A discussion of incentives in direct marketing  wouldn’t be complete without talking about that Agitator bugaboo of communication volume.

We’ve pointed out how volume has been poorly tested by those who advocate sending more and more …how organizations have found lower volume works better, and that donors hate it (twice).

And… twice we emphasized that  volume isn’t just the wrong answer; it’s the wrong question.

What more could we possibly have to say about the topic?   Well, there’s still the question of incentives and how they relate to volume that demands attention.

Let’s start with the the famous criminology question cui bono, Latin for “who benefits?”.  The concept that the person most likely to have committed a crime is the one who benefits from it.

I once had a vendor who accidentally put active donor names into a lapsed telemarketing program.  They got a payment for every call that was made.  When I saw the mistake and realized the people who made the mistake got paid for making the mistake, I suddenly put the appropriate scare quotes around “accidentally” and “mistake.”  I asked “cui bono?”.

It’s not to say it wasn’t unintentional.  I just have a rule about conspiracies: if the outcome of something is the same as it would have been had there been a conspiracy, then it really doesn’t matter if there was a conspiracy or not.

How many different mail pieces should you send this year?  Ask the direct mail vendor with whom you contract on a per piece basis.  Cui bono?  The answer will be like when they asked union leader Samuel Gompers what labor wants.  His answer?  “More.”

What should your ideal mix be of mail versus email versus phone be?  I’m sure it’s coincidence that your mail vendor wants more mail, your email vendor wants more email, and your telemarketer wants more calling.  Cui bono?

And that’s how you get to a schedule of overlapping communications that may or may not be related or coordinated, with little knowledge of the donor beyond a wallet and an address.

Heck, if you use DonorVoice’s feedback tool, we benefit from it.  Hence, I benefit from my blog post a couple weeks ago, where I talked about how people who don’t give feedback are less important to your organization.

In fact, I said that lack of survey-answering is something that should be included in your retention models, as these are donors less likely to retain.  In short, you should be soliciting donor feedback and using the DonorVoice Donor Feedback Platform™.  Cui bono?  I do.  So take this great advice with a tiny grain of salt.

Of course, to make my point I linked to a peer-reviewed study that I didn’t pay for.   So hopefully I maintain my credibility as a source.  Just because someone benefits doesn’t make them automatically wrong.  But it does mean extra skepticism is called for.

And so it goes with volume.  If those who benefit from volume are driving, you will end up in Volume Town whether you wanted to go there or not.

One more reason you should do the driving, not them.

Nick