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When Have You Acquired a Donor?
When you received their donation, right? Once you have their sweet sweet cheddar in your bank account, the person has made a donation. Thus they are a donor. They have been acquired. Q.E.D. On to the next blog post. But let’s consider this in reverse. You go to a new restaurant. It’s so horrid you […]
iBlackHole
The new M+R Benchmarking data are out; I highly recommend them. I was looking to do a summary of them for you but, as with my Agitator post today, got stuck on one chart: That’s right. The average mobile donation page conversion rate is single digits. This is why while mobile website traffic is the […]
The Terrifying Freedom of a Blank Sheet of Paper
It’s a yearly exercise – take what you did for your direct marketing program last year, replace some controls with the tests that beat them, and set up your tests and tweaks for the next year. Lather, rinse, repeat. This system has advantages. You know what each communication is capable of, and what it isn’t. […]
#MeToo Moment for Fundraisers
“I had a meeting with the chair of trustees. The meeting did not go well. As we were walking away from the meeting, he put his arm around me and squeezed me to him whilst saying “this would all be so much easier if you were just friendlier, Jane.” “He went to kiss me but […]
Segmenting Your Donor Services
Every donor is worthy of respect. After all, not everyone gives of themselves to help others. Every dollar given is a sacrifice. Even if given with not-wholly-pure motives like tax benefits or looking good to others, a dollar to charity is a dollar not spent on the hedonic or the temporary. And yet, for charities, […]
(Lack of) Speed Kills
When Amazon started, people were nervous about providing a credit card number in hope that their books would arrive. (Don’t @ me, 25-and-unders, this was a real thing.) Will my book arrive? Will it be what I intended? Is this whole Internet thing a scam? So a large part of Amazon’s infrastructure works to convince […]
The Value of “Random Amazement”
This week Nick and I deal with the critically important function of “Donor Service.” Let’s start with this fundamental question: Do you really know what good donor service looks like? I sure hope so, because as we’ve reported before, nearly 20% of all donors who drop out quit because of lousy donor service. Consequently, any […]
Segmenting “Cost To Acquire” Using Identity
A couple months ago, I argued that cost to acquire (CTA) was one of only two metrics that matter in a deep, comprehensive way. (The other one, for those who like spoilers, was donor lifetime value.) And yet, CTA can lie. If one acquisition mail package has a response rate of 1.1% and an average […]
Low Risk Approach to High Reward Discovery
Yesterday Roger outlined the failings of alleged-segmentation systems that aren’t customized to your organization. Today, I’d like to suggest a proven, low-risk approach to dramatic improvement through better segmentation. It’s hard to get away from the significant advantages that come with being a mature nonprofit brand: you can get very good at delivery, incremental efficiency, […]
Teaching your elephant to dance – Delivery and Discovery
There are significant advantages to being a mature nonprofit brand. You can get very good at delivery, incremental efficiency, and volume. Delivery is about exploiting what we know to get something close to what we expect; it is the origin of efficiency. After all, if you know next year’s acquisition package is going to look […]