McKinsey boils it down to asking five questions. Or more accurately, five lines of inquiry, each with a host of questions.

If you have reason to be taking an overall evaluation of your fundraising program, these five ‘questions’ provide a pretty decent framework:

1. What exactly influences our consumers (donors) today?

Says McKinsey: “…we find that companies are aware of the growing importance of touch points such as earned media but don’t understand the true magnitude of their effects or how to influence them. The solution is usually to commission research that gets at the heart of understanding the consumer’s decision journey. Such foundational work must shine a light on the touch points and messages that actually influence consumer behavior. Marketers must be ready to use the findings to debunk accepted wisdom and legacy rules of thumb.”

2. How well informed (really) is our marketing  judgment?

McKinsey says: “Marketers often hear that the answer to improving their judgment in this rapidly changing environment is data … We counsel a return to what creates great marketing judgment: start by formulating hypotheses about the impact of changes to your marketing mix and then seek analytical evidence.”

3. How are we managing financial risk in our marketing plans?

McKinsey cites a company that “…set risk parameters that enabled some changes in the marketing mix but limited the total shift in any given year. There was a maximum percentage for spending on unproven vehicles, for example, as well as limits on annual spending reductions in some channels or increases in others. This simple allocation model ensured a gradual move to emerging media, mitigating risk while providing breathing room for piloting, testing, and learning.”

4. How are we coping with added complexity in the marketing organization?

As McKinsey notes: “The exponential growth in marketing complexity seems unending and needs to be managed. We’ve found three things that are always true in managing complexity within the marketing organization. First, you’ll require a number of specialists. You just will. You can’t get the skills and knowledge you need in just one person, and you’re not likely to get everything you need internally. Second, you’ll need somebody who both integrates marketing efforts across channels and communications vehicles and focuses on the bottom line. Finally, you’ll need absolute clarity in processes, roles, and responsibilities.”

5. What metrics should we track given our (imperfect) options?

McKinsey observes (a bit hopefully, I thought): “Metrics are rarely perfect. Yet the volume of data available today should make it possible to find metrics and analytic opportunities that take advantage of your unique insights, are understood and trusted by your top team, provide proof of progress, and lay a foundation for more sophisticated approaches to tracking marketing ROI in the future.”

The higher up you are in your nonprofit’s fundraising food chain (and I include CEOs and Board members), the more useful you will find this article. And if you’re down a few rungs, it wouldn’t hurt your standing at all to pass this up the ladder.

Tom

Were your email appeals ever ‘sexy’?!

I thought not.

But there’s an important point made in this article from Synchronicity Marketing, titled: Bringing Sexy Back to Email: 3 More Ways to Stand Out in a Crowded Inbox. The competition in the inbox is getting tougher and tougher. Your email appeal is competing with some pretty flashy content from other marketers.

Claims the article: “Today, three exciting innovations are bringing video, audio, animation and dynamically-updated content to email and the inbox has never looked hotter!”

It goes on to describe how new open standard HTML used in the most prevalent email receiving environments has opened the door to video displayed directly in the body of an email. Ditto for animations.

In addition, email tools now permit dynamically customized content to be served in the email, based upon factors like current time, location or other business rules defined by the marketer.

Commercial marketers are diving in … possibly making your email appeals look pretty pedestrian. Links to examples of all of the above are provided in the article.

This is not Email 101 stuff, but for you experienced big-time users of email fundraising, it’s probably time to take a look.

Tom

Scripps Howard looked at the most recent IRS Form 990′s for the nearly 38,000 nonprofits and charities that raise at least $1 million per year, and found that 41% of them told the government they raised their funds at no cost.

So much for transparency in the charity sector!

Sure, there are some extenuating circumstances. For example, I happened to stumble across the story as it was told on WPTV in West Palm Beach, FL (online, of course, I’m not allowed vacations). They examined the 990′s of the inter-related Martin Memorial Medical Center, which had no fundraising expenses, but received $3.1 million in ‘contributions and grants’, and the Martin Memorial Foundation, which appears to have spent $1.2 million on fundraising to raise $5.6 million in ‘contributions and grants’, of which $2.8 million was given away (presumably to the Medical Center).

