Killing the One-Size-Fits-All Onboard
Consider these donors to a disease organization:
- She’s a researcher working on your disease. You featured some of her research in your newsletter and she was reminded to give you a donation.
- She was diagnosed with the disease you are working to eradicate. She found tips on management and coping on your web site and wanted to show her appreciation.
- A favorite high school teacher of hers just passed away. The obit said in lieu of flowers to donate to your organization. She did, knowing that she wouldn’t be able to travel back for the funeral.
- She got a person in the office Secret Santa drawing and, knowing little about him other than his mother suffers from the disease, donated in his name.
All these folks clearly have different identities and motivations for giving – some likely to be repeated and some not.
But to your database, without additional knowledge, they are all $20 donors.
So you ask the questions we talked about in my previous post as soon as possible. You know who they are, why they give, and what they want to hear about from you in the future. But how do you adapt your communications for the ones who answer (and the ones who don’t)? A few pointers:
Topic area. This is the obvious one. If you have identities of cat people versus dog people, it’s giving cat content to the cat people and dog to the dog people. Some of these divisions are less obvious, like making sure the people who are or were medical professionals hear about your work on a cure. Regardless, it’s important to know what types of people are giving and what types of information people like that want.
One non-profit (who wishes to remain anonymous) segments by animal, whether the donor enjoys nature inside versus outside, and whether she involves her children in their nature activities. This 2 x 2 x 2 matrix of communications means that there are – you guessed it – eight different versions of their emails. The good news is that its usually a few sentences or an image here and there for each email. The most challenging one is for their gift catalog. But as Amazon will tell you, it’s much better to sell the nature coloring books to the people who have kids interested in nature.
Much of this can be accomplished by using customization commands within the same email, for those who like if-then logic, or by versioning out emails for the rest of us.
Medium. Often, the channel by which a person makes their first donation is their primary mode of giving (and is always one by which they don’t mind giving). But sometimes it’s based on what is convenient. Someone who prefers to give through the mail may make an emergency donation online. A person who likes to give online might come face-to-face with a solicitor at the mall.
If you are asking for channel preferences as part of your onboarding, you are no longer limited to welcoming someone through their channel of origin. Welcoming them in all their preferred communication channels increases the likelihood they will engage you in all of them.
Frequency. Those who don’t know as much about you need to get more introductory communications; those who are passionate about you need fewer.
This sounds counterintuitive in a direct marketing world where conventional wisdom preaches greater volume to those who love us and more tentative efforts with those on the fence. However, the data bear this out.
A nonprofit looked at high-commitment versus low-commitment donors and the difference between 0, 6, or 12 introductory non-ask communications.
First, the obvious result: no one wanted 12 additional communications.
Those donors who were highly committed to the organization had their retention go down by nine percentage points when they got additional communications. They said things like, “Stop convincing me; I’m already convinced.” (There’s also evidence more knowledgeable donors are less likely to donate to awareness activities; study here.)
But for low-commitment donors, the six additional communications corresponded to a 12-point increase in retention. They said things like, “I believe you do important work, but I actually don’t know you well.” The study is discussed in more detail here.
Have a neutral version for those who don’t answer. If the person hasn’t told you whether they are a cat or dog person, this shouldn’t stop the introduction process. In fact, it makes it more vital, because whatever that identity question is for your organization is probably the most important piece of information for segmentation.
You may already have this control version of communication. It’s the one you are currently sending to everyone regardless of who they are. If you don’t have the information from which to customize, you can’t be blamed for not doing so.
I would recommend using the first information ask to determine identity, and doing it again in subsequent communications to increase your chances of getting this vital information. After all, you wouldn’t ask someone for a donation once, then throw up your hands if they don’t donate. The same is true for seeking information required for getting to know your donors.
Incorporate non-donors. This is especially true online. Through your Google Grant or normal search engine work, you should be getting people coming to your site with no intent of donating. By capturing and welcoming these constituents, you can learn about them and make an ask that is going to be relevant to their reason for coming to you.
One word of warning here: the ask should come only after you have solved their problem. Let’s take the person who wants to do something about your issue. That something is, to them, to email their legislator about a piece of legislation you are working on.
A traditional fundraising approach would be to have a button on the advocacy page that encourages them to donate to your advocacy campaigns instead of taking an action alert. This is interruption marketing and is mistakenly trying to take them away from what they want to do and attempting to force them to do what you want them to do, which will too often result in their doing neither.
Any asking, whether monetary or for more information about the donor, should come after you’ve helped them accomplish what they wanted to do. Engage, don’t interrupt.
Other thoughts on how to better customize your onboarding process?
