The natural assumption is that most donors to the American Hangnail Society either have hangnails or care about someone who does.

Yes, as you can tell, we are anonymizing a disease-focused charity.  There is not, to my knowledge, an American Hangnail Society (AHS).  (Yet; I’m eagerly awaiting the DRTV spots with dreadful looking cuticle beds.)

Clearly, AHS donors will skew toward direct (I have hangnails) and indirect (someone I care about has hangnails) connections to the cause.  To get motivations for every type of donor, we’d have to sample deeply.

When the dust settled, only three percent of their file were people who had no connection to hangnails.  A bit over a third (35%) only had indirect connections to hangnails.  And fully 62% of their donors had hangnails themselves (despite hangnails impacting only about nine percent of the general population).

With that one finding, they stopped trying to differentiate among direct connection, indirect connection, and no connection.  Instead, for the purpose of getting donations, they chose to ignore those who didn’t have the disease. Instead they concentrated on attracting, retaining, and differentiating between those with direct and indirect connections.

If you’ve been reading this week, you probably already have guessed that a priming statement like “we thought you might be interested because of how hangnails have affected your life” increased preference for a communication (which translates to response rate, CTR, etc.) by 32%.

Even more interesting is that AHS didn’t just go after those who had been diagnosed with hangnails.  They were able to combine mission outreach – helping people with a greater likelihood of hangnails manage their risk and get diagnosed – with their development efforts using an online lead generation campaign.

They created a tool that asked a few basic questions.  Those questions screened for the prospects’ likelihood of getting torn skin at the base of their fingernails.

The problem was that this tool had Field of Dreams thinking.  Alas, just because they built it didn’t mean that people would come.

Thus, they had to promote the tool.  Since part of their mission is to help people with this awareness, they were doing programmatic outreach.  (Yes, I used the word “programmatic” here intentionally – it can be classified as such on your cost allocations.)  And,  by the way, these screeners also signed up to receive more information about how to lower their risk, manage their condition, and/or generally live a hangnail-free existence.  And, of course, they also get asked to support AHS in those communications.

So AHS started with Facebook ads, asking people to learn their risk of hangnails in just one minute.  Because Facebook is sooooooo dedicated to privacy, it wouldn’t allow them to target ads to those most susceptible to hangnails, so the targeting was super broad.  We were worried that CTR and ad relevance would suffer.

Relevance certainly did suffer – we had to advertise to a lot of people who weren’t likely to get hangnails for another 20-30 years.  Nonetheless, the click-through rate was five percent and the cost-per-click was $.31, lower than their search engine marketing.  It turned out that the right people worried about, and clicked on ads regarding hangnails. The demographics of participants matched nicely with those who should be worried.

In short, identity isn’t just for appealing to existing donors.  By knowing the identity of their donors    AHS was able to target their programmatic outreach for acquisition –bringing in constituents who, as a result of that outreach,  were a good fit for the organization.  A programmatic win, a fundraising win, and a win for nail beds everywhere.

So how can you take your best identity and use it not only in your donor program, but in your acquisition?

Nick