Sally Heaven

Keep it Simple

The end is upon us!  The end of 2011, that is.  Ken Cantu shared an easy-peasy template last week to help you build an End-of-Year-Fundraising email message.  And one of the most important things he said was "keep it simple!"

So I'm here to repeat that message, and to encourage you to take an objective look at your organization's homepage.  Try to forget for a moment that you work where you do - imagine yourself outside the fishbowl, clicking onto your org's homepage because you're deciding to make a year-end gift.  Pretend that it's December 31, and you're feeling the generous holiday spirit, and you're trying to donate quickly before you go out on the town to a New Year's Eve party.

Okay, are you there?  Breathe in, breathe out.  Now open your eyes and look at the homepage.  And answer these questions:

• Is it easy to find the "DONATE" button on your homepage?
• Is there concise but compelling messaging about why your organization needs the gift?
• Does it look visually appealing?  Are you motivated to click through?

Now let's say you've clicked through to the donation form.  Here are a couple more questions:

• Does the link go directly to a form, or does it go to some kind of intermediate page?  Do you have to click through again?
• Is the form easy to fill out?
• Are you motivated to fill out the form and give generously?

Or is it too complicated to figure out how to give?  If you had only half-decided to give, would you just give up and find another organization to support, one that made it easier to donate online?

If the answer to that question is yes, then don't despair - it's not too late.  You still have time to make it easier for donors to give!  Just keep this principle in mind - it should be simple!

Happy Holidays, and may you all exceed your End-Of-Year fundraising goals!

The Agitator and Ask Amounts

I follow several nonprofit fundraising blogs, one of which is The Agitator, and this recent post about "ask amounts" on direct mail and fundraising forms caught my eye.  Roger Craver classifies the conventional wisdom about ask strings as being akin to flat earth fundraising - and advocates for using a different paradigm when choosing how much to ask donors to give.

Read the post, and the linked white paper about the research and testing that went into this sweeping declaration.

This post piqued my interest in part because of a vibrant discussion held at the Convio DC Users Group last week about end-of-year fundraising.  As the group discussed strategies and tactics, one of the points was about just this question - how much should you ask someone to donate?  What if they are brand new?  What if they're an existing donor, or lapsed?  Should we jettison ask amounts entirely and allow donors to fill in the "Other Amount" field?

Very good questions, and the only answers are to be found in testing - the answers may differ from one organization's housefile to another.  I'm interested in hearing about ask amount testing that orgs have conducted - please discuss in the comments!  And if you're a Convio client, then log on to the Convio Community to check out the Local User Groups - face to face vibrant discussion is a great learning tool and a great way to connect with other nonprofit organizations in your neck of the woods.

Major Donors are Multichannel

And other than that, the rich really aren't that different from everyone else - especially online.  If you've read our major donor study The Wired Wealthy: Using the Internet to Connect with Your Major and Middle Donors, published in 2008 by Convio, Sea Change Strategies, and Edge Research, then you already know a few important things about major donors:

• half of wired major donors say that online giving is their preferred giving method
• most wired wealthy already give through multiple channels
• most wired wealthy visit the website of a nonprofit before they decide to give

And if you've been keeping up with recent trends on mobile, then you also know that by 2014 more people will view webpages using a mobile device than a computer.

Not to mention the explosion of social media in the last several years.  Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Foursquare, Tumblr, YouTube, blogs, and a million other ways for your organization to get the word out and for people to have conversations about your organization and your mission.  A million ways for a wired wealthy person to find out about your oganization, to learn about your work, and to be inspired to give. And direct mail, email, telephone and face-to-face conversations haven't gone away - in fact, some might argue the strategic application of these communication channels has even more importance than it used to.  That's integrated marketing.

Finally, there's an interesting series of blog posts on the blog Passionate Giving that makes the case that nonprofits owe it to their donors to analyze the cost of major gift fundraising and to do it as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible.  There's a lot more contained in the 6-part series, so give it a read.

