Lots of new cash donors... but where are my monthly prospects?

Over the past 18 months we have worked with nine charities on donor acquisition.  Across all the campaigns, all but one have hit gold. With ridiculously high response rates some packs and lists with decent rollout potential are achieving around 5% from cold mailings, and ROIs close to 1.0.

Everyone is happy.  But how to find the potential monthly donors in these shedloads of new donors?

We are testing thank you letters with monthly asks, thank you letters followed by monthly ask mailings, and following both by phone calls; in a few months we will know a lot more about the right approach.  But in the meantime, check out my debate with Lisa Sargent on the great SOFII website.

http://www.sofii.org/node/270

Floods and Fires

The floods across much of Eastern Australia are mostly over.  For now.  But cleaning up and rebuilding is not over, and many families are yet to get back into their homes.  Indeed, some have no home to return to.  And the outlook is not good, with very high chances of further catastrophic floods into the future.

At the same time, other countries have been hit hard. Brazil has lost at least 800 people, and many other countries are struggling to rebuild after, and prepare for more, flooding.

The response to the Australian floods by the Australian public has been overwhelming.  They have donated around $200m - $168m to the official appeal and several millions more direct to charities. Almost every retail business is running an appeal and thousands of volunteers are still helping to clear up.

Australia managed to go a long time without any really serious natural disasters - most photos that you see are in black and white, it is that long ago.  Until two years ago when the Victorian bushfires raged out of control, and this summer's floods.

The flood affected areas are larger in size and scope than the fires of two years ago, and in terms of worldwide natural disasters, the casualty numbers are in the same 'order' - 173 in the fires and 35-50 in the recent floods. There are still people listed as missing, hence the uncertainty.

The fires raised around $400m - the floods look like they will raise perhaps $250m.  Both substantial sums, but why the disparity?

I don't doubt that the number of deaths had some impact - but not all of it.

Both events were mass media events. Although retailers and other businesses have tried various ideas, it is the TV that drove most of the donations to both campaigns.

Victorian Bushfires, 2009

And herein lies the main reason the floods are unlikely to surpass the fires in donations. Fires are more exciting.  Floods, usually, seep up, slowly inundating homes and causing slow motion destruction.  Fires rage, they leap across roads, leave hardly anything behind and are primal - they are terrifying.  Floods, usually, are not.

In these floods, an extraordinary event occurred - what has been described as an 'inland tsunami' - which meant the floods moved up in the primal areas of peoples' minds to something dramatically terrifying.  The inland tsunami will have added a huge amount of income to the appeal; it was all we were talking about for a while.

Inland Tsunami, Queensland Floods 2010/2011

In both appeals, Australians have dug deep and been generous, but in the end, we can't beat emotional motivation in raising more money.  Despite the fact that these fundraising events were not run by fundraisers, the lesson for fundraisers is applicable for all money raising campaigns.

You need to understand your media (in this case TV) and use it to tap into emotion, clearly demonstrate the need and make sure it is dramatic, interesting and compelling.  Only then will you maximise people's abilities to make the change.

Sean

The Floods are terrible... but fundraising must go on

My thoughts go out to the people affected by the devastating floods that La Niña and other factors have wrought across the planet.  Here at home in Australia, the crisis is not over with more major flood events expected. The three most populous states have been hammered hard and we expect the death toll of 20 to increase.  The other side of the world has seen at least 400 Brazilians killed, 40 South Africans, Mozambique is being hit and Sri Lanka has had more devastation caused than the 2004 tsunami.

Death tolls don't really tell the whole story - a nation's ability to respond and rebuild and the infrastructure damage is huge.  I do hope that you can support the organisations responding to these events, but please don't let the plight of foreigners be pushed out of your mind as much as our media have pushed it off our TVs.  Please give to foreign aid organisations as well.

Also, since most readers of this blog are fundraisers, I urge you to please; don't let the floods damage your charity by cutting back on your fundraising.  It is true that in some areas your appeals may not do quite as well - but they will do better than if you don't do them.  Your hospital, school or medical charity still needs the money.

My experience is that events like this do damage fundraising for other causes - but much more of the cancellation of fundraising programs that the choice of donors.

Sean

I need a CEO

Happy new year!

I am back from a long trip to Canada, USA, a short stint at home and a proper holiday in the Solomon Islands. Now back into the swing of fundraising. And the first thing I need to do is recruit a CEO in Australia.

Please let any senior type people wohi could be interested in such a neat job know; or maybe you, dear reader? A great job, making the world a better place and working with a great team.

