Once upon a time, YouTube had what they called the Gangnam Style problem.  They recommended your next video largely based on the popularity of videos, so engineers joked that if you just left your computer on YouTube long enough, it would play Gangnam Style eventually.  (This also dates the problem nicely to 2012-2013.)

YouTube retooled the algorithm to be more about the type of videos you personally watch, causing more people to spend more (monetizable) time on the site.  They learned first, then acted.  And their recommendation engine works swimmingly now.*

We want people to have a similar experience when engaging with our nonprofits, flowing from searching to learning to acting to donating to posting to getting warm glow to repeating.  We want our next metaphorical video to be the most natural transition from what you did to what you will do next.

Which is why we gotta talk.  Our orders are messed up, y’all.

What happens after the typical online donation?  We thank the person.  Yay!  And we select as the next activity: share about your donation on social media.  Boooooo.

Why boooooo?  Let me count the ways.  The hit rate on getting another donation is amazingly small. One study pegged it at, and I am not exaggerating, .0005%.  Also, that same study found broadcasting a donation makes someone less likely to fulfill a pledge (and thus less likely to donate again).  So it probably has negative return.

But leaving aside that it’s a bad idea, it’s also out of order.  What should you do first: ask someone to share their experience or find out if they had a good experience?  Or, put another way, if someone nearly threw their computer out the window because of something on your donation form, do you want them to share this experience with their friends?

I’d argue you want people to share their good experience with their friends and their bad experience with you so you can fix it before they share with their friends.  Learn first, then act.

Similarly, last week, I got multiple emails from nonprofits I support about Amazon Prime Day, asking me to order through Amazon so they might benefit through the Amazon Smile program, giving them .5% of my purchase price.

Before I get into the order argument here, let’s think about the goal of such an email.  Why doesn’t Amazon have a program where they refer donors to you and you pay them .5% of the donation amount?  Because they figured out the good end of this particular economic transaction and are offering you the other (or “bad”) end.

Amazon Smile is fine for passive income, but in terms of promoting it?  I’m usually the last person to recommend adding another ask to your series, but if you got one $20 donation from an email, it would be worth as much as $4000 in Amazon smile purchases.  Which do you think is easier to get: $20 donation or $4000 in purchases?

So the mere existence of such an email mystifies and confounds me like seeing David running ads for Goliath.

For the purposes of this discussion, though, let’s focus on the fact that I got multiple of these emails.  When you sign up for Amazon Smile, you designate a charity to receive your ha’penny on the dollar.  A charity.  Singular.

These charities were encouraging me to buy on Amazon to benefit them without knowing whether my purchases would actually benefit them.  So all but one of these organizations weren’t even encouraging me to donate to them with their emails.  (Actually, it was all of them; my Amazon Smile organization didn’t send me such an email.)

If you wanted to send an Amazon Smile email – and you should not, but if you did – you would first want to know whether you were their favorite charity.  Learn first, then act. 

This is not an exclusively online phenomenon.  You will sometimes hear the mantra: Ask.  Thank.  Report.  Repeat.  And as we’ve said, it’s good advice as far as it goes.

But if you aren’t learning, you aren’t growing.  If you go after the same person with the same pitch and deliver them the same value every time, your best case scenario is to get the same gift.  To grow and upgrade and get that mid/major/monthly/legacy donor you seek, you must upgrade your knowledge of the donor.  You must learn why they give and give more of that to them.  You must fit yourself into the place they have for you in their heart.  What order does that happen in?

Learn first, then act.

Nick

* This works swimmingly unless you count that if you start watching YouTube videos with a little bit of hate in them, you get videos with progressively more hate in them, until you become a giant hate monster.  If your goal is to sell more ads, this isn’t a negative; if your goal is anything else, it is a negative.