queer ideas

Five things we learned at the IFC

Following a very enjoyable few days at the International Fundraising Congress in Amsterdam, I've put together my key take aways from the event.

1. There's loads more to data than just numbers.

Chuck Longfield, Blackbaud's chief scientist, has a job where he can crunch millions of numbers from a huge range of charities. If a question pops into his head, it doesn't take him long to find the answer.

In his session, Chuck shared some of his findings which included the following juicy nuggets…

• If someone calls you to change their address they are TEN times more likely to leave you a legacy (or upgrade, or set up a regular gift or anything else you might ask them to do).
• Donors who tend to give uncommon amounts (e.g. £32) are much easier to upgrade than those who give common amounts (e.g. £25).
• Donors get hooked on giving amounts. After 4 years they are 80% more likely to stick to their preferred amount rather than increase their gift (rising to 90% after 5 years).
• Calling a donor to thank them (whether you speak to them or just leave a message on the answer phone) can increase their next year's gift value by up to 40%.
• Misspelling someone's last name can decrease gift size by up to 12%.

2. Old school communications are the best for building deep engagement

AJ Leon is Chief Maker of Trouble (that's a real job title) at Misfit Inc. in New York. AJ told a story of how he helped raise $72,000 for a total cost of $250. He included a few key insights too...

• Stories have to have conflict. If Frodo had just skipped into Mordor and tossed the ring into the volcano, no one would have cared.
• The tools of fundraising are changing, but the principles of engagement are the same.
• People don't automatically trust big brands any longer - including charity brands.
• Never let your organisation get in the way of a good story.
• When launching a campaign always ask which bloggers you can link up with.
• Social media has made donating even more annoying.
• Management boards kill great ideas.
• Things are moving so fast that spending time writing a ten year strategy is worthless.

You can see AJ's presentation here. And you might like to read Paul de Gregorio's thoughts on it here.

3. The recession is here to stay

Tony Elischer (amongst others) pointed out that the recession is going to be sticking around for a long-time yet but that was no reason to accept poor results. He highlighted the fact that over 60% of donors only give once, describing it, quite rightly, as shameful...

"That's not the fault of people who are giving. That's our fault. We're still not getting that second gift."

He showed how organisations like Christian Aid have bucked the trend by fundamentally changing their fundraising offer, recruiting donors by focusing on work that donors want to support and allowing them to give in the way that works for them.

4. Rubbish in = rubbish out

Direct Mail is working. Digital is working. Mobile is working. The trouble is they don't work if the underlying idea, content and offer is rubbish.

5. Everything on the internet is just speeded up direct marketing

Beate Sorum of the Norwegian Cancer Society put together a great presentation that tackled one of the ongoing myths of the fundraising world – that digital fundraising is magic. It isn't.

What was particularly interesting about Beate's presentation was the distinction she made between communicating online and through a press ad or DM pack. The difference is one of size. And that's the problem...

"On the internet we can put up any crap...so we forget to prioritise, we forget to ask and we forget to rigidly monitor and analyse".

Her advice was that we should re-learn our direct marketing and remember to test what we ask for, how often we ask and who we ask.

Or in other words, we need to give donors an opportunity to do something they want about something they care about.

You can see Beate's presentation here.

Show donors what they can do. Not what they can't

When it comes to creating appeals, there is a natural assumption that high numbers generate high levels of income.

If many thousands of people are at risk or in danger, logic would dictate that donors will give more money than if just one person is affected.

And this seems to be the practice that many charities follow. Take a look at any emergency ad and you'll probably see the size of the task featured in the first paragraph – 280,000 people forced from their homes, thousands buried alive and 23 million facing life threatening shortages of food.

These ads, from three great organisations probably raised significant sums. But there is a growing body of research that shows featuring such large numbers serves to suppress response rates, perhaps reducing the effectiveness of these essential fundraising tools.

By presenting unimaginable levels of need we make people feel helpless. Such large numbers don't convey need or increase urgency. They simply serve to remind donors of the people that they can't help.