So the Center shows up on the Scripps Howard list of non-reporters of fundraising expense, but that doesn’t tell the full story. Obviously the Foundation is the legally distinct fundraising arm of the Center. Nothing seems terribly ‘wrong’ about that … it’s just a mite confusing to the average donor (who in this case might wonder anyway what happened to the other $2.8 million in contributions that didn’t get given away!).

But such detail won’t be apparent to the average would-be donor around the country, whose takeaway is likely to be quite simple … “Sure are a lot of deceptive charities out there … four out of ten to be exact. It’s not coming out of my wallet!”

Here’s the link to the Scripps Howard study.

Tom

So I had mixed feelings about this recent post by Katya Andresen.

I agree with her main point 1000%: “The single most powerful thing you can do as a fundraiser is to take great care of the donors you have.”

Amen … Amen … Amen!

However Katya then focused almost exclusively on the ‘thank you’ process, providing an excellent checklist on what makes for effective thank you’s.

But to me, ‘caring’ for donors involves a whole lot more than thanking them after the fact. Indeed, your pre-gift behaviour might be even more important … definitely more important than any boilerplate “good manners require a thank you, so here’s yours” wasted effort.

Katya does touch upon some of the other ingredients of  “caring” for donors when she talks about ongoing communications. She mentions:

• Regular reporting to donors on their impact (even better if you can wrap a story around your report);
• Asking donors for feedback (asking for feedback on something specific and meaningful is far better than a tossed off “we welcome your feedback’); and,
• Including donor voices (which signals that you indeed listen to donors and appreciate what they have to say, not just what they give).

I’d add one more, respecting what your donors have already told you — from correct spellings and addresses to contact preferences and programmatic interests.

True donor appreciation begins well before the thank you.

Tom

Within 24 hours our web hosting service crashed and we were unable to deliver an Agitator post on Thursday. Sorry about that!

So, we’ve just got back up and running, hopefully with better ‘infrastructure’.

We had been talking about testing landing pages, and lo and behold …

A short versus long copy test from Which Test Won? Take a look.

BTW, Which Test Won? invites digital marketers to submit tests they’ve conducted, with results, for the edification of us all. Here’s the invite. Entries by May 25th to gain fame and glory. Let’s get some online fundraising tests in the hopper.

Tom

Donors can respond instantly to stimulus from any other medium – a TV commercial to a billboard to your fundraising letter or email appeal.

Considering the ascendancy of mobile devices, David Berkowitz writing in Social Media Insider proposes “Death to Internet Week” (which I gather is this week). Maybe that’s a bit premature.

Much of his article won’t interest fundraisers, but he is making a fundamental point about the movement of digital traffic – especially in the social media space – to mobile devices.

He cites stats that a majority of Facebook users – 500 million – access the service from mobile devices … and the mobile users actually spend more time accessing (441 minutes per month vs 391 for computers). In fact, 83 million people use only Facebook’s mobile services and not its online site.* Similarly, more than half of Twitter users log on via a mobile device.

While the switch to mobile access involves all sites, for social media he argues that the change is occurring even faster for two reasons:

“Mobile devices have always been designed for communication, so the only difference now is that people are using the devices more for data than voice. Younger Americans prefer texting to talking, and that preference line is creeping into older demographics each year.

Social media is increasingly about sharing content. The easiest way to create content – especially anything involving sound, images, or video – is through a mobile device. Once that content is created, it’s now fairly effortless to share it. Sharing content is usually the purpose of creating it. The ends and the means are the same. Why create content? To share it. Why share content? Because it was created.”

But his key point relates to what I would term the ‘readiness’ of your mobile device for instant response … to anything appealing, anywhere, anytime. As he says:

“It’s traditional advertising – TV, radio, print, out of home, in-store – that’s most likely to reach people who have their mobile devices on them. It doesn’t matter what the call to action is; the mobile device gives consumers a way to express their interest by taking action.”

Fundraisers have lot to learn about optimizing their efforts for mobile response. Yet I don’t see fundraisers talking about the subject … including all those consultants occupying the online fundraising space.

Just deadly silence. Maybe they’re too busy texting.

Tom

* Meanwhile, here’s a AP-CNBC poll in which half of Americans think Facebook is a passing fad!

And I asked … What did we miss?

Reader Dawn Stoner could have said … DUH! Landing pages. But she was more polite, recommending as follows:

“Email landing pages!

