You heard that — maybe said it — before.

It occurred to me as I was listening to this Ethan Boldt (Direct Marketing IQ) video reviewing a new carrier format he thinks will light up response rates. One example is from Obama for America 2012; the other is from Gettysburg Museum.

Now, Roger grew up in Gettysburg and belongs in the Museum, but I digress.

Ethan draws our attention to the carrier. Cool. But what about the letter … the reply card … the signer … the dollar string … an insert …  a premium … or any other component that one might test?

Roger has been arguing, with our colleague Kevin Schulman at DonorVoice, that package testing as presently carried out is pretty much a crap shoot. Too many variables are tested simultaneously, and on no basis other than somebody’s ‘conventional wisdom’ or a few hunches, with the result that no one can really tell which elements of the package might really have made a positive difference … and which didn’t.

“Oops … we didn’t beat the control.”

Meanwhile, lots of time and money wasted. And we’re still not sure why.

So Roger and Kevin have developed a methodology for pre-testing potential package components and variations in an affordable but empirically reliable way … before anything goes in the mail.

That’s the subject of their free webinar on this Thursday the 9th at 11:30 eastern. You can still get a seat here.

So before you rush off to test an envelope that uses “four-color, full-bleeds to the edge and in-line printing to the max” … you might want to consider what Roger and Kevin will demonstrate on Thursday.

Tom

Neither will ordering your copywriters, no matter how talented, to “beat the control” be of any help.

After 40+ years as a copywriter, I’m certain the only way to systematically “beat the control” is to stop searching for silver bullets and start addressing the THREE BIG PROBLEMS that plague almost all nonprofit testing. Problems that contribute to the same poor results year after year.

These problem — and more importantly the solutions to them — will be addressed in a Webinar on February 9^th, where we explore and explain a ground-breaking process undertaken by, among others, The American Heart Association, Production Solutions and DonorVoice. I hope you’ll join us. Registration is free for Agitator readers and you can sign up here.

First a confession. For years I’ve been as guilty as everyone else for not facing and addressing THE THREE BIG TESTING PROBLEMS.

PROBLEM #1: Incrementalism to Nowhere. Whether because of aversion to risk or simply out of habit, most testing involves tiny changes (color of envelope, one type of label vs another type, different ask strings, etc). While it’s true that small changes in response can yield meaningful changes on the top or bottom revenue line, it’s equally true that even with these, the vast majority of tests do not beat the control.

PROBLEM #2: The A/B Path to Infinity. The traditional bread and butter testing methodology is the A/B split test. Problem is that neither you nor I will live long enough, nor have enough testing budget, to find a winning combination of elements among countless possibilities. As an oversimplified example, take a direct mail package with 3 components —outer envelope, letter, reply form — and 6 variations for each component.  That’s 729 possible combinations. If an organization does 15 tests a year it will take 48 years to test all the possibilities!

And when you consider a more realistic and complex example that also includes a front or back-end premium (or both), and additional inserts or involvement devices, the possible combinations, for all practical purposes, are infinite. With A/B testing it’s the equivalent of looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack.

PROBLEM #3: Lack of Wisdom in Conventional Wisdom. Almost every direct response fundraiser I’ve met will acknowledge that the process of determining what components and variations get tested is anything but empirical, rigorous or efficient. Typically, the process borders on the haphazard, with an abundance of caution and conventional wisdom thrown in.

It doesn’t have to be this way. As you’ll see in the Webinar, there is a proven, math-based methodology nonprofits can use to pre-identify solid test ideas — those most likely to compete with and beat the control — and greatly reduce time and cost by not mailing test packages likely to perform poorly, and at the same time increase net revenue by increasing volume on likely winners.

The sophisticated direct mail fundraisers at The American Heart Association have been testing this methodology and have uncovered a solution to one of the most aggravating and wasteful practices in direct mail — the mailing of a test package with not one, but numerous test elements.

The practice of giving thumbs up or thumbs down to the entire package, with zero guidance as to whether individual components were well received, happens all the time. Mea culpa!

