Last month, we talked about the advocate donor identity: how to tell if you have one, the science behind online activism, and how to get and convert advocates.

Let’s assume you’ve gone through those, determined you have an advocate identity, and found it to be valuable (not all advocates are and advocacy is not a necessary condition of a quality donor).

But you, like many others, are having challenges scaling advocate acquisition.  You are doing content marketing, highlighting news stories, working your social networks, and blogging about your efforts.  And it’s doing well, but you think it can do more.

You are certainly thinking the right way.  It has historically been easier to get someone who gives to charitable causes to care about an additional cause than it has been to get someone who cares about your cause (but makes no charitable donations) to give.

This has lead to a slow-moving tragedy of the commons where we are all fishing from similar donor pools.  It’s incumbent upon us not just to preach to the converted, but to introduce the life-changing power of philanthropy to the heathen.

So, to learn more about how to scale an advocacy acquisition program, I talked to Randy Paynter, CEO of Care2.  I had given paid acquisition short shrift in my previous discussion of acquiring advocates because I wanted to get to organic (read: free and free-ish) means of getting advocates.

Unfortunately, this leads to scalability issues.  As he and I discussed, and we’ve discussed here:

• Facebook organic reach is going to zero (and is close enough for most purposes)
• Facebook advertising can be valuable, but may not scale
• Google Grants have been severely curtailed (I don’t know about you, but to get to 5% CTR on my accounts, I had to switch from scalpel to cleaver)

And getting traffic from Facebook and Google is an area that requires expertise.  As Randy points out, that’s something nonprofits must pay a pretty penny for, as you are competing against everyone in the Facebook feed and Google search engine.  They are paying for that expertise, so you either must also pay for it or hope that you can find an expert in online advertising that is also very poor at reading her paycheck.

So organic traffic is low and nonorganic traffic can get expensive.  At the very least, you can’t guarantee a cost-per-lead or per-donor.

The Care2 model is (approximately) $1.50 per lead – the cost varies based on the level of targeting and volume.  For this, they promise all new leads, all workable email address, and both postal and email addresses.

Individuals, not organizations, create most petitions on their site. When people take these actions, they can opt in to hear about other petitions like yours. Once someone has taken your action, they can opt in to hear more from your organization. That person becomes a lead for further cultivation.The leads come from some form of advocacy that a person takes online through Care2, whether a petition or pledge.

I’m not here to advertise for this particular service (I try not to advertise  even for the company that’s paying me and Care2 isn’t paying me) but think it may be an option for some organizations.  Perusing their case studies, it appears that the conversion rate from advocate to donor is between 2% and 5% (stripping off outliers).  If that’s the case, at $1.50 per lead, you’d need to get $30 to $75 per lead in donations to make it worthwhile – you can best judge whether that’s something you can accomplish based on your average gift and engagement.

But I did want to share some of the tips that Randy offered than can make campaigns more successful:

• The organizations that do the best have some of the fastest responses to an acquired lead.  In going through the case studies, one from World Animal Protection stuck out – they got 4.7% and 6.9% conversion from two telemarketing campaigns following up on leads.  While more expensive than email or mail, this type of outreach is immediate and thus likely had a significant impact.
• The more related to the initial outreach is to the petition, the better.  If you sign a wolf hunting petition, a monetary ask to help stop wolf hunting fits very closely to your expressed preferences and goal.
• Be yourself. The greater emotional connection to the organization, the better.  Some organizations who don’t do a lot of advocacy activities start with advocacy petitions that aren’t hyperpartisan (e.g., sign a petition for clean water).  This attracts the types of leads that are likely to fit with the organization long-term.  Conversely, if you have a strong advocacy bent, lean into it.  The most successful campaign I saw on the site was the Bernie Sanders campaign (16% conversation rate! Remember what I said about dropping outliers?).  Needless to say, their petitions didn’t pull punches; the leads they acquired were ready for the campaign ask that followed.
• Mobile friendly. You are mobile friendly, right?
• A customized donor journey. To quote myself:

“Let’s say you have all of the above humming along, but you run the numbers and your advocates are only worth 90 cents in lifetime value.  Your advocacy donors just aren’t converting.

Often, this is because the communication stream for your advocates looks exactly like your communication stream for everyone else.  The next logical action for someone who takes an advocacy petition online is not mailing in a check to support your annual fund, taking a call from a telemarketer who doesn’t know anything about the constituent, or joining your walk coming up in 42 short days.

And yet that is frequently the next action many organizations request.  It’s as though their goal is to expose people to as many different aspects their organization as possible.

They might as well put up a banner proclaiming:

This organization doesn’t know who you are
or what you care about,
but we do want your money.

A singularly unappealing message.”

These are all good tips for any campaign, I’d say.  Thanks to Randy Paynter spending time with us to share what is working for nonprofits with them.  I hope that if you decide to use the service that it works for you!

What are your experiences with advocacy-based lead generation?

Nick