Craig outlines his thinking around the recent Rogare/Professor Adrian Sargeant review of relationship fundraising, why the donor journey needs a rethink, and the enormous challenge facing big charities in breaking down silos in order to put the needs of the donor first. Craig tweets @frdetective, and you can find his blog on the Rogare review here. The interview is available to download here.
Also, another (Fund) Raising Voices interviewee, Ken Burnett, blogged recently on the relationship fundraising phenomenon his 1992 book began, and why the subtitle is more important than the title. Ken’s blog is available here; he tweets @kenburnett1.
Marianne is Senior Consultant at Cornell University, and formerly worked at Carnegie Mellon and Harvard Universities. She is a leader in advancement services, donor modelling and data mining and understanding donor engagement, speaking regularly at conferences and seminars on these subjects. She tweets at @mpellet771.
A few points from the interview:
The use of insight can have powerful effects, increasing income and allowing not-for-profits to build stronger supporter relationships. In the UK, prospect research has traditionally involved less quantitative or statistical methods. However, ‘prospect research’ is different in the US, where it is largely data-driven.
Wealth screening: we all know it and use it. And yet, even vendors admit that their information only covers around half of the millionaires in the population (and that total is probably an underestimate). So, here will be a significant portion of the HNWI population whom charities are not aware of, sitting on their databases. If not-for-profits modelled and analysed the level of wealth in more detail, they would almost certainly raise more form these groups.
Social media is coming to the fore in gaining valuable, ‘soft’ information on supporter preferences and interests. Marianne’s team includes a full-time person scraping information from the web (and hand-connecting this to relevant supporter records), including network information, which is mapped in NodeXL. Text analytics is also in vogue.
The web has fundamentally changed customer care, and Marianne describes some of the key ways in which this has happened. First, Amazon “spoiled it for us” by raising the bar for the level of customer service users now regularly expect. Next day delivery, automated, ‘you might like’ suggestions, and hugely responsive customer service are now all par for the course, whereas before they were considered exceptional. Charities must keep up with these developments or be left behind.
There is lots more in the interview — I hope you enjoy it.
Charlie is CEO of DonorVoice UK, who work with not-for-profits to reduce rates of donor attrition and in building supporter relationships. He tweets at @charlieartful.
The interview is about retaining donors. Retention has the coming idea in fundraising for…a long time. Ken Burnett published the fundraising classic ‘Relationship Fundraising’ in 1992, with Professor Adrian Sargeant’s ‘Building Donor Loyalty’ published in 2004, both books are well-known and acknowledged references on how charities can build strong and enduring relationships with supporters. Charlie is a real evangelist for the cause, and opened my eyes to the danger that many charities are — often without knowing it — committing suicide through inertia. We know that two things — the ‘functional’ and ‘personal’ connections to brands — are critical in determining the level and durability of charitable support, yet many not-for-profits routinely follow the mantra of ‘just ask more and it will be fine’.
But we still find ourselves hemorrhaging support. Around one third of first time supporters of charities in the UK do not give a second gift, and in the US around 70% of donors have not continued giving a year later. Acquisition budgets increase, but retention budgets do not exist. We furiously slop water into the leaking bucket, even while holes continue to appear.
In the UK this is especially important, as the generation who the CAF call the ‘Civic Core’ (the 9% of the population who contribute 66% of the time and money donated to charity) are now well into their 60’s and 70’s. This group have doubled their charitable giving in the last 30 years, as younger people’s engagement with charity has fallen off a cliff. To even sustain out current donated income, UK charities urgently need to reach new audiences, as well as building stronger relationships with existing supporters — no mean feat.
Charlie talks in the interview about the fundamentals of retention. He also speaks about recent work done to test how commitment works, the psychology of commitment to brands and organisations, and what people want from organisations they support. Hope you enjoy it.
(Fund) Raising Voices 