It’s a yearly exercise – take what you did for your direct marketing program last year, replace some controls with the tests that beat them, and set up your tests and tweaks for the next year.  Lather, rinse, repeat.

This system has advantages.  You know what each communication is capable of, and what it isn’t.  The communications in most need of fixing get the most attention.  You have donors who responded to these appeals in the past and are more likely to again.  It’s efficient.

And the alternative – starting with a blank sheet of paper – is truly terrifying.  Like Nietzsche’s abyss, as you stare into the paper, the paper stares back into you.  Our minds weren’t meant to question all our assumptions simultaneously.  It’s like when you start consciously thinking about your breathing and now can’t stop.

The problem is that you can “efficient” your way into the grave.  Direct marketing is a treadmill with each new donor being slightly less likely than the one before it to give again.  Each appeal does slightly worse than it did the year before if unaltered.  Doing what has been done before will rarely get you results that fall off a cliff, but it will even more rarely give you an unexpected home run.

Over time, you will also tend to design your strategies, tactics, and messages toward the mass middle.  In using the results from the happy medium, you don’t serve both tails.  What do you do with the superfan who donates eight times a year, volunteers at your local office, and donates her birthday to you on Facebook?  She’s two standard deviations out; you will miss her if you look at the meaty part of the bell curve.  And she’s where much of your growth can happen.

The last-year-plus model also unchallengingly codifies assumptions.  If you take last year’s mail acquisition budget and add 5%, you may miss that you were acquiring donors far more efficiently online.  You won’t be investigating face-to-face or DRTV.  You may spend the same amount in each month even though you are in the news in February each year and get far better results.

So you must ask yourself “what would I do if I were starting this program from scratch today?” every so often.  Or “what would someone else do with this program?”  Because if you don’t change, someone else may get that chance.

The easiest way I’ve found to break out of previous thinking is to start with your donors.  In the day-to-day, we can get wrapped up in CTA, CTR, and CPM until we can’t C straight.  These metrics are necessary and wonderful, but they also get us thinking by communication.  You might miss that your mass market messaging may not be working for a segment of your file.

Let’s say you work in an animal welfare organization.  You have done your identity spadework, brainstorming donor identities and testing them to see which hold value.  You’ve discovered that you have a significant, but minority, religious audience.  They love animals; that’s their focus for your organization.  But you can see in your surveys and requests for feedback that they talk about their giving to you as “wanting to help all God’s creatures.”  They pray shelter animals will be adopted.  Some may even talk about animal abusers as being worse than the corrupted Antediluvians (yes, I’ve seen this).

You would not and should not change all your messaging for this group.  This is still a significant insight.  It opens new segmented messaging, new list strategies (if you match the message to the donor), and potentially new channels.  It also requires new information, surveys, and tactics to get this differentiation point (more than just demographics – there are plenty of religious people who support animal charities that don’t see the former impacting the latter).

All this is missed if you try to do last-year-plus.  And it’s not just these broad strategic issues you may gloss over.  You’ll also miss the steps along the donor journey.  I’ve seen cases where donors were getting twice as many mail pieces as intended just because the acquisition hand didn’t know what the appeal hand was doing.  Lapsed donors thus got twice the appeals precisely when they had less than half the chance of responding (and being deluged didn’t help).

Does this mean you won’t end up doing some of the same things you did before?  Absolutely not.  It may be that all your donors love that tentpole member card appeal you do at the beginning of January.  But there is value in asking the question, looking at your program with a donor’s eyes.

Nick