queer ideas

The Ghosts of Christmas Past are a Fundraiser's Best Friends

Christmas is the time when fundraisers get excited about the sound of a man or woman trudging through the snow struggling under the weight of a sack full of gifts. Only for us, it’s the post delivery that gets our hearts beating a little faster. Not the thought of Santa Claus.

That’s because Christmas is the season of goodwill. It’s a time when we can expect our donors to be at their most generous. CAF in the UK have found that as Christmas appeals start dropping through letterboxes, the number of people giving rises to over 57% of the population (and to almost 80% of the over 65s).

But why does Christmas have such a big impact on our attitudes to giving? Of course, the celebration of Christ’s birth is hugely important, but in the secular society within which we live, is that explanation enough?

Not to my mind.

Christmas is far more than a religious festival. It is a multi-dimensional event that has happiness as a supreme goal - often defined by consumption. But to fully understand what constitutes a happy Christmas, we have to identify those factors that actually do make us happy.

Tim Kassler and Kennon Sheldon of the University of Missouri looked at this very subject in their 2002 paper, What makes for a Merry Christmas.

They found that “Despite the fact that people spend relatively large portions of their income on gifts, as well as time shopping for and wrapping them, such behaviour apparently contributes little to holiday joy”.

What mattered most was celebrating with close friends and family. And the focus on materialism did nothing more than distract “people from the true meaning of the season.”

This was particularly pronounced amongst older respondents who reported greater feelings of happiness largely explained by the opportunity of spiritual and physical reconnection.

And in my considered opinion, the chance to reconnect is why Christmas is such a powerful driver for giving to charity.

If you were brought up in a Christian country, you’ll have many memories of Christmas. And when any of us think about Christmas, we think about traditions. Not just national traditions, but, more importantly, family ones. Where were your presents going to be on Christmas morning? Under the tree? In stockings by the fireplace? In a sack at the foot of your bed?

What time do you open presents? As soon as you wake up? After breakfast? After church? After lunch?

Do you have Christmas dinner or lunch? Do you make a toast before you eat?

The list of traditions that families adhere to is almost endless and it’s very rare that any will be broken without good reason. Even though there’s obviously nothing stopping us from changing the way that we celebrate Christmas other than that profound and deep link to the past.

And as fundraisers we should learn from this. This need for tradition can be a very powerful driver for giving.

Let me give you an example.

For several years at Bluefrog, we have included a sheet of sticky gift tags with a Christmas appeal produced for one particular client. Though the appeals differ, each year the stickers are the exactly same. They feature old fashioned, cheesy images of snowmen, reindeer and Santa Claus.

A few years back we were asked to bring them up to date. We created a modern set that many of the younger people involved in the project loved. Luckily we tested them alongside the traditional design. The new stickers suppressed response by a significant margin.

Why would a new set of Christmas stickers have such a big impact?

The answer is simple. Many donors had incorporated the use of our stickers in their Christmas traditions for many years and by changing them we had broken a link with the past. The tags helped make the giving of presents a richer experience because they bridged the gap between the commercial and the charitable sides of the season. And the new design simply didn’t have the same resonance as the original version.

By responding to this need to reconnect with the past, we can create far more powerful appeals than those that simply present a request for help. We can actually offer an antidote to the commercialisation of the season that so many donors (particularly older ones) dislike.

So my first piece of advice is to pull out your archives and guard books. And use them to build an appreciation of how your donors have previously engaged with charities over the years. If you haven’t got an archive of your own, take a look at SOFII or visit this Pinterest board which features hundreds of ads going back almost two centuries.

You’ll see similar themes repeated decade after decade. Themes that when incorporated in your appeals, can significantly increase your income.

Take this advertisement from Barnardo’s from 1927 asking donors to play the role of Santa Claus and buy Christmas food for an orphan or destitute child. Alongside it is an advertisement from the NSPCC produced in the 1990s that has a similar message. It might not be particularly innovative, it might even seem boring to some, but it’s just what many donors - particularly older ones - find motivating.

