Your message should be relevant.  That statement, proffered as ‘advice’, is about as useful as its polar opposite, don’t make your message irrelevant to the audience.

Can the same message sent to everyone on your donor file or in your acquisition marketing be equally relevant to everyone?

There’s a stark difference between targeting and tailoring to achieve your relevance goal.

Targeting is making group level choices about where to aim your single message.  Renting lists from groups just like yours is targeting.  The reasonable hope is your conservation message to people giving to other conservation groups increases the chance your conservation message is perceived as more relevant.

The problem is twofold,

1. The commoditized, limiting nature of it since it’s brute force simplicity makes it widely used.  There is zero competitive advantage.  Your donors aren’t yours, they are everyone’s.
2. It’s still the same message to everyone, just a more refined everyone.

Tailoring starts with what’s known about the individual and matches message to the person.  You still get groups but the process starts at the individual level and goes up.  Targeting is starting and ending with group level choices (e.g. old, young, rich, active, lapsed).

This is generically referred to as path model but let’s call it our Relevance Model.  It’s a fuller but still simple explanation of cause and effect that shows our desired outcomes, our goals and our means to get it.

The Relevance model explains that as relevance goes down, perceived intrusiveness goes up.  And perceived relevance has a double whammy effect if we’re off the mark.  A lack of perceived relevance,

• directly lowers the chance I’ll think, feel and do in the ways you want and
• it indirectly cements my not thinking, feeling and doing the way you want through higher feelings if intrusiveness.

A series of digital ad experiments proved the model out.  The ads were tailored to Big Five personality traits and shown to people high on the given trait – e.g. Conscientious version of the ad to Conscientious people (you can know this about your file for $0.15/name).

In every instance, a tailored ad made the ad feel more relevant and reduced perceived irritation.  This caused more positive comments and interaction with the ads.

Make it relevant?  Yes, please.  Tailor instead of target?  Definitely.

Kevin