Certainly some groups may try to read the tea leaves and infer or guess — based on years of experience and past testing — why a package did poorly and what might be salvageable. But clearly, this is a flawed process fraught with layers of personal bias.

If you’re concerned with direct mail — whether in acquisition or on your house file — I hope you’ll join us for an hour in understanding more about the process, while hearing case studies from The American Heart Association and others.

Roger

P.S.  Registration in the Testing Webinar is free to Agitator Readers.  Sign up here.

I’m serious.  Here’s why.

Moneyball, the 2003 iconoclastic bestseller by Michael Lewis  — now  a very popular and acclaimed movie starring Brad Pitt — is an entertaining and effective study in successful and counterproductive behaviors. I recommend it as ‘must reading’ or ‘must viewing’ for all fundraisers, development committees, boards and executive directors.

“It’s the biography of an idea,” says Moneyball author Michael Lewis. It deals not only with wins and losses, but also with the quest of a man who wanted to revolutionize a sport; someone who, in Lewis’ words was willing “to rethink baseball: how it is managed, how it is played, and who is best suited to play it, and why.”

That man was Billy Beane (charmingly played by Brad Pitt) the provocative general manager of the Oakland A’s with unconventional ideas about what a team with limited resources could do to compete with wealthy powerhouses like the New York Yankees. Billy takes on the system by challenging the fundamental tenets of the game. He looks outside the conventions of baseball with its cherished dependence on the intuition of scouts and hires a brainy young number-crunching Harvard-educated economist to help him figure out a better way.

Together they tackle conventional wisdom with a willingness to reexamine everything. Armed with computer-driven statistical analysis long ignored by the baseball establishment, they go after players overlooked and dismissed by the business-as-usual baseball world for being too odd, too old, too injured or too much trouble, but all of whom have key skills that are universally undervalued.

As they forge forward, their new methods and roster of misfits rile the old guard, the media, the fans. Using ‘sabermetrics’ (data analytics) the Oakland A’s found the good players they could afford, while successfully challenging many tenets of baseball’s hallowed conventional wisdom.

And just as in every other specialized field of human endeavor the detractors, the old-guard and the high priest experts argued that this focus on numbers dehumanized the game and ignored the intangibles that only ’trained scouts’ could see.

Although data analytics is an element in the story, that’s not really what Moneyball is about. More broadly it’s a real-life story of innovating to succeed, or as Billy Beane puts it in the movie, “Adapt or die.” Beane the entrepreneur innovating out of necessity.

And so it is in today’s world of nonprofit fundraising, communications and management. More than ever survival depends on innovation, the willingness to challenge old assumptions and, to no small degree, the ability to discover and use better measurements, benchmarks and other metrics that are based on more than myth and convention. Metrics that help us more strategically, accurately and competitively steer a course into a successful future.

It’s more than coincidence that Moneyball begins with a quote from Yankees star Mickey Mantle:  “It’s unbelievable how much you don’t know about the game you’ve been playing all your life.”

Ain’t that the truth. And for this reason over the next few posts in our “Flat Earth Fundraising” series, and with your help and suggestions, I want to focus on challenging some of the conventional wisdom and  fundamental tenants in our craft, while also introducing  you to some innovative approaches that might help us all change the game for the better.

What sacred cows would you like to challenge?

Roger

P.S. Interested in innovation? Then try the webinar I’m moderating that will present a new approach and tool for pre-testing packages, developed by DonorVoice. Seats in the February 9^th  (11:30 EST) Direct Mail Testing Webinar are going fast. Agitator Readers can register here FREE.

This article from The Guardian reports that 10% of prime time TV ads have been developed using neuromarketing techniques … reading the brain’s reactions to creative stimulus in real time.

So, I’m wondering … who will be first in the nonprofit sector to don the EEG headset?

My predictions …

1. It will happen.

2. The first will be a major health-related charity (because they have the money to experiment) or maybe even more likely, a child sponsor agency (because they have the money and they already use direct response TV to prospect for high lifetime value donors).

