely to be aspirational and motivated by a desire to do good and help change the world for the better.

It’s all too easy to forget your dreams and get tied up in small details, endless meetings and trivia that distract from your effectiveness.

Have a think about the last time you visited a project, spoke to a beneficiary or went and chatted to your programme staff.

If it has been too long, why not make it a commitment in 2012 to take time to re-connect yourself to the dream that made you want to be a fundraiser in the first place…

Fundraising Round-Up

Here's my first round-up of 2012.  I hope your year has got off to a good start.  These posts are only from the start of the year, so if I missed anything over Christmas then do let me know.

I'm delighted to say that since the start of the month, I've been working with Pamela Grow to provide a monthly round-up for the SOFII monthly bulletin.  Why not sign up today?

Katya on the importance of metaphors.

Karen Zapp looks at the impact of colour in your direct mail.

Kevin on why innovation comes on top of your exisiting offers (not instead of).

Stuart Glen on a lovely thank you from Child's i - I also received a card and it was my favourite Christmas Card this year!

Your ears as moneymakers on the 101 Fundraising blog.

Aline on making your own luck.

Fired up Fundraising with some killer tips for thank you letters.

Kivi does some mystery shopping and gets some pleasing results (which makes a nice change!)

Donor Voice take an in-depth look at donor segmentation.

Jeff asks what donors want. Spoiler what they say and what they do are different things.

A direct marketer asks what businesses can learn from charity direct marketing.  HT Jeff Brooks.

Six great links on making presentations.

 

 

Forget charities, I'm going to give directly...

I loved this story from the US about strangers randomly paying off the Christmas lay-away bills of struggling families.  The whole story just oozes feel good quotes and restores your faith in humanity.

Closer to home, my mother-in-law did something similar (with work colleagues) for families in her community.  She decided to go direct to families (via social services) after having a couple of bad experiences of donating directly to charities.  Overall, she found the whole experience much more rewarding than giving via a charity and it was something her whole company got involved in.

Elsewhere, the Oxfam blog reported on Give Directly, who are enabling donors to directly transfer cash via mobile phones to families in need in Africa.  It's a fascinating concept and completely cuts out charities by getting people to give straight to the individual family in need. 

I still think they need to think how they are going to report back to donors (it lacks some of the feelgood factor of the above examples), but it will be interesting to see if it proves popular.

It's a bit early to declare this a fundamental shift, but I do think there are some lessons we can learn from this as professional fundraisers.  Here are some of my takeaways...

1. One of your main jobs as a fundraiser is to connect the donor to the beneficiary through your communications.
2. You can do this by always trying to humanise what you do.  Put stories and emotion at the heart of what you do as a fundraiser.
3. Make your donors feel part of something important and that their giving is making a tangible difference.  Being made to feel that your donation is disappearing into a large, anonymous pot can be deeply unsatisfying.
4. Don't forget to report back to your donors on the difference their gift has made.

 

Final Fundraising Reading Round-Up of 2011

What better way to finish off the working year than with a final round-up of fundraising related links from the last couple of weeks... :)

Whatever you are doing this Christmas, have a wonderful time.

Thanks for reading and best wishes for a memorable 2012.

Kimberley with some wise words for thanking donors in small charities.

The Wild Woman interviews Jules Brown from the excellent Dear Joan blog.

Jeff on how your silos are killing your fundraising.  The Agitator also makes a plea to avoid them in this well argued post.

Margaux from Bluefrog reports from the London IoF Conference - sorry for not making you cry!

Kev on trying new ideas (complete with examples).

Katya with five strategic mistakes to avoid in 2012.

I loved this thank you Paul received from Send a Cow.

Sarah Clifton takes a fresh look at the donor pyramid and proposes a donor lifecycle map.

Barbara with 10 predictions for fundraising in 2012.

Freakonomics report on experiments in charitable giving.

Pell and Bales share 10 life lessons from one of their telephone callers.

