Back to Normal

March 25, 2022      Roger and Kevin

Covid changed everything.  For a little while.

The prognosticators claiming otherwise were seemingly trying to outdo one another with their hyperbolic goobly gook.   Here is one such hot-take, “that one can talk about a global synchronisation of human behaviour establishing a completely new, universal change of consumer patterns.”   Uh, yeah, whatever.

A nod to Mark Ritson’s column for these charts and some of the quotes.

Follow the brown line.  This shows a trendline absent Covid.  Notice how the post Covid part of each chart is largely in line with where it was already trending pre-covid?  Turns out men don’t want to wear sweatpants forever nor is e-commerce anything but what it was if Covid never existed, an up and to the right trendline.   And Zoom?  Well it’s where Peloton is, desperate to prove to the market that its future is as bright as the momentary blip in time called Covid.

I’m not suggesting Covid didn’t have an impact.  Nor even that it’s over.  I have no clue of the full impact nor the over-ness.  What I am saying is that the wheels of change tend to turn slowly unless you’re comparing 2020 to 2021 and mistaking it for eternity or a”new-normal”.

Where does the so-called “new normal”  leave fundraising?

A betting man, which I am if my DraftKings account during the NCAA tournament is any indication (I’m killing it…no, not really), would say it looks a lot like these charts and that which was was already trending will keep on doing so.

  • Direct mail costs are going up
  • Direct mail yields are going down
  • Ditto for email – open and click rates are atrocious
  • Ditto for F2F in most mature markets
  • Wherever there is profit, you will have more market entrants until you ground the profit to zero
  • Mail more, make more was always a garbage idea.  The law of diminishing returns still stands in direct marketing
  • Volume creates irritation, lots of it, and it manifests in people tuning you out
  • People are different, treating them the same is never a way to maximize your return
  • Most segmentations fail because they live mostly in PowerPoints slides or in the minds of their creators.  Most are garbage anyway and do the least damage if they remain there
  • Most tests fail because they lack any reason to believe they’ll work in the first place
  • The most common behavior rut in your fundraising is people simply ignoring your direct marketing
  • Breaking this rut is hard and requires a dash of familiar and a dash of new to breakthrough
  • Saying “people want to give” is silly.  Parting with money causes mental pain.  Nobody wants that
  • They do want to reinforce their values and goals but that runs a lot deeper than “warm glow”, which seems to be camouflage  for tons of lazy or crappy asking
  • We need a major re-think on fundraising built on the “why” of behavior
  • Those reducing this re-think to social proof or a handful of other ‘nudges’ they read about in a best-seller book do a disservice to behavioral science and fundraising and the humans we’re trying to get to respond
  • Sometimes, the only way to get the data you need is to ask the human being you want as a supporter
  • “People don’t do what they say” is true but only if you ask lousy questions
  • People also don’t do what they did
  • Defining loyalty as some pattern of behavior is mixing up cause and effect
  • Ditto for “engagement” scores that have likely yielded zero value to the sector but produced reams of ideation sessions and internal meetings to nowhere
  • The assumption is that engagement only works when practiced in the “more” mode.  More is better, except for large chunks of donors for whom giving is and always will be extremely passive.  They can be psychologically satisfied and profitable for you if you’ll just let them
  • The future is here, it just isn’t evenly distributed.  There are brands out there doing it differently.  They have a different mindset, one that yearns to question, dig deeper and adopt a continuous improvement mindset
  • This mindset is what separates often messy, squiggly line of progress, success and growth from the straight, highly predictable steady, slow decline

Kevin

 

3 responses to “Back to Normal”

  1. erica waasdorp says:
    March 25, 2022 at 7:44 am

    Hi Kevin, thank you for this.

    However, you’re throwing out a lot of things here without saying what we fundraisers can do differently to get the donor to keep giving… what i’m not seeing here is the going back to basics and looking at your thank you processes (or even thanking donors for that matter)…

    I hear way too many people who make assumptions without verifying them.

    I hear way too many people who think that a thank you email is adequate stewardship, or that one email a quarter is adequate or that it’s all in cryptocurrency or crowdfunding now or that direct mail doesn’t work or email doesn’t work when so many many nonprofits are not even scratching the surface with what they could be doing (better or more of).

    I hear way too many people who never even consider picking up the phone to say thank you to their donors (nor text for that matter).

    I do hear a lot of people whose direct mail does work well and they could be doing a lot more of it, even if it is more expensive. Twice a year is simply not enough to keep your donors engaged.

    I hear a lot of people who do a great job with their donors, with highly personalized messages on their appeals, especially if they don’t have email addresses for everybody.

    I hear a lot of people who went from two to three to four appeals a year and they raised a lot more money and had more donors engaged with the organization.

    We can’t throw any and all nonprofit on the same pile, nor should we scare those smaller ones away from doing what they could be doing more of.

    Not everybody is mailing every 3 weeks. Not everybody is emailing every day or sometimes even twice a day.

    What’s the plan? If your organization doesn’t have one, create one, work it then evaluate and tweak the plan based upon what you see and hear.

    Your last line said it best: what’s the mindset? The mindset should be to have a plan, wanting to do it better, treating your donors right, but also raising more money for your organization.

    Every plan must be tailormade for your organization, so let’s throw out the generalities and have the open mind we fundraisers need to look at the best way to accomplish the above.

    • John Lepp says:
      March 25, 2022 at 8:39 am

      Erica – I am sending you the HIGHEST of fives…

    • Claire Axelrad says:
      March 25, 2022 at 9:55 pm

      I’m with John on the high fives Erica. This article made me want to write something, and now I don’t have to! Of course, a lot of what Kevin writes has merit (it generally does), yet people have to start somewhere. And the basics still work pretty darn well — assuming they’re rolled out, as you say, according to a strategic plan and within a context that builds towards transformational relationships, not just transactions.

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