3. If this tool is akin presently to the mainframe of the ’60s and ’70s, soon there will be the iPad version … with one in every development office!

Other predictions?

Tom

There’s simply too much good stuff going on out there to spend time dithering about whether or when the economy will rebound, for boards to come to their senses … or whatever folks spend their time worrying about. Usually, things over which none of us has any control.

Agitator Readers are special and we sure don’t want them looking back on 2012 wishing “If I had only known” about this innovation or that innovation.

Equally, we have no desire to tout, hype or otherwise go overboard on the latest New, New Thing. Too much of that going around already.

Rather, our goal with the new Agitator Toolbox is to serve up innovations that have been tested and proven. And we’ll also focus on innovative approaches and processes that build on basic and sound fundraising and donor relationship practices.

Some of these tools, applications and case histories will come from our colleagues at DonorVoice, DonorTrends and TrueGivers. Others from serendipitous discoveries we make while attending conferences and reading mounds of research reports. Still others from alert readers. We hope you’ll share your discoveries with us.

Because a large number of Agitator Readers find themselves dealing with direct mail, our first entry for the Toolbox is about a proven tool designed to identify likely direct mail package winners and losers – without having to waste needless time and money on waiting for ink to dry and the postal service to deliver. It’s all explained by Kevin Schulman, the CEO of DonorVoice.

WARNING: You won’t find the Toolbox in your daily email feed; rather it’s a feature that will appear on the homepage of The Agitator’s website along with other features  we hope prove helpful. Features like our Jobs section … an Archive now Searchable by Categories … and some older favorites like Comments, a constantly updated listing of The Agitator Community, and our popular Blogroll.

We’ve added or rearranged others in response to requests and guidance provided by Agitator Readers in our recent survey.

We hope you’ll pass along any discoveries involving tools, applications and processes you think are innovative and helpful. Help us fill the Agitator Toolbox. Together we can explore a fundraising world that’s filled with opportunity.

Roger and Tom

P.S. A Webinar on the Direct Mail Pre-Test Tool will be held on Thursday, February 9 at 11:30 a.m. Eastern Time.  Registration is FREE, but attendance limited on a first come basis.  Sign up here.

So … who are you?

If there’s such a thing as the ‘average’ Agitator reader, you are most likely to be a direct response fundraiser, in ‘the business’ for 4-10 years, working in a charity or nonprofit whose annual revenue is less than $10 million. And you read The Agitator, half of you daily, primarily for its strategic focus.

But that ‘average’ profile doesn’t really give the full picture of what is a rather diverse readership. For example, 47% of readers have been in the biz over ten years … 23% over twenty years. Plenty of experience that group can share with the 53% with less than ten years under your belts.

One way to do that is via more exchange through the Comment feature on our blog. Comments have been steadily rising … but more are better. And you can use our tracking feature to monitor (and participate in) comments on any given post.

And while clearly the core focus of our readers is direct response fundraising — and within that category, direct mail — an almost equal number give yourselves a ‘jack-of-all-trades’ job description. Somewhat to our surprise, there appears to be relatively little ‘specialization’ yet in online fundraising (7% claimed that focus), and relatively few of our readers specialize in major gifts or planned giving (another 7%).

25% of our readers work on the ‘other side’ as independent consultants or in fundraising/marketing firms.

Finally, four in ten of our readers work for nonprofits with revenues over $10 million, with half of those working for groups with revenues over $50 million.

About two-thirds of Agitator posts currently relate to direct response fundraising, with the balance fairly evenly divided between broad strategic issues/trends and other specialty subjects. That seems to track well with our readership.

We discovered that the Agitator blog feed is very faithfully read (50% daily, another 40% 2-3 times a week), while fewer blog readers say they also visit the website regularly for its additional offerings. Seem to be two largely different audiences.

We’ve not been as energetic as we should about enriching the website content (over and above the blog posts). But stay tuned. We’ll soon be launching our Innovation Center on the website, which will offer much more in-depth case studies and resources regarding the use of new fundraising tools and approaches … featuring both our own findings and case material furnished by Agitator readers and partners.

