By Joel Nicholson – LemonTree Founder
Are you faced with the common challenges a room of 150 passionate fundraisers shared recently with us at FIA conference 2017? Referring to key words we captured from this workshop (co-hosted with Lisa Miller, Cerebral Palsy Alliance), the challenges can be grouped as follows:
- New blue ocean audiences – younger generations, crowded market place, creating effective message outcomes, brand awareness, what’s the next big thing?
- Donor centric – invest into donor care, ROI vs LTV, targets not set by fundraisers, changing environment e.g. NDIS
- Data/analytics – retention – how?, digital base, older base, acquiring donors for RG, leaking bucket
To help address these challenges, key concepts to consider…
- We do have the ability to touch each group or life stage across the Australian audience. The common channels of DM engaging 60+ year olds, Peer to peer engaging 30 to 50 year olds, and F2F drawing a wide range including the 20s generation, albeit hard to retain, are examples of this.
- Cutting through the blurring of similar brands and growing your fundraising is clearly a challenge. There are over 600,000 registered NFPs in Australia, that is one NFP for every 20 people, which makes us the most crowded competitive industry in the country!
- There is currently limited insight into accurate donor motivations. Many organisations rely mostly 1st party donor data and 3rd party survey or geodemographic data to gather understanding and action communications. The time and resource cost to gather more comprehensive data can be uneconomical for most.
Actions we have in our hands…
- Expand giving in Australia is a reality via a few achievable actions. Firstly, by planting low-cost seeds with youth generations to give, similar to how Commbank taught saving many years ago with piggy banks in schools. Secondly, identifying donor life stages and tracking quarter to quarter movements typically drives new insight and quantifies the gaps. Finally, when embracing our multichannel reality, new experimentation into channels such as live chat and social custom audiences is working when matched to the right fundraising activities.
- Being donor centric is crucial for any organisation that aims for a sustainable future. It starts with a belief that data is your #1 asset and the need to build a strong data framework. This requires a discipline to budget appropriately on areas like data quality and resourcing the right skill sets. We strongly recommend applying a data maturity journey methodology.
- LemonTree Collaborative Analytics – a powerful concept taken from the commercial world that both protects the donor and takes your relationship with them to a deeper more relevant level. The data is deidentified, so can’t be traced back to an individual, however the collaborative effect of behaviours across the NFP industry allow new unique opportunities such as segmenting by motivation, propensity for reactivation, capacity to upgrade or convert, and finally a range of communication efficiency lifts.
Big thankyous for hosting the session go to:
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