Even now, the Salvation Army in the UK uses a similar technique. Each and every Christmas they ask their donors for exactly the same thing - to buy a Christmas meal or box full of food and toys for poor families. Just take a look at their annual report and you’ll see that they generate an ROI from their donors that puts most (if not all) big British charities to shame.

As I’ve already said, there’s nothing particularly clever about the technique. But it taps into, and helps satisfy, the donors fundamental need to reconnect to their past and the true meaning of Christmas. I am still surprised that it isn’t more widely used. But I’d imagine that there are few organisations willing to stick with an approach for the necessary number of years to turn it in to a tradition in its own right.

And that’s the problem.

There are many similar ideas just waiting to be rediscovered and developed. But your starting point when developing a new idea should be to reject the idea of producing different appeals each year. Instead I’d advise you to focus on developing a campaign that can underpin your Christmas appeals for a decade or two.

In my experience, the more you use an idea, the stronger it becomes. Yes, creative will need to be refreshed, but as long as the core approach and visual identity remain the same, it will grow and grow, year after year.

So as with shopping, start planning for Christmas 2015 early. As soon as you get back to work in the New Year, start to learn about what Christmas really means to your donors and find out what they feel it lacks. Then build a campaign aimed at giving them just what they want.

It won’t be easy. It will certainly require a great deal of hard work. But if you can develop an idea that cements your charity into your donors’ psyche as truly part of Christmas, you’ll be repaid many times in terms of extra income and engagement in the coming years.

It seems apt to leave the final word on this matter to Charles Dickens, who helped invent so much of what we take for granted about the season. He summed up it’s power quite neatly when he said, 

“Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childhood days, recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth, and transport the traveler back to his own fireside and quiet home!”.

This blog post was originally published on 101 Fundraising as part of a series on the theme of the Ghosts of Christmas. Click on the respective link and you can read about the Ghost of Christmas Present by Tony Elischer and the Ghost of Christmas Future by Rory Green.

Why do so many fundraisers like asking for such small gifts?

When Mark Astarita recently compared some charities to pound shops, he was right on the button.

Just like the pile 'em high, sell 'em cheap stores found on our high streets, charities have jumped on the discounting bandwagon.

You'd like to inoculate a child? Yes ma'am. That'll be £3 please. Kerching!

It's never been easier - or cheaper - to change the world. See an ad, call or send a text and within seconds you're being told that you've done something amazing. All you have to do is click on a link to the YouTube video to see the proof.

Why pay more?

And that's the point. Many people won't.

According to CAF's 2012 UK Giving report, there's a large number of people who appear to be acutely price sensitive when it comes to giving to charity. Just look at the 41% of donors who give under £10 each month. Millions of people, but they account for only 5% of the sector's voluntary income.

Whether they can't afford to give more or they don't really want to, the £3 offer seems to be aimed firmly at this price sensitive segment of the market.

Ask for £4 or £5 – as a one off or a monthly gift – and you'll see response rates fall dramatically.

And that's a problem. Just like the pound shop that depends on high volume sales to make a profit, the charity that follows a discounting model needs a large number of donors to make the strategy worthwhile.

And the easiest way to achieve this is to embark on a race to the bottom, where the charity with the lowest priced offer wins – at least in the short term.

After recruitment, the donors are called and converted to regular giving or upgraded. But because it was a low value appeal that drove the first gift, a request for more money tends not to generate a particularly positive response. The result is low conversion, low upgrade values and high attrition.

Take mobile giving for example. What do many £3 donors do when we give them a chance to skip or stop their regular gift? They skip and they stop. And they are doing it in ever increasing numbers.

And just as a pound shop budgets for a high percentage of its cheap and cheerful stock to malfunction and be returned, so the charity starts to look at attrition as a number that needs to be factored into a financial model rather than an indication that something is wrong.

High attrition is nature's way of telling you that your approach to fundraising is based on recruiting a large proportion of people that don't care about your cause. And if people don't care, it's very hard to engage them. People who don't care aren't going to read the communications that you send them, either online or offline.

The result is that a significant number of the donors that stick with you are not active supporters, passionately engaged with your work. Instead many of them are simply people who can't be bothered to cancel. After all, it's only a few quid a month.