Jeff opens a can of worms about innovation.  Lucy and the Agitator respond.

Sex, lies and the art of commanding attention - some great advice from Copyblogger on headline writing.

Eaon looks at the myth of influencers.

Does a personalised approach make a difference? Results from two tests

I wanted to share the results of two small experiments I've conducted in the last couple of months regarding personalised thank yous and appeals. 

I hope you'll find them of interest, though I need to say upfront that the sample sizes were (very) small and so the results aren't statistically significant.

Does a handwritten thank you card increase response to the next appeal?

For the first experiment we randomly split the responders to a previous appeal in two.  One half received our normal personalised thank you letter, the other half also received a hand written thank you card, which referenced their previous giving.

As well as being a nice thing to do for donors, I was also interested to see if those who received the extra thank you would also be more likely to give to the next appeal.

The results were as follows:

Normal Thank You: 28.1% gave to the next appeal.

Extra Thank You: 29.2% gave to the next appeal.

Interestingly, the normal thank yous gave more collectively than the previous appeal, whereas the extra thank yous gave slightly less!

So it appears not to have made any difference in the short term.  If I had the resources then I would love to monitor the long term effect on doing this to the lifetime value of a donor.

Does a personalised Christmas appeal increase response?

In the next test, we decided to send a personalised version of our Christmas appeal to our top 400 donors (they'd all given over £50 gifts in the past). 

We included a handwritten Christmas card featuring a poem from a beneficiary - you can read this lovely poem online.

Last year the response rate across all segments of the appeal was about the same.

So far the response rate is over 25% higher for the high value donors than all other donors.

With responses still coming in (I'd expect we have around 66-75% of responses now) then the top segment has responded at 13.2% compared with 11.7% last year, so by the end of the appeal I'd expect to see a 30-40% increase in response to sending the handwritten Christmas card to the top donors.

A pleasing result and one that we can look to utilise for future appeals as well...

 

 

 

Should we name and shame millionaires who don't give?

UK Fundraising have a great summary of the 2011 Coutts million pound donor report (you can download the full report here) and it shows that the number of million pound gifts in the UK fell from 201 to 174 last year.

At the same time, one of the Freakonomics podcasts reports on Australian Dick Smith who has publicly vowed to name and shame rich people who don't give.

Would such an approach work in the UK and has Dick's direct approach had an effect?

Sadly, I think the answer is no to both questions.

While I admire Dick's enthusiasm and directness, I think issuing threats and trying to embarrass people to give is not a viable long term solution to get people to give more.

In Australia his approach has attracted critics and he has been accused of being a bully.

If I was advising Dick, then I'd tell him that he might have more success by trying to show people the benefits of donating and the satisfaction that philanthropy can bring. 

I'd get him to encourage people to go on shows like Secret Millionaire and for him to  offer a matching challenge to millionaires who've never given before.

Finally, a public pledge (like the one from Warren Buffet and Bill Gates) that he will give most of his wealth away, might inspire others to join him.

In the UK I'd like to see more people celebrating their giving and publicising their philanthropy, but sadly our natural reserve means that even great initiatives like the Beacon Fellowship don't seem to attract the publicity and attention they deserve.

Rather than endless white papers and talks of tweaking the tax system to incentivise giving, I would rather see people celebrate the emotional joy of giving and encouraging others to join them.

Fundraising Reading Round Up

Time for another round-up.  The year has flown by and this is likely to be the penultimate one of the year. Enjoy!

The Grant Garden on asking nicely.

Alison with a fundraising analogy about brazil nuts.

Mark with some more analysis and results from his mystery shopping exercise.

Jeff and Nancy both critique a stupid non-profit ad.

Karen with some thoughts on direct marketing trends in 2012.

Pamela Grow hosts this November's non-profit blog carnival on giving thanks.

Aline with some emergency fundraising appeals (past and present).

Derek on fundraising films.

Tom Ahern with a sure fire recipe for failure.

The Agitator with an in-depth look at donor commitment.

