10 ways to make your direct mail results unbeatable ...

... by treating each of your supporters as an individual.

How you apply what you know about your supporters – how you use data and targeting – is key to everything you do in fundraising. It will have a greater impact on your response rates, average donation levels and return on investment than any other factor.

So here’s your 10 point targeting check list – nine dos and one don’t:

1. Do finesse your proposition with paragraphs of variable copy that match individual supporters – if they’ve only supported your education programmes in India, leverage India, if Africa, leverage Africa.

2. Do match each donation prompt or financial ‘ask’ to each supporter’s giving history. E.g. a lapsed supporter needs a different message to a supporter who has given recently.

3. Do learn from outside the sector. Retail direct marketing, typified by mail order, targets every customer’s own ‘price point’ – that’s how you can buy mail order lists by value of last purchase, average purchase value or highest purchase etc. At TW CAT we’ve identified over 10 subgroups of supporters who respond better when given personalised prompts.

4. Do match your main financial prompt or ‘ask’ to how much a current supporter has most recently given by using a ‘previous gift plus’ formula to increase average gifts.

5. Do match the main financial prompt or ‘ask’ to how much a lapsed supporter last gave and ask for exactly the same amount.

6. Do choose whether you use recency, frequency or value as the basis for your donation prompt. High- and Mid-value supporters typically respond more generously to a prompt related to their highest-ever gift than to one related to their most recent donation.

7. Do acknowledge your supporters’ previous giving history by thanking them for the longevity of their support and the cumulative value of their gifts. To be exact is to be correct.

8. Do use predictive lifetime value – LTV – models to identify supporters who will give the most over time then resource the money.

9. Do use other information you hold about supporters to personalise their individual mailing. Remember the man from the Pru – he always knew your dog’s name, and whether its bark was worse than its bite.

10. Don’t stop testing – always remember that what has worked once won’t necessarily work again.

NB. In head-to-head supporter mailing tests this approach has proven unbeatable.

Baby Boomers – not all peas in a pod

I’ve been poorly this week and missed out on lunch with one of my best business friends, a Baby Boomer like me.

Or maybe not like me at all?

Because, like Dorothy Donor, Baby Boomer doesn’t exist, except in the minds of marketers like ourselves.

Yes, we were all born between 1946 and 1964. But that’s 18 years – long enough for one Baby Boomer to father another.

Messages addressed to my colleague, on the brink of retirement, would be completely inappropriate to me – struggling to believe I’ll be 50 (fifty!) in January.

I’m inundated with demands from my various pension providers to make critical decisions about investments whose value is seemingly decreasing with each day’s delay, and I can’t do it.

He’s already made that commitment. He’s written himself a Job Description for retirement (terrific idea by the way) and is planning his spending accordingly.

I grew up listening to my father’s jazz and Punk Rock was the most influential music during my formative years. My would-be lunch colleague loves classical, especially opera.

However, my business friend and I share a love of good writing and a commitment to the charity sector. You might reach us both through the TLS, the Literary Review or Amazon.

It’s such shared characteristics that marketers need to uncover to make the most of the opportunities presented by Baby Boomers.

Because if you don’t, you might make the same mistakes some fundraisers made in thinking Dorothy Donor was their perfect supporter – and assuming she was a one-size-fits-all kinda girl when she turned out to prefer a tailored look, and she was just as likely to be a he.

TrueCall – another nail in the telemarketing coffin?

I spent yesterday ‘working from home’ – actually mostly hanging around waiting for a mechanic to turn up then chasing car parts round the city.

Even so, I did get some daytime at my desk (kitchen table) but even that was interrupted regularly by telemarketing calls.

Truth be told they didn’t really bother me, but my other half genuinely works from home for two or three days a week and she’s truly sick of them. But because of our work we don’t subscribe to the TPS (Telephone Preference Service – it’s an opt-out).

However, I see Which? has given a mixed but not significantly critical review of the TrueCall.

Now while this telephone equivalent of a spam filter just looks like more IT that can go wrong to us, my partner could well be tempted if the volume (number not loudness!) of calls continues at its present rate. She gets half a dozen calls a day at least. One day Style Kitchens(?) rang four times – and while she won’t take the phone off the hook or unplug it – why should she have to after all? – she’s sorely tempted, especially lately as the number of calls has risen noticeably, predominantly with ‘debt counselling’, consolidation loans and utility switching offers. At least half the calls we receive are recorded messages, many are only picked up at the other end when we answer and loads end up as either silent messages on our voicemail or even people saying,

“Hello, hello, can you hear me, hello …” to our answerphone. Idiots.

I don’t think we’ll get a TrueCall, and I don’t know if many people will buy one, but if they do, the telemarketing industry’s failure of self-regulation has only itself to blame.

Which? review: http://www.which.co.uk/reviews-ns/truecall/index.jsp.

Setting the right expectations has never been more important

It’s that time of year when the development of budgets for 2009/2010 is causing late nights and loss of sleep due to overcomplicated phasing spreadsheets, whilst managing campaigns at one of the busiest times for the sector.

However this year our thinking has to be even more considered than usual. In the current economic climate it has never been more important to look at different scenarios and to plan for what the next year to eighteen months might hold for fundraising.

Each day we are met with doom and gloom from the media about the economy and with predictions that the country will feel the real impact in the next financial year – we need to be prepared.

At TW CAT we help our charity partners to produce their budgets and as a result of the recession we are now presenting more than one scenario in order the better to manage expectations. Typically this means:

1) the plan we would be confident of meeting if the economic forecasts don’t worsen and

2) a worst-case scenario if we see fundraising income dropping.

