Does it seem a tad ironic that a donor relationship can apparently be maintained without knowing why the donor gives, what they care about, or how they prefer to participate?  The Fundraising Volume Machine has become exceptionally good at keeping in touch with people it hasn’t taken much trouble to understand.

Adults going back to school have taken a meaningful step toward a goal. Yet wanting the diploma and completing the work are different challenges. An experiment randomly assigned 895 students at Goodwill’s Excel Center in Austin to receive additional text messages from their life coaches or the usual support alone. Assignment to the messaging intervention increased graduation by 4.9 percentage points.

The messages came from coaches students already knew and could point them toward practical support. Experienced coaches customized more of their messages and had larger graduation gains. Coaches who sent more messages had no larger effect.

The study added communication and improved outcomes. The interesting question is what made that communication useful. A coach could draw on knowledge of a student’s circumstances to help them take the next step toward something they already wanted.

Fundraising has its own follow-through problem. Someone can care about your mission, intend to give again and still fail to do so. But another donor may have given with little personal connection to the cause. Sending both a reminder assumes they have the same problem. One may need help acting on a reason to give; the other may need a reason worth acting on.

“Hasn’t responded” describes an outcome. It doesn’t explain what to do next.

This is where the usual advice to “make it relevant” runs into a rather substantial inconvenience. Most charities don’t know which motivation belongs to which donor. Their records contain transactions, contact details and a surprisingly elaborate account of everything the charity has sent. The person remains a number on the file.

Getting beyond that requires insights work: measuring the identities, motivations and preferences that matter, then establishing a valid way to extend what you’ve learned to the wider file. Research with a sample can reveal meaningful differences. One route to applying those findings across the file is to link research responses with third-party data and build models that estimate those characteristics for individual records.

This is standard operating procedure at DonorVoice using third-party data to extend personality and identity insights across donor files. It’s doable, though highly atypical.  Here’s 3 examples we apply routinely,

• Personality:  to change how message is framed.
• Identity: to know which message to use
• Check writer vs. not:  to stop suppressing online giving by mailing non check writers a BRE and reply slip

The distinction matters. Swapping two words in an appeal is easy. Personalized matching requires a defensible reason to give this person a different message, frequency or way to respond.

That means the practical test starts before the creative brief. Do the research, validate the method for extending it, and randomly assign donors to the usual approach or the matched experience. Measure incremental giving and net revenue over a meaningful period. A message that wins today by pulling forward next month’s gift hasn’t necessarily improved anything.

Technology makes sending another message cheap. The work is establishing what you know about the recipient that deserves to change it. Until then, a remarkably sophisticated communications system can keep delivering the same uninformed decision, right on schedule.

Kevin