queer ideas

When to choose choice

Choice is becoming a buzzword in fundraising. But just how important is it?

Over the last few years, organisations like Kiva, DonorsChoose and CRUK (with MyProjects) have done rather well by offering people a chance to decide how their donations are used. Kiva, which launched in 2005, has generated over $200 million for people working their way out of poverty. DonorsChoose, which is only two years older, has generated over $77 million for schools in need of teaching materials. And CRUK has over 400 individual fund raising pages and 23 project pages which have raised hundreds of thousands of pounds.

But is choice the key factor that lies behind this level of fundraising success?

There are a number of charities that have built websites around the offer of choice who haven't been quite so successful.

Take FORGE for instance. I wrote a piece about this charity back in 2008 on how they came unstuck when they focused on offering online donor choice as a means to raise funds.

See The Difference, who do some great social networking activity to promote their site, also seem to be struggling (see this post for more thoughts on their approach to fundraising). If you look at their most funded projects on their website, few have generated more than a thousand pounds.

And My Action For Children which generated a massive amount of hits from press advertising and celebrity tweets seems to have converted just a tiny percentage to donors. Sign-ups just one month later have dwindled to a trickle.

I believe the different levels of success seen by the two sets of examples is down to something other than choice.

Kiva is fundamentally different. It asks people to lend - not give. And though a supporting donation is suggested (to fund the work of the KIva organisation) this is discretionary. In effect, you are not giving to charity as you can get your money back. As we've seen in the UK with Lend With Care, this is an offer that people find different and attractive. Add feedback on the impact of your loan and fantastic celebrity and corporate support (most notably that offered by YouTube) and you have a financial success on your hands.

DonorsChoose has also benefitted from celebrity support. But at its heart it offers something very special – great feedback. Though they will accept any size of gift, DonorsChoose prompts donors to give $100 by promising them a feedback pack from the school they help. This pack contains a letter from a teacher along with drawings, thank you notes and photographs from the children who've benefitted from the donor's gift. DonorsChoose encourage schools to get really creative with these packs and see them as so important that if a school fails to provide them to donors they can be excluded from the site. The other stroke of genius of the DonorsChoose model is that they also offer a thank you pack to everyone who gives a closing gift. So if a project has just a few dollars needed to hit target, the donor who makes up the shortfall - even if it really is just ten or twenty dollars – gets a thank you pack as well.

Take a look at CRUK's MyProjects and you see two main types of donation – gifts in memory and gifts in response to personal fundraising pages. In this respect it is not that dissimilar to JustGiving. The most successful of the projects on MyProjects is the Santander staff fundraiser for mobile cancer awareness units. Santander staff have been encouraged to raise money for CRUK with the promise that if they hit a certain target they will be eligible for a trip to Brazil to help renovate a school. MyProjects has simply functioned as an online means for them to run personal fundraising activities (see what I mean about it being just like JustGiving?).

If choice was that important to donors, thousands of tiny niche charities would be doing much better. If someone wanted to offer support for disabled children in London for instance, all they need to do is type those words into Google and they'd be presented with a long list of organisations that would love a donation. And more to the point, they would probably all offer a more rewarding and personal experience of giving than can be had when you donate to the national charities you'd find bidding on those search terms through AdWords.

And here's another example of why I think that choice is only a small part of the route to better fundraising.

I started out my fundraising career at ActionAid (about twenty years ago) where I worked on a product called ProjectAid.

ActionAid raised most of its income through child sponsorship. Supporter feedback and research told us that people loved knowing how their money changed a child's life. It also told us that some people found sponsorship expensive and others found it 'emotionally unattractive'.

We took a few logical steps and the end result was ProjectAid. We'd ask the donor to sign up to a regular gift and every four months we'd send them details of projects in need of funding. They could choose the one they wanted to support and we'd then report back on how work was progressing. I still have the first recruitment piece we ever produced and, as you can see, It's not that far from the 'game changing' ideas of crowd funding that we see today. Just on paper rather than on-line.

We tested it with a variety of media, but it didn't do that well.

But what was particularly interesting was how donors responded to the offer of choice. Most ended up ticking the 'where the need is greatest' box on the donation form. The product eventually was used as a 'drop ask' for people who were interested in child sponsorship but found the price too high. It was superseded by another product that concentrated on providing good feedback, which in the long run was more effective.

I've been involved in offering choice to donors in a number of different ways over the years and found similar results pretty much every time. Some people do value choice (particularly with causes such as cancer research and with high level gifts), but many others were more interested in hearing about need, impact and what they had done to make a difference. As one donor put it (and I paraphrase)...

"You're the experts on this. I just want to know that my money has helped".

In my experience, that's what charities should be focusing on. As I mentioned in a previous post, choice is only important if it is relevant. If it isn't, it can become a chore and actively turn donors off.

And if you are interested in finding out why, you should probably take a look at this study featured in Neuromarketing on choice fatigue.

