Join us for Should I sustain or should I go now

Last time we saw how to improve the quality of our sign-ups. So, now we have nothing but quality supporters walking through the door, they’ll all stick around, right?

If only it were that easy with every part of your retention challenge living on the acquisition side of the fence.

The big question is “what happens next?” The answer depends on what you know about the people who just arrived. And that depends on whether what you know about them is descriptive or predictive.

Descriptive data would be stuff like age, gender, geography, gift amount, campaign code, and so on. All crucial. But all ‘what’ data; what they are, what they did, and so on. None of this ‘what’ data can answer the most crucial question of all, ‘why?’

One common denominator of all new signs ups is they all said yes. The other is we invariably have no idea why they did (beyond the fact we asked them to). Which makes it a little tricky when planning their journey.

One option is hope they all said yes for exactly the same reason and hope we know what that reason is. A better option would be to replace ‘hope’ with ‘know.’ But to do that you need to know what you need to know.

Fortunately, all the wonky research has been done and is fully automated in the platform. So, let’s take a sneak peek ahead of our fuller explanation in our webinar on Oct 26^th.

Where does the journey start? Well, at the risk of telling you water is wet, it starts at the beginning. The first moment of interaction is the first moment of the journey. And the quality of that interaction determines if the journey is going to be a long or short one.

So, your first measure is of how good a job we just did meeting a new supporter’s basic psychological needs. Let’s take a look.

This dashboard view shows how we’ve done meeting basic psychological needs of

• Autonomy (I felt free to make my choice),
• Relatedness (I feel I’m part of something), and
• Competence (I feel I’m making a difference).

We see the first has dropped a little, the second increased a little and the third has remained the same. We can dig deeper and look at this same data broken out by channel, campaign, teams, agencies, markets, individual fundraisers to see our leaders and laggards and learn what the former does to improve the latter and create our rising tide.

But there’s more to know about our supporters than their satisfaction.  We’ll want to know the strength of their relationship to the brand (Commitment) and the part of self that connects with our cause (Identity). These, plus many other data points, go into the model predicting who’ll stay or go.

We use Commitment to determine Cadence – more stewardship comms to Lower Commitment people that need it, fewer to High Commitment folks so we aren’t trying to oversell what’s already sold.

Identity is another layer to get us beyond one-size-fits-nobody to a more tailored world with message matching who they are.  The simple example is dog message to dog people and cat to cat for the animal welfare charity.  And we know cat/dog because we ask and we ask because people like sharing relevant details about themselves that we can play back in tailored journeys.

If your CRM or “tech-stack” has lots of barriers to pulling this off we can deliver the entire journey without you missing any critical data or reporting.

To learn (far) more, join us for Should I Sustain or should I go now?

Charlie