Poor Research & Undocumented Best Practices — Barriers To Growth, Part 6
You’d think a $300 billion industry like ours would have empirically based standards and practices readily available and accessible to all.
After all, most sectors — ranging from apple growers to doctors and hospitals, and even zoos — have them. Fundraising doesn’t.
What we do have is mass of accumulated tribal wisdom, often conflicting, seldom empirically based. The result, as economists Gneezy and List note in their book, The Why Axis — the “the vibrant…important charity sector is driven by anecdote, not science.”
What an enormous waste of time and money. What an impediment to growth.
In the data driven world of direct response you’d think there would at least be a set of Data Standards such as exist in most other sectors. Standards that set the terms for format, definition, structuring, tagging, transcription, manipulation, use and management of data. Not fundraising.
The absence of a common Data Standard for fundraising is why online and offline systems are seldom able to communicate. Why organizations become locked into one system or another, often gouged by the vendor, but afraid to change because of the pain and terror of conversion from one system to another.
The same goes for so called ‘Best Practices’. With the exception of Blackbaud’s Index of Charitable Fundraising, with its benchmarking of key metrics from thousands of nonprofits, and the Showcase of Fundraising Innovation and Imagination with its 300+ examples of the best fundraising campaigns, there’s nothing out there.
Of course there are those who excuse or justify the status quo. “Yes, but fundraising is an art, not a science.” Such utter nonsense.
Medicine is both an art and a science. And physicians, nurses and hospitals have Standards of Care specifying appropriate treatment based on scientific evidence and the collaborative sharing of information between medical professionals involved in the treatment of a given condition. A patient in California with a respiratory infection is likely to get the same course of antibiotic treatment as the patient in London with the same condition.
Chuck Longfield, Blackbaud’s Chief Scientist, has long preached the need for more research and documentation of best practices in our sector. A process by which the ‘best practices’ for procedures most organizations must perform — collection of monthly pledges, thank yous and acknowledgements, for example — are peer reviewed, documented and then made available to the sector.
At the same time, we need to find better ways to make the reams of quality academic research (sometimes far too dense) in the behavioral and neuro sciences more accessible and useful to fundraising practitioners.
Such efforts would represent a monumental and expensive undertaking. But far less expensive than the endless waste that now occurs in our sector, where fundamental operational decisions — and costly mistakes — are based mostly on anecdotes and tribal wisdom.
Back in October 2011, Adrian Salmon, a UK fundraiser, responding to the announcement of The Agitator’s Flat Earth Fundraising series summed up the need quite well:
“Roger and Tom, look forward to seeing the fantastic new things people are doing, BUT I also want to see great examples of tried and true fundraising discipline being applied!
“Who keeps a rigorous record of all their tests nowadays? And knows what to test, and how to act on the results?
“Who really celebrates and inspires their telephone or face to face fundraising teams, whether in-house or agency — two of the most powerful tools any mass-market fundraiser has access to?
“Who’s using new media most effectively to capture those all-important phone numbers where real people can actually be reached, and where you can have a real dialogue with them?
“Who knows their cost per donor for acquisition and retention across all of their channels and demographics?
“Who’s really ‘developing’ their donors?
“So often a lot of what passes as ‘innovation’ seems to me to be a flight from the bits of fundraising that we think are beneath us – “Now that I’ve got this great new technique, I can stop bothering my supporters with those awful phone calls”, etc, etc.
“We mustn’t encourage that any further, surely….”
Adrian’s absolutely correct. If our sector is going to grow to meet the challenges of the future, we must find a way to more rigorously examine and identify ‘best practices’ and make this knowledge accessible to all.
Let’s start the ball rolling. What are your thoughts please?
Roger
7 responses to “Poor Research & Undocumented Best Practices — Barriers To Growth, Part 6”
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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Great post.Funny, Pamela Grow and I were just talking about this yesterday. In terms of what other organizations are doing and where to find the best research out there.
