A year ago, Bryan Miller at Giving in a digital world made an online contribution to each of ten UK charities raising money to assist earthquake relief efforts in Haiti.

Then he sat back and collected the avalanche of mail and online follow-up appeals he received.

Let’s say the results were not uniformly impressive! Here is his accounting. He’s done a spectacular job of wading through what appeared on his ‘donor’s doormat’ … here are his conclusions.

• Don’t immediately assume that emergency donors are particularly interested in your work beyond the emergency they’re responding to. They might be, or might grow to be over time. But in the first instance keep the focus of your communications on what you know to be their area of interest and only then see if you can get them to reveal what else they may be interested in hearing about. You might test emergency postal appeals, but don’t just mark them down for every mailing going in the vain hope that you might hit lucky. You just end-up looking wasteful and reducing the likelihood of them responding even when another emergency comes along

• Do offer online donors the opportunity to receive their Supporter Updates or Newsletters electronically – and extend the same offer in every printed copy you send. It’ll save you print and postage and the engagement and response options are so much richer online anyway. However, I wouldn’t advise offering the opportunity to opt out of all postal communications – as well timed and targeted mail appeals can still work, even with hardened onliners like me

• Do remember that many online donors are very willing to further their relationship with an organisation through some form of simple click-to-campaign advocacy action. But Don’t just hand over your emergency donors to your Campaigning team without ensuring that they have the opportunity to indicate whether they are interested in campaigning and/or opt-out of things they’re not interested in. One organisation in particular (again no name, but not the same as the bulk mailer chastised earlier) has an especially active Campaigns team who seem to delight in sending me emails about all sorts of things they are clearly very enthusiastic about – but who have never once stopped to ask me if I’m interested in what they do

• Do consider how you might learn more about online donors at the point of their first gift and then use this information to guide their subsequent communications. Not necessarily through asking too many questions at the point of donation (although a strategically selected few might be useful) but simply through using your website tracking data more effectively. For example, one organisation I know has found that donors coming to them through Bing have a better repeat donation and upgrade profile than those from Google (I’m guessing because those who stick with Bing as the default on their IE browsers are perhaps older/less tech-savvy than the norm?)

Thanks for sharing this experience Bryan … you deserve a raise!

Tom