Effectiveness of your holiday fundraising appeals

Good morning, all!

It’s been a few weeks since I’ve posted, and for that delay, I give you my apologies.

I’m working on developing a few different things here, but I wanted to take a moment to provide a blog for you all as we enter into December, where you will undoubtedly be putting together end of year appeals to your house files to close out 2010 in  a strong fashion.

A recent study written by Convio called the “2010 HOLIDAY GIVING Report” — included one chart that particularly piqued my interest. It was a survey sent to a wide array of existing and potential donors to nonprofit organizations across all sub verticals, and here is how they surveyed audience responded:

This tells us that the top two most effective appeal types are: (1) Appeals that focus on people, animals, or places in need of the donor’s financial help, or (2) Appeals that explain the need for funds now.

This goes back to the old argument of “emotion vs. logic” (which I just so happened to write about in a blog post earlier in the year — check it by clicking here).

This tells us that both with high-dollar and holiday giver audiences, that focusing on the emotional side of the coin (i.e. here’s what your funds will do to help these people/animals in need) AND creating a sense of urgency (by describing WHY the funds are needed at this time) help to drive the effectiveness of your end of year fund raising campaigns.

I also found it interesting that 40% of high-dollar donors said that they would be willing to provide a gift in the event that your appeal reminded them that they will receive a tax deduction for their end of year gift.

Perhaps segmenting your donor file into “high-dollar donors” and “average-donors” and writing two separate messages to include this sort of message in the appeal to your high-dollar donor segment might be effective. Feel free to test it & roll out the better performing message to the remainder of the email files.

Good luck this holiday season in closing out 2010 strongly!

All the best,

— GC

Further evidence that the preselected level on your conversion form increases your average sale

Further evidence that the preselected value increases your average sale.

In an article that I wrote on this  blog back in July titled, “Preselected values — your donation form’s best friend,” I covered a test conducted by our friends at the Salem Web Network regarding how their average gift values were increased by sending visitors in a split test to a form with (A) no preselected values, and (B) a preselected value of $50.

In an effort to further implement this line of thinking into our processes for fund raising, we conducted a test with one of our clients in an attempt to increase our average gift (or average sale) amount.

As seen in the chart above, we had seven different donation levels, each level being given a specific dollar amount tied to each level. Our goal was to set the preselected value at “Supporting Member,” which was a $50 giving level.

We started our testing on 7/28 and ran it through 9/30.

Over the test period, we have seen an increase of “Supporting Member” or the $50 giving level amount increase by 24.2%.

One of the things that we wanted to do was ensure that there were no negative impact on other key measurement categories such as conversion rate, or a decline in upper tiered giving levels. It’s important to pay attention to these figures, as if we increase the number of $50 gifts in exchange for a large decrease in $75, or $100 gifts — we negatively impact the revenue we are generating.

Also, if we decrease the conversion rate, we’re losing donors as a result of our changes — which will have a negative impact on our lifetime donor values and subsequent year revenue figures.

I am proud to report that (at least through this test period) that we did not see a significant decrease in either of the two figures mentioned above.

In fact, you can see an increase in the next level up (“Level 3”) throughout this testing period and a decline in the amount of “Level 1” (the donor level below) throughout.

This tells us that those arriving at the site with the intent to give a gift/donate, are willing to give a gift at our preselected value level, or the next level up, as opposed to the “least expensive” option available on the form.

We’ll continue to run tests, and will be providing sporadic updates on the subject matter as time goes on.

Enjoy.

— GC

Why marketers need to believe that clarity trumps persuasion

When it comes to any marketing, but most specifically fund raising for non profit organizations, we need to force ourselves to remember that clarity always trumps persuasion in our marketing efforts. Transparency and honesty will always prevail.

Some of you may know that I’m a big fan of MarketingExperiments, and more specifically their Director — Dr. Flint McGlaughlin. One of the things that he touts frequently when teaching and educating young marketing professionals is that clarity trumps persuasion.

He argues that marketing professionals do not need to be a genius at persuasion, so long as you can simply take the time to study your processes and achieve genuine clarity.

How many times have you been to a website that cites they’re the “… world leader in __________“, or the “… recognized global leader in __________“?

The odds are that these organizations are not the leader, or recognized at all, but rather they are being led by marketing professionals that are practicing persuasion tactics.

This same approach should be applied to nonprofit organizations, specifically with regards to their fund raising efforts. Think about how you approach your audiences (existing and/or prospective donors). Are you leveraging persuasion or clarity in your marketing themes and messages?

Our friends Jill and Chay were being married a week or so ago and while attending the rehearsal dinner (my wife was one of her bridesmaids), I found myself in a long conversation with the soon-to-be bride’s mother. We had not had a chance to talk much in the past, but in the flow of the conversation I found out that she was a donor to one of the organizations that we here at KMA Direct Communications manage and execute fund raising campaigns for (whose name I will not include in this article).

