happy donors

More notes from the recent Bridge to Integrated Fundraising and Marketing conference, this time on getting bequests.

• No, your best bequest donors are not the high-household income folks who make major gifts.  Bequests almost always come from people who’ve given often, in small amounts, and you haven’t heard from in a year or so.
• Profile of a bequest donor:  83 years old, widowed last year, no children or grandchildren.  Never gave more than $25, but gave at least twice a year for a decade.  Great predictor I hear: made gifts in 14 of the last 21 years.  But not 14 consecutive years.  A few people are crunching profiles here.
• Bequests donors have wealth.  Just not liquid wealth.
• Something like 96% of planned gifts are bequests, written into wills.  If you have extra time on your hands, pay attention to all those annuities and other fancy financial products.  If not: stick to bequests.
• Surveys are still a great way to fish for potential bequest donors.  But the first question should not be “are you remembering us in your will?” but instead “have you made out a will?” … “do you have a will?”  The majority of people die without wills, it seems.  If you have a donor who loves you, finding out that she hasn’t made out a will can be your entry point for offering help and getting a bequest.
• Yes, it’s important to get people to reveal their bequest, and highlight them in your newsletter.  New:  a page on your web site dedicated to bequests … bequest STORIES, that is.  Link to this from everything.  Even chapter web site.  The challenge:  keeping it fresh.  Someone has to pay attention.
• Anecdote:  At a gathering of good donors, declared bequest donors were given a special tag with the name of the “bequest society.”  Other donors saw this, asked, and many then inquired:  I want to remember XX in my will.  How do I arrange that?
• There are some very savvy consultants in the bequest field now.  Get the right one.

Notes from the recent Bridge to Integrated Fundraising and Marketing conference on Monthly Giving:

– More and more US organizations are enrolling donors in monthly giving programs, something long established in Canada, UK, Europe etc, late in the US due to different banking practices.

– Like getting any second gift, the best time to enroll donors in monthly giving is within 4 to 6 weeks after their first gift.

– Recency and frequency of giving are the key predictors for openness to monthly giving.  Not value (highest previous contribution).  Makes sense.

– Credit card giving is a strong predictor for monthly giving.  Also makes sense.  Thus online donors are good candidates.

– Phone is still the best channel to enroll in monthly giving.

– Street intercept monthly giving solicitation works well, but cost per enrolled donor is very high ($150) and donors tend to be young, with little capacity to give, high attrition.

– The best performing monthly giving mail solicitation asks only to enroll in monthly giving, without a fallback to “make a single gift today.”  That said, some orgs have controls with real strong monthly giving asks and a fallback only on the reply form.

– A $150 cost of acquisition of a monthly giving donor can be very satisfactory.   A $10 monthly gift covers that in a year and a half … an acceptable payback time given that monthly givers have high lifetime value.

I came across this useful article while mulling over a project where the client is asking for a strong emphasis on brand.

In” You’re Not Nike — Get Over It”, Jeff Brooks frames the issue very nicely:

“An effective nonprofit takes a different approach:  Instead of a look-at-me brand, it’s a look-at-you brand.”

Exactly.  He introduces this point with a discussion of the difference in “customer payoff” delivered with the transaction.  With iPhone, you get an iPhone.  With XXnonprofitXX, you get some satisfaction, feeling like you’re making something happen that you really want to happen.

So the “brand” doesn’t reside in the organization.  It’s in that experience.

We can argue that this is exactly the same for iPhone or Nike.  But they at least have a deliverable that makes a noise when you throw it against the wall.

Back to the client discussion, hoping the help them understand that this has got to be about the stories, not the PMS or the logo or the visuals that add a lot of cost to a communication but rarely deliver in additional donations … short term or long.

John Lepp of Agents of Good recently blogged about the possibility of nonprofits offering donors a money-back guarantee.  Framed in the context of poor donor cultivation — failure to acknowledge gifts or tell donors how contributions are being used — John sezs:

Here’s what I am proposing – a money back guarantee. Hey – if Sears can do it – you can do it.

If I give a donation to you – and you don’t THANK me, ACKNOWLEDGE my existence, TELL me how I’ve helped, treat me with a bit of RESPECT within – hmm – let’s say 30 days – I can ASK and GET my donation back.

Read his article.  If you scroll long enough you’d find my comment, now posted here:

– I don’t advocate donor-centered fundraising because it’s “right” … but instead because it’s smart. Poor cultivation is often the result of short-sightedness and/or inability to track lifetime value. Communications that don’t give you a decent net in the short run sometimes have big payoff long term.
– I’ve worked with a couple of political action groups that do give a money-back guarantee. These aren’t charities. The guarantee is for “membership dues” where “member” is used instead of “supporter” though they offer no more benefits than WWF, Sierra Club, Audubon, etc. The guarantees are prominent on page 4 of the letter and on the reply form. These guarantees have been tested. They lift response. And if ANYone asks for their money back, it’s rare and nothing compared to the response lift.

A cool tool from a workshop attended last week:  Google Browsersize.