But why has discounting exploded across the sector? Why do we ask for so little?

First off it's easy. All you need do is reduce the amount you ask for. Anyone can do it. It helps if your £3 will pay for something tangible like a mosquito net, a blanket, or inoculations, but that's not always essential.

Second, it's perhaps a reflection of the economic times. If people haven't got much cash, surely it's better to reduce the amount we ask for?

Perhaps. But when we see figures from that the Equality Trust showing us that income inequality is at a level last seen at the time of the first world war, it makes you wonder why so many charities are focussed on the most price sensitive sector of donors rather than looking at what the increasingly affluent top 10% of the population can afford to give.

A review of charity fundraising advertisements from just after the first world war shows us that the typical value of a prompted gift amount then was 10 shillings (or 50 pence in today's currency). To place that into context, you could buy 20 pints of beer for 10 shillings in 1920.

With the average pint in 2014 costing the best part of £4, that would be like us asking today for £70 to £80.

That's not something you see very often is it? And I don't really understand why.

For all the talk of an economic revival, the numbers show that it's only really the richest people who are benefitting. Currently the wealthiest 1% of the population hold more wealth than the poorest 50%.

Speak to this affluent group about their attitudes to giving and you'll find their hearts aren't made of stone. They have the same desire to help others as the rest of us. But one fact comes shining through. They don't think that the vast majority of fundraising materials produced by charities today are aimed at them.

So not surprisingly they rarely read them and they rarely respond.

One of the key reasons for this is that charities simply don't ask them for enough. £3 is seen to have such a small impact that it doesn't engage wealthy people either emotionally or rationally.

The other reason is far more worrying. And is down to the fact that price sensitive donors give so little and their attrition is so high, that success often depends on reducing costs.

As a result, thank you and upgrade processes are automated and regularly contracted out. That means that much of the human element is lost. Thousands of new donors are acquired who will never receive an individual and personal communication from the organisation they support.

This leaves the charity without any real idea of the full potential of the donors they are recruiting. But what's much worse is these donors have an experience of giving that is likely to leave them thinking that they aren't really valued – or needed. It's a vicious circle. Donors don't give enough to warrant special treatment, but without special treatment, the donors who can afford to give more, simply won't.

So rather than looking at how we recruit the largest number of donors as quickly and cheaply as possible, we should look at balancing our portfolio of supporters by focusing on what the donors who can give the most, actually want. Particularly when you remember that it's just 6% of donors who give 40% of all voluntary income to charity.

This will be a problem for many charities because it is expensive. It will require them to provide detailed information on the nature of their work, it means they will need to be able justify asking for a large sum and, above all, it will mean changing the way they treat donors. The general thank you letter, email or text with a link to a YouTube video isn't enough. Instead charities must re-learn how to communicate like human beings and show the donors that they are actually valued.

Just as there's no skill required to open up a pound shop, there's no skill required in asking people for very small gifts. Anyone can do it because it's doesn't take a great deal of imagination.

What's harder is creating an offer that supporters will pay a premium for. It might not bring in as many donors as discounting, but the long-term value and loyalty of the donors it does attract will far outweigh the quick wins of being just another charity that drops the donor focus in order to join the £3 a month club.

This is a slightly adapted version of an article I wrote for the September 2014 edition of Third Sector magazine.

£1 Shop photograph adapted from an original by Emily Webber from London Shop Fronts.

Plus ça change

Hundreds of old charity ads going back to the mid 19th century can be found here. Take a look.

Face to face fundraising from 1910

Many people seem to think that large-scale face to face fundraising was first developed by Greenpeace in the 1990s, but it's been around far longer than that.

ActionAid were recruiting child sponsors in the 1970s by going from door to door. And Oxfam were using press ads to recruit people to collect regular pledges from their friends and neighbours in the 1960s.

But that's nothing to what the YMCA was doing back at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Around the world, new YMCAs were built with money raised through what became known as the Lightning Canvass.

