Editor’s Note:  This is the first of a three-part series  on Advocacy Fundraising.

Part 1: the Importance of Advocate Identity.

Part 2: Slactivism Science.  Separating the wheat from the chaff.

Part 3:  Putting it all together.  Finding and Converting Advocates.

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THE ADVOCATE IDENTITY

Do you recognize any of these signs?

• Some of your supporters will email their representatives every time you ask them and sometimes when you don’t.
• You get feedback asking for action alerts on issues you haven’t yet covered.
• Social media comments about issues you raise make it clear that some people are following the issues closer than you are.
• You see some self-organization among your donors: petitions passed around at your walks or social media groups springing up around your issues.

Congratulations – you may have a policy advocate supporter identity.  (Also, if you see these signs at other organizations that work on your issues, you probably have the capacity to expand to these advocate audiences.)

Remember our criteria for identities: 1) they must minimize differences within the group and must maximize differences with other groups, and 2) segmenting and customizing by that identity must increase your results.

The Advocate Identity seems to fit these criteria:

• Advocates like to get information about what you are doing on a policy level and how they can be involved. If you have a dedicated band of advocates and send out alerts, be prepared to see high open rates, click-throughs, and actions.  Your non-advocates, obviously, won’t.
• One of the best non-holiday fundraising emails I’ve sent wasn’t a fundraising email. It was an advocacy email, where we only asked for money after someone completed the action alert, specific to the campaign that the person had just emailed their rep about.  There’s gold in them hills.

A word of warning: don’t assume that advocates will be worth more than non-advocates.  One common misconception is that people must do more and more varied things with your organization to be more valuable.  They don’t necessarily.  In fact, we’ll talk about the perils of slacktivism coming up this week.

The full rationale for this is in this blog post, but the short version is that loyalty has two axes: strength of relationship and potential to invest.  In Building Donor Loyalty (from 2004), Adrian Sargeant and Elaine Jay used a different form of “advocate” to describe people who have a strong relationship and high potential to invest.  (For the rest of the post, we are talking about policy advocates rather than this type of broader organizational advocate.)

However, there are also “passive loyals”: people who have a strong relationship with you but are content to “just” give.  Sargeant and Jay say “Campaigns that generate high numbers of this category of supporter have successfully matched their cause with individuals with a genuine interest and concern.”

Bombarding these people with irrelevant (to them) asks involves committing two cardinal sins: wasting your money and annoying your donors.

So how can you tell who is a policy advocate and who isn’t?

Ask.

People will tell you in their communication preferences whether they want to hear about policy issues. You are asking these at the point of acquisition or ASAP after, right?

But let’s say you have a life-threatening allergy to donor feedback.  Thankfully, advocates are one of the easier identities to capture with transactional data.  People who have waded through a steady stream of online/offline petitions for years without getting wet aren’t advocates.  People who have are.

If you are going to typecast folks this way, you’ll want to make sure that the “probably-not-advocates” get very few of your most important alerts to make certain.   And you’ll want to give your “probably-advocates” plenty of opportunities to opt out without severing their entire relationship with your organization.

But, you may say, what about the “slacktivists” who stay on my file without donating?  We’ll talk about them tomorrow.

Nick