There’s an old joke at the right that often feels like nonprofit marketing.

While we do and should have ambitions of expanding the charitable giving pie, we also want to secure our own organization’s piece of said pie.

One of the points Kevin made yesterday is that organizations are differentiating themselves by creating donor journeys based on donor identity.

But does that make a difference?

(Spoiler alert: it does, or he and I wouldn’t be doing a free webinar on it in a couple weeks. Hint: Sign up now. Free.)

You don’t have to take my word for it.  The University of Kent (best known as where Superman’s adoptive parents studied) did a report called “How Donor Choose Charities.”  Here are their main findings:

“[P]eople do not give to the most urgent needs, but rather they support causes that mean something to them. In particular, the study finds four non‑needs‑based criteria that commonly influence donors’ decision‑making:

• Donors’ tastes, preferences and passions, acquired as a result of an individual’s social experiences. These motivate many giving decisions, even among donors who perceive themselves to be motivated by meeting needs.
• Donors’ personal and professional backgrounds, which shape their ‘philanthropic autobiographies’ and influence their choice of beneficiaries.
• Donors’ perceptions of charity competence, notably the efficiency with which they are believed to use their money, often judged on the basis of the quality and quantity of direct mail.
• Donors’ desire to have a personal impact, such that their contribution makes a difference and is not ‘drowned out’ by other donors and government funding.”

There’s plenty of grist for the mill in just this summary.

But I’d like to focus in on “tastes, preferences and passions” and “personal and professional backgrounds.”  These are the backbone of what we would call donor identity – a core identity that (some) donors put on when interacting with your organization.  (A quick primer on identity-based segmentation here)

In short, people give to you not because of who you are, but because of who they are.

This donor identity effect is exactly what U of Kent researchers found, with comments like:

• “My son had meningitis so I give to the Meningitis Trust.”
• “My brother died of bowel cancer so I give to cancer research”
• “My mother became disabled and needed wheelchairs and things like that, and I realised what a difference it made, so I’ve been keen to give to charities that provide wheelchairs in the third world’
• “[My husband and I] work for the music business and so we support music charities and music causes”

As we have discussed (and will, I’m sure, discuss again), this identity doesn’t just provide a good segmentation for in/out decisions, although it does: the correct donor identity + commitment is a more potent predictor and model basis than any demographic, transactional or psychographic data.

It also tells you what to talk to the donor about.  This can start at a very simple level: playing back that someone was a cat or dog person increased both average gift and response rate on a telemarketing call by 15%.  The same is true for the person whose brother died of bowel cancer: by inserting a line like “You know firsthand the pain this can cause to a family.  That’s why we need to find a cure.” in a communication lets the donor know you know her/him and that you feel their concerns.

At a larger level, though, identity can change the value proposition for donors.  Take patients who were treated at a hospital.  They had twice the lifetime value of those without a direct connection to the hospital.  Hurrah!  We have a great way of predicting lifetime value, retention, etc., from just one variable.

But the more important part was that 60% of the reason that former patients gave to the hospital were messages around patient care.  For those who had never been to the hospital?  Literally zero percent.  They wanted to hear about research efforts and what the hospital was doing to promote greater health throughout the community.

Imagine yourself working for this hospital two paragraphs ago, before you knew about their identities.  You’d work on a letter, an email, a script that would go to your donor base.  That’s what most of our direct marketing programs are, perhaps tempered by a lifecycle analysis that gives a tweak for the lapsed donors.  But now that you know the gulf that exists between your donor groups, it’s difficult to imagine how to craft one communication that talked about the value proposition to these two different groups.

I encourage you to go through the identity looking glass.  Once you’ve taken an identity-based look at your own donors, you can’t look at them the same again.  Nor should you.

Nick