So those are the basic stats. We also received several hundred open-ended comments regarding what we might do better or differently. We still working through those, and will report on what we’ve heard and learned.

Thanks again to all who participated. You’ve helped us immensely and hopefully you’ll see The Agitator improve as a result.

Roger and Tom

But whether you’re new or a relative ‘old-timer’ with respect to social media, here from The Nonprofit Quarterly is an intelligent article that will help you think through what you’re doing — Four Reasons NOT to Use Social Media … and Why to Use It Anyway, by Christine Durand and Kristen Cici.

Their four reasons not to use …

1. It’s a fad — it’s going away soon anyway
2. What’s the ROI? I can’t see that it’s worth it
3. People will say bad things about us
4. Our supporters don’t use social media

Christine and Kristen examine the ‘truth’ behind each of these concerns, but then deliver the case — and sound advice — for doing it right. Hint: very explicit goals and metrics to measure progress against them are critical.

Nice job guys.

Tom

P.S. Thanks to Debra Richmond for the heads-up.

So we thought it fitting to give the last word of the year to an Agitator Commentator.

We picked this recent comment from Steve MacLaughlin at Blackbaud, who talks about the imperative for nonprofit fundraisers to embrace multi-channel fundraising. Use of multiple communication channels reflects the real world of donors … if not yet the real world of some nonprofits!

The bottom line: Different strokes for different folks (donors) is not just some ideal … it’s vital to fundraising success. And the chief obstacles to capturing its fundraising benefits are operational and data silos within organizations.

Here’s what Steve has to say:

“Is it channel conflict or cognitive dissonance? It is sometimes very hard to tell.

There is way too much philosophical debate on which channel should get the credit for the gift. This is mostly fueled by organizational silos or incentives that nonprofits have put in place.

Here’s the reality: Donors are multichannel. They receive messages across multiple channels and they give across multiple channels. They don’t care about your org chart or who gets credit for the donation.

The problem is that many nonprofits are still organized around single channels each doing their own thing, with their own strategies, their own data, their own donors, and their own systems. That’s broken and really costly.

Ultimately, you want to use the right number of channels to drive the right people to take the right action using the most effective and satisfying giving mechanism as possible.

If that means a direct mail piece and a check, then great! If that means a phone call and an online donation, then fantastic. If that if a tweet, an email, a QR code, a website, and a donation for, then so be it.

And if you’re looking at donor behavior across channels, then you will begin to see some trends in what channel mix works best for different types of donors. Oh yeah, did I mention that donors don’t all respond the same way to the same channels? One size fits all approaches are as doomed as single channel tactics.

Statistically speaking, online donors are much more likely to switch to become offline donors. About 32% of online donors will become offline donors compared to only about 3% of offline donors switching channels. Your results may very. Always be testing.

No one channel should get all the credit or all the blame. You succeed or fail based on how well you do these things together.”

Amen.

Happy New Year!

Roger and Tom

P.S. And here’s our New Year’s Resolution … Resolved: No Silos!

The Agitator’s esteemed Department of Analytics carefully measured which 2011 posts received the most readership, which garnered the most comments, and which did both.

The result? Something we’ve always suspected. Agitator readers are discerning, forward-looking , and renaissance-like in their interests. Frankly, we expected no less, but it’s always nice to have suspicions statistically confirmed.

In the Department of Forward-looking, our ‘Flat Earth Fundraising‘ series challenging some of the myths and conventions of our trade won high marks for both readership and comments, as did our report on The Future of Fundraising a summary of the “brainiac” session hosted by Blackbaud and moderated and summarized by Adrian Sargeant in Growing Philanthropy in the U.S.

As part of our expedition into the future we also set up The Agitator Lab and, along with DonorVoice broke important new ground on donor retention and loyalty with the first national Donor Commitment  and Retention Study.

