As the combined horrors of major crisis within major crisis within major crisis piled up last week there was one moment of elation.  The triumphant launch of SpaceX’s Dragon and its successful rendezvous with the International Space Station.

In the course of the cable news runup to the launch Brian Williams of MSNBC interviewed retired NASA Chief Astronaut Peggy Whitson, who’s spent more time in space than any other American.  The topic involved the “risk” the two SpaceX astronauts were taking.  Dr. Whitson indicated that over the years the risk of death in a flight like this had come down – a bit.  In the ‘60s the risk of death was 1 in 210.  For this flight it was calculated at 1 in 250.

To put the stats in perspective the retired astronaut pointed out that if these odds were applied to today’s commercial airline flights, they would translate into 1,000 fatal crashes per day.

All of which got me thinking, in much more earth-bound and far more mundane terms, about the risks fundraisers are willing to take when it comes to advancing our work through innovation and change.

Quite obviously a fundraiser’s risk of failure doesn’t involve flaming death at 17,500 miles per hour (nor is it mitigated by a multi-billion dollar engineering budget). But I do wonder how often most of us even take the time to think about, define and calculate the risk and cost of failure when considering innovation and change.  My guess is somewhere between “not much” and “never.

Maybe, as some suggest, the coronavirus pandemic and its consequent economic fallout will change everything,  or perhaps it won’t change much and sooner or later we’ll be somewhere back near ‘normal.”  Either way we fundraisers should pay far more attention to understanding failure.

Why?    Because, either way, change and innovation along with understanding and measuring the risk are necessary.  We weren’t doing all that well before the virus. And if the doomsayers are correct we’re headed for even more difficult days.

In facing an uncertain future it’s helpful to understand that the default position for most of our sector is to resist experimenting with innovative tools and processes because we insist that ‘It’ – the ‘It’ being a predictive model, a new online tool, a new multi-channel process, changing the composition of a board, seeking donor feedback, improving donor services, you name it — be 100% correct, 100% of the time. Otherwise, forget it, we’ll just stick with the same-old-same-old, thank you.

Of course, we arrive at such a silly belief without the foggiest idea of what the ‘failure rates’ are on the techniques and technologies we’ve been using — without questioning — for years.

The examples are nearly infinite.  Here are but a few.

• We reject the use of predictive models because they only work 80% of the time, not realizing of course that our old RFM segmentation processes may work only 50% or 60% of the time — if we only knew.
• We reject the use of telemarketing for securing monthly donors because ‘it costs more’ and ‘upsets donors at dinner time’, not realizing or bothering to calculate that our ‘failure rate’ for acquiring sustainers by mail is 5 times higher than over the phone.
• We resist firing and replacing a lousy board because we don’t want to rock the boat or feel we don’t have power, without calculating the ‘failure rate’ of a board that doesn’t give, get or often doesn’t even both to attend. (And it’s sure not difficult to calculate the failure rate of boards who forbid fundraising in the pandemic as ‘not in good taste’.)
• We resist thanking and properly welcoming donors because ‘we just don’t have the time’…’it’s a cost center’…’we don’t have the money or system to determine a donor’s identity’ without calculating the ‘failure rate’ of poor retention and decreased lifetime value.
• We resist using direct mail in the mistaken belief that digital is ‘inexpensive’ and easy without calculating the ‘failure rate’ of avoiding a channel that is far more productive, but may require the time to learn or work with an expert.
• For those who do use direct mail in some quantity the old method of incremental and often insignificant A/B testing rules the day. It’s time to calculate the “failure rate” of not using multi-variate testing, conjoint analysis, and predictive analytics. Too often they’re dismissed or resisted as some sort of witchcraft — all snake oil, lizard’s tails and newt’s eyes — simply because they don’t succeed 100% of the time. Even though the ‘good old ways’ succeed only 16% of the time when it comes to beating acquisition controls.

And on and on.

When it comes to the ‘new’ or ‘innovative’ techniques or donor and personnel processes that may open a brighter future for the organization too often our expectation is that it must work better than what we’re doing 100% of the time, or we simply can’t be bothered trying it or figuring it out.

Tradition and aversion to risk usually determine what’s defined as ‘Best Practices’.  Sadly, too few realize that sticking with the status quo is the greatest risk of all.

Roger