Enter your URL and this tool shows you what percentage of people see what areas of your web site when landing, based on statistics on browsers and what size people have the browser open to on their desktop.

For fundraisers, this is a way to quickly check whether your “donate” button is clearly visible to donors and potential donors when they land.

Beyond that, the overlay can reveal damage done by a committee approach to web design: you’ll see the results of too many stakeholders trying too hard to lay claim to real estate on the site.

Are supporters seeing what’s important to them? … or what’s important to your board?   Google Browsersize will give you a quick answer.  Check it out.

Nonprofit email efforts have come a long way in this century, from feeble to generally very good, largely due to the incorporation of the tactics and techniques of postal paper mail.

Overwhelmingly, organizations’ email approach is essentially mini-magazines, with lots of images (ideally captioned and clickable) and text topped with subheads and ending with “read more…”

The alternative is mini-letters. In a prior post, I try to make a case for further testing this now little-used approach. Here’s an additional slant on what we’re really doing in email…

In yet another earier post, I ask that you think of fundraising letters as an auditory, rather than written medium. Fundraising copywriters know this and write accordingly. It’s what works.

Direct marketing tests tell us what works but never why. I think it’s safe speculation to say auditory writing works because it simulates fact-to-face selling/fundraising.

Another factor is that, beyond all of our mail solicitiations, paper letters have largely been replace by telephone calls. Since, oh, 1940, people have transitioned away from letters into phone calls for most personal communication.

Some mistakenly think that email has replaces paper letters.

No. Email is replacing phone. And …

… an email communication is conceptually identical to making a phone call and leaving voice mail.

The good news: good fundraising copywriters have a conversational writing style in their DNA. When web and email were relayed from the tech folks to the direct mail copywriters, style went along.

The result? Almost all emails I receive from nonprofits read like conversation, whether they’re on minimag format or the rare text-only.

A good thing. And getting better.

Like tens of thousands of other people, I wasn’t a donor to Partners In Health until the Haiti earthquake.

I say that with confidence after reading that PIH gained tens of thousands of donors via online giving within a month after the disaster.  And I’ll wager that they have many thousands of “multis” (multi-gift donors) and more than a handful of pretty dedicated supporters thanks to fundraising efforts that do pretty much everything right.

Their emails have been informative, VERY emotionally compelling, and frequent enough to keep my attention.

They were appropriately focused on Haiti relief for quite some time.  Then a few days ago I received an email that demonstrates and excellent approach to moving a donor from an emergency cause to the organization’s broader mission.

First note that Partners In Health does not consider themselves an emergency relief organization.  They’ve said this on several occasions in their own communications, also picked up by relevant media.

They received wide attention after the Haiti disaster because they had plenty of people on the ground before the event.  Word got out.  Then they earned broad attention and respect for their remarkable relief efforts, including designation to run a key hospital early on.

So now, six months later, they’re still doing great work in Haiti, but they likely don’t want donations to continue to be focused strictly on Haiti, due to the limitations of designated use of funds, discussed in Happydonors some weeks ago.

Thus the email under discussion, which opens…

Dear Dan,

I write to you from Rwanda, where I have come for the first time since January’s devastating earthquake in Haiti. Many of us have been consumed by efforts there–efforts made possible by an outpouring of support for Haiti from partners new and old.

Ok, I’m already hooked into this transition, reminded of the reasons I supported this group for disaster relief…

When I arrived in Rwanda last week, I was very proud to see the PIH team working together with the Rwandan government, the Clinton Foundation, and thousands of people from the local community to put the finishing touches on what will soon be one of the largest hospitals in East Africa–a world-class teaching hospital that will offer (and teach) the high-quality care we believe all patients deserve.

Now I’ve been connected with full relevance and sympathy to Rwanda … same mission, different place, then to the broader mission worldwide…

In each of our eleven partner countries, projects like Butaro are realized by communities committed to working together to tackle the issues of poverty and disease. You are part of those communities. Just as in Haiti, the people we serve in Rwanda, Lesotho, Malawi, Peru, Siberia and elsewhere depend on your support of our global efforts.

The email continues (yes, it’s long!) with a compelling message that these other programs have been willingly sacrificing so that funds would be available for Haiti emergency relief.

Now it’s time to help THEM out.

Great messaging for the moment.   They merit the gift for that as well as their great work in the field.

An effective oddity: the subject line and donate button of the email urged me to “make a gift before June 30th”.  This is good marketing.  Putting any date forward creates some urgency, even when the date is not really a deadline, i.e., no negative consequences for missing that date.  On the actual donation site, I’m urged to make my gift before the end of their fiscal year on June 30.  Not a great reason for immediate action for a donor.  But no matter.  It was effective in the email itself, got me to the donation url.  Mission accomplished.

————————————————

P.S.  The gift acknowledgment email also addresses designated use of funds:

Your gift of $XX will help us further our mission of serving the poor in places that bear some of the heaviest burden of disease.

