‘Win Me Back’ – Synergy Fundraising

‘Win Me Back’ – Synergy Fundraising

by | Oct 21, 2019 | Customer Journey, donor-centric, Donor-centricity, Sustainable Fundraising

Guest blog by Adam Drinan, Director – Synergy Fundraising

The best way to win back donors is easy.   Don’t lose them in the first place.  

While it seems obvious, I’m a believer in tackling re-activation proactively but also focussing on the issues that increase donor attrition in the first place.

For that reason – here is my top five tips for winning donors back and my top 5 tips on how to avoid losing them at all!

Tips to win donors back! 

  1. Take real action

Are you watching and waiting or taking action?

We know the most important factor in whether someone will support you again is recency – so let’s say a donor who used to give every few months stops.   What will you do? Wait until they move from a 0-12 segment to a 13-24.

Then what? Wait for them to go 25+

The longer you wait the harder it will be to get a donor back in the fold.   Don’t move donors around in pots that effectively mean nothing!  

  1. Talk to me!

Surveys are magical things. Ever asked donors this question on a scale of 1-10?

“How likely will you support organisation x in the next 12 months?

Anyone that says 7 or less is flat out telling you they aren’t committed – you’ve got an opportunity to take action right there.  

Drop me a line via our website and I’ll tell you exactly what to do when donors answer 7 or less and what to do with donors that say 8, 9, 10. (Yes – even the 10 donors require some love!) 

  1. Taken the wrong road? Turn back!

Did you acquire a donor with a particular type of story, ask or case study?   I’ve seen charities acquire donors on one topic and instantly switch to other things.   It can be dangerous, try going back to what appealed to donors in the first place and see if anything changes.

The perfect storm occurs here when charities change the messaging on donors that haven’t been onboarded well (eg if your welcome/onboarding processes suck changing the messaging too quickly can really hurt). 

  1. Use Data to make better decisions!

If you’re big or small – over time, you’ll see similarities between the donors that attrite and supporters that keep supporting you.  

You’ll see patterns emerge that can start to predict with some accuracy who’s likely to stop supporting you.

If your own data isn’t painting a picture you can get some external assistance. Much like data hygiene this can cost less than the opportunities lost by doing nothing.

Once you can spot the patterns.   You can even take action on HALF of the donors so you can have a control group to see if your actions made any noticeable difference. It’s a game of patience and small tweaks but well worth doing. 

  1. Time to say goodbye?

It may be hard to say, but there are some donors that will be resistant to even your most charming efforts to win them back.  

Peer to peer fundraising is a great example. These events can bring in A LOT of new donors, but the 2nd gift rates are low. For many it’s the thrill of the event rather than the cause that’s the driving factor.

If you can’t offer the next new, exciting thing then they’ll be off. It’s either time to innovate or cut them lose and concentrate your efforts elsewhere.

Fighting a losing battle can cost you more even donors because you’re distracted by a fight you can’t win.    

Tips to reduce attrition. 

  1. Keep your data up to date  

 While data quality might not be sexy it’s essential to minimise what I would call “voluntary attrition”.

Examples of this would be washing your data against the Postal Address File (PAF) from Australia Post.

Some of you might have something like QAS or Hopewiser as part of your CRM – if you do, well done, because you’re verifying addresses in real time when you enter new prospects or supporters to your database.   (Have you ever ordered a pizza or uber eats and entered just a few characters here and there to bring up a perfectly formatted address – it’s technology that’s available to all of us now)

If you’re smaller organisation or don’t have a CRM that’s capable of adding a real time option – don’t worry.   You CAN get someone else to do it for you.   You’ll be able to find out who’s no longer at a certain address, sometimes you’ll even be able to access the new address.   If you’re part of a collaborative like Lemontree you’ll also be able to get insights on donor addresses that are incorrect BEFORE you mail them to find out.   What you can save on printing and postage can easily cover any costs involved.

The sin here is that a lot of charities don’t take either approach, and I’ll never understand why.   Even charities that pay hundreds of to acquire a donor won’t pay a few cents to verify their details – it’s crazy!

Crazier still? Databases without a high percentage of records with an email address and contact phone numbers.  

We know that around 1 in 7 people move every year, but you’ll know yourself that while you might get a new address chances are, you’ll always keep that Gmail you set up 10 years ago and you wouldn’t change your mobile number you’ve had since a Nokia 8350 was the shit! 

