Earlier this week Reinier Spruit (at Greenpeace International) posted at 101Fundraising regarding what he calls “long term testing”.
He urged fundraisers to consider stretching their testing horizons beyond the ‘quick and dirty’ typical package tests — carriers, teasers, reply devices, etc — to comprehensive testing of entire donor communications streams … his specific target was improving donor retention rates.
His test plan: separate a batch of new donors into segments that were communicated with differently (i.e., different blends of asks and non-ask contacts/engagement, online/offline contacts, etc) over the course of an entire year. Then measure which communications stream yielded the best donor retention.
One could argue that with substantial differences in the communications streams, it would be impossible to determine which aspects/components produced a significant variance, if indeed any resulted.
But you know what … in a way, who cares? The stakes are so huge with improving retention rates that if one path significantly outperformed the other, you’d break out the champagne first, and then dissect and refine the winning stream when sober again!
Undoubtedly there are small tweaks to any retention/renewal programs — that can and should be tested — that will yield worthwhile improvements in results.
But as Roger and I have been harping upon, retention rates suck these days. So I agree with Reinier and his basic point — we need to be thinking about more radical surgery for our donor retention programs.
As I see it, we need to be testing entire treatment protocols, not just the color of the bedsheets.
Tom
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Thanks Tom & Roger!
Totally agree, but may be difficult to accomplish if you’re a small organization. It’s expensive and may not be statistically significant. Can’t wait for the big guys to test.
Reiner is correct, which is why Bill Dodd set up such a comprehensive program for Greenpeace US in the 80s and 90s when he worked at Craver Mathews Smith and successfully grew the Greenpeace US program to more than a million donors.
So a larger question arises. What happens to institutional memory? When Greenpeace decided to bring its program in house in 1995, they abandoned many of the sophisticated strategies and programs that had been established, their donor base declined quickly, the staff who brought the program in house left with 18 months, and they were without the institutional memory about their missing strategies to get back on track.
Because of turnover, I’ve seen plenty of nonprofits try to reinvent the wheel because they have no memory of past failures or successes. Or perhaps the records exist, but to make a mark a new person believes he or she has to put a personal imprint on new strategy and campaigns, rather than update and tweak successful campaigns implemented by a predecessor.
One would only have to dig out the Greenpeace US records of 20 years ago to see an elegant strategy that tested different treatments of several donor segments. Of course, those records no longer exist in Greenpeace, but had the strategies continued imagine where their US fundraising program would be today.
Thanks for telling it like it is (was), Ken!