Combating helplessness is one of the key need states that donors experience. And by helping them tackle it, we can dramatically increase the amount of money we raise.

I learned this lesson back when I worked at ActionAid. We were running a new set of ads to recruit child sponsors. One execution that had performed well in research wasn't working on the page. It featured a photograph of a young Nepalese girl, Kumari, holding her baby sister.

We swapped the photograph to another of Kumari and ran the ad again. This time she was on her own. The response rate immediately hit the expected target.

Same design, same copy, same child.

I wasn't 100% sure if it was featuring just Kumari that had improved the response rate – facial expression had a role to play too. But subsequent tests and research demonstrated the effectiveness of focusing on one person in appeal communications.

Dr. Paul Slovic offers some examples of these studies in a fascinating webinar from The Communications Network.

In it he presents the "Collapse of Compassion" model to describe the reduction in response rates when the number of people in need of help is increased.

One study that he refers to sums this up rather well. Three groups of people were each presented with a different communications asking them to help Save The Children.

• A factual letter full of statistics...

Food shortages in Malawi are effecting more than 3 million children.

• A letter about one girl, Rokia and the impact of the food shortages on her.

• A combined approach featuring both the statistics and Rokia's story.

The factual letter generated an average gift of $1.14, Rokia's letter generated an average gift of $2.38 and the combined approach generated $1.43.

He also describes a Swedish study that found the difference between featuring two children instead of one amounted to a reduction in income of approximately 15%.

There is plenty more to learn by listening to the complete webinar. Not least, you'll hear Paul's advice on what charities can do to improve their appeal results.

And that can be summed up very simply – show donors what they can do – not what they can't.

By focusing on the magnitude of problems we push donors away. By helping them combat their feelings of helplessness we will engage and involve them.

Click here to read more about the complete set of donor need states.

The misdirected power of the brand

Some people think I don't like branding. They are wrong. I love great brands. The trouble is that I don't think many charity brands are very well managed and there are a growing number of pieces of research that serve to confirm my beliefs.

I thought I'd share a few of them after reading the recently published Charity Brand Index which features the UK's top 100 charity brands.

It was compiled using survey data from 3,032 people, who were asked about their awareness of charities and the impression they had of them.

"Respondents were asked about their awareness of 30 charities randomly selected from the list of 150. After highlighting those they were aware of, they were then assigned a maximum of five charities to focus on in the main survey. Respondents were then asked their views on these 150 charities, the metrics subsequently making up the top 100 ranking being: relevance, distinctiveness, familiarity, trust and impression.

‘Consideration to donate’ acted as a proxy for all these measures, which were then all multiplied by prompted awareness to ensure that charities which were loved by a few, but had low awareness, did not achieve a disproportionate rank."

The top ten were:

Macmillan Cancer Support
Cancer Research UK
NSPCC
RSPCA
BBC Children in Need
British Heart Foundation
Comic Relief
Marie Curie Cancer Care
RNLI
British Red Cross

Macmillan, with voluntary income of less than a third of Cancer Research UK, were surprise winners. Their high familiarity score and an extremely positive impression of the brand lifted them clear of the competition.

But what does all this actually mean? What is a brand actually worth?

A study published earlier in the year attempted to estimate the value of American charities. They gave top spot to the YMCA (a charity that doesn't even feature in the UK list) with a worth of almost $6.4 billion. The charity with the best brand image was the American Cancer Society.

A different set of criteria was used to build the US list. They included such factors as size of budget, potential for future growth, volunteer numbers and news coverage in their analysis.

These differences in approaches seem to back up John Murphy's thoughts on brand valuation. John founded global branding consultancy, Interbrand, and has a refreshingly honest opinion on the subject...

"Brand valuation is a 'social science' not a 'physical science'. Valuation opinions will always be just that – opinions."

For me, any assessment of charity brand value has to be based on the additional income it will help generate. The fact that someone knows that a charity exists or answers a specific need is worthless if it doesn't translate to the bottom line. And 'propensity to donate' doesn't quite cut the mustard for me.