Although our teams are optimistic that supporters will keep giving even if they are affected by the recession, communicating the possibility of falling income to the Finance Director, Trustees or Chief Executive is crucial.

Not only this but you need to show that investment in retaining all the donors you already have is key to maintain future income growth.

So do spend a little extra time this year setting expectations with the senior management team and you’ll be well placed to weather the uncertain climes ahead.

Show it to your mum

Steve, our Head of Creative has come up with a new and ingenious way of evaluating campigns. As much as it pains me to say it, it's not always about data analysis at the end of day ...

Show it to your mum:

While the final arbiter of the success or failure of any fundraising campaign is the balance sheet, results can take ages to come in. So for the impatient amongst us I’d like to suggest an alternative, although not in my case at least foolproof, means of determining whether your latest campaign is working as hard as you’d like it to.

Show it to somebody outside of the industry whose opinion you really respect, or if like me you are still fighting a somewhat desperate and probably vain battle for belated parental approval, you could show it to your mum.

If yours is anything like mine, I’d suggest only showing her materials in the public domain (inserts, press etc.). The simple reason being that despite years of my painstakingly and repeatedly explaining that lots of people want to receive Direct Mail, and value their relationships with the charities they support, my mum still insists that I ‘write begging letters’ for a living.

I don’t think my mum could ever be described as a typical anything, and she certainly isn’t a typical charity donor (she’s half way between a Dorothy Donor and a Baby Boomer – does that make her a Borothy? Actually, given her naturally sunny disposition I think Doomer might be more apt). But she reads the papers (OK, she does the quick crossword and checks her stars, but you know what I mean), knows what’s going on in the world and has a sharp eye for any contrivance or, as she would put it, ‘old flannel’.

So in many ways, she’s a one-woman, extremely cost-effective focus group. If you suspect yours might be able to offer you the same service, can I suggest the following, completely unscientific, scale for assessing whether your fundraising is really hitting the mark?

If she says “Mmmm. Lovely” then hands your lovingly crafted insert or press ad straight back to you and quickly changes the subject, its time to go back to the drawing board. 1 out of 10.

You’re on the right tracks when she takes an inordinately long time to read it, has to flip back pages a couple of times to get her bearings and says at the end “Oh yeah, I get it now, that’s quite clever”, but you could do better. The proposition’s got a bit muddied somewhere along the way. 2-4 out of 10.

A “Who’s my clever little boy” (I’m 40) and an offer to rustle up a quick bacon sandwich means you’ve definitely got something. 5-7 out of 10.

“Blimey, where’d you get your brains from?” and a quick ring round to make sure sisters, aunties and assorted acquaintances (in my mum’s case the ladies she used to work with on ‘the dinners’) get to see your piece, and are left in no doubt as to whose progeny was responsible for it, and you know you’ve produced a winner. 8-9 out of 10.

But you know you’ve produced the best, possibly award-winning work, when despite hours of your pleading and protestations, and your perhaps even offering to email her the original brief, she insists that, “You never did that,” and flat out refuses to believe that you could possibly have been involved with the production of such a powerful, moving or inspiring piece of work*. 10 out 10.

*This doesn’t happen very often.

Choosing celebrity patrons. Are Ross and Brand the new Barrymore?

Choosing celebrity patrons. Are Ross and Brand the new Barrymore?

Some celebrities become untouchable. For very different reasons. We won’t hear a bad word about Michael Palin or Dame Judi Dench. Some people can’t be put off Jeffrey Archer (‘he’s still a brilliant fundraiser’) or Lester Piggot (‘it was definitely a stitch-up’). But Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand’s names are currently mud. It may not last.

But the recent brouhaha goes to show how selecting charity patrons is a job fraught with difficulties. However there’s plenty of useful information in the public domain that can help you draw up a properly informed list of potential celebrity patrons.

First step may be selection criteria. Say, relevance, trust and respect.

Relevance is the most flexible of these, even within groups of supporters. E.g. what’s relevant to supporters of your challenge events such as sporting prowess may be irrelevant to attendees at your summer reception, where people may prefer to rub shoulders with people whose power rests in wealth rather than hand-to-eye co-ordination.

Ideally you’d find crossover – Lewis Hamilton anyone?

But it’s early days for him so far as Trust is concerned – something on which you can’t compromise. In a Reader’s Digest survey the three most trusted celebrities were Sir David Attenborough, Sir Trevor McDonald, and Rolf Harris – and what all the celebrities in the top 10 shared was 20 years or more in the public eye, unblemished.

Equally, who people respect will be driven by their own values. So, in a Daily Telegraph/YouGov survey, people said they ‘personally took pride in’

Dame Kelly Holmes
The Queen
Lord (Sebastian) Coe
Sir Trevor McDonald
Paula Radcliffe
JK Rowling.

Notice how each person on the list has clearly been chosen for completely different reasons – otherwise how could The Queen and JK Rowling make the same list? I suspect the Queen’s there because of the manner in which she conducts her reign. For JK, surely it’s the single mother made good, dragged herself up by her bootlaces etc.

Hence if your supporters, or those you wish to attract, are Daily Telegraph Readers, this isn’t a bad place to start. But wherever you start, don’t end up with Michael Barrymore.

Despite criminal convictions, Jeffrey Archer and Lester Piggott may have recovered something of their reputations, but even with only a police caution on file, there’s no way back for Barrymore.