There are some test results through:
the Direct Marketing Fundraiser’s Association Package of the Year,
Fundraising Success Awards,
Maxi Awards at the Bridge Conference,
Inside Direct Mail and
Specific industry conferences, and some wonderful e-newsletters and magazines, especially in the online arena (like M+R Strategic and Mandy O’Neil’s Connected Nonprofits) and the various consultants (all of which you see to the right of this post).
Webinars (free and paid) are terrific best practice sessions.
But it’s definitely not all collected in one spot. Also, it’s very much dependent upon the agencies who want the recognition to submit it (and it sometimes even costs money to submit) so that’s not a lot of help. Most smaller nonprofits and consultants don’t have the time or funds to share their great successes with the world.
I think the bigger question here is: why is it that so many nonprofits are not willing to even review the best practices that ARE out there, how little of it there is. Many are chasing after the next big new shiny object rather than reviewing past results and building from there.
Maybe the FIRST BEST PRACTICE should be: look at proven results and build from there… And you Agitator are doing a fabulous job giving us those proven results! Thank you and keep up the great work!
cheers, Erica
Really? Please can someone tell me what the definition of BEST PRACTICE is and who says what’s best pract and what’s not. Seems to me everyone loves to talk about this illusive “BP” thing but no one has actually SHOWN me what it is…..
Amen. Anecdotes are fine, but scientific research is needed to back it up if the sector as a whole wants to be more effective and efficient.
Here’s a theory as to why this research/aggregation/analysis/dissemination of BP isn’t happening:
REASON #1
We answer to short-sighted volunteer boards/leaders.
The Board of Directors of our hospital foundation are highly intelligent, full of heart and cause driven (a little bit resume driven as well, but I’d say that’s par for the course) – as are the high-powered individuals on our $17 million capital equipment campaign cabinet.
But their terms are limited; they have short-term goals (set by them and also set or recommended by us, the management); they want recognition in front of their peers and our community (often event driven); they want to engage with something tangible and easy to understand; they want to feel good and enjoy their volunteer experience.
They don’t have the time or interest in the technical research and analysis of fundraising technique (which to some degree, they all feel like they are already the experts anyway), and I don’t blame them. But it means that investing in an activity or a position that consumes resources to improve future, long-term improvements in technique garners little to no interest or budget.
REASON #2
Charities are still expected to raise each and every dollar while spending few to zero pennies to do it.
I’m sure everyone reading this blog is familiar with Dan Pallotta’s outspoken position on how artificially crippling this attitude is to our sector. But as well articulated as Dan’s arguments are, we still have a looong way to go. I’ve seen him address a huge room full of professional fundraisers and still get heckled! Boggles my mind…
Due to this reason, investment in testing, research and investigating better methods won’t happen because we can’t be seen to be spending donor dollars on non-mission objectives (Dan’s great arguments not withstanding). Unfortunately, this is still one of those areas where “perception is everything.” We can and should continue to work to change that perception of our sector, but that’s the long game. And it’s a Catch 22 too, isn’t it…?
Yes this is an issue that keeps coming up. Again I have been asked to show evidence that longer letters work better in fundraising by a new, small organisation with an uninformed and sceptical board. Although I have years of experience and testing in this area, there are few publicly available test results available to quote.
So the answer is almost always to waste money a small organisation like this doesn’t have in order to persuade the board that we are using best practice.
That’s not to say that long letters are always better. There are clearly cases where they are not necessary, for example in a major emergency that is already extensively covered in the media.
However if anyone has something available that will enable me to demonstrate this principle to this organisation without me spending hours of valuable time finding evidence, I would be grateful.
[…] Keeping pace with GDP is okay, but other portions of the private sector seem to be able to make the investments to enhance productivity and output enough to allow their growth to surge ahead of GDP growth. I think it is food for thought and is summarized quite well by my friend Roger Craver in this recent post. […]
It would be fabulous if all the large nonprofits who test just about everything would share some of their test data. Perhaps a common site devoted to what works?