It's why reports and studies that inflate the value of brand building activities are so dangerous. Branding is seen by a growing number of people as a universal panacea to a charity's ills and there is precious little evidence to back up their belief.

Branding just doesn't seem to be solving the deep-seated problems the sector faces.

Joshua G2 undertake research into which brands are most loved and hated by the British public and have included charities in their studies. Last year they found that Cancer Research was most loved (followed by Macmillan, RSPCA, NSPCC and PDSA) and Christian Aid was most hated (followed by War on Want,  Oxfam, The Salvation Army and RSPCA). Results for 2007 are here.

But what's interesting is to try and uncover why charities engender these emotions.

Luckily GMI / Mintel did their own study to try and uncover the attitudes underling these emotional reactions (also published in 2008). They assessed charities on a variety of characteristics. These included, trust, social responsibility, pride, innovation, great service, good value, good reputation, distinctive image, consistent high quality and caring for the environment. These were mapped out on radar charts. I've reproduced those for Cancer Research UK and Christian Aid. The darker shape represents the scoring for the charity, the lighter shape is the average for all charities they analysed.

You can see that Cancer Research UK scores very highly on trust and on good reputation. Christian Aid in comparison does very badly on both indices. But what is jaw-droppingly surprising is just how low both charities score on great customer service. But they are not alone – the fact is that every other charity they looked at also scores poorly in this area. Seven other radar charts are posted here (including Friends of The Earth, NSPCC, RSPCA, The Royal British Legion, The British Heart Foundation, Save the Children and Oxfam).

When asked about how engaging these brands were, the results were as shocking. Cancer Research UK was best with 12% of those surveyed describing the brand as engaging. The majority scored in single figures.

And it doesn't take a genius to understand why. Brand guidelines are almost always about the charity. Phrases such as we are brave, we are outraged, we are effective, we are honest and we are just dominate these booklets. And far too often, brand policing is solely about ensuring these sentiments are included in copy. 

What this process does is suppress the focus on generating engagement with donors. A hand typed and signed letter on poor quality stock that talks about what the donor has achieved is rarely going to appear in a set of brand guidelines, but in comparison with a branded corporate style mailing, I know which pack is going to raise most money AND bring the donor closer to the charity. And it is only through reducing the distance between the charity and the donor that we are going to engender real understanding and solidarity.

The days of the self-congratulatory brand are over. We must acknowledge that our brands live solely in the minds of our supporters. Research shows that the majority of people still trust and regard most charities highly. The role of any brand strategy should be to tackle key weaknesses and that includes managing the brand experience as well as influencing brand understanding and values. By doing so, we will take a huge leap forward in managing the ongoing problem of dis-engagement and the accompanying attrition that afflicts so many charities.

My recommendation is we do this by answering the needs of donors. If you haven't seen my posts on donor needs, I'd recommend you look at this.

By engaging and serving those who support us, attrition is being tackled and significant additional funds are being generated – even in times of recession.

Finally, if this has got you thinking, I'd recommend that you read a recent post from Aline Reed on her blog, Bluefrog Creative  where she shares some of her thoughts on brands that generate feelings of love.

My seven stages of Twitter

You must have heard about Twitter. If you are already a user, you'll probably be able to relate to much of my experience. If you haven't yet joined, hopefully this will help you find out what lies in store for you.

First a few notes for the real beginner.

• A tweet is a micro-blog. You have 140 characters to share a thought. People use URL shorteners so that they can post links. 
• A follower is someone who reads a twitterer's tweets. When you follow someone, their tweets are automatically delivered to you as they are posted. 
• The @ symbol before a name is simply there to define the name of a Twitter user. I'm @markyphillips for example.
• The # (hashtag - it's alt 3 on a mac) defines discussion topics to enable simple searches. #followfriday for example is the hashtag given to the day each week when recommendations on people to follow are shared (you will have to sign up to see what is happening on followfriday).

Now, back to my seven stages...