The idea was simple. Get a group of young men, divide them into teams and send them out on the streets for two weeks to recruit donors who would give on the 'Instalment System'.

It was the brainchild of Charles Sumner Ward, who could well be described as the godfather of modern fundraising.

Charles was General Secretary of Grand Rapids YMCA in Michigan. And he had a problem that many CEOs of today's small charities might recognise. He had to spend most of his time fundraising rather than doing 'real' work.

As a result he came up with a plan. In January of 1892, he asked his directors to close down their desks for part of each day so they could give "wholehearted support to an intensive, organised effort to raise the Y's budget at the beginning of the year". At the heart of the idea was a dislike of fundraising that resulted in a desire "to get the agony over with quickly."

The plan worked brilliantly. Together with a group of volunteers, they raised the year's budget within a few days. For the next five years, Ward repeated the exercise with similar results.

Soon other YMCAs were asking for his advice. He introduced them to his approach and success followed success. He raised £103,000 for Boston YMCA, £64,000 for Montreal YMCA, over £160,000 for Toronto YMCA and a massive £200,000 for Philadelphia YMCA (which would be worth over £16,000,000 today)

In 1912 he brought the technique to the UK and helped set up campaigns for a number of new British YMCAs, including one for Manchester YMCA. Having searched the archives of The Manchester Guardian I've found out what happened.

350 different volunteer fundraisers working in teams known by such donor friendly names as The Hustlers, The Tender Heart Ticklers and The Gold Chasers raised £14,000 in twelve days. They did this, in their own words, by...

"scouring Manchester during the campaign...merry bands of well-intentioned highwaymen on the prowl, ready to pounce upon every good-natured-looking individual with their cry, 'your money or your promise.' "

To build excitement they erected a huge fundraising clock in Manchester city centre that allowed everyone to see the money rolling in. It was so important to the campaign that it took pride of place in the campaign brochure...

Sadly, they fell short of their target by £6,000, but the regular payments on the 'Instalment System' made up the difference.

They generated these by encouraging donors to complete a forerunner of the direct debit form. It was designed to neatly dovetail with the the clock...

The success of these campaigns wasn't down to luck. Ward had tested and proved his strategy many times. And luckily, the Manchester Guardian on the 7th of October, 1912, detailed just a few elements of the approach...

"In money-raising, the quick campaign method had proved itself to be the very best method up to the present. The best time for holding the campaign was towards the end of January, because by then dividends and rents had recently been paid, and it was the time when many people and firms set aside amounts for the year's gifts...they should not overlook the importance of having a luncheon or dinner on the eve of the campaign to which they should invite a large number of possible subscribers."

But even in 1912, there were dissenting voices that weren't convinced that face to face fundraising was the way forward. The Manchester Guardian reported the concerns of the Rev. Stanley J. Hersee who thought the effect of a lightning campaign would be disastrous...

"It was really a spasmodic effort concentrated into five or ten days; they had a tremendous reaction, and the backwash was a bad thing. Many people were growing tired of the sort of 'revolver, your money, or your life' campaign."

It just shows that even when it comes to the attitudes of donors there's nothing new in the world of fundraising. Apart from the fact that today's face to face fundraisers look a little different from their Edwardian counterparts...

With thanks to Gary Shearin for providing the images.

Charity ads from the archives

I recently signed up to Pinterest and soon realised that it was a great way to put my archive of charity advertisements online.

It goes back to the beginning of the last century and features ads from Save The Children (UK and USA), Oxfam, The RSPCA, Salvation Army, Scope, ActionAid, The Sierra Club, Christian Aid, NSPCC, The Red Cross and The YMCA (along with those of many other organisations).

Hopefully you'll find it interesting to see how creative approaches have developed over the years. There are some great examples of technique on show (check out the YMCA ad from 1916). Sadly, you'll also see how some organisations lost their way in the 1970s and 80s as 'real' ad agencies started to get involved.

I've uploaded 75 ads so far and I intend to add to the resource over the coming weeks and months.

If you follow me on Pinterest, you'll have the ads delivered to you as and when I get the time for a big uploading session.

You can see them all by clicking on my Pinterest account here.

