Is Your Personalization = N/A?
Three spec sheets, we’ll let you guess which one is ours. The more relevant guess for fundraising, which of these is more likely to match the person reading it – yellow, green or purple?
At least the “Personalization: N/A” —isn’t even trying to pretend. The “4CP INKJET” is adopting a fake it until you make approach by dropping in your name and maybe even in color…
All the sector talk of donor-centric, audience-first, personalized and yet, here we are. In most of the sector, this is what counts as personalization:
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Dropping in {FirstName}
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Mentioning the last gift date
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Citing a gift amount
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Inserting 3–4 new words from the ‘base’ version in a two-page letter and calling it tailored
If your idea of personalization is using transaction history and internal data flags then you’re not personalizing, you’re querying a database. And the donor knows it. Real personalization means understanding the identity of the person you’re talking to, their motivations, their worldview, their psychological traits and then writing in a way that actually reflects that.
This data can live in your CRM but it doesn’t come standard nor is it “best practice”. If your “audience-first” strategy can be fully executed in your lettershop software, then you don’t have a strategy, you have a template.
So ask yourself, what does your spec sheet say? And what does your donor see?
Kevin
Behavioral Science Q & A
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