“As a medical professional”…

That was simple, no?  They certainly aren’t the types of words you would usually use to increase click-through, response, and conversion rates.

And, alas, they may not work for you.  Their power lies in the fact that they are a simple priming of a simple, but relevant, donor identity.

The test was with Make-a-Wish.  It seemed logical that medical professionals who worked with children in a position to have wishes granted may have a different reason for giving than a layperson.  We put up three Facebook ads with identical images and calls-to-action, but with different descriptions:

No identity: When you donate and help grant a wish, you help her fight her illness.

Soft identity: You know the heartache of a child diagnosed with a critical illness.  When you donate and help grant a wish, you help her fight her illness.

Hard identity: As a medical professional, you know the heartache of a child diagnosed with a critical illness.  When you donate and help grant a wish, you help her fight her illness.

As I said, simple: the phrase “as a medical professional” plus a reason a medical professional might have for giving that’s a bit different from the average person.

We advertised this to Facebook groups IDing as:

• Emergency medicine physician
• Emergency room nurse
• Oncology RN
• Pediatric nurse practitioner
• Pediatric nursing
• Pediatrics
• Registered nurse

The heavy identity had 74 clicks on 4300 impressions, for a click-through rate of 1.72%.  The soft and no identity conditions had 59 clicks on 4824 impressions, for a click-through rate of 1.22%.  A 42% increase.

(Why did the heavy identity have almost as many impressions as the other two conditions combined?  The Facebook algorithm was already optimizing for click-through rate and refused to show the soft and no identity ads as often.  As a result, we were also able to get the hard identity clicks cheaper than the soft and no identity clicks.)

Will “as a medical professional” work for you?  Maybe; maybe not.  If you are with Doctors without Borders, almost certainly.  If Sierra Club, probably not.

Likewise, Make-a-Wish doesn’t have to create different ads for every occupation from abacus repairperson to zoologist.  These other occupations don’t prime a reason for giving the way “medical professional” does.

Once you have an identity you know you want to prime and target, the lift we’ve seen here is the bare minimum.  After all, there is no blunter or more simplistic way of priming medical professionals than we did in this test.  Instead, you can go deeper into this audience, looking for additional ways to target it and deeper messaging specifically for them.

The trick, you may say, is medical professionals are going to be a small portion of most donor files.  How do you get scalability with an identity?

So tomorrow, we’ll look at an example where identities so dominate giving that they demand to be the primary mode of segmentation.

Nick