So what's my point about the wired wealthy's online habits, mobile, social media and making major gift fundraising more efficient?  Stick with me, I'll tie this all together in a minute.

Major donors are an important part of any nonprofit organization's budget.  Some organizations have been around for a long time and have robust major giving programs and robust membership (or annual giving) programs, and raise money from events, peer fundraising - a diverse revenue stream.  Some other organizations rely much more heavily on major gifts to support their work - and I'd venture to say that's more true for organizations that could realistically put themselves out of business in 10-20 years by solving the problem - curing the disease, passing the law, etc.  But in both types of organizations, major gifts are important.

Also, most major gifts don't happen out of the blue.  Most donors become major givers after already being part of the donor base.  That goes double for planned gifts.  So excellent donor management is important throughout the life cycle of the donor - you need a place for all of this information that helps you steward them in the best way possible.

Here's the punch line:  with so many different channels and so much new technology, the number of ways that you can interact with major donors - and they can interact back! - you need a system that can handle all of this data and put it together in a way that lets you make sense of it all.  A system that makes the right data available to the right people at the right time.  A system that is optimized for what it's doing in each particular moment.  And a system that is right for your organization's needs.  The point isn't to simply store your data, it's to make the data usable and accessible so in any given moment your staff can deliver the right message to a major donor.

That's why you should check out Convio Luminate™ and Common Ground Fundraising to see which system is right for you.  Whether you're a large national organization, a multi-affiliate group, a small or growing charity, or an enterprise operation, Convio has a solution that can help enable your success and take your fundraising to the next level.

The Sustainer Imperative

David Glass from World Wildlife Fund and I had a blast spending our Wednesday morning with folks at the Convio Summit during our session "All Roads (Should) Lead To Sustainers."

As we were preparing the content for the session over the last several weeks, we distilled all of the existing research and best practices that we could get our hands on and combined it with data that WWF has collected themselves.  What we ended up with is a philosophy that we have coined "The Sustainer Imperative™."  We are still polishing up a succinct description, but simply put:  nonprofits should prioritize sustaining giving because the value proposition for the organization is clear, AND because it allows donors to support your mission more effectively and impactfully.  (Look for our book, published by Glass Heaven Convio WWF Publishing Co. LLC, arriving on electronic shelves sooner or later, maybe ;)

You can download our slides to review what we covered.  I'll also summarize the high points.  And as we said a few times during our session, please do NOT hold your questions - I'd love to see some robust discussion in the comments so we can sustain the great conversation that we had at the Summit.

1. The Sustainer Landscape. Acquisition is getting harder, the number of channels has increased, and donor loyalty is on the decline.  But sustainers have GREATER loyalty, lifetime value, and are more likely to make a planned gift (PDF).  Also, younger people (especially GenX) are twice as likely to donate monthly).

2. World Wildlife Fund conducted a test to see if they could increase sustainer giving via their homepage without hurting one-time donations.  The answer: yes! Check out the slides for the details.  A valuable takeaway from this section was this - anytime you have a question like "What works better, X or Y?" or "Does Z work better than W?" then the best way to answer the question is to run a test.  What worked for one organization might work for another - but it's possible that due to differences in mission, donor profile and housefile makeup that something else could work even better.  So testing is your best bet.  David threw down the virtual gauntlet to challenge everyone else to conduct the same test.  Will you accept the challenge?

3. Make It Monthly™.  Sustainer giving by EFT/ACH/bank draft is the norm in Europe.  The value proposition is compelling.  If all USA and Canada-based nonprofits educated their donors about how monthly giving helps accomplish the mission by giving the organization revenue you can count on and thus alllowing staff to spend more time educating and advocating for the mission, it could influence the attitudes of donors everywhere.  Giving in the USA could evolve to a place where people think of a montly gift as the default, rather than something extraordinary.  This rising tide would raise all our boats.  Can you imagine how that would change your fundraising?