Since goal completion (donation, action) takes place not in the email but on the landing page, if you focus only on optimizing email content and driving more traffic to a landing page that’s not been extensively tested, you’re missing a major opportunity to maximize conversions.

Similar to emails, there are numerous elements to test on an email landing page. Some of the most important are:

• Headline (how you frame the call to action)
• Main copy (how your value proposition is expressed)
• Photos
• Trust building content (ratings, security seals, etc.)
• Form length & layout
• Button design
• Ask string
• Single page or multi-step
• etc.

Dawn clearly knows what she’s doing, so I’m sure she’d agree with one additional point … if at all possible, drive your respondent to a dedicated landing page, where the ‘close’ message, imagery and gift purpose follows through on the triggering email message.

Understandably, not all organizations have the time/resources to create dedicated landing pages for every campaign. But you should find some occasion to make the effort and test a dedicated landing page against a generic conversion page. You might find it’s well worth the additional investment of energy.

Can anybody share your experience with testing landing pages?

Tom

But it always comes back to … you’ve got to test for your own organization and circumstances.

With so much in email marketing that could be tested, where do you begin?

Here’s a useful approach proposed by Kara Trivunovic of Strongmail, writing in email Insider. Roughly, from easy to hard, she suggests …

1. Subject lines
2. Sending time (Personally, I think this is becoming a non-factor, but as they say … test!)
3. Audience (She’s talking about segmentation … absolutely)
4. Call to Action (Here’s she talking about presentation, not the content. But certainly offer testing should be on the list)
5. Content (Again, she’s talking style … word count, images)
6. Personalization (How much helps? What’s overkill?)
7. Layout (Your basic email template … does it need refreshing?)
8. Entire Campaigns

Not a bad checklist. Anything to add? How about: who is the message from?

Tom

We’ll close out the week with two final bits of mobile news.

Nielsen refers to “America’s New Mobile Majority” reporting that 50.4% of US mobile subscribers now own smartphones. With some interesting skews by ethnicity …

And Pew Research tells us how folks are using their smartphones, referring to a “new culture of real-time information seekers and problem solvers.”

Here’s what smartphone users do with their phones … what Pew terms “”just in time” activities:

“Some 70% of all cell phone owners and 86% of smartphone owners have used their phones in the previous 30 days to perform at least one of the following activities:

• Coordinate a meeting or get-together — 41% of cell phone owners have done this in the past 30 days.
• Solve an unexpected problem that they or someone else had encountered — 35% have used their phones to do this in the past 30 days.
• Decide whether to visit a business, such as a restaurant — 30% have used their phone to do this in the past 30 days.
• Find information to help settle an argument they were having — 27% haveused their phone to get information for that reason in the past 30 days.
• Look up a score of a sporting event — 23% have used their phone to do that in the past 30 days.
• Get up-to-the-minute traffic or public transit information to find the fastest way to get somewhere — 20% have used their phone to get that kind of information in the past 30 days.
• Get help in an emergency situation — 19% have used their phone to do that in the past 30 days.”

Activity by age shows the expected pattern …

Unfortunately, I don’t see ‘Donate’ on that list!

Tom

A question instead.

I’ve just been reading a variety of articles (examples here and here) about improving email performance in the commercial space. Apart from the usual advice about subject lines, timing, length, testing etc, the real rising issue involves the steadily increasing likelihood that your email message is being read on a mobile device … with a variety of drawbacks (from small screen, unless it’s a pad, to the distracted environment the reader is probably in).

I’m wondering what this means for The Agitator’s email feed. How many of you guys are following The Agitator via mobile device? As best I can tell at first glance (I’m now inquiring), Feedblitz can’t report that. I can see that 10% of our subscribers are following via Twitter (only 3% are using an RSS feed), and I presume most of those are using a mobile when they do. [Interestingly, 11% visit our website using a mobile device ... 84% of those using an iPhone or iPad.]

But I can’t get similar stats on the email feed.

So I don’t know how concerned I should be — or not — about the reader-friendliness of The Agitator to mobile readers.

For us, it’s just a matter of trying to provide a better service.

But to digital fundraisers, mastering mobile will have bigger and bigger financial consequences.

Do any of our readers have a sense of what percentage of your email feeds are being viewed via mobile device? And what are you doing about it?

Tom

P.S. One of these articles instructs that 4 lines of body copy — yes, four — represents best practice! Any fundraisers out there following that rule?!