What's wrong with charity advertising?

Howard Gossage is my favourite Mad Man. If I have an advertising hero, it's probably him.

Howard didn't particularly enjoy coming up with ways to sell more cars and airline tickets, he was just rather good at it. What interested him most was making the world a better place.

So when David Brower of the Sierra Club asked him to help prevent the Grand Canyon being flooded through the building of the Glen Canyon dam, you'd have thought Howard's response would be an automatic yes.

But it wasn't.

David asked Howard's agency, Wiener and Gossage, to lay out an open letter he had written to US Secretary of the Interior, Stewart Udall. It was his last ditch attempt to try to stop the construction going ahead.

Howard read the letter and concluded that it was over elaborate.

To use his own phrase, he thought David was "putting raisins in the matzos" by going into too much technical detail.

In his opinion, this was the same mistake that far too many charities and cause-related advertising made. The ad talked at its audience and in doing so alienated the people who were most likely to help.

As Gossage explained...

" When they [The Sierra Club] came to us for counsel I happened to mention this to them and said, 'What you've got to do is give people recourse. You've got to give them something they can do so they don't feel guilty and, therefore hate you for making them feel guilty'."

Brower wasn't persuaded, so a test was agreed. One million editions of the New York Times carried his open letter ad and one million carried Gossage's ad.

I haven't got the final results, but Gossage's ad (below) outperformed Bower's ad "enormously" (you can find a readable version of the ad here).

As you'll see from the number of coupons, Gossage's aim was to drive response. Each carried a message that could be sent to the US President, the Secretary of the Interior, the Head of the Interior Committee of the House of Representatives, the reader's Congressman and the reader's two Senators.

As copywriter Jerry Mander admitted, it was the coupons that made the difference...

"Gossage did the important, brilliant thing with those multiple coupons. That had never been done before. They were very, very important because in those days people used coupons; they were their internet."

Brower's original target, Secretary Udall, sums up the impact of the campaign rather neatly...

"That was really a stroke of genius. Of course he knew how to put the heat on you. If you were in my position you had to react."

As a result, support for the Sierra Club doubled from 39,000 to 78,000 and the bill that would authorise the construction of the dam was defeated.

It was the interactive nature of Howard's approach that worked. Rather than lecture, he wanted readers to participate in the ad. This created a connection that meant the brand and message were much more likely to be remembered.

It was an approach that made him different.

He believed that too many agencies suffered from a lack of both creativity and information. Instead they relied on repetition of the same message in the hope that it would finally break through to consumers.

It sounds like much of the charity advertising that we see today – campaigns are praised because the ads look alike and say the same thing.

But when you think about it, this approach is akin to admitting defeat.

We've decided that the only way someone is going to take in our message is if it is constantly paraded in front of their eyes (or ears). That might be acceptable if we're selling something as ordinary as baked beans, but when we are fighting global poverty, tackling climate change or even searching for a cure for cancer is it the best that we can do?

Gossage summed up the problem quite neatly when he said....

"The real fact of the matter is that nobody reads ads. People read what interests them, and sometimes it's an ad."

And that's the point. We need to focus on what interests our donors – not on telling them what we want them to think.

That was exactly what Gossage did with his ad. He gave everyone the chance to protect something that they valued. As a result, the Grand Canyon is still an incredible place for us all to enjoy.

It's a rather amazing story, but it doesn't end there.

You might have thought that after this success, the trustees of the SIerra Club would have been incredibly happy.

You'd be wrong.

They weren't sure that they actually wanted all the publicity and controvercy stirred up by Gossage's campaign.

David Brower disagreed with them. The result was his resignation.

Brower's next job was based in Gossage's office where he set up a new environmental pressure group. After a little debate, a name was agreed - Friends of The Earth.

Hat tip to @HayesThompson for recommending Changing The World Is The Only Fit Work For A Grown Man

Mick Jagger ate my mail pack

The Resource Alliance has recently released a video of a presentation I was involved in at last years IFC in Amsterdam.

