A presentation from David Ogilvy on the importance of direct marketing.
As I watched it, I couldn't help but be reminded of the relationship between advertising people and fundraising people today.
Well worth a few minutes of your time.
Thanks to the Jewish Donor Blog.
Hi Mark - it appears to be my day for commenting on your posts :-)
David Ogilvy says in his talk above (paraphrasing) - 'you know to the dollar, that long copy outperforms short copy, that a 2 minute advert is more cost-effective than a 30 second one..." etc. And of course loads of tests have been done on those kinds of things in fundraising for years, and experienced practitioners know the results.
Except that for some reason I (and I don't know how many colleagues have the same experience) seem to end up explaining this over and over again and being asked for proof, often by our seniors. There's no central source that we can all go to to show that these things are true, unless a charity has its own in-house historical database of results.
And so here's a comment I made on ThirdSector back when Lindsay Boswell argued for more practical and applicable fundraising research:
"Here's something I think the sector desperately needs:
a direct marketing response database.
Response rates for appeals at different times of year, via different solicitation media \(i.e. mail, phone, face to face, DRTV, Web 2.0) for different charity sector organisations. In the university sector, we have the Ross-Case survey, that delivers helpful broadbrush indicators of how different universities compare in their fundraising efforts - how valuable would a sector-wide database be? It wouldn't necessarily involve any identifiable data being stored, just appeal stats against an agreed protocol.
Also, we have the excellent www.sofii.org - a fundraising archive of the most effective \(and less effective!) appeal creative from around the world. Could this also be integrated as a kind of creative benchmarking knowledge bank?
You could potentially have a subscription-based database delivering statistically reliable, up-to-date quantitative information, to be used for benchmarking and forecasting.
I'll leave it to my colleagues in other fundraising areas to put their suggestions forward, but as a direct response fundraiser, that's what I think would be incredibly valuable."
Posted by: Adriansalmon | Thursday, June 02, 2011 at 01:54 PM
Couldn't agree more Adrian. We need to have these benchmarks around to assist in developing our strategies, persuading others what works and to enable us to compare our own results against.
Posted by: Morag Fleming | Friday, June 03, 2011 at 09:35 AM
Hi Adrian and Morag
It would be a great resource. Being on the agency side, I get to see loads of results and can tell you that even in these hard times it's still possible to generate an immediate profit on a whole host of recruitment techniques – if it is done correctly.
The only trouble is, how do we share this data? Not many charities want to give away too much information and, as their agency, we respect that decision.
Instead, I write this blog – to show what can be achieved and give direction about what I know is working.
It is of course possible for any agency to benchmark your results. All you'd need is to provide your donor file and they could give you a pretty good idea how you are doing. The only trouble is, that doesn't necessarily help you sell in new techniques and ideas to an uncertain board.
Maybe a formal approach to the IOF is in order? I'll have a chat with a few people and see how it would be received.
Thanks for reading and commenting.
Mark
Posted by: mark phillips | Saturday, June 04, 2011 at 10:31 PM
Mark and Morag - thanks for your responses. I think this would certainly be something the IoF could do as a massive service to its members - and might even be a great incentive for charities to continue their membership year on year, if it was regularly updated and proved useful.
Mark, I totally agree with you about the difficulties of data sharing, but actually the Ross CASE survey of university fundraising (http://www.rosscasesurvey.org.uk/)is quite a good example of how this can be organised within a charity sector, although it's not terribly detailed - aggregate fundraising data is made available publicly without naming individual institutions, and for those who wish to share in more detail a confidential data set with named institutions is shared with those who've signed up to it. Interestingly as far as I can see around 75% of participating institutions have taken part in that more detailed exercise, so it turns out to be very interesting and useful. We're currently working on a similar more detailed exercise specifically around our 'annual fund' (i.e. essentially direct marketing) activity, which will be a lot more granular.
So what would be necessary for the exercise would be a way of categorising charities, by cause area(s), size of budget, donor file, etc. and working out a way of categorising the degree of detail included in appeal data - type of appeal, i.e. cold/warm/public broadcast; medium - telephone, mail, radio, press, etc.; no of solicitations (where poss.), more granular appeal design specifics, i.e. letter length, leaflet (yes or no), response results, financial results, etc. etc. etc.!
It would take a bit of doing to work out how granular the data set should be and also whether it should be historic or not....
...but although it's hard, I think it would also be massively worth doing.
Posted by: Adriansalmon | Monday, June 06, 2011 at 09:01 AM