queer ideas

Don Draper's don forms

Innovation is great. But why waste time trying to create something that already exists?

That's why I encourage the Bluefrog creatives to spend time with their noses in dusty old tomes finding about what our fundraising grandparents where up to. Time spent in research makes brainstorming the next big thing far more effective.

As part of an exercise in sharing some of the information he uncovered, Tom, one of our Art Directors stayed firmly in the character of the Mad Men and created Don Draper's guide to don forms.

Not only did it make me smile, It's also very useful. You'll see it's packed full of great ideas on how to increase your income by improving your donation form. If the copy is a little too small for you, you'll find his original version on the Bluefrog Creative blog. Take a look, and you can increase it in size until your heart is content.

You'll probably notice that it only features the front of the form. There are a few things that you should do with the reverse as well. But that's another post.

Why all charities should thank donors

One of the most dangerous things you can do to any appeal is add a 'we don't value you enough to thank you' tick box to your donation form.

They seem to offer supporter choice and some donors appear to like them, but to my mind they simply tell the donor that only egotists expect to be thanked. And that's not particularly nice.

You've probably seen the type of thing I'm referring to...

We try to make money go as far as possible so we only acknowledge donations when specifically requested to do so. If you would like an acknowledgement please tick this box.

They are dangerous because they can destroy the relationship before it has a chance to start.

Yes, people give because they want to help, but unfortunately the charity / donor relationship is a little more complicated than that.

Donors have a whole range of needs and the process of thanking is as important to them as the process of asking.

The key message behind any thank you is one of value. In a transaction with a donor, it is a chance for the charity to say "we value you".

And showing a donor that they are valued is an incredibly powerful step towards getting further gifts.

The impact of thanking was recently demonstrated by Adam M. Grant and Francesco Gino in a series of studies published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Their experiments are recounted on Psyblog...

"In the first study 69 participants were asked to provide feedback to a fictitious student called ‘Eric’ on his cover letter for a job application. After sending their feedback through by email, they got a reply from Eric asking for more help with another cover letter.

The twist is that half of them got a thankful reply from Eric and the other half a neutral reply. The experimenters wanted to see what effect this would have on participants' motivation to give Eric any more help.

As you might expect, those who were thanked by Eric were more willing to provide further assistance. Indeed the effect of ‘thank you’ was quite substantial: while only 32% of participants receiving the neutral email helped with the second letter, when Eric expressed his gratitude, this went up to 66%."

The researchers then looked at the wider impact of thanking. Would Eric's thanks motivate people to help others? To find out, they introduced Stephen, another student in need of help with a cover letter...

"In a second study, Eric’s thanks (or lack of thanks in the control condition) was followed, a day later, by an email from ‘Steven’ asking for similar help. The percentage who offered to help Steven was 25% when they had received no gratitude from Eric, but this shot up to 55% when they had been thanked."

It's an interesting finding, and I wouldn't be surprised to discover that it transferred to people's attitudes to charity.

If it does, those organisations that save a few pounds by not thanking donors might not just be damaging their own income, they could also be hurting the rest of us too.

Picture credit: Fenng

If it's hard to read, it's hard to do

Bluefrog's Creative Director, Aline Reed, has been running a competition on her blog. It's taken the form of a fundraising quiz, and last week she focused on the joy of fonts and reversed out copy.

I've had a few 'conversations' over the years as I've tried get people to reconsider the 'edgy' font they've decided to use. I've gently suggested that something a little more legible, though less distinctive, might generate a better response.

The response has often been the questioning of my parents' marital status, a request to see a design qualification and a demand to see proof of my peculiar hypothesis.

The last two have been difficult to deliver. I missed out on art school and have yet to test the benefits of using Comic Sans, reversed out of acid green on a fundraising pack.

But Neuromarketing has come to my aid on the matter of legible fonts. A recent post highlights research by Hyunjin Song and Norbert Schwarz (PDF)  who have studied how font use can impact on the way we perceive information.

They put together an experiment that gave people instructions on an exercise regime. Some were given instructions in Arial, the others received theirs in Brush.