4. Examples and Tips.  Premiums can boost conversion, and creating a branded program to which people can belong is common.  While these tactics can help, you can also be successful without a name for your sustainer program, as long as you can educate your donors about the dramatic impact their monthly gift would have on the mission.  What's a surefire way to Not Get Sustainers?  Don't ask anyone to contribute monthly.  Let me frame it in the positive - ask your donors to contribute monthly! 

Excited?  Want to put a plan into action?  Here's a simple place to start testing a sustainer ask on your website for people who arrive and want to donate for the first time.  The goal is to find the "sweet spot" for a sustainer ask targeted to new visitors who will make a donation "over the transom," as it were:

• Calculate your org's average online gift from last year, discarding donations that were extremely large so they don't skew your results
• Use Google Website Optimizer to test 3 donation forms
• Form 1 pre-selects as minimum the average gift
• Form 2 pre-selects a HIGHER amount
• Form 3 pre-selects a LOWER amount
• Analyze the results!

So let's chat - tell us in the comments one thing that you plan to do in 2012 to boost your sustainer fundraising program!

Maximizing Lifetime Value Part 2

Last month I posted a treatise on sustainers vis a vis maximizing lifetime value of your donors.  If you're looking to increase lifetime value (LTV) - and you should be - then converting your donors to a monthly giving program is the way to go.

This month I want to briefly discuss something that goes hand-in-hand with fundraising, especially to monthly donors - stewardship.

Stewardship can mean different things to different organizations, but at the heart of it, it means developing a relationship with the donor that acknowledges both their gift and their commitment to your organization's mission.  And when it's done well, it can mean that your donors are more likely to give again and again.

Last week Michelle talked about how she had signed up as a sustainer with an organization, but then her card expired and the organization never followed up with her.  Tragic!  Here's a partner story for that tale of woe:

Many years ago I signed up as a sustainer with an organization.  It seemed like my gift was a "set it and forget it" arrangement, because beyond the initial thank-you, I didn't receive monthly acknowledgements that my gift was processed.  I know that it was, because I saw my credit card statements every month, but didn't hear from the organization about it. 

That's fine, whatever - honestly, I didn't really need a monthly email receipt.  I was committed, and even upgraded my gift without being asked.

But annoyingly, the organization seemed to have me just dumped into the general messaging stream.  The appeals for additional donations I receive never acknowledged my ongoing support in any way, or that after 6 years of being a sustainer I had given over $3,000 to the organization from a monthly donation of $40.

Now, I wasn't looking for special kudos from the organization - I gave because I wanted to support the mission, not because I wanted to be thanked.  But the lack of acknowledgement pointed to a larger problem, which at the heart of it was a lack of stewardship.  Not only was I not being acknowledged as a donor, but the organization wasn't making any special effort to communicate with me differently than everyone else on the email file.

Here's the punch line:  during a crisis point for the organization,  I wasn't sure where they were headed strategically, and so I canceled my gift.  And I probably wouldn't have canceled if the organization had better communicated with me during the crisis, but also over the last 6 years.

So what does it mean to be a good steward?  It means hard work, unfortunately (hat tip to Tom at The Agitator and Mike Rogers at Convio).  There are metrics and data that you can apply to your donor file to predict trends and do modeling.  This is all a proven science - and yet, I think there's more work to do here beyond the data, and it goes to how organizations actually communicate with people.  That's why I don't love the word "cultivation" as it relates to donor communications, and much prefer the term "stewardship." 

It's a data-driven world, but don't forget:

• your donor file is actually made up of individual people
• data can predict trends but people are motivated by emotional connections to your mission, the courage of their convictions, their friends and families, peer pressure, etc.
• speak with a consistent message and even with a genuine tone through all channels - even through staff transitions or agency transitions
• think holistically about what your donors - and potential future donors - are seeing from you over the course of months and years
• communication is a two-way street - when was the last time you asked your members how they think you are doing, sort of an "approval rating?"

This goes beyond the concept of a message calendar.  You need a system to support a holistic view of constituents, like Convio's Luminate CRM™ to help you analyze constituent behavior across all channels.  But you also need to communicate back through those channels with a genuine tone, a consistent message, and an eye toward stewardship.