Dating apps and fundraising co-ops have something in common: both promise to find your next great match while also having a strong tendency to keep everyone competing for the same people.

A couple field experiments testing how dating app design affects swiping (i.e. selection) is instructive.

Most dating app swipes are dominated by photos and height, so a very select niche of extra attractive tall people get repeatedly swiped.  Adding a text field first didn’t change who got swiped because people could and did check the photos first.  But, requiring people to make an initial decision based on text, with photos available at a second stage, changed the outcome.

Interest spread across more people without reducing the total number of likes or resulting matches.

Fundraising has its own version of that first screen. In co-op selection, recorded giving is the admission ticket. Once people qualify, sophisticated models rank them using donation history alongside demographic, behavioral and commercial information.

But sophistication inside the gate doesn’t change who gets through it.  A local parent with a strong reason to care about a children’s hospital can remain invisible to that selection because their giving isn’t recorded in the participating sources. Meanwhile, someone who reliably answers appeals gets another invitation to add the 17th charity to their rotation.

The highly solicited person may respond right away while the parent may need an intro, a reason to connect with this particular hospital, and time. A selection process built around past response only gives us opportunity with the first person.

Adding a bazillion consumer data points to the existing donor pool doesn’t resolve that exclusion. We’re still considering parenthood only among people who passed the giving-history screen.

We recently examined a client’s donor file for whom we’d done primary research linking survey data with giving data.  The analysis determined that being a Parent (or Grandparent) helps explain a primary motivator for giving.  The Parents are much more Committed and likely to stick around. But the co-op produced names were only about 1/3 parent/grandparent.  Why?  Identity is secondary, at best, an incidental afterthought often with co-op selection where and the fancy math sorts people on likelihood to give tomorrow if solicited today.

A model can be very good at reproducing a fundraising strategy we ought to reconsider. If success means an immediate response to the usual solicitation, optimizing for that outcome tells us little about people who might respond to a different introduction.

That’s the opportunity behind Acquisition 2.0: select people with a credible reason to care, introduce the charity, and test whether that connection develops into giving.

Fundraising talks endlessly about building relationships, then often starts by asking who has responded to somebody else’s appeal.

Before commissioning a better ranking of those people, we should examine whom that first screen keeps excluding. Otherwise, we’re paying for better matchmaking while refusing to meet anyone new.

Kevin