Agitator Cliff Notes: “Data Driven Nonprofits”
I have a confession to make.
I still dog-ear pages.
Yes, this goes against my former-library-employee training. No, I don’t leave books open so it breaks their poor spine; I’m not a total monster. Yes, I know I can take pictures of the pages and put them on Evernote or Pocket now. Yes, I can bookmark them on Kindle or Audible too. But I still do it.
This week, we want to explore those ideas worth coming back to (that aren’t in Roger’s book or Nick’s books, all of which are highly dog-ear-able and make great gifts!). Hopefully, you’ll like them so much you’ll dog-ear… I mean bookmark… the page.
First up is Steve MacLaughlin’s Data Driven Nonprofits, which Roger called a “new fundraising classic.” I couldn’t agree more. Thus, I wanted to share a few of the pages I keep coming back to.
Data focus and sharing is a necessary condition for donorcentricity. In Steve’s book, Jeffrey Lindauer, the VP for advancement services at the IU Foundation said:
“We have definitely had development officers who entered a contact report on a prospect that has no interest in their particular program, but during the conversation, the prospect is clearly expressing an interest in another program… The culture of sharing enables someone to call their development officer peer and say, ‘Look, I’ve had no luck with John, but John really loves athletes or John really has an interest in curing cancer,’ and then they had the prospect over to someone who can pick up the ball and hopefully make that next contact for the right program.”
And later Jeanne Pecha, VP for advancement services at the FSU Foundation, says
“We track all of the communication preferences of all the different academic units in our colleges. It was important to become more granular in the communications preferences tracking so that if the person wants to hear from the college where they graduated from but they don’t want to hear from another group, that can be managed.”
There’s solid data for this in the higher-ed space. Noah Drezner did work where there were four different need cases presented in the script for alumni: need-based, merit-based, first generation to go to college, and LGBTx person cut off by parents because of LGBTx status.
First-generation and LGBTx proved to be the most effective scripts. They were significantly more effective if the script matched the identity of the donor. (Note that this doesn’t get to the heart of why someone gives, which is why demographics are a weak proxy for reason to give, but any steps forward are good steps forward).
In The Agitator Kevin Schulman has noted that identity + interest + ask match is critical for all development, not just major gifts and not just higher ed. Think how a simple “bird” vs. “general nature” donor identity question helped increase RSPB’s response rates and average gift by 15% each on a humble telemarketing call.
What MacLaughlin and Lindauer are saying is that you need to get that data first, then put it into a shareable format – the data do no good if they aren’t shared. In this case, it’s shared among people. In your case, it may be shared among databases.
Retention begins at acquisition. Yes, you’ve heard us say it before. But it bears repeating. You should be looking at which donors retain (or earlier, intermediate measures of which donors self-identify as committed to you). Then set your acquisition systems up to get more of those donors. Steve highlights this with a story from the Denver Rescue Mission, where they found donors who are giving to organizations more like their organization, as well as those donors in the Denver area giving larger average gifts and give 2.4 gifts per year instead of 1.8 on average.
You can get a significant lift from thank you calls. WGBH’s set up a Contributor Development Partnership to help smaller PBS stations stay viable. The Partnership ran a thank-you call program for new donors – just thank you’s, with no asks. As Steve puts it, “the idea of spending money to call a donor and not solicit them for an additional gift was met with some initial skepticism.”
But the results bear it out. That single phone call (timed within six months of that first gift) increased donor retention by 56% and revenue retention by 72%. This means that it was more successful with more valuable donors.
Hope these “cliff note” insights are of interest to you (and make you want to read the entire book). For those who’ve already read Data Driven Nonprofits are there other key insights you dog-eared?
Nick
P.S. Please let us know what other books you’ve dog-eared – maybe we’ll get yours in a future post!
