This question of  ‘at’ or ‘to’ struck me when reading a report from a UK agency that ran ads for a US animal rights advocacy charity.

I found the thinking behind the ads and the testing to be wildly superficial and uninteresting and almost certainly leaving lots of money on the table.  But, I realize I might be in the minority here. 

Here’s a snippet of the findings. Forget for a second that it’s only click-through rate and not return on ad spend or some such metric.  That’s not my quibble in this instance.  The big ahah finding involves the showing of ads with pigs.

I’m not anti-pig mind you.  Hell, my kids all asked for pigs of various shapes and sizes at different points in their delinquency...er, I mean adolescence.

The problem isn’t in claiming that if you are going to show an animal and if you have four choices between chickens, cows, fish and pig,  then pigs are best.  Let’s accept that at face value for this post.

The problem is the starting point, the superficial, ‘skin’ deep thinking about why people give.  If you don’t know why people give and how the answer to that ‘why’ question isn’t the same answer for everyone then the only alternative you have is fundraising At your supporters with a message reflecting your needs because you don’t really know the donors’ needs.

People aren’t giving to help pigs or sheep,  or your Issue A or Program D.  But this is how the vast majority of fundraising works because we

• assume everyone is the same and
• we know much more about what we have to sell then who the supporter is, much less how they differ from each other.

And so we send out “at” you fundraising appeals that assume everyone is the same and wait to see if Issue A, B, C or D or Pigs, Cow, Chicken or Fish gets the higher response rate and declare it the “winner”.

On the other hand, if you’re truly marketing “to” donors this approach means that much of your message has absolutely zero, zilch, nada to do with the organization or Lions, Tigers or Bears.  If your message isn’t 2/3 about who the donors are and showing you know their values, personality and goals and 1/3 connecting that to your brand and mission as way to deliver on their needs then you are probably doing “At” fundraising.

The tricky part with “At” fundraising is that it’ll always produce a “winner”, the best outcome from your sub-optimum set of options.  This is very different from identifying the winner from the best set of options available.   Granted, “best” is an idealized notion, so let’s aim for a better set of options.

The starting point is selling to your supporters, not at them with pigs.

Kevin