The Wild Woman looks at the anatomy of a successful annual appeal.

Katya gives a thumbs up to donors.

Dan Pallotta on jargon.

Is fundraising income increasingly fragile?

A talk I attended at the RSA by Nassim Nicolas Taleb (the author of the Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness) has got me thinking whether fundraising is about to hit a crisis.

In his talk Taleb talked about nonlinearities, optimisation and fragility and the idea that when businesses, governments, projects etc reach a certain size then the consequences of any problems increase exponentially. 

To illustrate the point he gave the following example. 

With 10,000 cars on the streets of London it might take 30 minutes to drive across the city.  Increase that to 50,000 and even 75,000 and the journey time might hardly change, but at some point, lets say 90,000, the journey might suddenly take an hour as that is the point that saturation is reached and jams ensue.

The following graph illustrates the point:

Non-linearities and fundraising

Looking back at the results of the mystery shopping research I talked about last week and the evidence of increasing donor attrition, acquisition costs and fundraising fatigue*, then the point is approaching where it will become too expensive to continue to rely on badly applied fundraising methods and the impersonal, transactional approaches taken by the majority of our profession. 

Using Taleb's language, the point of over-optimisation (and the resulting chaos) may be closer than we think...

I live in hope that the result of this will be a paradigm shift - from rhetoric about relationship fundraising, loving our donors and listening to their needs etc, into action.

*Here are just a few anecdotal examples of fundraising in crisis:

Direct debit cancellations hit a record high in August 2011.

Some of my own recent research revealed that the cost of recruiting a regular giver door-to-door has doubled in the last 10 years, whilst attrition has increased by over a third.

CRUK  has seen it's fundraising income drop for the first time since it formed and has cut the number of Race for Life events in 2012.

Overall giving in the UK is static and it would be interesting to see if fundraising costs overall have increased.

 

 

 

 

Why do mystery shopping results always shame fundraisers?

Last week I had the pleasure of listening to Mark Phillips and Damian O'Broin present the results of a mystery shopping exercise they've recently undertaken in the UK, Ireland, U.S.A, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

I'm sure they will be blogging about the results in due course and I don't want to steal their thunder, but if you've ever read any fundraising mystery shopping survey, then you can probably guess the results.

With a few notable exceptions most charities they tested are lousy at thanking, welcoming and keeping in touch with donors.

As a profession it simply isn't good enough and the end result is that it costs more and more to recruit new donors, people get fed up with giving and fundraisers get tarred with the same brush as banks and utility companies in the bad service stakes.

We owe it our beneficiaries and our profession to be better than that, so ask yourself - if my team was mystery shopped how would we do?  If it's anything less than first class, then you have a duty to make things better.  Starting now.

So while the bad practices of others gives an opportunity to impress donors with our competence and personalisation, it is only a small consolation. 

Wouldn't it be great if next time one of these mystery shopping exercises is completed people are wowed into saying what a good service we are providing as a profession... 

 07/12/11: Update

Mark and Damian have the following posts up about the research:

Online donors have letter boxes too

Who sends your emails?

Seeing what the donors sees

Weekend Fundraising Round-Up

Thanks to everyone who entered my competition to win tickets to this week's IoF London Conference.  Congratulations to Vasileios and Helen.  I'll be writing up some thoughts on the conference next week.

In the meantime, here are some of the articles that have caught my eye recently...

Kimberley goes for a walk in the mountains and meets a great fundraiser. 

Mark makes the case against the case for support.

Dear Joan on saying thank you.

Karen with some tips on thanking as well.

Aline on personalisation and showing donors love.

Kevin on effective fundraising and marketing.

Agents for Good stand up for donors.

Paul with a moo-ving Facebook campaign.

Beth with a case study on how the Humane Society of the US use their 1 million Facebook fans.

The Agitator asks if your donors would miss you?

A Twitter PR disaster from Quantas to learn from.  Articles by Eaon and Web Ink Now.