Are your communications coming unstuck?

Imagine if you will a scenario where you have finally had time to properly read the mail from the charities that you support. You are motivated to respond to the latest request for money. You go and get your wallet and fill in the donation form with your credit card details or find your cheque book and write out your cheque. So far so good.

You then go on to enclose the donation form in the Freepost envelope provided and find one or both things:

• That you need to be skilled in origami to get the donation form to fit into the envelope provided and have to fold it several ways to get it in
• That after (finally) enclosing the donation form you go to lick the envelope and it doesn't stick so you then have to go off to find some glue or Sellotape

Now this is another pet hate of mine. Because we as fundraisers should be breaking down the barriers to giving not creating them. And though the two issues above are not big things they could in reality make the difference between you receiving the donation or not! And I know because I have experienced them both this weekend.

I wonder, how many Freepost envelopes remain unposted because someone couldn't find or be bothered to find the Sellotape that they were going to dig out later ..but never did.

So please, a little plea. If you are going to provide envelopes to aid response then make sure they stick - just test them yourself. It isn't about buying an expensive envelope it is about providing one that does its job.

As regards the donation form, there has been much written about them, but again, it's about functionality and in the same way you look at what information is vital to capture on a donation or response form and making it as easy as possible for the person completing it - another check is whether it easily fits into the envelope you have provided. Simple.

After all, this is one occasion where 'pushing the envelope' probably doesn't apply.

Thank you for stopping by!

What would Goldilocks have done without 'just right' ?

While in godmother mode recently, I was strolling through the children's section of a book shop and there was Goldilocks and the three bears.

As my adult self flicked through the book I was reminded how much I loved that book as a child (probably because I love bears), but I remember thinking to myself what if there wasn't a 'just a right' for Goldilocks? That there was only two beds to choose from or two bowls of porridge for her to try? Would she have chosen any of them or just left - or is there always a 'just right' whatever the range of choice or is a decision made irrespective?

However, I was reminded of my Goldilocks thought recently while reading a really interesting book by Dan Ariely called Predictably Irrational. Essentially, first part of the book explains the idea of relativity and how decisions are based on how the options we have are presented in relation to others.

Now many a marketing offer is based on this psychology - and if you look out for them they are quite obvious - like subscription offers, but how much of this psychology do we try and test in our fundraising?

Recently raised by Craig Linton on twitter asked the twitterverse for ideas around the revamp of his organisation's donation form. He received some suggestions and recommendations. Now I was one of the people that offered up my ten pence worth - on the basis of the importance of a strong case for support being linked to the ask prompts - but would 3 prompts result in a 'just right' scenario for supporters better than 5 prompts?

Equally - how we present a regular giving ask in a script or mailing i.e. 'for less than a cost of a news paper...' or 'for the cost of half a chocolate bar you could...' etc how effective are these comparisons in helping supporters see the relative worth of the ask in real-life context? After all they are still very well used but are they actually effective?

I would be really interested to know if anyone has actually done any real testing on this in their fundraising recently - if you are happy to share.

Thank you.

Do you know what your supporters are doing?

Oscar Wilde once said that a cynic is a man that knows the price of everything but the value of nothing... now I am not saying that all of us in the fundraising world are cynics and in fact a healthy dose of cynicism helps us keep our wits about us.

However, in some cases I do think we as fundraisers can be a little prone to put price before value i.e. we can judge an activity on its cost and income rather than the true value an activitiy can yield both from the supporter and the value to the supporter.

Take appeals for example - they will have a clear spend attached and a corresponding income target based on xx number of supporters being mailed and xx% response rate and of course in simple terms these are the main measures of success.

However, one dimension of such activities that we don't seem to be so focused on is how we measure the bi-product or rather bi-behaviour of such activities. Instead we focus on the behaviour we have planned for and are expecting. And really - since when do people behave completely as we would expect?

We know that measuring any response to recruitment requires a recognition that people today engage multi modally across channels - so having seen a DRTV ad they are as likely (if not more so) to follow-up on-line as they are of phoning or texting.

The point is the same can probably be said for how people choose to 'respond' to your communications. As we acknowledge the value of integrated channels in recruitment for example - we probably need to apply the same logic in measuring response to supporter activities.

So, next time you run an appeal or any activity for that matter, do some digging in the data to see how many people who didn't formally respond to your appeal chose to do something else in the same time period while bypassing your donation form or response device. Who:

• Increased their dd payment permanently instead of making a credit card payment


• Chose to take up another offer or product instead of sending in a cheque


• Decided to leave a legacy in their will to you instead of uplifting their DD for one month only....


• Sent in a donation using an old donation form ie not the one for your most recent appeal?
  

Now part of the solution is of course ensuring that your donation form / response device is more than just a mechanism for a one of gift - but facilitates any number of ways people may want to respond to one of your requests for money or time. By doing so and ensuring upfront that all parts or methods of response are part of the data capture and thus part of the on-going reporting, means you would be capturing all of this information automatically.

That said though there are certain behaviours that it is more difficult to monitor like the example earlier of someone choosing to use an old donation form to respond to your latest request. It is probably more common than we realise and yet often the only way you may find out about these responses is when you see money showing against an old activity in the monthly accounts.

Meanwhile without a proactive eye out for such eventualities the likelihood could be that the thank you letter relating to that old appeal has gone out with little relevance to the reason why the supporter gave this time.

I won't labour the point to heavily about the importance of the donation form and making it work better, because everything from fonts, ask levels and cancel your dd asks have been shared already at queerideas at askdirect or at Sofii - and much can be learned from all of them in helping to perfect your form or at least to test.

However, what I am ultimately suggesting is that in order to truly measure the value of an activity we need to look beyond the ROI . We should look at all the ways your supporters are behaving in response to any given activity - even if indirectly and ensuring that processes and triggers are in place to monitor them. That way we will see the wider value of an activity and will be better informed to make decisions about their future direction and strategy.