The list and data world are changing fast.  What worked for you last year may not work this year.  If you relied heavily on Google or Facebook to find new donors you may be in for a shock.  The purpose of this week’s posts is to better prepare you for  2020.

Here are the main reasons all forward-looking fundraisers should want to build their organization’s own internal audiences–audiences:you control that are no subject to the whim of third parties.

• Traditional acquisition (rent a list, mail it, repeat) is waning in effectiveness
• You can turn third-party data into sweet sweet first-party data that makes your constituents uniquely valuable to you and you to them
• It’s a way to bring new people into philanthropy
• If someone else holds the data, you will end up paying them every time you want to use it

And,  we’ve talked about how you have people with your donor identities out there who haven’t given before and how organizations have been successful with giving something of informational value to attract constituents and donors.

But we are already seeing signs of this gold rush window closing.

Today we’ll talk about Google; Wednesday, Facebook; and Friday, other techniques you can use for building your audience before everyone is locked away in the few companies that control the data world.

Google is often seen as a mostly neutral arbiter of Internet goodness to the point that when it doesn’t find the results you want, you are shocked. (Speaking of, does anyone know what is on Brent Norwalk’s family crest on the latest Good Place episode?  Because Google doesn’t.). You search, it brings you the best links, you learn/do the thing you wanted to, and you are happy.

Except that’s not how Google works in most cases.  As of June, more than half of all Google search ended in no clicks:

This is a trend that’s been in play for a while in part because of increasing overall no-click searches and in part because search is shifting to mobile (and mobile has fewer clicks):

Why are fewer people clicking?  Googles bring in content from sites and highlight them in SERP (search engine results page) features like:

• Knowledge panels (on the right, usually for famous people, places, or things)
• Instant answers (when Google thinks it “knows” the answer to a question)
• Top stories (news stories about a topic)
• Featured snippets (a summarized answer to a specific question or query)
• People also ask (what it says on the tin)
• Ads

For Google, these zero-click searches aren’t a bug; they are a feature.  Their goal is that you never have to leave Google to get the information you need.  So Google is using other people’s content to satisfy their end users and when money changes hands in this transaction, it’s from the other people to Google.

Nice work if you can get it.  No wonder they are working to increase the percentage of the time they can internally source answers.

As a reminder, if someone doesn’t click, they can’t take an action with you, whether that action is signing up, volunteering, advocating, or donating.  So zero-click ecosystems are a threat.

How do we survive?  There are four big ways (five if you think a legislative or market shift will save you):

Join them.  Only 12% of Google results currently have a featured snippet, meaning that 88% are up for grabs.  So let’s grab; but do so under our terms.  We want to answer the question, so Google will select us.  We want to do so in a way that generates interest in learning more, so people will click on our information.  And we want to do so authoritatively, so we’ve left a positive impression for those who don’t click.

Let’s start with what questions people are asking about our topic.  Facts, definitions, how-tos, and comparisons are always popular.  Beyond this, I like AnswerThePublic to help with this, among  a number of good tools.

For example, entering  “wetlands” into this generates 165 questions like “what wetlands provide for us,” “when are wetlands important,” “who regulates wetlands,” and “are wetlands carbon sinks.”  These are opportunities for a wetlands preservation organization to capitalize.

Create a headline with the target keywords in it (sometimes the literal question), with a paragraph that follows that answers that question (in 54-58 words).  Answer the basic part of the question in the first sentence (e.g., if you are working on “What do wetlands provide for us?”, your paragraph should start “Wetlands provide X for us.”) then expand on this in a way that leads to some sort of action on your page ti tempt the reader to take.

Pay them.  Ads always show at the top.  It should surprise you not at all that ad clicks are growing even faster than zero-click searches.  From last June to this one, searches that have ended with an ad click have gone from 9% to over 11% on mobile and from 6.1% to 6.9% on desktop.

The coming search world is trending toward and could very well end up in two camps: pay to play or served within the search engine.  Your interests are best served by getting people out of this ecosystem and into yours by getting them to opt in for their preferred method of communications from you.  Yes, you will have to pay Google to do it, but those prices are rising (more on this with Facebook Wednesday), so there’s no time like the present.

You know how you look back at your predecessors and wonder why they didn’t do more mail acquisition when they were able to make a profit on it?  Don’t be the digital equivalent of those folks.

Get better.  More likely than a totally non-organic search engine dystopia is that there will still be a third place for great content with strong clicking opportunities to win out.  Google is actually making this easier. Their BERT update two weeks ago has a bunch of improvements for natural language processing, making traditional “cram keywords in a page” search engine optimization even less effective.  Instead, it means that when Google lists an organic search listing, it’s even more likely to be the best.

So be the best.  Create great content on the topics that are important to you and help it win the day.  (That’s what we’re trying here at Agitator | DonorVoice HQ – let us know if it’s working.)

Skate to where the puck is going.  All this talk of mobile versus desktop ignores that more and more searches are done by voice with Alexa, Siri, and their siblings.  More to come on this important topic, but some key tips here.

Nick