‘If I’d asked my customers what they wanted they’d have said a faster horse.’ widely attributed to Henry Ford

In our recent Supporter Journey White Paper, we talked about common insight traps that many fundraisers fall into when planning supporter journeys.

We’ve all been seduced by the siren calls of personas, demographic profiling and typing tools. They are intuitively appealing and feel good to use. Yet basing your fundraising strategy on them can lead you on to the rocks.

We’re not saying completely abandon them (well we sort of are, but know that you’ll probably ignore us since you already spent the money), but we want to make sure you’re aware of the pitfalls of simple solutions and typing.

Of course, it might be useful to have a picture and profile of some of your supporters in your office. It can remind you of your audience and stop you thinking ‘well, I don’t like it’, but is it worth paying tens of thousands of pounds for this? We’re skeptical.

So why do we feel so strongly about this?

Our own experiences (and mistakes) show that it is very hard to put many of these insights into practice. Often age or stereotypes are used to group people together.

BUT…As Professor Mark Ritson said in this article that is well worth a read:

“If your segment is populated by different people who want different things, it is not a segment. It’s a joke and so are your skills as a marketer.”

In short,  there’s simply no way you can effectively change your messaging based on that type of demographic segmentation, which is the point of doing segmentation in the first place.

AND…the chaos within demographic clusters isn’t solved by getting ever more granular. You could make your head hurt by trying to figure out the difference among “Financially comfortable families,” “Prosperous suburban families,” and “Affluent professionals” (three real segments from ACORN groups).

The truth is that even if I’m the same age, sex, gender, sexual orientation, etc., as my neighbour, if I’m caring for a loved one with Alzheimer’s and he isn’t, the way we react to an Alzheimer’s charity will be entirely different.

So what’s the alternative? We firmly believe that true supporter-centric fundraising can only be delivered by understanding the underlying ‘why’ and core reason for someone giving to your cause – a supporter’s identity.

Here’s three reasons why we believe identity trumps these other approaches:

• Identity is tied to a reason the donor gives to you
• Identity allows for specific messaging
• Identity can be asked and identifies a core reason for giving

If you’re in the mood for white papers, then you can also download our paper on identity, where our fab behavioural scientist Dr Kiki Koutmeridou shares more on this crucial subject.

Craig