Together with Damian O'Broin from Ask Direct in Ireland and Sandra Cnossen-Albers from WSPA in The Netherlands (who now runs her own fundraising consultancy, Raising Results) we put together a presentation on celebrating the history of direct marketing. It also included a few of our thoughts on where the medium is likely to go next.

 

The whole session was about an hour and a half whereas the highlights video only runs for 19 minutes, so I've added the complete stack of slides so you can see some of the other examples of great (and not so great) fundraising ideas that we focused on.

Mick Jagger Ate My Mailpack

The original presentation also included a few short films missing from the stack. I've included these as links below. The one in my section highlights a particular theme of my part of the presentation – it doesn't necessarily matter what your charity does, if you focus on the needs of the donor you can still make a very effective case for support.

It shows how a US DM agency put together cold fundraising appeals for a serial killer and a convicted fraudster that generated response rates of between 1.5% and 2%. You can see the actual video (which is rather funny) and read more about the experiment here.

Damian's part of the presentation features features three different videos that thank donors. These can be seen by clicking the following links.

New Zealand Blood Service

Concern Worldwide

ActionAid

You can see another video from the IFC featuring Damian and Aline from Bluefrog Creative (along with some chap called Ken Burnett) on the theme of fundraising innovation here.

So what have fundraisers been doing over the last 30 years?

A rather interesting paper has just been published by CGAP and CMPO looking at three decades of charitable giving in the UK.

It's based on a detailed analysis on the main trends in giving that uses the government's Living Costs and Food Survey (which used to be called the Family Expenditure Survey – FES).

The last thirty years have been a period of massive social, technological, political and economic change. And by taking a long-term look back in time we should be better placed to make plans for the current turbulent era and those yet to come.

The full paper (all 64 pages) can be downloaded here, but for those of you too busy to read it yourself, here are a few points that I think are worth highlighting:

The Millennium marked the end of a decline in the proportion of households giving to charity

Back in 1978, the number of households that gave (during a two-week survey period) to charity stood at 32%. It had fallen to 25% by 1999. Over the first eight years of the current decade it averaged at over 28%.

To my mind, that bounce back matches the explosion in face-to-face recruitment and is representative of all those young donors finding their way on to our databases.

Donations have increased

Donors are now giving almost three times as much as they did in 1978.  But the rise in giving over the last twenty years only reflects the growth in GDP.

As a share of total spending, households give just 0.4% – the same as they did in 1988.

All the new charities that have been set up, the new fundraising techniques that have been introduced, the growth in regular giving (up from 36% in 1983 to 63% in 2008) and the impact of the web haven't had that much impact on how much people actually give.

Giving is largely recession-proof

This is something that a number of us who have lived through economic downturns have been highlighting for some time. It's good to see that the statistics support our opinion. As you'll see from this chart, even during the difficult times (marked in red and green), giving has remained strong:

I've posted before that recruitment and subsequent development of new donors can get rather tough when money is tight. Some analysis that I've seen has shown that more donors are just giving a single gift to a charity and simply not responding to subsequent appeals. I'm also hearing of some frightening rates of attrition regarding street fundraising.

And when I look to the future, even with these statistics in mind, I have some real concerns about what will happen over the next twelve months. The number of people who look likely to lose their jobs (particularly older women employed in the public sector) worries me and I will be amazed if we don't see an even more pronounced effect on recruitment. I just hope, that as in the past, our loyal donors will make up the shortfall. Whether they do is probably down to the actions that we take now. But more on that later.

Older donors are becoming even more important

The over 65s now account for 35% of all donations, compared to just 25% in 1978.

One area of particular interest that the report uncovers is the giving behaviour of baby boomers (the youngest tranche of this demographic group is highlighted in grey in the table) whom we first observe when they were in their early twenties and then track right through to their forties. As you'll see, participation grows as they age. That to me is rather good news. A number of people have questioned whether baby boomers will be as generous as their parents and grandparents. The trend indicates that they are (for more on this, please take a few minutes to read the comments to this post).