If used appropriately, choice can probably enhance your offer, but, using the tried and tested (and tired) golfing analogy, it should be one of a number of clubs in your fundraising bag, rather than a single club that you rely on for the whole game.

The difference makes little difference

Of everything the International Fundraising Conference offers, it's the international part that's the best – the opportunity to share ideas and learn from fundraisers from throughout the world.

In my experience, it doesn't matter where an idea comes from. I've learnt from fundraisers in many different countries – the US, Holland, Australia, France, Austria and more.

I've taken their ideas and implemented them with great success in the UK.

It's why I'm always surprised when I meet fundraisers in the UK who tell me their donors are 'different' to those I'm used to.

There are some differences that you have to take into account if you are raising money from people with different cultural backgrounds. I've been recently involved, for example, in some fascinating discussions about the Islamic charitable obligations of Qurbani and Zakat.

But when it comes down to the final analysis, people are motivated by very similar things, wherever they live or whatever their background.

CAF have recently published a study that helps demonstrates this by looking at the charitable motivations and barriers of British Indian donors. They found that when it comes to philanthropy, British Indians aren't that different from other givers in the UK...

• They want to be kept up to date about the progress and issues relating to work they are helping to fund and feel that people who give more should have access to more frequent reporting.
• They want to give to work that is relevant to them and their culture.

For example a person from Gujarat would feel more motivated to help a fellow Gujarati from Africa as opposed to someone from Bengal in India.

• Smaller charities are of interest to many because they feel their gifts to these types of organisations are 'more personal' and have a 'bigger impact'. Though, just as with many other donors, they need to be assured that less well known charities are trustworthy.
• They want to be part of something rather than just be a passive giver. They think that engagement with a charity and the chance to network with other like minded people encourages more consistent and involved giving.

Which doesn't sound very different to what I'd expect any donor to say - wherever they come from.

The full study can be downloaded here.

How you say you spend it is important

I've just seen a piece of research undertaken by nfpSynergy that looks at the impact of using different ways to describe charitable expenditure.

The study compared spending on fundraising and service provision, asking donors how impressive they found a range of descriptive options...

1. Our charity raises £3 for every £1 it spends on fundraising.
2. For every £1 we raise, we spend 65p on those who need our help.
3. We raise £1 for every 33p we spend on fundraising.
4. For every £3 our charity raises, £2 goes directly to those that need it.

Over 60% of respondents were impressed or very impressed with options 1 and 4, whereas less than 50% were impressed or very impressed with options 2 and 3.

The results would seem to suggest that people can relate more happily to whole numbers. This would mean that the traditional XX pence in the pound / dollar goes directly to those who need our help statements in reports and mailing packs may not be as effective as we'd like to think.

Results on credit crunch copy vs normal copy test

This is a quick heads up on one of the tests we've been involved with on the effect of directly talking about the credit crunch in DM packs. 

Same packs, same projects, same asks – but one version placed emphasis on the effects of the economic downturn. The other pack simply ignored it.

I can't give too much detail at this stage, but it seems mentioning the credit crunch is depressing response and average gift. On the high value cash segment, the credit crunch copy reduced response by 0.3% and reduced average gift by £30. On the low value segment the credit crunch copy reduced response by 0.5% and average gift by 60 pence.  Breaking down the broad segments to individual cells gives a less certain answer but the combined results show a downward trend.

Hopefully I'll be adding more details at a later date.

Should you worry about the size of your donation form?

I've got to start somewhere, so I'll ease my way into blogging with a little mythbusting.

We've been involved in this over the past year or so as we look at testing some of the weird claims about direct marketing that you just aren't sure about. I'm sure you are aware of the scenario...

Someone asks a question over a few drinks at a conference and those gathered offer their opinions. One person mentions this to a few colleagues when they return to work, this is passed on a few more times and before long that humble opinion is turned into a cast iron fact worthy of inclusion in the next edition of How to Fundraise.

This week, what works better? A large or small donation form.

Bluefrog has traditionally always used smaller forms on our low value mailings, either A5, A6 or DL depending on format, but word on the street was that we’d raise more with a bigger form.

The test was undertaken with a large traditional cash file that definitely contained a fair number of people with the first name of Dorothy who would go for tea at a National Trust venue on their way home from church on a Sunday afternoon. We tested it on lower and higher value cells. It was a very clean test. Everything apart from the size of the donation form was kept the same. We tested A4 versus A5.

And what did we find?

There was hardly any difference. The larger form generated a slightly higher gift (pennies), but across our test cells, the A5 form generated a response rate that was about 6% (of total response) better than the A4 piece. This meant that the nett income was about 4.8% higher on the pack with the A5 form.

Will you get the same results? I don't know. But if you fancy increasing the nett income of your next appeal by about 5%, your donation form could be a good place to start.

Isn't that nice to know?