Should I Sustain or Should I Go Now? Improving Sign Up.

October 17, 2022      Charlie Hulme, U.K. Managing Director, DonorVoice

Join us for the should I sustain or should I go now learning session.

The first sign a supporter is leaving is they’ve left. Doesn’t make life easy for anyone managing acquisition campaigns.

Sure, there will be proxy factors in place for quality – e.g., age, payment amount.  But at least one of those  (hint: it’s payment amount) isn’t linear with retention.  There is no free lunch with monthly amount.  And yet we’ve seen many a compensation and payment model that assumes it’s linear.  You know what’s worse than paying a lot more upfront for a $35 a month donor?  Paying for a $35 month donor who quits at a high rate.

Regardless, these proxies are always incomplete.  It’s like trying to evaluate the quality of a cake at the raw ingredients stage and only having half the ingredients you need.

This means you can’t accurately predict who is staying or going.  And certainly not why   Which leads to our not knowing what we can do to fix the problem.

Well, now we can. The following is just a sneak peek into a few views you’ll see if you join our webinar.

Think about your current acquisition reporting. Now take a look at this dashboard from DonorVoice’s Acquisition Platform, and imagine these are your figures.

The first thing to notice is this is real-time reporting of your live campaigns. This applies across channels and compares channels. In this anonymized example we’re looking at the last 30 days of face-face acquisition. In the middle of the screen, you see the count and how it compares with the previous 30 days. And just beneath you see the same for annual value.

But, here’s the game changer. Look at the dial in the top left of the dashboard. Here you’re looking, again in real-time, at the number of supporters you just recruited who are at high risk of leaving. You also see the number at-risk  has increased, from 23% to 25%.  We call this the TrueQuality Score.

You now have a meaningful, forward looking measure of quality. And now that it’s measured properly, you can manage it.

So, back to imagining your campaign. You now have a dashboard in front of you showing you who is leaving.  What about the why?

Well, let’s look at the dials along the bottom. These give us a real-time snapshot of some of the measures going into the Quality score.  The average donor age and sign-up satisfaction have dropped while unsubscribes have gone up.

These ‘why’ measures give us specific guidance as to what actions we can take immediately by clicking the ‘Dig Deeper’ button.  Let’s click unsubscribe and bounce. I can see which agencies, which campaigns, and (in the image below) which fundraisers have the best and worst performance.

The red dots represent individual fundraisers by their volume in the last 30 days. The blue bars show their corresponding unsubscribe and bounce rates.

Now I can go to my in-house campaign manager or external agency with clear-cut direction. Bounce/unsubscribe is a bigger problem for some than others.  This is trainable and fixable.

Of course, this is just one of many variables that go into the TrueQuality Score. But for each, you get similar insights and actions.

Join us for Should I sustain or should I go now.

Charlie

 

 

 

 

2 responses to “Should I Sustain or Should I Go Now? Improving Sign Up.”

  1. Bob Hartsook says:

    Certainly, Agitator illustrations are related to smaller gift through direct response. Frequently, I contrast those with my view from a major gift level, suggest $100,000 to multimillion. When you lose that donor, it certainly could be expectations for this size gift continuously for an extended time. However, in this level, you should have a personal relationship where you can and have talked to the donor. One aspect I have found in social service issues and to some degree in youth oriented, is a frustration of the donor of a lack of progress in curing this problem in their community.
    Their expectation isn’t complete cure, but progress. Many mission driven CEO’s and development officers continue to share the vivid need, and not the progress they have achieved in subtext of the over all numbers and broad based comment of no progress.
    We recommend that our leaders communicate, victory or opportunity for victory in elements of their work. One easy one, is what is the record of recidivism for those who have participated in the programs you have offered. Many communities are taking on homelessness with success, but it is a community wide effort with lots of partners.
    One funder shared with me, “We keep giving and giving and we see little progress in solving these issues.” Nonprofits are responsible to be prepared to answer those questions.

    • Kevin says:

      Bob, thanks as always for the readership and the commentary. Our mass-market equivalent is a view that stories should follow a “redemptive arc”. Yes, a story is by definition, anecdotal but the power of 1 often trumps stats, including with rich people.

      The redemptive arc shows struggle/need to be sure but it never ends there, though that is often what fundraisers prescribe as ‘best practice’. People don’t give because there’s a need, people give because they believe it will help address a need. Just showing need requires too much mental effort for many people. Make it easier, show the benefit of the charity intervention and how the person in need is better off – challenge, intervention, improvement in circumstance. And we do this by involving the beneficiary, show their real story, told well and how their agency and mastery has improved.

      Seeing progress is great and often best done by seeing another human being be tangibly and psychology better off. This makes the donor have strong reason to believe their donation, regardless of size, will make a difference.