Do you select, segment or do personalized matching?  A definition is probably in order to answer that accurately.    A big part of the distinction is whether you treat people differently or not.

• Selection is who is in/out for a communication.  This is almost always tied to behavior data – e.g., RFM, hasn’t opened an email in any of the last 459 sends.  Importantly, your donor doesn’t know if they didn’t receive something from you as part of the “out” group.  To argue that the “in group” is different by virtue of getting something is a really, really low bar for saying you treat donors differently.

• Segmentation.  I used to define segmenting as the act of creating your groups who have different needs and wants and therefore, get different communications sent their way.  But, upon reflection it seems the sector often sees segmentation as just the first part, creating groups.  This group creation is often done for reporting of results and the groups might be different RFM buckets (0-12, $5-$20, 1x) or perhaps, different test segments (red envelope vs. blue envelope).  Importantly, creating groups has nothing to do with treating people differently.  The donors never experience anything different that is tailored to them.

• Personalized Matching.  This is the term I’ll start using from this day forward to describe message-to-person matching; changing the message to align with some characteristic of the person receiving it.

Personalized matching is about versioning and it certainly requires knowing something about each person that warrants tailoring.  The uber-minimal example is using the person’s same in the salutation, Dear Kevin.  Warm and fuzzy.

This is probably done by 100% of charities and therefore doesn’t really count.  It’s tablestakes and it’s faux-personalization since it doesn’t require changing the substance of the appeal.  Ditto for the faux-personalization of referring to people’s giving history or their label as “current supporter or member”.   This doesn’t change the substance of the appeal.

We’ve showcased countless examples of zero tailoring controls versus personalized matching (Identity and Personality) to show lift that comes from making the communication more relevant, familiar and positive to the reader.  But, what about this faux-lite-personalization, might it be enough?

In a word, no.  This experiment was for a smoking cessation program.  The test treatment involved tailoring the cover letter of a smoking cessation program booklet.  The faux-lite personalizing referenced the person’s name and noted they’d received this because they registered for the program on date X.  The people in the yellow bar got a much more tailored letter that pulled in pre-screener information these folks had shared as part of the registration process – e.g. amount smoked, years smoked, attitudes on smoking.

Personalized matching works.  The why may seem obvious but it’s worth stating,

• It makes the content more relevant
• It make the content easier to process, more fluent
• It makes the content feel more familiar
• It makes the content feel more “right” to the reader
• All of the above makes them more likely to give or do on your behalf
• All of the above makes them more likely to feel good about themselves and the decision

Which of your donors don’t deserve the bulleted list of experiences with your appeals?

I don’t understand why there isn’t a thunderous scream from the rooftops from every charity demanding Personalized Matching.  I fully understand a charity not knowing where or how to start but I don’t understand why this is anything other than a core requirement, a must-have in the world of fundraising.

This shouldn’t be about ‘raising the bar’, it is about resetting it in the only place that makes any financial or human sense.

Kevin