The results were remarkable.

Those that received instructions in Arial, estimated that the exercises would take just over eight minutes to complete. Whereas those who received theirs in Brush, thought the regime would take nearly twice as long - 15.1 minutes.

Those that saw the exercises as taking eight minutes were much more likely to engage with them. As the authors noted:

"Apparently, the students' brains mistook the ease of reading about exercise for the ease of actually doing push ups and crunches, and this misunderstanding motivated them to think about a life change. Those who struggled through the Japanese brushstrokes (Brush) had no intention of heading to the gym; the reading alone tired them out."

The experiment was repeated with instructions on how to make sushi and the results were the same. The hard to read font increased the estimated time to complete the task and reduced participation.

As Neuromarketing suggests:

"If you need to convince a customer, client or donor to perform some kind of task, you should describe that task in a simple, easy to read font. Since this phenomenon is related to the concept of cognitive fluency, you should also make the type size easy to read and use simple words and sentence structure. These steps will minimise the perceived effort needed to accomplish the task, and your success rate will increase."

When should you use suggested donation levels?

A short while ago, Google shared details of a test they undertook on "one of the disaster relief donation drives on Google.com".

The goal was to discover the ideal suggested donation level at times of an emergency – $20, $50, $100 or no prompt at all.

Full details are available here. But in short, they discovered that not using a prompt generated the highest number of donations and the highest level of income.

Does that mean you should start removing suggested donation levels from your appeals?

No.

Suggestion levels can have a powerful positive impact on both response rates and average gift. They simply need to be used intelligently.

People often have preconceived comfort levels for deciding what to give and prompting is the main way you can get people to re-consider them.

They are particularly important – absolutely essential in fact – for recruiting and upgrading mid-value donors (those that give from £100 up to £5,000).

How much do you want? is one of the key questions that donors ask (have a read of The 11 Questions Every Donor Asks if you are interested in finding out what goes on in a donor's mind when they are considering a gift). If you don't answer it, they will often give you far less than you are looking for.

By prompting (and justifying) very high suggested gifts to people who can afford them, you can generate very high levels of income and very high ROIs - even at recruitment. This pack that I developed when I worked at the YMCA, back in the early 1990's generated ROIs of up to 13:1 on cold - but very carefully targeted – lists!

At Bluefrog, we find that the majority of mid-level packs generate gifts that are at or very close to prompt levels.

Low value files (where people are giving cash gifts of between £5 and £25) are different. Even if a pack has a specific price justification, donors very often ignore it, giving their usual amount instead.

This is further complicated with emergency appeals. People will often give much higher gifts at times of obvious and extreme need, when past giving behaviour can be ignored.

Prompting can uplift low value donors. It might only be by £1 or £2, but it does work. What is most important is to test and to keep an eye on how donors respond because it doesn't necessarily work for every donor nor every charity.

At the end of the day, it is how your donors respond that is important and if, when you look at your data, you find that some of them see suggested donation levels as a turn off, the answer is simple. Don't use them.

For the rest of the file however, they are a very important tool that should be regularly used to increase donor engagement and levels of income.

How to create a great donation form

The donation form is the last great wilderness in the world of fundraising.

Too often it has been seen as an administrative document that serves little purpose other than ensuring a gift can be added to a database record and thank you letter dispatched with as little work or thought as possible.

That's a mistake.

In that simple DL, A5 or A4 piece of paper lies a great untapped resource that can be used to increase gifts and bring a donor far closer to your charity.

It has always surprised me that the response device receives so little attention, particularly as it is the main interface between the donor and the charity. Of all the components that go into an appeal, this is the only one that someone has to interact with – whether it is ticking boxes, filling in personal details or adding a signature, the humble donation form gets some real donor attention lavished on it.

Sometimes, it is the only part of an appeal that actually gets read.

I remember a friend's mother telling me that she would carefully open envelopes from one animal welfare charity, pull out the donation form and response envelope and discard the rest unread. This was because she found the appeals "too upsetting". The charity was always guaranteed to get a gift. She didn't need any details of particular projects or specific prompts. She trusted the charity and knew the donation form would sum up what they wanted her to do.