Hundreds of Agitator readers participated in webinars and briefings on the Study’s findings  and more than 15 organizations contributed their files to confirm the findings of the national survey. Not everyone was smitten. Some of the 50 national groups whose level of commitment we measured weren’t happy with their low scores and we probably won’t receive a Christmas poinsettia from them.

Fortunately the majority of organizations studied followed up and many are now undertaking more detailed studies to better understand donor commitment and improve their retention rates. Tom’s post, Wouldn’t You Want to Know? pretty much explains why.

In the Department of  Renaissance-thinking, our crack analysts note that not only are Agitator readers interested in big picture, trend-oriented content, but also devour fundraising tips and insights.   Our post on Mark Phillips of the UK’s Bluefrog  fundraising agency’s dry as toast entry called What We Learned at the IFC is one of the year’s must reads. Running neck in neck with Mark’s insights are our posts on Asking Amounts, Infographics Say It With Impact on the benefits of multi-channel fundraising … and even a piece on a the importance of letter spacing in a letter, titled, Magic Fundraising Machine Boosts ROI.

However, looking ahead, Tom’s post, Are Online Fundraisers Stealing Credit? is coming on fast in terms of most read. Starting a food fight between direct mail and online fundraisers is sure to get attention!

Whatever the reason (our esteemed Analytics Department hasn’t the foggiest idea), both the number of readers and their level of participation through the Comments Section and via email to us reached a record high this year. We are grateful.

And, always mindful of George Bernard Shaw’s counsel  that “the mediocre borrow, genius steals” we’re  thankful for the diligence and insight of folks like Ken Burnett at SOFII … Jeff Brooks at Future Fundraising Now, Katya Andresen at The Nonprofit Marketing Blog and, in fact all the talented folks listed in The Agitator’s Blog Roll. They help fill the larder that nourishes us all.

What do you think was ‘naughty’ or ‘nice’ in this year’s Agitator?

Season’s Greetings,

Roger and Tom

Today I notice this report from comScore saying that 183 million American internet users watched online video content in November for an average of 20.5 hours per viewer.  Within that, 7.2 billion video ads were viewed. Wow!

Then simultaneously, I received an email alerting me to VOA Chesapeake’s online video campaign for this year. It turns out that last year’s 15 day campaign raised $75,000 in one month. This year’s effort has been expanded to five weeks and will include a heavy dose of social media (here’s the Facebook link).

Here’s a description:

“Each week consists of two videos aired through social media and the organization’s website on “Make A Difference Monday” and “Watch it Wednesday,” where (Courtney) Shirley, a former NBC reporter and anchor, takes viewers behind-the-scenes  at the organization providing information and ways individuals can get involved. This year the campaign also features new videos sharing stories of those being helped. “Tell Us Tuesday” encourages social media engagement through current events and questions aimed at engaging the non-profit’s online audience. “Thank You Thursday” spotlights a story of thanks on the Courtney’s Quest blog, created and written by Shirley or other featured bloggers such as the non-profit’s CEO/President and clients. “Fund Friday” targets financial and in-kind donations by fundraising through social media.”

Once again I applaud this effort. It shows that a smaller nonprofit can be just as inventive as the big guys.

And there’s something else to note about the campaign as described. I think it’s going to provide plenty of opportunity for human connections to be made between VOA Chesapeake’s client-beneficiaries, their staffers, and their donors … even though it’s a digital campaign. That’s the contribution of video.

And that, in turn, reminded me of this blurb, from of all places Supermarket News, about the the craving consumers have for human interaction, citing this Harvard Business Review article, The Future of Retail? Look To Its Past. Says author Peter Merholz:

“In our increasingly connected world, people crave authentic human interaction, and the future of retail is going to look a lot more like it did in the more distant past (or still does in markets and bazaars), and a lot less like the bureaucratically-driven mass consumerism we grew to expect in the twentieth century.”

There’s no escaping “mass” fundraising, but campaigns like that of VOA Chesapeake show us how to bring a human dimension into our efforts … and online video has a huge role to play in that.

Courtney Shirley, you deserve a raise!

Tom Belford