The TL/DR  (Too Long, Didn’t Read) version of this week’s posts has been:

Volume is not a strategy. Not for retention.  Not for net income.  And especially not for donor satisfaction.

Now the painful truth:

Lack of volume is also not a strategy.

Cutting volume, as many organizations have done successfully, is a great tactic as part of a larger strategy.  But, it’s not a satisfaction tactic; it’s an anti-dissatisfaction tactic.

In Richard Oliver’s Satisfaction (not to be confused with the more popular, but less salient to this discussion, version by the Rolling Stones), he talks about three types of need categories:

“1. Bivalent satisfiers – the upward and downward translatable attributes that can cause both satisfaction and dissatisfaction.

2. Monovalent dissatisfiers – essential but unprocessed attributes only capable of causing dissatisfaction when flawed

3. Monovalent satisfiers – psychological “extras” processed at a higher level of the need hierarchy.”

As an example, if you found a bouquet of free flowers in your hotel room, that’s a monovalent satisfier (happy when there, but you don’t expect it).  If you found free Wi-Fi in your hotel room, that’s a bivalent (happy when there, sad when not).  If you found a dead body in your hotel room, that’s a monovalent dissatisfier (you don’t expect it, but sad when there).

Volume is a monovalent dissatisfier.  It’s the mess we fundraisers made.  We get credit for cleaning it up, but not extra credit.

To get to a sustainable growth model, we not only need to clean up the mess, but we have to get to a deeper understanding of our donors.

Here are some tips on how to get to that better future.

Tip #1:  If you aren’t hearing volume complaints from your donors, make sure you are listening.  That is, actively asking for feedback.  It’s amazing how many fewer complaints you hear when you don’t ask or don’t listen.  In an ideal world, this is a small part of every interaction with the organization and a large part of the few communications that are for the sole purpose of gathering donors’ opinions and advice.

This is something that works to assess your volume problem, if you have one. But it can also transform other processes.  One organization increased their online donation form’s conversions from 12% to 32% (and donor complaints from frequent to non-existent) by listening to their donors and implementing changes based on their thoughts.  They were simple things – add PayPal, fix your acknowledgments, don’t require so many form fields – but together, they made a difference.

As I talked about a couple weeks ago, you probably have some of these same issues undiagnosed.

If seeking donor feedback is a burden for you, there’s  a free online feedback tool here. (Would we like you to pay for it?  Of course, because you get a much better feature set and options like offline feedback, dashboards, etc.  But this version which is  in the Agitator Tool Box is free forever, if it has what you need.)

Tip #2:  Yes, test decreased volume if it’s a complaint you hear.  On Wednesday, we talked about five organizations that have had success – short- and long-term – by decreasing volume.  The interesting part is that there were four different strategies for doing so:

• Testing a pilot program against the control donor journey
• Modeling based on who should get what volume
• Changing based on donor commitment levels.
• Asking for donor preferences and acting based on them

The latter two bear further examination, because they take volume from the realm of “everyone gets fewer communications” to “here’s a journey just for you.”

Tip #3:  Change your communications based on donor commitment levels.  Wednesday’s piece talked about how new low-commitment donors benefit from (retention-wise) additional introductory communications and new high-commitment donors benefit from getting to the point.

But there’s more value in collecting commitment and satisfaction up front: fixing issues for committed donors and fixing systems to get and retain more of those donors.  Amnesty Belgium increased their six-month retention rate from 60% to 80% by doing this.  The full story is available in detail here but some important points:

• Commitment and satisfaction were the most predictive variables in their modeling, so if nothing else, they learned who was going to lapse.
• They reached out to committed donors dissatisfied with their interaction. These are the donors most likely to forgive and become productive long-term donors with a bit of apology.
• They rewarded those who brought in the most committed donors, not the most donors, because the fight against churn and burn fundraising begins at acquisition.

Now, you have a solution that changes the volume of communications, yes, but also creates a sustainable fundraising model based on the desires of donors.

Speaking of…

Tip #4:  Ask for donor preferences and act based on them.  What if you communicated with donors as often as they wanted through the channels they want?  Shocking, I know.

We reported on the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, who found that donors who requested – and received – half as many contacts gave more than the group who didn’t express a preference.

Another organization built a telemarking list containing nothing but folks who have indicated they will donate one time per year. When telephoned that one time per year, the conversion rate on this list of donors posted a whopping 83% (details here).

There was an even more dramatic example recently with a client who looked at the yearly value of their donors who had expressed a preference of one, two, four, six, or 12 mail pieces per year.  Each of them had a yearly value of six to eight times more than those who hadn’t expressed a preference.

You may argue that these donors don’t get more valuable by expressing a preference.  Rather, it may be more valuable donors who express a preference.

And you’d likely be right.  But I don’t care.

Do you know how much effort you put into determining who your best donors are?  Now, imagine by putting a communication preference survey in your onboarding mailings/emailings, you could get some of them to put their hand in the air a la Hermione Granger and say “ooh! ooh! Professor!  I’ll be worth 100-700% more than the average donor!”

Now open your eyes – you weren’t dreaming.  When you see data like these, the fact that you are also saving money on the cost of those communications to these donors seems negligible.

Tip #5:  And, of course, base your appeals on the identities of the donors in question.  We’ve covered this a great deal lately, but this too is a condition for a donor-centered, sustainable fundraising strategy.

In these Tips I hope you see the difference between strategy and tactics.  A strategy of continually more communications is not sustainable.  Neither is a strategy of continually fewer communications.  A strategy of continually more donor-focused communications, however, is infinitely sustainable.  Into this, we should put our efforts.

Nick