More details here...

http://paretofundraising.com/join-our-team/

Sean

Al Clayton challenges the whole creative process in fundraising

Creative ideas from Al Clayton

I am at the AFP congress in Toronto, and just attended a great session from Alan Clayton, who these days is working with Ken Burnett causing trouble and challenging charity paradigms.

As well as being fun and entertaining, the session had some excellent truths. Here are my notes...

When doing creative, don't do the normal thing, ie:

What do we need to tell people?

What is our case for support?

Do...

What do we want our donors need to feel?

Get emotional resonance. Emotions trigger actions, logic only kicks in afterwards.

The first method is all about how to get a pack/campaign out without getting it wrong, or causing problems - in my words, professional competence crushing and preventing doing the 'right thing'.

All good charity fundraising must be built on emotions, designed to trigger emotions. Period. No exceptions.

Even though, when asked what they would be more likely to respond to, donors are likely to say a logical argument is more likely to get them to give, it is not true.

Logic is for focus groups, not the real world.

After donating, donors will post rationalize. But really, it was the emotion that got them to give.

Emotional impetus is important even for big, corporate gifts.

Al gave an example of the NSPCC getting a huge donation in the UK, equivalent to $10m, by getting the company directors emotionally involved.

Far too often, some professional in a charity works hard to squish emotion out - especially in corporate fundraising applications. Don't.

Logic appeals to people to shift their values, think about things. Emotion shortened this. And e best way to get that emotional response is to align with peoples values.

You can't change peoples values quickly. Al gave an example of Greenpeace trying to, with their 'Clean Seas' program to change behavior. They knew it would take a while, and it was a 25 year program. 

But with a fundraising piece we only have moments. So we need to resonate with the donors' values, straight away.

Al talked about Non-profit narcissism: 'we need, you should...' that relentless need creates poor long term gain, though good short term campaign. I think this is kind of about interpretation, and good fundraising really does need to convey need (else there is no action) and the examples he gave demonstrated need, so perhaps it is more how you demonstrate need.

(I think that the 'we need, you should' angle can work in some communications, but needs to be balanced with good donor care, feedback and telling a long story developing with the donor relationship but I accept that this rarely happens. Charities get trapped in the 'we need, you should' thing, because most charities really look at short term only, and struggle justifying non direct cash raising communications).

Al talked about how we need to get fury and love at the same time. Like parents. Brilliant creative should get euphoria and fury working well. I love this, but it is really, really hard. Charities talk about having direct mail letters that are 'much more positive' but this is not what Al means. Good fundraising letters demonstrate need with hope.

Greatest mistake in fundraising is telling people about 'us', not 'them'.

Summary

The old creative process

• Case for support
• Brief
• Assemble the tools
• Bolt it together from facts
• Concept
• Copy
• Design

FAILS because it is not about feelings

Replace it with a more simple approach:

Emotionally resonate with audience, then do the brief. Get yourself in the mood before doing creative

We saw lots of brilliant examples, which I can't paste here (pictures etc). Go see him at a conference some time.

Oh, one last point - Good creatives are moody. For a reason and good creative makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up - not what ticks the boxes.

Sean

AFP Congress

I am excited to be in Canada ready for the AFP Congress. And I get to meet our new staff in Pareto's Toronto office.

At the Congress, I'll be presenting stuff on digital fundraising - tools like Google Analytics and of course Google AdWords (which are free for charities in many countries).

Within that, I will be talking about Anne Holland's excellent WhichTestWon website - which as well as giving some great "Did you get it right?" conversations in the office, there is a wealth of information from the commerical sector of how to make websites more responsive.

So, check it here and let us know if you got it right...

Sean

Are you actually having an impact? Show me!

The formula for success isn't as simple as dollars in - dollars out = bottom line - particularly for nonprofits working in the area of advocacy or providing direct services.

If you're the boss of an organisation whose only concern is fundraising, then measuring your success is easy. Pick up a pen, grab an old envelope, and write out the following simple equation: {spend x, raise y (over z years)}. Substitute your own figures for x, y and z, and bingo! You now know all you need to know about whether to reward or fire your fundraising manager.

But for organisations that conduct advocacy and/or provide direct services, the challenge of measuring success is very different and almost always much more complex. Perhaps that's why some nonprofits make only the most cursory attempt to do so, whilst others dodge the issue all together.

