Do Or Die Time
We’re now into that ‘do or die’ time of the fundraising year.
Surely you’ve laid your plans for the big year-end push … exactly how many mail and email appeals will you squeeze into the next 122 days? How many of those will be in the last 10 days?!
Pamela Barden’s recent post — Fundraising’s Wellness Check — in NonProfitPro provides a good set of boxes to tick as you evaluate your healthiness for the big push. She offers 15 ‘vital signs’ to check.
I think it’s a pretty good checklist.
While she doesn’t explicitly use the term ‘lifetime value’ — and that, alongside list growth, is the master measure of fundraising wellness — Pamela does talk about the ingredients that go into increasing lifetime value … most notably renewal rates and donor upgrading.
And it’s good to see her include some points regarding donor servicing … key to donor commitment and renewal.
Of course increasing lifetime value needs to go hand-in-hand with maintaining — indeed increasing — list size. Sure you want to be nudging individual donors up the ladder, but you want the lifetime value of your entire file to rise. Losing 40% of your donors might cause your average lifetime values to look better (and I stress ‘might’, assuming you only lost the least valuable donors), but leave you less net income for your organization.
As you go into the last 122 days of the year, you’re probably much more in ‘get it done’ mode than ‘fix it’ mode. More about ‘get it out the door’ than ‘are we doing the right thing?’ After all, in terms of the fundraising promises you made to your boss (or client) for 2015, it’s do or die time!
That’s understandable … to a point.
But if you honestly answer Pamela’s 15 questions, you’ll undoubtedly pick up some niggling signs or symptoms over the coming weeks that should be recorded … and become the priorities for your new year’s wellness agenda.
Tom
Behavioral Science Q & A
Integrating an individual giving appeal with other communications from a charity can have both positive and negative effects, and the outcome largely depends on how it’s executed. Advantages of Integration Brand Consistency: Maintaining a consistent appearance and messaging across all communications can reinforce the org’s brand identity and strengthen brand recognition and trust among your […]
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I’m not aware of any in-market tests specifically comparing recurring vs. gift frequency language. I suspect the answer might not be the same with all gift frequencies, nor with all people. It sounds like a great opportunity for you to test and find out what works for your audience. Based on the literature, here’s a couple […]
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Based on what we know from existing data, those renewal notices can actually be pretty effective in getting people to donate. They tap into our psychology – creating a sense of urgency, reminding us of past support, and using personalization to make the message hit home. They’re playing on our natural tendencies to feel obligated […]
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Interesting question. I had a quick look at the testing done on this topic. On the positive side, in all cases, over half of donors decide to cover the fee. In some cases, it goes as high as 65%. Not a negligible percentage at all. Here’s another test from iRaiser showing consistent results (see point […]
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There’s just one thing to consider when designing a supporter journey: the supporter. More specifically, you need to take into account: Who the supporter is i.e. their identity, which is the reason they support this cause, and their personality, which describes the way they “see” and process the world. These will determine the kind of […]
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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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