  1. Stay Relevant

I’ll cover this one by giving an example of what NOT to do.  

I recently spotted a post on Facebook about an issue that shocked me! It was an animal welfare issue I wasn’t aware of – so I clicked the FB post, ended up on a nice landing page and donated within a few minutes.

That’s when the experience went from hero to zero.   I got a really generic receipt by email – it didn’t even mention the project that caught my attention in the first place.

Even as someone that’s totally aware that small gifts aren’t tagged, I’d still like my communications to talk about my first gift and that I was helping the project that inspired me to click through and donate.

Worse still, since that donation they’ve gone out of their way to talk about everything BUT the issue that encouraged me to act.

Now someone at the organisation in question is probably wondering why so many donors only given once but who’s really to blame?

  1. Get to know me and FAST!

 It’s WAY harder to say no to a friend than it is a complete stranger, right?  

If donors feel they have a genuine two-way relationship it’s much harder for them to ignore your last ask, that newsletter or let your next phone call go to voice mail.

Ask donors questions, find out about their lives, their dreams and their motivations. Most people give to express their values, find out what those values are!

Do you get donors calling you pro-actively to update details? Guess what, they are your most engaged donors because they have a golden opportunity to walk away from you, but they don’t want to.

That call is an invaluable part of donor bequest scoring too – so make sure you flag anyone that contacts you to change their details! 

  1. Don’t let your processes and assumptions dictate your messaging – it’s really dangerous!

 You see a lot of this

“We haven’t heard from you in a while”

Let’s say a donor traditionally donates at Christmas time but they miss a year – we’ll probably say that donor hasn’t given for 2 years and it lapsing or lapsed, when in reality they didn’t respond once and who knows why – they could have had an expensive car repair, a medical procedure, they may have not even been in the country (which is just one reason why respond by dates can be a problem at certain times of the year!)

But the bottom line is that we’re treating them as a lapsed donor, but they don’t see that at all – in fact, the speed in which life passes by – that donation two years ago and often feel like it was recent.

If you treat a donor like they’ve abandoned you – it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy

Be careful what you say and like life in general, thanking people for what they HAVE done will always be received better than telling people where they came up short.  

  1. Premiums

Love them or hate them, if you used them for acquisition and then you stop, expect your attrition rates to increase.  

A premium-incentivised supporter has a different relationship with your organisation than one that’s giving to express their personal values or with a strong personal connection.

If your recruit with premiums, you’ll likely always need to incentivise the relationship in some way. The idea that you can wean a donor off premiums with an amazing case study sounds great in principal, but rarely works in practice.

If you’re in this situation, the question you need to ask yourself is ‘Is this worth the cost/resource to keep going?’.

A simple look at the longer-term ROI will give you the numbers you need to decide what to do.

Renew your donors now!

Renew your donors now!

by | Aug 8, 2019 | Sustainable Fundraising

The cost of acquiring donors is 5 times the cost of retaining existing donors.

Retain just 5% of your donors and donations increase by 25%.

I’ll repeat that: the cost of acquiring donors is 5 times the cost of retaining existing donors. Retain 5% of donors and you’ll increase donations by 25%.

Taking a longer term perspective, Dr Adrian Sargeant says “a 10% increase in donor retention can increase the lifetime value of your donor database by 200%.”  

With projections like these, it’s surprising that focused investment in the ’Renew Me’’ stage of the donor relationship journey, is often limited in comparison to other strategies designed to create and retain long-lasting donor relationships. 

When understanding donors is the first step to renewing them, why are we not  deepening donor understanding not a strategic priority to drive better results?  

A fundraisers retention conundrum we commonly experience across our LemonTree member organisations is: “do you invest in better measurement on the impact of your fundraising activities and identify those donors at risk” OR “do you invest your limited resources on the likely low hanging fruit and measure later?” A chicken or egg dilemma. 

Our March 2019 Donor Centricity Collective (DCC) survey on the biggest challenges fundraisers face showed a resounding focus on retention, retention, retention! So why is deepening donor understanding through scoring and segmentation, not given the time and effort it deserves?  

Let’s drill into our conundrum. 

I really like a fundraising strategist from the US, Mark Rovner,  when he simply answers effective retention as “Authentic engagement: No bullshit like tote bags or fake emergencies. Deeply understanding why the donor supports you and delivering on her (or his) expectations. Superb content. Great donor service.” 