Scoring election scorecards

I've been thinking about this a lot recently, ever since I received an ‘election scorecard' through my post from a well-known environmental nonprofit. You've probably received one yourself - several nonprofits produced them in the run up to the general election.

As I held the scorecard in my hand, and read through the list of issues the nonprofit wanted me to consider when deciding who to vote for, I couldn't help but wonder: as the various departments allocated precious dollars to this exercise, how many took the time to work out exactly how they would measure its success? And come to think of it, exactly what would constitute a successful scorecard campaign anyway? New supporters? A flood of donations? Or would a slight rise in the profile of the highlighted issues be deemed enough?

It's a question I put directly to the manager who was directly responsible for the scorecard that arrived in my post that day. I asked him to imagine I was his boss, and that I had called him into my office to justify the expenditure on scorecards vs. other campaign devices.

He acknowledged it was a good, if tough, question. His response was to point out that the campaign wasn't about translating the scorecard into votes; it was a service for members and would hopefully raise the profile of the issues highlighted.

"Yes", I said, "that's all very well. But I'm your boss and I need some proof that this was money that couldn't have been spent more productively. So how are you going to measure the success of these two goals?" His answer was, in a nutshell, through anecdotal feedback and media mentions.

Measuring success might be tough - but it is necessary.

I fully appreciate, of course, that environmental nonprofits will always face a tough job measuring the success of profile-raising campaigns. After all, we can't know if a climate change campaign was successful until such time as climate change has been demonstrably arrested - or the last human on earth dies of its affects.

Yet as difficult as measuring success certainly is, I firmly believe that it's part of every good fundraiser's job to come up with ways to do just that. Especially when you are an environmental nonprofit, and your job is to save the planet. There is simply too little money around to waste a single cent on a campaign that doesn't have a real, tangible and measurable impact.

Success for service providers

So it is hard for advocacy nonprofits. But what of service providers? On the face of it, measuring the success of what these organisations do must surely be far easier. For example, let's say you run a helpline, and you've just launched a campaign to raise its profile. If the number of calls goes up in the wake of the campaign, all you have to do is divide the increase by the cost of the campaign, and you've got a figure to measure your success against, yes?

But hang on, what about the quality of the calls? What if the information was not relevant As soon as you go down this qualitative, rather than quantitative, avenue, you realise pretty soon that measuring the success of a service provider isn't as simple as you might have thought.

A case study: Epilepsy Action

So how do you measure outcomes in terms of quality of life? To answer that question, I want to talk to you about Epilepsy Action, a fantastic nonprofit that is very close to my heart. Partly because they were my first client in Australia, partly because a very dear and close friend had a terrifying operation to treat his debilitating epilepsy (it worked by the way). And partly because they have a very thorough approach to quality control: they bend over backwards to measure outcomes.

Carol Welsh from Epilepsy Action told me that after each person is helped, e.g. at a camp or a memory workshop, participants complete surveys and mark how relevant and useful parts of the service were. She explained that: "our staff look at the surveys and then feed into the next activity. Also we use our phone room to call about a month later and ask [participants] questions specifically to see how the service is being delivered."

Carol went on, explaining that at the moment they are "Trying to reach out to people in rural communities to promote services by video."

Sounds sensible, but it gets better. As I write, Epilepsy Action is doing various marketing initiatives to build up a database of relevant people in welfare and health services and network through networking. But get this: "... we measure staff time on each task and evaluate whether it produces the outcome we are expecting." Fantastic stuff - they actually measure staff time against marketing activities that are not just fundraising. Now, how many organisations can say they are doing that?

Measuring outcomes - not just output

I am not an expert on epilepsy, and I imagine there are conflicting approaches to value from services but at least Epilepsy Action is measuring its outcomes (not just outputs) clearly. They have a sound platform upon which to plan and improve their future campaigns and service provisions. What's more, when potential donors ask them exactly what they have achieved for the quality of lives of their beneficiaries, they can give them a direct and demonstrable answer.

Which prompts me to ask once again - how many other advocacy and service providing organisations are able to do that?

Reading this article, you are probably a fundraiser. But ask yourself - are you raising money that is having a good value impact? I am not talking about dollars in, dollars out. I am talking about impact.

One final piece of advice: a great structure to use and evaluate yourself against is Givewell's Impact Analysis. This is not Givewell in Australia (fantastic data gatherers!) - it is Givewell.org in the USA. Check out what constitutes ‘impact' on their website here.

(c) Sean Triner September 2010

(This is my most recent Agitator column published in F&P Magazine E-bulletin.)