If you designated your gift for Haiti, your donation will help bring medical assistance and supplies to areas that have been hit the hardest and support long-term recovery efforts in Haiti.

I didn’t notice the option of designating a program on the donation site, so this may just be an all-purpose acknowledgment for gifts off this and other giving urls.

Probably relevant only to my fellow “Mid-Atlanteans” (within a two-drive of Washington DC) but:

The “Bridge to Integrated Direct Marketing and Fundraising” conference is coming up on July 26-28.  This is the fourth year of a joint endeavor by the Association of Fundraising Professionals DC Metro Area Chapter (AFP/DC) and the Direct Marketing Association of Washington (DMAW),  again at the Gaylord in National Harbor.

This marriage started rocky.  The first year, it seemed like all the AFP people wanted was major giving/bequest sessions, while the speakers were largely small donor mail.  The DMAW folks are mixed fundraising and for-profit consumer or B2B.  Not enough overlap of content or audience that first year.  But things started to merge, meld and get MUCH better ever since.

Second year the fundraising middle ground got covered with strong sessions on cultivation … how to move donors up the giving ladder.  Plus more of the major gift people I met in subsequent years were sensitive to the fact that bequests most often come from the small-gift donor pool.

This year they’re offering plenty of tracks for all involved.  Check ‘em out if you can attend.

Big bonus for fundraisers:  I’m a fan of Michael Johnston, as I’ve written here before, and he’s doing a full-day pre-conference workshop. Attend if you can.  You won’t be disappointed.

In my previous post, I described a recent bad experience trying to stop credit card debits resulting from an inadvertent sustainer gift.   The organization apologized and promised to resolve problems that led to my frustration.   If you haven’t read the last post, please do so now, so what follows here will make sense.

I’m a happy donor again, but now look back at the dynamics of this sour experience:

– Fatal web usability on a fundraising site. The first order of usability is preventing donor frustration.  An odd thing about the web:  when people can’t achieve something, they say “I’m stupid” instead of “you’re stupid.”   Better if they faulted you, because blaming themselves dramatically heightens the negativity of the experience and the damage done to the relationship.

The must hurtful issue I encountered was a string of web cues that all made sense, lulling me into a feeling that all was well and “I’m good”.   Then a big “Oops” when I hit a huge disconnect between what I was told I could do and what I could actually do.  I followed the path, hit the snag, though to myself “What did I do wrong?” … followed the path again … and again, with my frustration ramping up with each pass.

The email told me I could click through for info on my account.  The account info page told me I could change status.  A “help” pop-up told me exactly how to end my sustainer status, step by step.  But the last step was “look for the ’stop payment’ button” when that button did not exist.  I did this four times.

So my initial irritation was moving toward rage.

The folks at this organization told me they were addressing this.  Hope they’re quick about it.  Turning a sustainer into a nondonor ain’t the direction we’re looking for.  Then there’s …

– Meeting donor expectations. That frustration headed for the stratosphere in a week due to a mix of expectations unmet and promises unfilled.

This wasn’t a website problem.  It was a disconnect between my expectations of service on a website and response time.  When I sent emails to the membership office, I didn’t hear back for four days.  In 1980, when snailmailing a question or even phoning in, a four-day response time might have seemed fine.

No more.

A separate issue: phone message that promise “we’ll get back to you soon.”   Most donors will take any indication of when you’ll get back as a promise.  You gotta keep those promises.  And “soon” means “today” or certainly “within 48 hours.”

This is largely about expectations, and today the bar is pretty high.  If you’re ever unsure about your response time, you’d be far better off loudly disclaiming any promise.  Or consider making promise that would be unacceptable by most standards …but a promise you can keep.

– A possible solution: Under-promise, over-deliver? A couple of weeks ago I had my wallet pinched in Sevilla, Spain, losing my passport, a debit card, and 200 Euro.   I stopped transactions on that debit card with one email.  Cool.

When my back-up debit card (from a different bank) didn’t work, I suspected that they’d lost my memo about travel to Spain, so the vigilant fraud division was blocking transactions.

With no mobile or other reasonable way to change this status, I went to this bank’s web site.  Sending an explanatory email to the general customer service @dress, I got a bounce-back promising action “within three days.”

Whoa!  This card was my only means of getting cash.  Three days was very bad news.

I found a different bank @dress within a secure, customer-only part of their site, but got the same discouraging promise.

Angry and a bit desperate, I was wondering if the embassy would cash to only paper check I had.

Imagine my delight when, in about 24 hours, I got responses to both emails acknowledging the problem, apologizing, and assuring me that my card would now freely transact in Spain’s ATMs.

With their feeble under-promise, meeting reasonable expectations suddenly had a “wow” factor.   Under-promising and over-delivering made me an even happier customer.

If this organization’s phone banks were totally slammed, and there was little chance of a quick response to an inquiry, why not say so  … with an over statement that “we might not be able to back to you even in a week, but be assured that we WILL answer your question and address any problems.”

If the organization had lowered my expectations, I wouldn’t have had a week of rising bile.