 So why is deepening understanding and segmenting donors accordingly often seen as a will-do-soon rather a must-do-now?  

We believe this can be answered by examining the 4 main fundraising levers:

  1. Channel
  2. Time
  3. Message
  4. Audience 

Channel:

Research tells us the Channel lever  receives the biggest focus, primarily because the channel list is long: eDM, mail, call centre, face to face, peer to peer, social, SEO, SEM, etc..

 Lots of time goes into deciding which channels to utilise and how much to spend.

 Timing: 

The timing lever also takes up a lot of decision focus. What time of year; what time of day; how much time to spend?. Then coordinating and executing timings with mail houses, call centres, and tech platforms takes more time!

Message:

After the first two levers, the message lever is often not leveraged fully. Messages become all-purpose to all-donors. One size fits all. Why? Whilst the biggest perceived barrier to varying messages is the perceived cost, we believe that an even bigger barrier is the depth of donor-understanding and therefore the capacity to segment donors and deliver a message that’s for more targeted – and relevant – to them. 
Which leads to the fourth lever…

Audience: 

Typically, when it comes to segmenting an audience, static segmentation are all that time, budget and/or donor understanding allows . As a result, the same message goes out to all, aside from perhaps a small number of higher value groups such as major givers, frequent givers, and bequests.

And herein lies the opportunity: because how can donors be renewed and retained without changing priorities or operating rules to start with audience understanding and working backward from there? (Refer great book by Eliyahu Goldratt who wrote “Theory Of Constraints”).

Certainly in the commercial world linking the engagement/attrition score closely to the customer journey is a real differentiator to most engagement/attrition outcomes. Why should this not be the same for NFPs?

How to renew donors 

Firstly flip your thinking and turn your planning process upside down to start with understanding your audience: your donors. This is the “Connecting” the first part of our sustainable fundraising CCC model.

Machine learning is at our fingertips now. Start scoring your donors beyond Recency, Frequency, Value (RFV ). Use machine learning to deepen your understanding of what motivates your donors. Then apply these insights to predict who is at risk and who values your cause the most.

Renewing your donors becomes much more viable if you can widen your understanding of them through collaboration across each cause your donors have a relationship with. “Collaboration” – the second stage of our CCC model-increases your breadth of understanding, enabling you to make more informed, targeted decisions about how to build, retain and renew your relationship with your donors.

A final action – and third “C” in the LemonTree model – is to truly “Care” about your donors by acting on your enhanced understanding of them. For example, saying “Thank You” is often cited as the most powerful communication you can deliver to a donor – how can your “Thank You” message be said in a way that will mean something specific to them so you truly renew your relationship?

If you can successfully renew your donors and achieve a 10% increase in retention, you’ll be well on your way to increasing the lifetime value of your donor database by 200%…and that could make a world of difference.

Protecting your donors and your sustainability, our conversation with FIA

Protecting your donors and your sustainability, our conversation with FIA

by | Jul 11, 2019 | Donor-centricity, Sustainable Fundraising

Many of us work in this sector to make a positive impact on society. But has the nature of fundraising in today’s digital world led to a proliferation of communication and around privacy concerns that sometimes challenge our core beliefs?

Have the negative experiences of our overseas counterparts; the rise of “leaking donor bucket” syndrome; – and the declining ability to acquire donors via traditional channels got you wondering where things have gone awry; what can we learn; and what can we do differently?

On our mission to create more sustainable giving practices in Australia, these questions and concerns are certainly at the forefront of our minds here at LemonTree Fundraising.

That’s why we recently sat down with the FIA’s Head of Code and Regulatory Affairs, Scott McClellan, to discuss best practice donor protection and others trends across the industry. Some really interesting market research was discussed and some powerful areas of focus resulted from our conversation. 

Handling Donor Preferences

Earlier this year FIA’s Code Authority commissioned mystery shopping of 30 FIA organisational members to assess their compliance with the Code. Donations were made in April via telephone and website.

To date no breaches of the Code have been recorded. Nevertheless, the monitoring found that most charities that received the unsolicited donation by telephone did not take the opportunity to ask the donor about their preferred method for receiving future communication.

By contrast, a clear majority of charities contacted via their website did enable the donor to choose their preferred method of future contact.