I thoroughly enjoyed the conversation and her recommendations, as it was essentially a one-off donor survey. She was very candid with me and honest/forthcoming.

In our conversation, she told me that she would highly consider giving more often to the organization if they would simply show her how her (and other) donations were being allocated and what impact they have had. Because this client is so young (not even a year old yet), we have not had a chance to implement a “here is what your dollars are working for” type of message… but, her recommendation follows the theme for this message.

By providing her clarity and insight into how we are using her gift towards furthering our cause and making an impact on the world we live in, she is more likely to give more donations and more frequently.

In this case, there was no example of persuasion (we are, after all, good marketers and follow the principles that we preach … :-)), so I cannot identify how she was dissuaded from providing another gift due to it.

Strategically, we are planning on adding additional clarity into our messaging to share with donors the exact impact their gifts had regarding this nonprofit organization’s cause.

To close, and to echo the thoughts and direction of  Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, I will ask each of you to remember that clarity in your marketing process should always answer three things to your prospective donors:

1. Where am I?
2. What is your offer?
3. Why should I give a gift to you?

If you continue in My word, then you are truly disciples of Mine; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.

– Jesus Christ, John 8:31-32

All the best,

— GC

Preselected values — your donation form’s best friend

Preselected form fields are like driving your potential donors into a tunnel. Yes, they can turn around and leave the same way they came in, but if they convert, they're likely to convert at the level that you've selected for them.

I learned one of the most interesting factoids on a recent trip with my KMA colleagues to visit a valued partner in Salem Web Network a few weeks ago. It was a simple test that they had run, but the results were pretty staggering.

They wanted to run an A/B split test for a campaign on behalf of one of their faith-based non-profit organizations regarding whether or not Salem Web Network could generate better results by driving email traffic to a donation form with a preselected donation value.

In an attempt to not disclose any sensitive information about their test, their client and/or the exact figures that were generated, I’ve decided to share the figures based solely upon comparison against one another.

The first form (the control for the experiment) drove visitors to a campaign-specific landing page, with strong copy calling for donations for this particular cause. On the form, the Salem Web Network team used a standard array of donation form values that were relevant to the audience type. They did not leverage any preselected donation levels on this version.

The second form (the treated version of the form for this experiment) drove visitors to the same exact form as the control in every way, with the exception of the fact that the Salem Web Network team preselected the 2nd tier donation level.

The email marketing list was segmented at random to allow for the results to be to properly measured against one another. The email messages were exactly the same in every way, with the exception (of course) being the call to action link for the “control” email sending visitors to the form without preselected values, while the “treatment” email drove visitors to the form with the preselected value.

So, here’s the big question: Which form do you think performed better?

Based upon the title of this article, I’m assuming you already know. If you guessed the “treatment” version of the campaign, then you are indeed correct.

The “treatment” form outperformed the “control” in every major measurement statistic used to measure success by the Salem Web Network team.

Below are the staggering results:

• 109.86% increase in overall number of donations
• 111.21% increase in form completion percentage
• 143.22% increase in average gift size
• 157.12% increase in donations collected

The Salem Web Network team, being the good marketers that they are, eliminated the “control” version from the campaign plans and rolled the “treatment” version of the campaign out to the rest of the email file list generating a great ROI for their customer.

So, why is it that the “treatment” version of this campaign performed so much more favorably than that of the “control” version? It has everything to do with the psychological mindset of a donor.

Those that visited the landing page from the email list read and consumed compelling content contained in the email message and clicked through to the landing page for more information as to how they could support this particular client’s very noble cause.

Once on the “treatment” landing page, they were given an array of options to select in terms of a gift size. By controlling the form selection by giving them a level that we’d like for them to donate at (while, of course, allowing the donors to select whatever donation level they could afford, or felt compelled to give towards the cause), the Salem Web Network team effectively was able to lead donors to the water … and the donors drank.

This is an extremely important point to remember as a marketer — campaign targets (in this case, prospective donors) want to be lead in a particular direction. By sticking a landing page inside of your website (and showing your global navigation elements), or designing a form that has too many fields, or any other sort of items that can cause a psychological resistance to performing our call to action, we end up losing the sale.

Our landing pages need to be as streamlined and as simple as possible for our visitors to convert. If we do too much to “muddy the waters” so to speak, we provide our visitors with enough of a reason to leave us, rather than perform our call to action.

I will be implementing these tactics into future strategies for our clients moving forward and look forward to writing future blogs about amazing stories of increased fund raising results in the near future.

I hope you enjoyed these geeky numbers as much as I did.

— GC

More about Salem Web Network:
Salem Web Network is the online division of Salem Communications, which began in 1999 with a single website – OnePlace.com. Today, SWN consists of 12 national sites, including the most well-known brands in the faith marketplace, such as Crosswalk.com and Christianity.com. Additionally, more than 50 radio station websites are part of SWN’s platform, which now reaches more than 7 million users every month.