5 responses to “Agitator Cliff Notes: “Data Driven Nonprofits””
Behavioral Science Q & A
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I’m not an expert in this but a quick search surfaced this article on the effect of tax reforms on 2019’s charitable giving. The researchers didn’t find a reduction. Actually, they observed an “increase in charitable contributions in 2019, even with the lower tax rates and the dramatically smaller number of taxpayers who itemize their […]
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Ah confessions, Nick. Me too…dog-earing books. I like books (NOT electronic books). I like to hold books and hug them and pet their spines when I walk by them. I love love book stores and libraries. You were a library employee? Me too, when I was 16. I shelved books! You know, pushing around the book cart. Sometimes I got distracted from shelving and just hung around in the “stacks.”
Nick, the books, like most focused in this sector, quite often make a singular and fatal error – they assume the data upon which decisions are based are accurate and updated.
I know I’m beating a dead horse here, but it all starts with a data-first platform. We recently did a review of CRMs and their processing support for NCOA (http://truencoa.com/crm-ncoa-report-card/) and were quite shocked.
With this year being the 32nd birthday of NCOA we thought every CRM in this space must natively support NCOA – right? I mean, everyone is still using direct mail – right? We found that not one single provider had an integrated and cost-effective solution with weekly monitoring. How good is your CRM if they can’t even support a 32-year old technology? What decisions can you trust with more than 10% of your database completely wrong? …not to mention CASS/DPV, vacant, and non-residential addressing.
Ah another “monster”. I love books as well, paper bound books (I used to bind music and worked in the music library as part of a work-study job in college). And yes, I turn down pages, highlight, write notes in margins, etc. books are meant for consuming as one would a gourmet meal.
Thank you for stating so clearly that “retention begins at acquisition.” That said I wonder, does retention, in some cases, begin before acquisition, e.g., when a nonprofit considers purchasing a mailing list or sending event invitations to a new group of prospective donors, etc.?
@Sophie, I really hate to draw parallels between the for-profit and non-profit space, but they do apply in some cases. The “pre-acquisition” stage you are referring to is supported two ways. 1) know your market, and 2) get your messaging right. In the for-profit space these are market research and marketing communications – sometimes combined into “Marketing Communications Research”.
For the first, I haven’t seen enough examples of NPOs spending enough time performing this step. We’ve launched several products to help organizations figure that out, but it starts with knowing your scope: local, regional, national, international, and then knowing everything you can about prospects within that “universe” – I often hear about donor databases being referenced as the “universe”, but since those donors are known, they cannot possibly be part of the unknown that is the universe. I digress.
For the second, it’s about segmenting your universe of lists, invitations, what have you, and aligning your communication strategy. I believe first-time donors/attendees should have a different message than those who have been a prior donor/attendee. There’s no reason you can’t make assumptions about the lifetime value of your prospects during “pre-acquisition” which is why ask amounts are so critical. And remember, test, test, test.
Sorry I missed out on the discussion – was under the weather yesterday.
Simone, yes, I was a library page when I was 16 and 17, doing exactly what you describe. I was a bit obsessive about it (like many things in life – takes a certain type of person to write a paper on the science of ask strings) to the point that my home books were in Dewey Decimal order. Now, they are in color order because I 1) have many books on similar topics and 2) often remember the color of a book cover rather than the author.
Tim, many books may skip over data integrity issues, but Data Driven Nonprofits is not one of those. The FSU Foundation above talks about their data integrity committee that has met weekly for the past decade and how they work from NCOA, appends, email sanitation, etc. Steve also talks about the need to frequently update for death, moving, and postal discounts (not necessarily in that order). I’d certainly agree that in-database support could be vastly improved – like many other processes like e-mail appends and the like, it’s often pull out the data, give it a thorough scrubbing, and put it back in. That has potential for loss at every stage.
Sophie, you are absolutely right and perhaps I should say that retention begins with the acquisition process (except it’s less pithy). Too often, acquisition process and retention process are in separate world. We don’t trace back to say “hey, the people we acquired doing X drop off faster than Agatha Christie weekend houseguests — maybe we shouldn’t acquire that way, even if they have a low CTA.”