Yesterday, writing about the donor acquisition phase of the ‘donor journey’, I suggested that the very first step to understanding the path your donor prospect was following was to, well, know your current donor. The assumption of course is that you’re seeking clones of that donor.

There are several ways you can know your donor. For example, when you examine your current donor file, you’ll have heaps of transactional data. You might have source and channel information. You might have scored donors for giving potential.

That’s all extremely valuable and will guide marketing decisions you make along the donor journey, but it doesn’t put you — and more importantly, your creative team — inside the heads and hearts of your donor prospects.

The key question is: Who is this person? How might they be thinking about your cause, your organization? What is the broader worldview they might have that could abet your effort to enlist them?

Hopefully you will have engaged your actual donors enough to have a sense of this. And maybe you will have done some formal research on your donors’ relevant attitudes.

And maybe this has given you and your creative/message team an accurate perception of the person to whom you seek to appeal.

How important is that?

Here’s a great article — Do You Have A Story To Tell? Baby Boomers Want To Hear It — by Jim Gilmartin, writing in Engage:Boomers.

In this piece, Jim is not simply repeating the usual ‘everybody loves a story’. He’s making a deeper point about how Boomers, in particular, process communications aimed at them. And if you understand — having taken the trouble to know your donors — that they are overwhelmingly Boomers, you might want to heed his insights into what’s going on inside them.

Jim begins with a warning: “A huge cognitive gap exists between a 30-year-old copywriter and a 65-year-old consumer. The result is that very little advertising aimed at Baby Boomers reflects the way they think because, typically, the young copywriter sees the world through the lens of an under-40 year old.”

He then points out the differences in how those two cohorts process information because of how their brains are working. For example, he notes:

“Today, all of the Baby Boomers are now over the age of 51 and have a stronger right brain orientation than younger markets of the past … The right hemisphere perceives reality in images (not words) … Generating emotionally strong responses is more critical in Baby Boomer markets than in younger ones because older minds depend more on emotions (gut feelings, a.k.a. intuition) in forming perceptions, thoughts and decisions than younger minds do.”

After explaining all this, Jim does get to the point about stories:

“The right brain loves stories. The stronger right brain bias of Baby Boomers also increases their responsiveness to messages conveyed through stories as opposed to expository or neutral statements. Stories generally do a better job of emotionally engaging Baby Boomer minds. In fact, Baby Boomers are more likely than younger consumers to ignore a message that simply describes a product with little or no affect.”

Treat this post as merely a ‘Boomer sidebar’ illustrating why and how ‘know your donor’ — Who is this person? — must be your starting point in understanding the donor journey.

It’s not just your communications tactics (channels, contacts) that will be better informed, but even more importantly, the efficacy of your communications style will be improved.

Tom

P.S. And if you fancy your organization appealing not to Boomers, but to Millennials or Hispanics or working women or some other major market segment, the core advice stands … begin by really knowing your donor in the kind of detail described above. No short cuts allowed.