Engagement Scores: The Empty Calories of Fundraising/Marketing
Click. Like. Follow. Attend.
Or is it attend, follow, click, like? Non-financial behavior may be useful but there are lots of weak-tea ideas being trotted out under the banner of Engagement.
Two Engagement notions in particular should be relegated to the dung pile where engagement hustlers look for ponies.
Bogus Idea #1
1.Engagement is a set of behaviors. “Engagement is not a metric, it’s an excuse“. This from Google Head of Digital Analytics, Avinash Kaushik. Ouch. He goes on to say, “creating relevant engaging digital experiences is a huge part of my job”. How to square that circle?
We’ve seen charities and consultants cobble together non-financial behaviors (click, like, attend, follow) and call it an “Engagement Score”. Engagement is not an outcome or behavior. It’s a state of mind conceptualized as a splash of passion, enthusiasm and fascination creating a more mentally involved and engrossed supporter.
The value of Engagement as an emotional concept different from Trust, Commitment and Satisfaction is speculative, at best. I’m not arguing against the idea that some of your best supporters have achieved this higher level of mental involvement. I am asserting there’s yet to be any seminal, evidence-based work by academics or practitioners showing what your charity should do differently to foster “engagement” versus what you’re currently (or should be) doing to foster Satisfaction, Trust and Commitment.
Jumping to the end and cobbling together all these non-financial behaviors to track and ponder why you have more or less of this vaporous element is dangerous, circular logic. If ‘engagement’ is operationalized as a random set of behaviors then the only way to increase it is to bombard people with stuff as a necessary precondition to move your and their engagement score.
There are lots of people who are mentally engaged with your brand who will only infrequently reveal themselves with their mouse or feet. There are also lots of people who will tune you out in our effort to “engage” them.
If a Click is a useful metric then it can only be valuable if it’s not buried in a stew of Engagement Score nothingness. And, the only way a Click or Like or Follow has any value is if you can tie it to business outcome.
This all leads into bogus idea #2.
2. Engagement metrics cause business outcomes. If Google says engagement metrics are an excuse, that’s nothing compared to what Facebook’s head of marketing science, Brad Smallwood, says. He calls engagement data “irrelevant”, saying it has “no more chance of predicting actual business outcomes than a random guess.” Double ouch.
And yet Facebook included an “engagement” metric in their 2007 dashboard, which was a rolled up smorgasbord of irrelevance. Not to be outdone, Forrester, in that same year, proclaimed “engagement” as marketing’s new key metric.
There is often correlation with non-financial behavior data and giving data – e.g. sign up for newsletter correlates with giving, taking advocacy action correlates with giving. This correlation should be as surprising as it is useful – not at all. In fact, some of the highest correlation in Facebook’s massive trove of behavior data is between clicks/likes/follows on your personal posts and company/charity posts. That’s right, people who click, click.
A US telecom provider found image ads generated less social engagement than other creative formats, so it dropped them only to find later that image ads drove more revenue than other ad formats. Treating engagement as a useful outcome doesn’t make our campaigns perform better, and may actually make them perform worse.
Under Armour founder Kevin Plank has a prominent sign in his office, “Don’t forget to sell shirts and shoes”. This is why they measure purchase intent rather than engagement with their digital advertising.
Engagement is a state of mind, not a behavior. Many people will be ‘engaged’ without ever having their digital or real footprints affirm it. And your attempt to force that footprint will cause some who might have become engaged to tune out.
Engagement is neither a causal path nor necessary way station to real business outcomes.
Princeton philosopher Harry G Frankfurt wrote an essay, “On Bullshit”.
The purpose of bullshit, he argues, is “not to communicate, but avoid communicating; to sound impressive while saying nothing too specific; to give you room for maneuver if scrutinized.”
The next time you hear someone talking about making your marketing or fundraising more engaging or needing to engage your supporters more, or wanting to create an Engagement metric it’s probably wise to reflect on Harry’s words.
Kevin
7 responses to “Engagement Scores: The Empty Calories of Fundraising/Marketing”
Behavioral Science Q & A
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Always enjoy The Agitator. You and your team, at times, take a contrarian view. Your challenges are always well articulated. During my active fundraising career, no one hired me to help them make friends. They retained me to get them the money they needed to accomplish their mission. I was measured by raising actual dollars so nonprofit can use those resources to change the world. I was evaluated on “…did I raise a buck or not…”. Frankly, I valued the clarity and crispness of that measurement.
Bob
Bob, thank you for the readership, feedback and comments, which are always appreciated. You nailed it on clarity and crispness.
I doubt there’s evidence for this either, but doesn’t it seem more likely that donating leads to engagement rather than the other way ’round?
Hi Jeff. If “engagement” is defined as a mental state of being engrossed in something (e.g. an appeal) then I’d say it comes first. But I’d argue achieving that deeper mental state is not necessary to get someone to give (or do). But of course nobody defines engagement that way, it’s a word with no meaning other than to loosely reference a random set of non financial behaviors – click a petition, pray, attend event, like or share something on social.
In this world engagement has been bastardized to mean a bunch of random somethings when if the random somethings have value, they need to be kept separate and specific. And none of them are a necessary precondition to giving nor a necessary next step in the “journey”. As a for instance, we worked with a human rights group that automatically sent petition asks to new donors who hadn’t been exposed to the brand in that way. We found out it was hurting as many donor relationships as helping because only half (ish) considered themselves activists, the other half was turned off by it.
Always super interesting to read you. I’ll give you the example of the regular donors we interface with every day here, donors of 10 dollars per month. Even if 95% of them declare that they leave for economic reasons, we have little doubt that the economic reasons overlap with the boredom that has taken over the happiness of the donations of the first few months (but, of course, it is difficult for them to declare it!). For this reason, dividing donors between “convinced” and “in love” makes sense in our database. Looking at the data, we have evidence that Commitment is very predictive, while Satisfaction and Loyalty are much less so. We are looking at the data and it seems that there is a correspondence between donors “in love” and their participation in surveys, in interacting with our messages in the different channels, and in re-deciding the monthly amount (down or up, it is always a feeling of being active in the relationship). Ultimately, we are thinking that feeling “active” is the first cure for boredom and falling out of love. Always thanks to your insights and…To be continued
Hi Enrico, thank you for being a regular reader and contributor. Agreed that people will state what’s convenient or seen as palatable or even superficially top of mind when prompted with “why” questions about their own behavior. Glad Commitment is being used and delivering value. I’d argue that Commitment (sense of personal connection, know what expect from brand, trust forming) is fueling the survey taking and message reading.
And then the job of the welcome and first few interactions is to foster high quality motivation, which will fuel Commitment. High quality motivation comes from fostering sense of,
1) Autonomy – knowing up front that can change amount with no hassle (or cancel)
2) Competence – believing their $10/month is a good decision. This starts in the pitch but needs to be reinforced in the next few touchpoints with affirming their values will be reinforced by giving and that the money is put to good use
3) Relatedness – there is a let down here as go from highly involved, personal interaction at signup to a one-way string of comms and no human attached. Options here include putting the F2F fundraiser photo on welcome email or two. Reinforce shared Identity in messaging, and send satisfaction email post sign up and auto=responder tailored to their satisfaction answers to show we care.
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