Dismissal

I first heard about Twitter a couple of years ago. I'm not sure who told me about it first. It was either @rydesign or @breathingsince.

At that point it looked to me like some sort of mass texting service that you could use to let your friends know about the state of your hangover, what you'd had for lunch and what particular song was playing on your itunes.

I thought it seemed like a load of rubbish.

Signing up

After hearing and reading a few news stories, I finally signed up in February. I made some inane comments along the lines of those described above. My opinion hadn't really shifted much.

Fiddling

I started following a few people and organisations outside my network of friends and got a few follows back. Being a newbie, I didn't quite understand the rules. I did a small number of business type tweets that referenced queerideas.co.uk and Bluefrog along with other sites and news that I thought might be of interest to charity fundraisers. 

Interest

@AlineReed let me in on @serafinowicz's use of Twitter and Just Giving to raise £5,000 for Comic Relief.  I blogged on this back in the middle of March. The fact that someone was using it for fundraising suddenly lifted Twitter out of the realms of a disjointed stream of consciousness into something that charities could use to engage donors and raise funds.

Oooooh I thought (in a rather Frank Spencer way).

Engagement

I started following 'hard core', looking for all Twitter streams that interested me. From social networking specialists, through to charities, fundraising, advertising, Arsenal, news, celebrities and politicians. I gained new insight into charity fundraising, uncovered fantastic pieces of psychological and social research, discovered great new organisations like herorat.org from @AmandaSanter and started to interact with CEOs of charities like @Kjer from FORGE. 

I started being braver about my own tweets too. I saw that personal comments helped to turn organisations into people who I grew to like. Rather than just keeping it to newsy items, I started to joke and returned to a few of the tweets that I'd dismissed weeks earlier. I even started to swap restaurant reviews with @causeperfect and we have been talking about setting up a 140 character restaurant review twitterstream called #wowchows (credit to Jackie for the name).

I also moved from using the twitter website to TweetDeck for my computer and Tweetie for my phone. These make it easier to communicate with large numbers of twitterers.

Conversion

Recently my brain has started changing. I am now thinking in 140 character chunks and I'm much more economical when explaining issues. 

What has been the biggest surprise is that it has changed how I give to charity. If I like the people who are tweeting, I'm much more likely to give to them. As a result I'm now a donor to the Lake Simicoe Conservation Foundation in Canada through @KimberleyCanada, Borneo Orangutang Survival Inernational through @DerekHumphries, Charity:Water through @scottharrison and as I've mentioned already, to FORGE through @kjer. I've even got around to re-starting a direct debit to Amnesty International UK because of the tweets from @SusanneUre from Amnesty in Canada.

Smaller charities in the UK have also caught my attention. Organisations like @HearingDogs and @bullyinguk are in the big league on Twitter being regularly recommended on #followfriday. The biggies such as @theNSPCC and @christian_aid are still comparatively quiet and follow very few people.

Twitter is another enormous step in the globalisation of charities. It is changing the ground rules on a weekly basis. Just because I live in the UK, for example, doesn't mean I have to support a charity based here. The feedback I get from my Twitter friends is what is important to me. 

I can see that more of my donations will be given through the way I interact with them on Twitter. Next on my list is going to be the sponsorship of a Lion Guardian through Wildlife Direct - brought to my attention directly by the CEO – @paulakahumbu.

Evangelist

Of all the social networking vehicles I've engaged with, Twitter has been the most enriching and rewarding – in all senses. Yes, there is a fair amount of chaff amongst the grains of wheat, but each snippet of news that I read, each thought that I'm exposed to and each link that I click returns so much that it is worth it.

I really can't see the day when I'll stop blogging and I don't see Twitter damaging blogs at all. At the end of the day much of the joy of Twitter is through being referred to larger thought pieces, more detailed stories and research findings and I'd like to continue adding to the knowledge and understanding that Twitter is helping tens of thousands of people to unlock.

Why don't you join us? New friends, understanding and knowledge comes free with every sign up.

You start here.