Hopefully, you’re convinced.  You’ve seen you get better results when you know and prime your donors’ identities.  And you think that creating content for your donors can be a valuable way of acquiring new constituents.

But there’s a question at the back of your mind: will people tell you what you want to know?  Will they give you their information in exchange for your content?  And will they give you more info while you are there?  After all, there is more focus on privacy than ever.

There are three good answers to this.  For those of you who are reading on because I promised a story about the sex lives of Danish people, it’s the third answer if you want to skip down.

First, whether someone will give you information about themselves is an excellent predictor of whether they will retain.  The full post is here, but the TL; DR version is for DonorsChoose.org, donors who gave personal information retained at a 32-41% rate; those who didn’t retained at a 10-16% rate.

Imagine how much you would pay to have a variable that predicted retention to the point that one group would retain more than twice as well as the other.  Now stop imagining: this is it.  And it’s free.

In other words, don’t worry about people not answering.  In a way, they are answering.

Second, people will give you information in the right context.  In Factfulness by the Roslings, they report this story of talking with gynecologists working in poor communities:

“I was interested to know whether some STDs were more common in some income groups, and so I asked them to include a question about income on their forms.  They looked at me and said, ‘What? You can’t ask people about their incomes.  That is an extremely private question.’ …

‘Some years later, I met the team at the World Bank who organized the global income surveys and I asked them to include questions about sexual activity in their survey. …  Their reaction was more or less the same.  They were happy to ask people all kinds of questions about their income, the black market, and so on.  But sex?  Absolutely not.”

This makes sense.  We expect a gynecologist to ask about sex.  We expect an economist to ask about money.  When you switch those, they are out of context.

For us fundraisers, this means that questions asking about their experience with our organization, what they feel about nonprofits, and identity questions related to their reason for giving.  If we, however, were we to ask about STDs for whatever reason, we’d have to do a decent amount of explanation.

Third, even if it isn’t the right context, people will give you information if properly compensated.  Our information is like any other resource we have; like our labor or our time, we will trade it for resources.

This is a different view of privacy than is sometimes taken.  Often, we think of our privacy as a categorical no-no: people will let you in only so far, but no farther regardless of the remuneration.  But that belief just isn’t so.

In 2014, a Danish travel agency saw the statistics – birth rates were at a 27-year-low. Danes were not reproducing at a rate sufficient to replenish the population.  Think what happens when you don’t do acquisition on your donor file, but replace “acquisition” with “when mommy and daddy give each other a very special hug; a stork comes months later.”

They also saw surveys: 46% of people do more special hugging whilst on vacation.  Ten percent of Danes were conceived on vacations.

And so the “Do It for Denmark” campaign was born.  There will be no links included in this post.   Feel free to Google.  I recommend the incognito browser.)  The message was simple: more travel, more hugging, more Danes.

But wait, there’s more.  You could get a discount on your travel if you (or your travel partner) were ovulating during your trip.  And were conception to happen, you could win three years of baby products and a family-friendly vacation.

What about customer retention?  There was also a “Do It Forever for Denmark Loyalty Program.”  The more Danes you made, the bigger discounts you got.

The Danish National Statistics Bureau reported births increased 14% year-over-year in 2015.

Now think back to your efforts to get donor information: either to come on to your file as a constituent, giving up their name and address (physical or virtual), or to answer your questions, giving up some information about themselves.  Someone in your organization probably worried: will people answer that?

Your answer can be that you can get almost any information with the right incentives.  After all, for a discount on travel and an opportunity to win some diapers/nappies, Danish people gave up their ovulation schedules.  And they gave up when they got down.

Surely you can get someone to tell you whether they are a cat person or dog person?

Nick