In Greek mythology, Procrustes was the hotelier from hell.  He had a bed where passersby could spend the night.  If they were too short to fit the bed, they would be stretched to fit it; if they were too tall, they would have the “excess” lopped off.  His sizist reign ended when Theseus (of minotaur and Athens-founding fame) fatally fitted Procrustes to his own bed, in a bit of that poetic justice so beloved by mythology.

Why bring this up?  Because we have our own Procrustean exercises in direct marketing to donors.  To try to get some economies of scale in our efforts, we gloss over the little unique things that make us all human.  Have you ever:

• Asked for a title because your database asks for it? The British government’s Government Digital Service put this well when creating their guidelines: “You shouldn’t ask users for their title. It’s extra work for users and you’re forcing them to potentially reveal their gender and marital status, which they may not want to do.  There are ways to address people in correspondence without using title, for example by using their name.”
• Sent a Mother’s Day appeal or notice to your file? Did you wonder if any of your supporters had just lost their mother or their child?  Or if their mother abused or abandoned them?
• Wished someone a happy religious holiday without knowing whether they belong to that religion? We talk in depth about this here.

I have done all three of these and likely more.  It’s difficult to think outside of your own experience and wonder what other people are going through; it’s impossible to think of all the scenarios.  That’s part of why feedback (before and after marketing goes out) is so valuable – it gets you inside of other people’s heads.  Even if you do think of this, it’s tempting to say “how many times are these actually going to happen?”  After all, these are the exceptions, not the rules.

Here’s the problem: we are all exceptions.  There’s a great story from Todd Rose’s The End of Average about the Air Force in the 1950s.  They were working to find if cockpits weren’t the right size for their pilots, so they found the average physical dimensions on ten measures of four thousand pilots.  Gilbert Daniels, a researcher, wondered how many pilots were in the middle 30% for all these measures.

None.  Zero.

Even when he looked at only three of the measures, less than four percent  fit into the average mold.  There is no such thing as an average pilot.  So when they designed a cockpit for the average pilot, they actually designed it for no one.  From there, the Air Force worked to be flexible – adjustable seats, pedals, straps for helmets, things that seem obvious today.

Same in the case our donors are.  Physically, yes, but also in terms of their needs and our wants as well.  We should engineer like the Air Force – with flexibility according to needs and wants, based in categories of the donors’, not our, choosing.

That’s where our well-documented dislike of personas comes in.  Personas sand you down to the average for your cluster of people using third-party data stew and claim it as an insight.  But there’s one more reason to not to like personas: the potential to entrench what is, and isn’t, normal.  Sara Wachter-Boettchers’s excellent Technically Wrong talks about how she was working with a CMO to put names to personas, a common exercise to help create empathy for the user.  He agreed with all their choices until:

“we reached the last persona, “Linda.” A stock photo of a fortyish black woman beamed at us from above her title: “CEO.”

Our client put down his paper.  “I just don’t think this is realistic,” he said. “The CEO would be an older white man.”

My colleague and I agreed that might often be the case, but explained that we wanted to focus more on Linda’s needs and motivations than how she looked.

“Sorry, it’s just not believable,” he insisted.  “We need to change it.” …

Back at the office, “Linda” because “Michael” – a suit-clad, salt-and-pepper-haired guy.”

You could say don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater – we should not throw out personas because of one (expletive redacted).  But there is no baby.  Even if the persona had stayed Linda, it would have put everyone who had a set of needs into a demographic bucket, chopping off or stretching whatever bits didn’t fit.

Contrast this with a donor identity: a common set of interests based on the core reason of why people give to you.  Identities don’t give a rat’s behind as to your title, your income, or what paint chip you most resemble.  And they come from the donors themselves – you don’t have to guess (or if you do have to guess, at least you had the manners to ask first sans answer).  You’ll be better off for it, as will your donors.

Nick