Seems like two questions worth knowing the answer to if you are in the business of trying to affect donor behavior.

One of the main reasons they give has nothing to do with your specific charitable brand but rather, their using your charitable brand to deliver on,  or otherwise reinforce, their innate sense of self. Said another way, this is what they “bring to the party” having nothing to do with your marketing or fundraising efforts per se.

Seem soft and fuzzy?

Or maybe you think you are already doing this by using “you” pronouns instead of the 2nd person “we” pronoun or because you work hard to make the donor the hero and show how their gift is having an impact?  While all of the are marginally on target and marginally useful, they are, at best, the optimizing of the generic.

Or maybe you’ve done an attitudinal segmentation and identified six (or 4 or 5…) segments who have very different profiles and maybe even differences in what might pass for “motivation” to give.

And maybe you have even managed to link this segmentation to your database and discovered that lo and behold these segments seem to behave differently when you look in the rearview mirror.

Please don’t mistake effort, time and complexity for progress. We’ve seen many of these efforts that mistake correlation for causation (i.e. seeing some differences in behavior by segments) because they start from a flawed, attitudinal segmentation that has no theoretical basis and as a result, is random.

Random never works except randomly.

But, let’s be generous and assume you do have some groups on your file that differ based on their motivation or reason to give. Now what?  What is the experience you are going to serve up for these segments? Is it changing a few marketing messages to be more in concert with their motivation for giving? What else?

Still pushing out fundraising ask after fundraising ask in as many channels as possible?  The end result is likely still lousy retention because even if you got the identity/motivation right, you missed on translating that starting point into an ending point of a very different donor experience.

What is the alternative? Let’s start with an intuitive and illustrative definition of ‘identity’.

People have an identity for each distinct network (social, professional) in which they ‘participate’. A person has multiple identities and can consider themselves a parent, an American, a fundraiser and a person with Type 1 Diabetes.

We all have multiple identities but they are only relevant in certain contexts. A person’s sports fandom is totally irrelevant to their charitable giving. Make no mistake however, the identity that is relevant is a major, causal driver of behavior (and attitudes). And knowing which identity they are bringing to the party when interacting with your charity should dictate a lot more than copy changes that attempt to sing the right notes.

By way of specific example, consider health charities and those donors who are also current or potential beneficiaries of the charity. In short, they either have the disease/ailment/handicap your charity is fighting or are a care-giver for someone who does.

This is the relevant identity. It is, without exception, the number one reason they support you. Seems so obvious doesn’t it? But here comes the provocative part – the content that should be going out from the fundraising/marketing team to those with the disease (or caregivers) should look a lot like it was sent by the program staff.

What is required to successfully match the identity and associated needs and preferences is simultaneously;

• Knowable
• No more difficult to deliver on and yet,
• Requiring such a mental sea change in approach that most will dismiss it out of hand.

The sea change to successfully raise money from those with a direct connection to a health charity can be boiled down to two, complementary statements:

• The number one reason they donate is because of the services side of the business.
• The number one way to raise more money is…here comes the mindset shift…for the fundraising/marketing team to deliver services (i.e. information, access, promotion of service outlets).

“But we are marketing/fundraising, we don’t do services”, say most fundraisers.  No, you don’t. But you do attempt to deliver relevant information designed to elicit giving behavior. Generic appeals are attempting to invoke emotion with someone else’s story when their own story is the one that truly matters.

What these folks need to match their identity is significant, consistent and without exception, recognition of who they are. This results in very different copy to be sure. But, as importantly, it requires pulling the content not from the Fundraising 101 best practices handbook but instead, the services side of the business.

In short, market the informational hotline, not the sad story of a victim they can help

Meet donors’ needs. They will meet yours. In some ways it is that simple and also that tough all at the same time.

Identity matters. I urge you not to make the mistake of thinking some random group of attitudinal clusters is some form of true identity that translates into donor motivation, needs and preferences.

And even if you have that part nailed, the next question of how you treat these folks and what you do – beyond copy tweaks – is the difference between delivering a great donor experience and a crappy one.

Kevin