The Sir Chris Hoy approach to Fundraising

If anybody else will admit to perhaps taking an occasional sneaky look at the BBC’s Beijing Olympic coverage last summer, which unfortunately took place largely during work time, I’m sure you will have shared some of my astonishment. GB were winning. A lot.

Nowhere was this success more overwhelming than in the cycling velodrome, where team GB – Sir Chris Hoy, Bradley Wiggins, Victoria Pendleton et al – swept all before them, winning a devastating nine gold medals.

The term ‘unprecedented’ hardly does this success justice. In the previous 60 years since WWII, GB had won four cycling gold medals in total, and now nine in one games. How did it happen? Was there a new wonder training regime? Did the bikes have secret motors stashed in their back wheels?

Interviewed after his third gold medal, the soon to be knighted Chris Hoy explained the team’s winning philosophy;

“The accumulation of tiny advantages”.

Put simply, under Director of Coaching Dave Brailsford, team GB looked at every tiny aspect that might possibly improve performance and applied it. Anything (legal) that might confer an advantage was used. So the cyclist’s helmets were tested to make sure they provided maximum aerodynamic resistance, their diet closely monitored to ensure that each individual had the optimum energy available for their event and their BMI controlled to give them the explosive power they needed. No aspect that might affect performance was overlooked, and boy did it work.

So can we apply these same high performance principles to fundraising? Of course we can, and should. Like the cyclists the first thing we need is, of course, the raw materials. For Chris Hoy’s thighs, think a stand-out proposition. But once that is in place we then need to think about everything that might affect how a prospective donor might interact with a fundraising communication? Are they drawn in by a line on the outer, or are they going to be put off if the BRE looks like it isn’t secure? Is there a photograph or line of copy that might alienate some of the potential audience?

As responsible fundraisers, we need to examine every last thing that might impact on a pack’s performance. Just as in Olympic cycling the margins between success and failure can be tiny. An inappropriate signatory could knock five per cent off your response rate, meaning your campaign misses its target and you end up among the also-rans. But pay attention to every last detail and you give your fundraising communications the best chance of success.

You might not win a gold medal, or a knighthood like Sir Chris, but get the details right and you can achieve the fundraising results that your organisation needs.

Six easy steps to take to apply the Pareto principle and increase your direct marketing income – George Milne, Joint Managing Director

Here’s step 2 of how to apply the Pareto principle and see your income soar.

Step 2
We touched on how your active multiple giving donors who give £100 or more will give you a significant proportion of your donor income. We also know that they are responsive to donor appeals.

They have shown you that they are interested in your charities work, so let’s recognise this and give them insight into how you deliver a fantastic service and make a real difference to lives. Tell them how you have identified the problem and worked to come up with a comprehensive solution that will tangibly improve your beneficiaries lives – you are, after all, experts in your field.

Don’t be afraid to tell the full story, even if this takes 2,000 words or more to do.

TW CAT has tested letter length for high value donors and we know that longer copy produces a better response in terms of both average gift and response rate.

So get out there and don’t be afraid to give your donors all the facts; they’ll need them to make an informed decision. You wouldn’t invest or spend anything from £50 to £1,000 without knowing exactly where your money was going, so don’t expect that your donors will. Trust them with the facts. Give them real insight into your work today, and tomorrow they can be the all-important ambassadors that your organisation seeks.

Some very wise words from George ...

Six easy steps to take to apply the Pareto principle and increase your direct marketing income – George Milne, Joint Managing Director

You’re a fundraiser, so chances are you’ve heard of the Pareto Principle, formulated by Vilfredo Pareto in 1906. Maybe you know it better as the ‘80-20 Rule’. In practice, it means that about 80% of your donor appeal income stems from around 20% of your donors.

You’ve, no doubt, noticed that active donors of multiple gifts with a highest gift of £100 or more consistently boost your appeal incomes by donating more money more often. In fact, it’s a surprisingly constant
phenomenon. TW CAT has found, across a wide range of charities that this holds true within a range of around 65% to 90% of appeal incomes.

So we have put together six easy steps to applying the Pareto principle

1. Look at each donor transaction and classify it realistically. It’s amazing how often charities base their segmentation on, say, sponsorship money raised by taking part in the London Marathon, which is more an indication of the donor’s physical stamina than their ability to go on making large donations.

2. You know these donors are responsive to direct marketing appeals, so give them more to read. TW CAT has tested letter length for High Value donors and we know longer copy produces a better response in terms of both average gift and response rate.

3. Take a distinct creative approach for your High Value donors. While the emotional argument for support you usually make to your donors still applies to them, they will also want to see the rational argument. Extra ‘lift’ elements, including financial reports and endorsements from their peers will help to lift response.

4. If a certain group of supporters provides more income than others, then it must be worth greater investment. This may mean using a more expensive media such as telephone or simply sending mail packs printed on better paper stock, which suits the High Value proposition by treating serious issues seriously.

5. Make sure you’re asking people for the right kind of gift. While identification of High Value donors is mostly based on the recency, frequency and value of their gifts, you can assume that everybody has the
potential to give, as long as the most suitable method of giving can be found. For example, a donor who seems cash poor but asset rich may be a more likely legacy prospect, so why not go ahead and ask them for one?