Similarly, receipts sent to donors generally had no option for the donor to alter their communication preferences. While there is no requirement to provide a communications preference choice to current donors, it is considered best practice to regularly offer it in the context of donor care.

Scott also mentioned “a current focus of Code monitoring is the treatment of donors who may be in vulnerable circumstances. This is a tricky area, demanding compassion and good judgement from fundraisers. The Code itself requires fundraisers, when they identify such a person, not to accept a donation.”

FIA has published a practice note to help members identify donors who may lack capacity to make a decision to donate due to their vulnerability.

Communication Compliance

Other topics discussed with Scott, included the changes we are seeing in the awareness of and preparation for the governments Digital Platforms Enquiry, Consumer Data Rights and Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

As these privacy-driven controls begin to tighten, both the FIA and LemonTree Fundraising have observed mixed views across fundraising on high vs. low frequency of communications and which is in the best interests of the donor.

Interestingly, in what appears to contrast the increasing privacy-driven compliance measures, Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has declared overall communication complaint levels from Australian consumers are in decline. However this could be due to the mass reduction in telemarketing of the financial sector, as opposed to changes in fundraising telemarketing practices.

What did we conclude?

Protecting vulnerable people is getting better and easier with the ability to apply ‘vulnerable propensity’ scoring across your donor base and equip your donor support team with a flag on your CRM for the next time they communicate with a potentially vulnerable donor.

When it comes to the frequency with which you communicate with your donors, one size does not fit all. It’s no longer enough to be compliant with government and industry regulations; you need to be compliant with your donors. Begin capturing communication preferences on your donors as part of your opt-out process. Often they are more frustrated, rather wanting to stop giving completely.  Check out our LemonTree Fundraising preference/opt-out capture page as an example.

Finally, conversations increase learning which leads to change. We each play a part in the future of the fundraising industry; it’s important that we continue to share our experiences and learnings so together we can create more sustainable giving practices in Australia. We look forward to continuing our conversations with Scott and the FIA and encourage each of you to tap into your passion for social good and contribute to the discussion. Comment below or reach out to Scott at smcclellan@fia.org.au or myself joel.nicholson@lemontree.com.au directly.

How to fundraise in our diversified donor world

How to fundraise in our diversified donor world

by | May 30, 2019 | Sustainable Fundraising, Trust Economy

With tax appeals out and the fundraising focus now firmly on the Financial Year or second-half planning, the most common conversations I’ve had with peers over the past two months have been centered around:

● traditional fundraising getting harder

● active donor bases declining; and

● how to re-establish and grow a truly engaged donor base in our diversified donor world.

Other repeated challenges shared from our recent DCC pulse check have been around RG attrition; diversifying income and retention, retention, retention! All of which demonstrates why we need to attract and grow lasting relationships through a deeper understanding of donors and their motivations.

Diversified Motivations:

One way to better understand your donor relationships – and how they work best in a diversified fundraising world – is to study each stage of the donor relationship through the lens of the Endear Me stage.

Research from around the world on practical fundraising experiences to help endear donors suggests:

“Share with them your areas of success, so you endear them to your charity, not just the cause you support.”

“Even our flaws can endear us to our supporters.”

“Surprise them in ways that will make sure they never forget you and endear them to your organisation”

Earlier this year, we spoke to Dr Adrian Sergeant about the Endear Me stage of the donor relationship (read the full Q&A). He suggested endearment may not come from reminding your donors of the values of your cause and what you stand for, but rather from reminding individual donors of:

● Why they donated in the first place – their motivation;
● How they felt when they did; and
● How they identified themselves when making the emotional decision to donate.

At LemonTree, we understand it can be difficult to identify the motivation behind a donor’s decision to donate given survey data is typically limited to a small percentage of your donors. Instead, it’s worth considering cause-based motivations or time of year motivations as another way to understand and endear your donor.

What are your donors motivated by or identifying with when they give?

Some actions to consider in our diversified donor world:

TIP #1
Invest time into researching each of the relationship stages of your donors and how you can best understand and create most value at each stage.

TIP #2
Invest deeply into understanding your donors through improving data accuracy and leveraging predictive collaborative insights that are now available to you. As a start, rate your organisation on each stage of the 8 step Donor Centric Roadmap (download your FREE copy!)

