What to Focus on

Here's a gem from Drayton Bird's "Commonsense Direct Marketing". He did a test with panels covering a myriad of combinations of list, price, mail date, ways of responding and creative approaches. His goal was to quantify the relative importance of each. The graph below shows his findings: the response difference between the worst and the best performance of each factor.

Reading the Chart. The difference between the best list and the worst list was 6 times. For example, if the worst list got a 0.20% response rate, the best list got a 1.20% response.

This graph rings true for me from my 25 years of direct marketing testing. Audience is the most important factor in strategy, followed by offer. This is often expressed as the "40-40-20 Rule" Audience drives 40% of the response, as does offer. Creative is 20%. This is different from Drayton's findings, but I take both as illustrative rather than definitive.

I'll take it a step further. In planning you should start with a selection and understanding of audience, then move to offer and finish with creative. They all need to work together.

The Medium Is the Offer

You may have heard the medium is the message. This pithy phrase comes from a book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, by Marshall McLuhan (1964). The basic idea is that the characteristics of a medium can dominate and even override the content carried by the medium.

In fundraising we depend on media to communicate with individuals. We need to pay close attention to the media we use because they influence what our audience receives from the communication.

Think about it. A typical appeal letter carries a vivid cry for help. And gets a 5% response rate. Why doesn’t it get at least 50%? Are people really that calloused? That’s part of the point. The medium, a mass produced piece of direct mail, plays a significant role in what the individual receives. It dilutes it.

Contrast that with an in-person visit from the organization’s president. It's harder to say no.

The medium is the offer.

The offers we present our donors are defined by the medium we select. A double buckslip direct mail package is fine for a $25 annual fund drive, but it's not suited for presenting a complex community development project for $10,000. The richer and more personal the medium, the better suited it is for involved and high-priced offers.

Haiti & Emergency Donors

Check out Bryan Miller's entry on Haiti. As usual, Bryan has keen insights on creating coherent online donor experiences. I particularly like his ideas of giving donors communication options and asking their interests. These have worked well in my experience.

While on the subject of emergency donors, here's an interesting finding that reminds us that not all emergency donors are created equal. This splits SE Asia tsunami donors according to their 1st gift amount. Look at the difference in LTV!

You may find that a good percentage of your emergency donors are in the $100+ category. You can afford to develop special approaches for these high-end donors.