6. Remember, the principle doesn’t just apply to donors. The same approach works just as well for High Value recruitment, not just in investment in the creative product but investing in finding the right prospects to generate donors who will contribute to the 80% of income.
“

An end to the age of spin, hopefully.

The banking debacle, and some of the spin put out by their PR and communications people has been nothing short of jaw dropping. Rather than apathy or cynicism their continued protestations have been creating outright anger. I’ve been seeing the same thing with lame government excuses and justifications for the mess the economy is in. Rather than a simple shrug of the shoulders many people are genuinely appalled.

Perhaps the most bizarre recent example of spin I’ve seen was from a US company who called their latest round of job cuts ‘career upgrades’ for those poor souls losing their livelihoods. They pitched it as an ‘opportunity to expand their career experience with new and exciting organisations elsewhere’.

It is very hard not to write a series of expletives at this point.

I think people have had enough, enough of being treated like idiots, being given messages with no meaning and of being fed a ton of cobblers masquerading as the truth.

Applying this to our world of fundraising I detect a similar trend emerging. People are sick of gimmicks, of window dressing and of false or misleading claims. Supporters don’t want to be spoken down to, patronised or fed the same corporate line. What they do want is something of substance, something real, something tangible. They want the detail, they want the information, they want the facts.

Wouldn’t it be lovely if your mobile phone company told you that the new model actually had a better battery life, more free minutes and a faster web connection rather than making some spurious claim that it will improve your life in new and exciting ways. It’s a phone, get over it.

Fundraisers who let their donors know the need for funds, in no nonsense terms, are likely to find that they generate a much better response than those who use spin to cloud the issue. The world does not need more spin, what it needs is truth and clarity. And that applies equally to fundraising

Exploiting our need to care?

An email arrives in my inbox, subject titled ‘Help out our mates Down Under’. It’s from Virgin Wines.

Thinking that it’s a charity appeal and that andrewb@virginwines.com has got together with his contacts in the wine industry in Australia to do something to help the victims of the wildfires I open the email, as presumably the company expected I would.

So I’m disgusted to report that it was just a springboard for what amounted to any other wine offer.

Just a horrible exploitative headline that reminds me of those rubbish classified ads that begin SEXSEXSEX Ironing Board for sale …

But in this case the base human instinct Virgin Wines appears to have sought to exploit is our – my – need to care for somebody else.

So I’ll be giving my Virgin WineBank balance of £60 to The Salvation Army in Australia – whose members practise temperance by the way – which is what Virgin Wines should have asked me to do in the first place.

Shame on them.

Let it snow

Although not a rant along the usual lines about the lack of preparedness for the current weather – and nobody can say we didn’t see it coming – I couldn’t let the opportunity pass to note the advantages of life outside the English capital.

Of a team of 21 due in today, only the four dependent on the rail network didn’t make it in to the office in central Brighton … the rest just walked. Admittedly it took one of them – Diane bless her – over an hour but she’s here …

Mind you, so few of our charity partners are about that most of the team are watching out of the window as hugely irresponsible ‘drivers’ skate the ungritted roads. Did nobody tell them ‘high gear, low revs’ when they learnt to drive?

And we poor pedestrians have to dice with death alongside them … really, what's so important that they have to put our lives at risk?

Anyhow, it’s hot pies all round and early closing so everybody gets home safely again before dark … traffic allowing :)

New Year's Resolution

Happy New Year everyone. Well, here we go into 2009. Woolworths has gone, so has Wedgwood. Adams is going to the wall and Zavvi is in real trouble. Debenhams has almost £1BN of debt to service. I hope they did well in the sales.

On my first day back after the holidays I read reports suggesting medium sized charities are going to the worst affected by the recession. I’ve filed it with the other reports stating large and small charities will bear the brunt of the downturn.

Charitable income will fall by 5%, no 10%. Was that 15% I heard?

Everyone has an opinion. And that’s just great.

The economic firestorm started a long way back, but went stratospheric three months ago. That gives us a full quarters fundraising results to look at to assess the initial impact. That’s a lot of data. Well, here’s a thing. Whilst Lehman Brothers was going to the wall and the stock market shrinking by almost 25%; whilst the number of people unemployed rose to almost two million; whilst house prices fell by 10% and savers saw interest rates halve, most of our clients posted strong results from their autumn appeals. Three clients had record appeals in the autumn. You know who you are. Early indications are that Christmas has gone pretty well too.

I’m not suggesting that we’re going to be unaffected, of course we are. However, lets be informed by fact, not opinion. Let’s look at our fundraising empirically. Let’s make decisions based on a firm understanding of the figures, and of our knowledge of the marketplace. Let’s understand year-on-year performance, yield per donor and the real net first year position from recruitment activity. Let’s have a grip on attrition figures (monthly at least), let’s make sure we’re on top of ROI by media channel. To maximise the chances of hitting income figures this year fundraisers are going to need to move quickly to take advantage of tactical opportunities whilst continuing to focus on implementing longer term fundraising strategies. We can only make successful tactical decisions when we have the facts to back us up. Otherwise we’re going to be guessing. Guessing isn’t going to please trustees or Finance Directors. And it won’t deliver results.

My resolution for 2009 is to be informed by fact, not opinion. We won’t always have all the data we want available, but we should be able to make best use of what we have. We’re in for a challenging year, but let’s tackle those challenges with evidence, and not speculation.