TIP #3
Invest your resources into more ongoing relationship building programs and less stop-start campaign communications. Like most relationships, donor relationship growth happens with consistent effort. It also frees up your time in our diverse donor world when many programs are quietly and viably running in the background.

TIP #4
Consider your answers to our 3 Cs framework (see how we do it!):

LemonTree Fundraising - Connect - Collaborate - Care

● How do you CONNECT? – how do you seek to understand your donors more deeply?

● How do you COLLABORATE? – how do you strive to understand a wider cross-section of donors?

● How do you CARE? – how do you show your donors you value them?

TIP #5
Finally, ask yourself what beliefs, motivations and/or identities your donors relate with and how you can use these to increase endearment to your organisation.

For more information, or to book a free Donor Discovery Session please complete the below:

Book a free Donor Discovery Session

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How to Endear your Donors: Insights from the Commercial World for the LemonTree community

How to Endear your Donors: Insights from the Commercial World for the LemonTree community

by | Apr 12, 2019 | Customer Journey, Donor Endearment, Sustainable Fundraising

Speaking at our last Donor Centricity Collective (DCC) event, Mark Jenkins, CEO of Resurg Group asked the audience a series of thought-provoking questions designed to help them endear more donors to their cause. LemonTree asked Mark to share those questions with you here to get you thinking about endearing your donors.

 

At Resurg, we’ve managed to turn the concept of endearing customers on its head. Instead of us trying to endear them, we have created an environment where our customers actually endear themselves to our business. We’ve achieved this through a relentless focus on the client relationship journey and addressing a few key questions through that lens:

  1. What combination of events will almost guarantee endearment?

You can’t expect immediate endearment. Nor should endearment be treated as a one hit wonder. However, if you can work to successfully engage your customers – or donors – across a series of interactions it will ultimately lead to endearment.

  1. What does ‘endear your customers / donors’ mean to you?

Endearment can mean different things to different people and different organisations. For Resurg, a truly ‘endeared’ customer:

  • Owns their relationship with us
  • Feels empowered in the relationship

We know that if we can put our customers in the driving seat of their engagement with us, then we simply facilitate their endearment to the product and to Resurg.

3: How can your customers / donors ‘own’ their relationship with you?

We have worked hard to make our product all about the customer. It wasn’t always like that. For a long time, it was all about the product. Whilst the product worked, our customers weren’t fully engaged with it. They were passive participants.

We wanted our customers to be active with our products. So we found a way to make the product far more about them and their needs. We introduced benchmarking.

The benchmarking function indicated what other customers were achieving with our product and how. The customers themselves were demonstrating the potential value of the product to each other. We weren’t involved. Our product simply showed the different benchmarks for different metrics. In doing so, we created a common connection between our customers, aligning them more closely with people just like them and putting them in control of their journey with us.

 How can you make your cause more about your donors? How can you incorporate them into your cause, so they feel a greater sense of ownership in the charity from the outset? 

4: How can you empower your clients / donors in their relationship with you?

We recognised that we were pushing a lot of information out to our customers. Sometimes this was well received; other times not. We realised that if we simply allowed our customer to set their own criteria for how and when we reached out to them and with what content, they would engage with it far more readily because they had requested the information. They were in the driving seat. They were empowered.

What sort of engagement criteria can you offer your donors that could help trigger their giving?

Reflect and refine:

Reflecting on our own journey, perhaps the greatest success we’ve had when it comes to customer endearment has been facilitating the connections between our customers. We invite them to become part of a network – a performance group – where they can openly communicate with and learn from their peers, as well as share their own insights and best practices. Together, they influence and shape each others attitudes, decisions and behaviours.

Again, Resurg is not involved in these group. But simply by creating a platform for connection and facilitating these relationships, we have built an ambassador network within our customer base. A tribe of people who endear each other to the Resurg products and business.

I encourage you to consider how you can leverage the power of the peer-to-peer donor network to help influence individual donor attitudes and behaviours. For example, how can you harness the power of LemonTree’s DCC community and the collaborative insights of its members?

Remember, endearment does not stem from a single occurrence. Create a journey for your donors where they own – and feel empowered in – their relationship with you, not the other way around. Focus on a combination of events and interactions, and you will be rewarded with their endearment.

As one of Australia’s finest business intelligence, performance management and analytics specialists, Resurg provides businesses with the tools for smarter decision-making by integrating their forecasting, data analysis and reporting into a single platform.