And this is the important point.

When a donor finishes reading your appeal and picks up their pen to write you a cheque, they might have decided to help, but haven't necessarily decided how much to give.

Your donation form should sum up just why you need help and what you are asking for. It's an opportunity to make the case for the highest gift you think is appropriate.

So as well as including...

• The donor's name and address (with a space to amend if details are wrong)
• The response address and charity number
• Payment details (who the cheque should be made payable to and decent sized credit card boxes)
• Gift Aid declaration

...it should also include a set of justified prompts for a suggested gift.

I'm a great fan of asking people to give what you need (obviously within an achievable range). A pack created around one central idea with a fixed price is a probably the best route to increase response rates and average gift (there's a great example of a very single-minded donation form here).

But if you aren't so lucky to have a single minded offer, a simple approach that always works is to suggest two gifts. The first should match the previous highest or modal gift (test) and the second should be 25% higher.

Using colour, bolding the font or even circling the amount can help you get the gift you are looking for.

And you should always include an open ask box that allows the donor to contribute the amount that works for them. But rather than just writing other next to it, try using inclusive language. Bernard Ross pointed out this test, where the words Surprise us were used instead. It generated an uplift of 15 to 20% to average gift with response rates staying the same.

The other idea that I'd suggest you test is including a very high value offer. Years ago, when I ran the DM programme at YMCA England, we had a high value donor club called the Fellowship of Patrons. There were no real benefits offered to members apart from the fact that subsequent appeals and feedback were always highly personalised. The minimum value gift for membership was £700.

We simply added an extra tick box with a small description of the Fellowship to the donation form of our recruitment mailings. As a direct result, we would receive a handful of £700 donations every time it went out. This file formed the basis of our high value donor programme that generated many hundreds of thousands of pounds for the YMCA each year.

But there's more...

Donation forms can do far more than simply bring in money. A few well chosen questions can set the tone for the relationship between your charity and the donor for years ahead. One of the best examples of this is provided by Camphill, a charity that works with people with learning difficulties.

Rather than simply look at the donation form as a response device, Camphill used the reverse of their form to empower and involve the donor by offering choice. Headed, Let the Camphill Family help you, it gave donors the chance to opt out of future newsletter and appeal mailings (click on the form to enlarge).

Heresy I hear you exclaim! Surely if we gave donors the chance to not receive appeals, they would grab it with both hands. Our supporter file would be gone overnight.

It just isn't true.

As you'll see on Sofii (registration required but really worth it), Camphill gets great responses to their appeals and newsletters, with an average response rate of 31%. The Christmas only segment regularly generates 50% and the information only cell (who don't receive a response device or reply envelope) consistently perform at 14%. That's higher than many charities achieve from their warm file.

There's a piece from the Wise Marketer (registration required) that has more details on their Christmas 2001 mailing that generated over £1,000,000 from just 78,000 supporters. 

And Damian O'Broin from Irish Fundraising agency, Ask Direct recently posted some results of a mailing for The Irish Hospice Foundation. They used a donation form that offered donors the chance to cancel their direct debits.

Four of them took the opportunity to do so.

And 400 chose to increase their gift, dramatically increasing the charities income.

You can read more about the campaign and see their donation form on Damian's blog.

The approach of Camphill and The Irish Hospice Foundation might sound counter-intuitive, but by remembering that donors give to us because they want to, we can improve our results and increase our income.

We can waste a fortune mailing donors that no longer want to support us. By asking them what they want to do we achieve two important goals...

We reduce waste and, most importantly, we offer donors a different type of relationship – one where their needs are taken into account. By doing so, we remove guesswork from our planning process. And rather than wondering what our donors want to receive, we'll actually know.

If we respond, it seems we'll be well rewarded.

Update: I'd like to highlight a comment from Craig Linton at Fundraising Detective. This is well worth doing...

"Another good tip for a donation form is a space for donors to write in any thoughts, ideas or feedback. You need to be careful with this as there is no point doing it if you ignore what is written, but if you respond appropriately it can be really powerful."