Our calendar is 12-months and most of civilization has been using since 1582.  These 12 months have a natural, logical basis tied to lunar cycles but having lunar cycles dictate the supporter ‘journey’ for charities starts to quickly lose both logic and reason.

And yet, how many charities start with a blank calendar (or more likely, last year’s calendar/journey) and begin the business of filling it up?

Something dropped in for every month, probably multiple somethings.

It’s an internally driven approach to journey planning that inevitably starts with 12 months of calendar arrayed across the top of the Excel sheet or the sticky note version on a white board equivalent.   The column months arrayed across top are complemented by the even more insular rows of supporter groupings or donor segments – e.g., monthly, one-off cash, midlevel – that tell us absolutely nothing about these people including their cadence preference.

The goal then becomes to fill it up. With stuff. Outbound stuff we want to send, promote or ask for. This is what we call the “Gregorian Supporter Journey” with calendar month and the internally-assigned donor segment jargon as the basic organizing principle.

Why Do We Do This To Oursleves?.

There are a variety of behavioral science principles that point out our irrational willingness to do more of a given task if it is framed as part of a set. For example, if a ‘set’ is a pie chart with 4 slices versus a pie with 6 slices we will do more of the task in the 6 slice context. Thus, if our donor journey calendar had 47 months we’d feel compelled to fill it up, to “complete” it.

So Why Is This a Problem? And What’s a Solution?

The problem is that continuous, always-on fundraising is not optimum. Not even close. Who says?  The commercial sector and a load of academic analysis, including within the charitable sector.

What does marketing/fundraising/promotion get us?

The pros? Donations are the first and obvious answer, the one metric we measure really well and obsess over. But the group who donates is always the tiny minority relative to the total group exposed. What are the pros there? Staying in their consciousness, brand building. This is very real, as it (can) increase the likelihood of future giving among a much larger group.

Great, “continuous” sounds like a winner, perpetually getting donations and staying in customers’ and donors’ consciousness.

The cons? All advertising, marketing and promotion has massive diminishing returns on donations. In short, there is a finite amount to be raised from Donor A, in a given time period, and all the comms in the world won’t change this. If this were the only downside then continuous advertising is merely inefficient but not counterproductive.

Alas, this ain’t the case. The bigger, more insidious problem is the irritation effect that comes from continuous communication. It affects not only today’s donor but also tomorrow’s donor. It causes attrition. This is as well documented and agreed upon and proven in academia as it is unknown or unaccepted by damn near all the large charities around the globe.

We cite the large charities here to distinguish from the smaller groups that likely do have some “white space” on their fundraising/marketing/comms calendar, though that decision was probably driven by internal preference or opinion and is still sub-optimum in the execution.  And while we won’t claim to have looked at every large charity’s marketing/fundraising/comms calendar we’d wager heavily in Vegas that none of them take an entire month off, much less two or three…

Contrast this with the commercial sector where much of the advertising is not continuous but instead operates on what is referred to as a “pulsing schedule”.  “Pulsing” is just what it sounds like. On and off. Repeat. Heavy “on” period of communications to get sales/donations and build brand/stay in their consciousness followed by an off-period to avoid the negatives of irritation and annoyance.

This is not just theory. It is empirically proven, over and over and over.  And not just in the commercial advertising sector.

There was a large study done looking at 5 Dutch charities over 22 consecutive fiscal quarters or just over five years.  In the study researchers knew how much money was spent on fundraising/marketing/comms and the resulting number, amount and timing of donations.

The researchers did modeling to look at the distribution of response (and by extension, probability of response) over the 22 quarters.  This is the squiggly red line in the chart below that shows a very distinct up and down pattern – peaks are high likelihood of giving and the troughs are low likelihood.  Because all of these charities were continuously spending across every month that activity is (loosely) reflected with the dotted purple line.

What is obvious is that response does not follow the spend.  What should be equally obvious is that each charity could get a far greater return by matching spend to outcome by shifting to a pulsing approach.

So what is optimum? From this study it was quarterly pulsing – one quarter on, one quarter off, then repeat.

Here at the Agitator can almost physically feel the response by many who read that last sentence.

• A quarter with zero pushing out of stuff? Are you insane?
• We only raise money when we ask.
• Our donors love our content, there are very few who get irritated and for those who call to complain, we will adjust their volume.
• We did a test once where we sent fewer asks to a test group and we raised less money.
• If we do this and other charities don’t they’ll get all the money in our off period.
• This was a Dutch study, surely it doesn’t match my situation in my country.

We could address each of these in turn and perhaps will though folks that build up this immediate line of defense are most likely to only double-down on their viewpoint in the face of counterfactuals (another oddity of human behavior).

This is for those folks who are looking for different answers to the same questions and open to the notion that 12 months full of stuff is random and perhaps influenced by our desire to complete whatever ‘set’ we create.

Any Agitator readers care to share your experience with creating donor journeys and/or pulsing?

Kevin