There’s a great 1977 Saturday Night Live skit with Steve Martin (transcript here; video here) called Theodoric of York, Medieval Barber.  The basic joke of the skit is that regardless of the malady his patient suffers from, Theodoric bleeds the patient (even if the condition is that s/he has been bled too much).  When questioned, he replies “Say, who’s the barber here?”

Trust me: it’s funnier that my description of it.

I was reminded of this “when all you have is a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail” quasi-scientific approach yesterday when I got an email from the normally excellent M+R about their actually excellent 2018 Benchmark Study with lessons about retention.

Then I spit out my green tea, because the lesson about retention was, allegedly, email more and everything works out:

“We can increase retention just by asking more and more and more. …  with email response rates declining (down 6% this year, to an average of 0.06%), one of the only ways left to increase email revenue is by increasing appeal volume. Year after year, we find that volume continues to climb steadily higher, and so does overall online revenue.”

That’s why I thought of Theodoric of York and his continued calls for more bleeding.  Regardless of the symptoms or disease, the answer from some will always be “more!”.  And no one will ask if the “cure” is causing the disease.

Perhaps the reason people are responding to emails less is the sheer volume of them.  So, using M+R data, let’s look at historical response rates to emails and the number of emails organizations send throughout the year.  And since M+R’s support for their volume-first model uses standard correlations, we’ll use that too.  Here are the results:

• Correlation between fundraising response rates and total number of emails you send: -.42
• Correlation between fundraising response rates and total number of fundraising emails you send: -.42
• Correlation between fundraising email click-through rates and total number of emails you send: -.42
• Correlation between fundraising email click-through rates and total number of fundraising emails you send: -.47

That’s right.  This means that an increase in emails, and fundraising emails, is correlated to a decrease in engagement with those emails – clicking on them and donating.

Let’s zoom in at the years when organizations sent the least emails (2015) and the most (2017) and pretend that your list size is 1000 donors to make the math easy:

• 2015: 48 emails, 21 of which are fundraising. 1000 donors get 21 fundraising emails and give at a .06% rate.  You get 12.6 donations.
• 2017: 69 emails, 24 of which are fundraising. 1000 donors get 24 fundraising emails and give at a .05% rate.  You get 12 donations.

Or let’s look at the first year from which they have data (2012)* to last year’s report:

• 2012: 57 emails, 20 of which are fundraising. 1000 donors get 20 fundraising emails and give at a .08% rate. You get 16 donations.
• 2018: 66 emails, 25 of which are fundraising. 1000 donors get 25 fundraising emails and give at a .06% rate. You get 15 donations.

To M+R’s credit, in the email they said “Beyond a certain level, an overly-aggressive fundraising appeal schedule might cause supporters to turn away more than it encourages them to give.”

What these data show is that that point isn’t ahead of us; it’s behind us.  We are already, on average, potentially turning away more donors with our appeal schedules than we are picking up with them.  (I say “potentially” because these are correlative, not causal, data, just like M+R’s analysis.)

So how have we been able to have consistent online revenue growth?  By growing our lists:

Note that for most these years, list growth went up faster than revenue growth.  Still think it was email volume driving the train?**

How many of you out there think that double-digit email list growth is sustainable?  For those considering putting your hand up, I should mention the US population is growing by .7% per year.  For those still considering putting your hand up, may I interest you in a multi-level marketing distributorship?

Email volume won’t save us.  Maybe M+R is right and it helps a bit with retention.  Maybe we’re right and the average nonprofit has a slightly negative impact from increased volume.  Either way, we aren’t going to be able to email, or not email, our way to prosperity.

List growth won’t save us.  Yes, you should grow your list as part of a short-, medium-, and even long-term strategy.  But know that more scale also means less qualified potential donors.  The people most likely to be your supporters are already on your email list.

What will save us?  Deeper, not broader.  Getting more out of every donor and every communication to the donor.  Understanding why a person gives and giving them the opportunity to make the impact they want to make.  Sending communications that people want to receive.

Or, as Theodoric of York says:

“Perhaps I’ve been wrong to blindly follow the medical traditions and superstitions of past centuries. Maybe we barbers should test these assumptions analytically, through experimentation and a “scientific method”. Maybe this scientific method could be extended to other fields of learning: the natural sciences, art, architecture, navigation. Perhaps I could lead the way to a new age, an age of rebirth, a Renaissance! [pause] Naaaaaahhh!”

PS. If you’d like studies of the impact of volume on programs, you can start here, part of a week of discussion of communication volume over at The Agitator.

* 2011’s report did not appear to have message volume data.

** Unfortunately, this is all revenue, not just revenue from email, as this was not reported in all the M+R reports.  While my Spidey-sense says that it would move in the same way, Spidey-sense isn’t scientifically valid.