Choose Your Tuesday: Greed or Goodwill?
What makes us think a perfect stranger, who’s never given to our organization before, will choose to do so? It’s highly counter intuitive. People are more likely to continue doing what they’ve done before.
We talk a lot in fundraising professional circles about the folly of concentrating too many resources on donor acquisition and too little on donor retention. Whenever I coach volunteers to do fundraising, I always suggest they remind current donors how many years they’ve already been giving to the organization. It’s significantly more difficult to get people to reach a new decision.
But what if you’re a start-up organization that doesn’t have many donors? What if your only choice is to go after first-time donors?
Let’s take a look at parallels in the retail marketing world. The always provocative thinker, Seth Godin, recently blogged about buying something for the first time. He notes there are only three kinds of sales, and the third is akin to a revolutionary act (one-third of people in the world have never made a first-time purchase; they do what their parents/grandparents did). The three kinds of sales are:
- Buying a refill, another unit of a service or product you’ve purchased before
- Switching to a new model/brand/style
- Buying something for the first time
Renewing your donation is like buying a refill or replacement product. You know you like this charity. Targeted marketing works here, because the donor already trusts you. This is a ‘safe’ decision, and easy to make.
Giving to a different charity in the same category is like switching to a new brand when you’ve already given to a (hunger/AIDS/cancer) charity. It’s something you’ve already decided you value. You don’t have to be sold on the cause; just the service delivery model.
Making a first-time donation is like buying something for the first time, perhaps to the little arts organization in the neighborhood that you’d never heard of before last week. Mass marketing usually doesn’t work well to stimulate this purchase, because it’s hard to know who to target. A new market must be created. To get someone to this decision requires strategic, consistent messaging – plus perseverance – to educate your prospective supporter and earn their trust.
In the end, it’s good to keep one thing in mind: it’s all about community. We want to belong. We want to be a ‘member’ of something. We make the same decisions as our friends and relatives because we’re mutually dependent on one another. And communities are about dependence, and caring and contributing. There is comfort, and safety, in numbers.
For start-up nonprofits seeking to develop numbers (i.e., an annual giving base of individual donors) the lesson is clear. To paraphrase Seth:
It’s not going to happen tomorrow, or the next time. It will happen because we show up. We settle in. We become part of the fabric of the community. Ideas spread within the community. When we consistently over deliver, then drip by drip, day by day, that’s how we change the world.
The bottom line: Everyone wants to make a difference. If we operate on the premise that people want to be engaged, then we can figure out how to engage them and persevere in so doing. And, equally important, we must have a plan in place to steward these new donors so that in the future they will make the first and second type of decisions – and spread this decision-making to their friends and relatives.
Aside from plain old vanilla direct mail, what’s been your most effective strategy to get folks to give to you a fir
st time?
st time?
2 Comments
Spot on – it's all about sales. While fundraising is a specialty, it's still sales. Whether you're selling a product, or an idea, or an investment (in a cause), the concepts are the same. Consumer research, prospecting, finding and filling needs, the 'sale', follow up etc.
And whether you call it sales, marketing, fundraising or whatever, we could probably all learn a thing or do by revisiting Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People". It's all about the building or a relationships of trust. Thanks for the comment!