Affluent donors are giving more

The richest 10% of households now account for 22% of total given (up from 16% in 1978). From 2003 to 2008, the top 50% of households (ranked by donation size) accounted for 92% of all giving. It should be noted that the largest donation observed in the 30 years of data is only £1,500 so it seems very likely that many high-value donors haven't found their way onto the survey. If they were included, the impact of the rich would be even more pronounced.

So what does this mean for those of us fundraising today?

First off, I think we can draw some comfort from the evidence that donors keep giving at times of economic hardship. Though the current recession is particularly tough, I'm confident most donors will remain true to form.

However, qualitative research undertaken by Bluefrog shows that when money becomes tight, donors are likely to focus their giving on favoured causes and organisations.

As a result, charities must concentrate on giving donors what they want – a real understanding of what their giving has achieved and a means of becoming part of the charity rather than just a a source of funds.

This is important for donors of all ages. An ongoing worry of mine is the possible impact a poor relationship might have on donors who are early in their giving lives. A large number of young people recruited on the street are currently cancelling their regular gifts shortly after sign-up. The response of many charities seems to be little more than hoping for the best and expecting the recruitment agency to replace the lost donors as part of a guarantee. Of course, this approach might be effective in the short-term, but what is the long-term impact on how that donor sees the charity when they enter the prime charitable stage of their lives?

Charities should also look at how they treat mid-value donors (those who give between £100 and £5,000). At Bluefrog we've seen that donors in this range respond best to charities who drop the mass marketing approach and concentrate on adding value through increasing relevence and personalisation. The result is a significant increase in income.

Finally, a robust win-back strategy should be developed for donors who lapse. If donors are lost, it doesn't have to be for ever. But winning back should not simply be handed over to a telephone agency. A real relationship is based on hearts and minds, not just repeatedly asking until someone says yes just so they can put down the phone.

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.

More great ideas from before any of us were born

I picked up a copy of My Life in Advertising & Scientific Advertising a short while ago.

It was written in the 1920s by Claude Hopkins. Claude was an ad man who wasn't too shabby at his craft. Back in 1907 he was earning $185,000 a year.

The book, based on analysis of thousands of advertising campaigns, contains his thoughts on what makes a great ad.

I couldn't put it down.

As I turned the pages I soon came to realise that any fundraiser who decided to apply Claude's principles to appeals would have a success on their hands. Take this example on producing a mail order ad:

"Mail order advertising is a profitable study. Note it's economy of space. It is nearly always set in small type. That is because thousands of tests have proved larger type wasteful. All pictures have a selling value. None are used for decoration. 

Take a profitable mail-order ad and set it in twice the space. Use larger type, more decorations or a border. You will get an ad which looks more attractive, but you will double the cost of replies and sales. 

This fact should be accepted, for this economy principle, after thousands of tests on hundreds of lines, has become practically universal. And it proves that waste of space is folly in any line of advertising. That includes large type, or borders, or pictures that don't help to sell. All ads would be set like good mail-order ads if the same rigid tests were applied. 

That is the hardest fact for an ad writer to learn or an advertiser to comprehend. The natural instinct is to make the ad attractive. One must remember, however, ads are not written to amuse, but to sell. And to sell at the lowest cost possible."

And this example on headlines:

"An automobile ad might refer in the headline to a good universal joint. It might fall flat, because so few buyers think of universal joints. The same ad with a headline, "The Sportiest of Sport Bodies," might out pull the other by fifty to one.

This is enough to suggest the importance of headlines. Anyone who keys ads (records response data) will be amazed at the difference. The appeals we like best will rarely prove best, because we do not know enough people to average up their desires. So we learn on each line by experiment.

But back of all lie fixed principles. You are presenting an ad to millions. Among them is a percentage, small or large, whom you hope to interest. Go after that percentage and try to strike a chord that responds. If you are advertising corsets, men and children don't interest you. If you are advertising cigars, you have no use for non-smokers...

...Don't think that those millions will read your ads to find out if your product interests. They will decide by a glance–by your headline or your pictures. Address the people you seek, and them only."

Evolution is a powerful force, but from what I've read in Claude's book, people haven't changed much at all over the last hundred years.

Add it to your Christmas list.