Are Online Fundraisers Stealing Credit?
Am I seriously behind the curve? Or asleep at the wheel? Or is old age just chipping away at my memory?
Whatever. I don’t think I’ve ever seen numbers like these …
Way back in September 2010 a donor survey was conducted by Campbell Rinker for Dunham + Company, a US fundraising consulting firm.
The remarkable findings I’ve just noticed (brought to my attention by a recent Queer Ideas post) relate to the interaction between direct mail appeals and online giving.
Take note:
- 14% of respondents (who were online givers) said that a direct mail letter prompted them to give online versus only 6% who said an email prompted their online gift;
- 1 in 3 donors (37%) who give online say that when they receive a direct mail appeal from a charity they use the charity’s website to give their donation;
- One in two (50%) of generation X or Y donors say they give online in response to a direct mail appeal with 1 in 4 (26%) of boomers turning to online giving when they want to give as a result of receiving a direct mail appeal. Only 14% of those over 65 will do the same, as 3 out of 4 of this demographic prefer to give by mail.
- 20% say their online giving was prompted by someone asking them to give in person. (WOW … that still happens?!)
Now, I grant that this is survey data, as opposed to hard transaction data, but even so the implications are startling …
As much as one-third of the response to any given direct mail appeal could come in via the nonprofit’s website. And only if your mail appeal directed respondents to a dedicated response page would you possibly know that with any certainty.
So think about that …
Are your direct mail returns being ‘under-counted’, making your mail program look weaker than it actually is?
Are those geeks running your online fundraising getting a bit of a free ride?
Are you integrating your mail appeals and online capture such that you can find out?
Whatever your answer to these questions, the bottomline is that your online ‘donation’ pages had better reflect all known best practice, or you’re killing yourself.
Tom
13 responses to “Are Online Fundraisers Stealing Credit?”
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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Five years ago, over here in the UK, I was agency-side and was exercised by this very idea. We did some research, and hit the same figure: 1 in 3 responders to direct mail would respond online. We did determine some similar variation across age groups. The digital agency were not best pleased – and as they also held the “integration/strategic” mantle, it was a pyrrhic victory!
I’m interested to note that the figure (and I recognise the huge number of uncontrolled differences) hasn’t changed much….
Incidentally, dedicated response pages aren’t going to help, as a large proportion of people will still just google. What does work – and your DM agency should be prepared to do this, as its in their interest – is to dedupe new online recruits against the mailing files (unless you are blanket-mailing the whole universe).
I think that another important question is, “Why do your direct mail team and ‘those geeks running online fundraising’ have separate and competing goals?”.
How is your organization going to optimize the amount you are raising when you are fighting against others in your own organization?
We’ve done quite a bit of analysis measuring cross channel influence. We have seen some clients where 50% of online gifts were influenced by direct mail. Until charities break down their silos they will not be able to truly optimize their spending by channel.
So far, across 63 major national campaigns this year, our clients are seeing the direct mail gateway function more effectively than ever as a portal to pURLS, e-commerce, plus dialogue driven resources. Since the beginning of the 4th quarter, more donors than in years previous are coming through gateways we have established to track their giving habits, time to respond, average gift versus the broad audience, and renewed giving. Without question, be they young or old, direct mail motivates their actions.
For one client, we were consistently seeing about 1/3 of DM recipients giving online. We would go through all the online transactions in a given month and match up online donors with those who had recently received a mailing. This was a relatively easy way to get a better assessment of how much out mailings were bringing in – and there were no fights between the DM and online agency about who got the credit! We knew that once these people had given online, we would have their email address, therefore by the time the next appeal came around we could hit them with a double whammy (email and DM appeals) and see response go up accordingly.
To this end, we really tried to get our DM recipients to give online, strategically it was a better move for us. One year we placed a really high profile ad on the organisations home page that looked and felt like the mail package that had recently gone out. Low and behold, the percentage of DM recipients giving online went up massively and overall that mailing did far better then it had the previous year. This indicated to us that many more DM recipients were trying to give online as a continuation of their mailing experience but couldn’t easily find a form to give to.
This makes total sense to me. I read the direct mail and almost always go to the website and donate. It seems so much easier than writing a check and mailing. I seldom respond to emails because, in part, I receive so many so often that I just speed read them so that I can move to the next one before I delete them.
This doesn’t surprise me at all…I’m definitely one who does this, and I just happen to be a Gen Xer. 😉 HA!
I have a question for the group. I’ve found that our people who do not let us mail to them are very, very difficult to renew (probably further supporting this article). How are all of you getting your email only people to stay engaged? The emails alone don’t seem to do it. I’ve even emailed people personally from my regular account, but it still isn’t as effective as the direct mail people. Would love you ideas! Thanks!
Another point to consider in breaking down silos between direct mail and on-line fundraising — it would be very helpful to require at least a zip code (and even better the entire street address) for someone who registers online. For years, on-line gurus have argued against capturing snail mail addresses from online donors. Perhaps this is changing now, perhaps not. But it has always “exercised” me that we fundraisers, as private individuals and professionals, go to great lengths to build databases that can store multiple street addresses and multiple email addresses … knowing that people have multiple email providers,..and then don’t capture the information up front on-line that would at least give us a clue/a chance. to practice list hygiene with emails stored in databases. I’d love to hear some comments on this aspect of the on-line/off-line debate. What are people’s experiences, as individuals and as marketers?
I’m definitely a one-way cross channel giver. I receive lots of DM but I never mail a check. Always donate online. But I also respond to good (as in beautiful and well written) email appeals. I’ve noticed that since I bought an iPad, I am responding to email appeals more often than before. They just look sooo good on the iPad.
OK So can I just change direction a little bit and move onto statistics and the scariness of misinformation in my area of expertise: bequests/legaicies. Why? Cos lifetime giving stats have REAL meaning – the money is in and Bazooka you know whether you have met your target or not. Now in legacies (sorry I am from the UK – bequest is such a horrid word) it is just is not the same. Any measurements/benchmarking is just not accurate. My company reads 1000 wills a day in the UK after people have died. We read EVERY WILL and know of EVERY bequest. And we also know of EVERY death – so we can truly measure “pledgers rates”. Now, take our latest review and we find the pledgers fulfillment rate for the following: Christian Charity 13%, Welfare/disabled charity 22% . overseas development agency 26% and animal charity 56%.
OK so we are the only country in the world who can benchmark accurately…. I think. BUT to go back to my point: You lifetime giving experts have watertight stats – us legacy experts have nothing in reality, So how can you develop a business case to boards for investing in legacies? TALK TO ME Richard
I have the same question as Kim. I am seeing more and more of our “email only” donors in our Lybunt & Sybunts lists. In addition, we recently did an annual appeal mailing to non-donors. We sent to 4,800 people via direct mail pieces and 1,900 via email. We received about a 1% response from the direct mail people but no responses at all from the email.
My questions is: Even though your donor has specified email only, is it wrong to send 1 year-end direct mail solicitation if they have not reponded to any previous email solicitations?
Great reminder to create dedicated donation pages for your mail appeals.Plus, it would be good to include some language on your regular donation page (for those who just “google” you), that reminds them of the mail appeal they rec’d. I’ve often used a drop-down menu that includes an opportunity to give based on the ‘case’ in the most recent mail appeal.