Nick
5 responses to “Killing the One-Size-Fits-All Onboard”
Behavioral Science Q & A
Integrating an individual giving appeal with other communications from a charity can have both positive and negative effects, and the outcome largely depends on how it’s executed. Advantages of Integration Brand Consistency: Maintaining a consistent appearance and messaging across all communications can reinforce the org’s brand identity and strengthen brand recognition and trust among your […]
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I’m not aware of any in-market tests specifically comparing recurring vs. gift frequency language. I suspect the answer might not be the same with all gift frequencies, nor with all people. It sounds like a great opportunity for you to test and find out what works for your audience. Based on the literature, here’s a couple […]
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Based on what we know from existing data, those renewal notices can actually be pretty effective in getting people to donate. They tap into our psychology – creating a sense of urgency, reminding us of past support, and using personalization to make the message hit home. They’re playing on our natural tendencies to feel obligated […]
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Interesting question. I had a quick look at the testing done on this topic. On the positive side, in all cases, over half of donors decide to cover the fee. In some cases, it goes as high as 65%. Not a negligible percentage at all. Here’s another test from iRaiser showing consistent results (see point […]
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There’s just one thing to consider when designing a supporter journey: the supporter. More specifically, you need to take into account: Who the supporter is i.e. their identity, which is the reason they support this cause, and their personality, which describes the way they “see” and process the world. These will determine the kind of […]
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I’m not an expert in this but a quick search surfaced this article on the effect of tax reforms on 2019’s charitable giving. The researchers didn’t find a reduction. Actually, they observed an “increase in charitable contributions in 2019, even with the lower tax rates and the dramatically smaller number of taxpayers who itemize their […]
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This is fabulous information, and so fascinating. It all makes total sense. Yet I can’t help worrying about the small nonprofit that is barely getting out their appeals and thank you letters. Then they’re being told to add a sequence of donor-centered communications to build relationships and stop the churn and burn. And now they’re being told to to all this specific listening; then tailor their approaches to different donor segments accordingly. Yes, yes, of course! But… how are they going to manage this?
Any thoughts or tips?
THANKS!
Claire,
Here is one consideration, this is not another layer, this is a redefining of “donor-centered” communication, appeals and thank you’s.
The global, generic version where we know nothing about them but change pronouns and a few other copy changes is simply not enough.
The generic thank you is not enough. Not if you are in the business of raising money, which only comes by understanding why people do what they do. The “more” model of more content and interactions is not what raises more money, it is better content and interactions.
Yes, people like giving but even that blanket statement is too simple since
if it was negative emotions that drove the donation they didn’t like it at all. The logic flaw is to extend the oversimplification to ‘people like being solicited’. This dogma is repeated over and over despite all the evidence to the contrary.
I realize the small shops may not be asking/sending enough but if the mental model is “more” (and more includes all the no-ask comms, which often get mentally processed the same way as the appeals) instead of better they’ll have missed an opportunity to grow faster and smarter.
Start small with what is being described in this post and the prior ones, get proof in-market and time will be found to continue adding more of what is being described and to systematize it to make it more efficient. Optimizing time and lowering opportunity cost are the biggest success drivers, regardless of organizational size.
But this is more than process change, the psychology needs to change since, as Peter Drucker notes, culture eats strategy for breakfast.
Consider this. What if your mindset was your organization doesn’t have permission to send anything until you’ve learned something specific (that relates to why they support or what they want). Once you have that, not only do you have permission, but you also have an obligation. That simple mental model can make a big difference and help provide the initial incentive to change.
Some tips for a small organization:
1. Start small. Yesterday, we talked about a nonprofit that had a 2x2x2 matrix of communications. A small nonprofit could start (and possibly end) by asking about, and customizing on, only their most important identity factor. That could be cats/dogs or patient/non-patient or lives nearby/doesn’t (for museums, parts, local environmental organizations, etc.) — whatever that is for them.
To Kevin’s point, if you look at it as “we don’t have permission to mail unless we learn”, start with the one most important thing to learn.
If all you can do for feedback is have an online survey to which you direct your offline donors and actively solicit for your online donors – congratulations: you are already ahead of many major nonprofits.
Similarly, sending six additional mail pieces to less committed donors would be extreme overkill for most small organizations. But you could test an introduction to the mission mail piece that follows the initial acknowledgment (and you could batch it to reduce the internal burden on staff).
2. Use existing information. Let’s say you are a museum foundation and don’t yet have access to commitment scores and are testing a mail piece following the acknowledgment like the above. I’d look at the method of acquisition to see if there are differences in results. My guess would be people who came to become donors because they came from museum attendee lists don’t need an intro to the museum, but those who come from outside lists might. That could make the hypothesis for their test instead of commitment.
Similarly, you may be able to divine cat v dog for a rescue shelter by what they adopted. Still better to ask if you can, but a step in the right direction is a good step.
3. Automate. Let’s say you are an organization that is running acknowledgment letters out of an Excel/Word mail merge – not uncommon. You want to do a cat/dog divide, but you don’t want to have two different letters. What you can do is have cells in Excel that are =IF( statements that populate a word here, a sentence there, into the mail merge that create customized letters. It will take a little work to create the template, but once you have it, it’s no harder than running the acknowledgment file traditionally.
4. Prioritize. A variant of #1. Once you find your most important differentiation point – your patient/non-patient or cat/dog – you could do worse than to focus on that for a year or more, working on system changes, testing customized messaging (especially with online, where that’s easier), and listening to your donors about the difference there. It’s often easier to think of this as “the cat/dog goal” with everything driving toward that purpose than trying to do everything at once.
Or you could focus on the weakest link in your process, e.g., “our database can’t handle this type of customization”. Having a focus on that opens new vistas for projects so effort there at first will pay off.
Hope this helps!
Kevin and Nick, thank you for illustrating some of the ways that small nonprofits can begin to kill the one-size-fits-all onboarding experience.
I love Kevin’s idea to incorporate the mindset that your organization doesn’t have “permission to send anything until you’ve learned something specific (that relates to why they support or what they want).” So simple. So powerful.
And Nick – brilliant advice, particularly on automatization and prioritizing.
To keep it super simple, in the past we’ve recommended spending an hour a week sending out something as basic as this https://goo.gl/GJUxK5 to 10 to 20 loyal donors.