If you fundraise with merchandise – a vest for example – you have lots of sizes and you let the donor pick the size.  You get lots of complaints about sizing after the fact.

The size matters and one size definitely doesn’t fit all.  Why does the fundraising that markets the premium fly in the face of this with a one size fits all approach?

Is everyone’s reason for wanting the premium and supporting your cause the same?  Are all people the same on the inside even though your array of vest sizes acknowledges the outside sizes differ?

But how to segment your donors?  This is the right question to ask and two inter-related problems often arise; infinity feed by randomness.  If we allow for random ways to slice and dice there are infinite possibilities, making it impossible to choose correctly.  And so we fall back to what’s easy – assuming everyone is the same on the inside.

We get rid of random by focusing on the ways we differ on the inside that cause our behavior.  Our personalities are a great example.  It’s inside stuff and we don’t all have the same one.

Fortunately, Personality can be reduced down to a Big Five and from there, we pick and choose based on hypotheses about brand fit.   Here’s an example.

This is for an outdoor/sports oriented cause.  They use premiums, a vest in this example, and here is the control (which we’ve anonymized but you get the gist).

We decided to tailor our test versions for those prospects high in Openness and separately, those high in Extraversion.

If your testing doesn’t have (at least) two versions against the one-size fits all control then you aren’t being donor-centric.  You’re rearranging deck chairs.

We didn’t pick these two (from the Big 5) randomly.  People high in Openness are very into the beauty and wonder of nature and the outdoors and those high in Extraversion are social and among other things, more likely to do group or team activities.

• The ad copy for the Openness people read “support our team and share the beauty of [sport] with this official vest”
• Ad copy for the Extraversion people read “Join the party and cheer for our team with this official vest”

The colored parts were the only difference, everything else in the ad was identical.

But, behind the scenes the targeting was very different for Openness versus Extraverted.  These people are wired differently, their interests are different and therefore, where we expect to find them in the digital world is also different.

Results?

Those who give to the tailored ads get tagged in the CRM as being Openness or Extraversion so the tailoring can continue.  These are donor-centric segments – defined by who they are on the inside in a way that materially impacts their behavior and dictates how we message them.

The value of this isn’t the winners, though that’s nice.  The value is the non-randomness of the approach.  It’s grounded in really well established theory and evidence on why people do what they do that makes them different on the inside.

We solve our infinity problem and have a path forward that is well lit by our knowledge; not of what won or lost but why.

It’s vest size fundraising.

Kevin