Retention concerns?  Privacy concerns?  Opt-out/opt-in concerns?  Regulatory concerns?  Making content relevant concerns?

All of these concerns can be effectively addressed—and solved whether you’re in a small organization or a large one– by First Party Data and it’s little known sibling Zero Party Data.

Too good to be true?  Nope.  What we’re going to cover in this series comes as close to a “magic bullet” or Swiss- Army -knife-for-Fundraisers as our Agitator modesty and empirical data will permit.

This is the first in a series that will introduce you to the benefits and essentials of gathering,  storing and utilizing the most important information about a donor. And we’ll use case examples to illustrate how First Party Data/Zero Party Data is used along with the results.  This is not theoreticals nor the art of the possible.  The future is here, it just isn’t evenly distributed.

What is First-Party data and why is it the key to all that ails you?

Let’s start with a conceptual rubric of First Party Data contrasted with its cousins –Second and Third Party Data..  This graphic defines each and highlights the relative trade-offs.

Yes, you can buy 3^rd party data and have it appended to your whole file; instant reach.  Quality is a big problem but even if it weren’t there is zero competitive advantage because anybody can get in line behind you and buy the same thing.

Second party data is what Facebook knows about their users that they rent to you.  This gives you a way to filter and select audiences but never provides the actual data to you!  After all, these data are Facebook’s first party data and it is the reason they are worth a bazillion dollars.  They know more about their customers than anybody else.

Sounds like first party is the winner but don’t take our and Facebook’s word for it.  Consider that our commercial brethren are fast awakening to the fact that it’s the key to Lifetime Value (long-term) and lift (short-term).

From an Econsultancy report circulated among commercial marketers, The Promise of First-Party Data:

• 74% marketers say 1^st party provides strongest customers insights.
• 64%, say 1^st party provides highest increase in CLTV.
• 62%, say 1^st party provides highest lift among data sources.
• Fewer than 10% report similar benefits from third-party data.

This idea of first-party data as fundamental to fundraising and communications strategy is paradoxically both foreign and familiar for charities.

On the one hand,…the “familiar” is all the behavior data we collect and store from our supporters to use for subsequent marketing.  But, even in this first-party behavior data category we struggle mightily to collect and store the non-financial behavior data in a consistent and reliable, non-siloed way.

Witness those 6,431 codes in a variable/field that are supposedly placed in the database over the years to indicate supporter interest or ‘affinity’.  Problem is, nobody knows what the codes mean.  Chances are they’ve changed every time staff has changed, and there is no data in the field for most supporters.

On the other hand…The “foreign” part of first party data is what we’ll call “declared” or more  descriptively, “voluntarily and willingly provided “ data directly from the donor.

Consider this quote from a VP of Media Optimization at Adobe Cloud:

“Brands need to rely more on clean data from their own loyal customers, who willingly give information in exchange for something they value. Most marketers intrinsically know this, but less than half use first-party data to target ads today because implementation and execution are hard.”

Make no mistake.  The era and hype of Big Data isn’t over by any stretch. What any sensible fundraiser must acknowledge is there is an inflection point where simply aggregating more data should no longer be the principal focus. Instead, the times and generally declining retention rates demand a  move to greater quality in the marketing data being used.

On top of the fundamental need to improve donor experience and donor value there’s the issue of the public’s sharper focus and concern over privacy which provides one more reason to pay attention to the importance of  first party data.

In short, your organization can more than justify a move to paying more attention to first party data; either you see the light or will soon feel the regulatory heat of privacy. In our world of GDPR and consumer privacy and trust issues, nonprofits need to shift their data focus.  We need to,

• Create 1:1 data relationship with supporters;
• Build first-party data of self-declared and self-offered data to;
  • Mitigate legal risk
  • Manage reputational risk
• And, equally important, uncover the “why” of donor giving and involvement in your organization.

Dig In and Discover Zero-Party Data

Let’s now dig in on this declared, volunteered/ willingly provided first party data and let’s dub it zero-party data to borrow from a term coined by Forrester to distinguish  it from passively collected (often unknowingly by your supporters) behavior/interaction data.

Zero-party data versus old-school first party data is the difference between knowing that Jane Doe, SupporterID 350910, has Type I diabetes versus inferring it just because she visited your webpage containing Type I content.   (In truth, there’s likely no connection between the web behavior of this person and the main CRM where supporter 350910 lives, but indulge us).

How do we know if Jane Doe, supporter 350910, has Type I diabetes or is concerned she might or whether she is the mother of a 9-year-old girl recently diagnosed?  We ask the only source that will have this information– Jane Doe.

And why will she give us this personal information?  Because the organization doing the asking is focused on helping all three possible Jane Identities (“Has Type I”, “Concerned about Type I”, “Mother of child with type ”) and can only do so in a way that quickly and efficiently meets Jane’s goal of reducing emotional stress and anxiety by being more informed.

Are you truly serious about engagement with supporters?  How about asking them about themselves with a germane, context relevant question?  You know,  as in a conversation.

Too difficult?  Too time-consuming?  This can be done at scale if you treat getting this data as business process.  Meaning you embed the key questions into existing touchpoints (including online giving forms, sustainer acquisition forms, telemarketing scripts, emails, newsletters, direct mail reply forms, etc…).  We have many clients doing this as a census, meaning they get it from every new person they acquire.  Every single person.  If you treat this data for what it is or can be, then you’ll realize it’s  important as the bank details.

How do we know what our key questions are for our specific organization?  This is critical and simply intuiting or winging it is ill-advised.  Too often the time and effort spent on intuiting will be mistaken for progress and your zero-party data initiative will wither on the vine.

Our next post will spell out three types of zero-party data along with Do’s and Dont’s on how to measure/collect the data.

Also,  as a future reveal, our third post on this subject will showcase examples of leading-edge charities who have gotten into the zero-party data game and reaped big financial rewards.

After all, and we can’t stress this enough; the future is here, it just isn’t evenly distributed.

Roger and Kevin

P.S.  Also in the next posts we’ll highlight all the objections to doing this and offer up some counterpoints to these objections.