DonorVoice

Walk A Mile in Their Shoes I'm surprised when the donation form companies give me deer in the headlights look when asked whether they do user experience research.  It's happened many times, I'm a slow learner. The charity sector avg donate form conversion rate is 12%. That's 88% failure among people who made a choice to be on the flipping page. You can torture the behavior data, it will never surrender what it doesn't have, answers. Enter user experience research, you know, ask em'.  UX research never fails to reveal use cases you'd never dream up. For example, lots of people print out the digital confirmation web page. Depending how much "tops and tails" stuff you have on the page, it can spill out to multiple pieces of printed paper. Take it from me, people hate that. It seems the latest UX fashion trend is multi-step checkout.  Behavioral science might endorse this because, --Chunking out the steps so no single step seems daunting with lots of fields --while simultaneously showing a progress bar to remove ambiguity --and once step one is done our completion bias kicks in and we want to finish It seems behavioral science is very likely wrong as many head to head tests show the single form page converting better. But, those multi-step forms often look pretty with modern design aesthetics. If only those pesky humans would stop getting in the way of pretty process. We aren't alone. The commercial sector is replete with avoidable user experience failures if only somebody dared walk a mile in the user's shoes. --Google Meet: It had counterintuitive mic and camera toggle buttons. The buttons would turn red to signify muting, but many users mistakenly thought red indicated the mic was active. --Hulu's Unusable App Tab: Hulu once included a tab to manage subscriptions, but instead of providing the expected functionality, the tab instructed users to visit the website to handle their account. --Fiverr's Misleading Star Rating: Fiverr deviated from standard UX conventions by representing its five-star rating with just one star and a number next to it (e.g., a yellow star with a "5"). --Netflix’s Autoplay Issue: The feature, which automatically plays trailers or previews when hovering over a title, is a notorious UX complaint. But maybe the worst checkout process in history is the old-school Convio forms. This is page 3 of a 3 step process and I'd wager 9 dentists out of 10 would think they were done, mission accomplished, donation made. After all, it says transaction summary at the top and has that government issued ID feel to it. But alas, one more step required, hitting the hard to spot process button. It would take very little time and money to do a smidgen of user research delivering a stratospheric ROI. The only thing missing is an inkling of desire to run your design by the people you expect to use it. Check that. There's two things missing. The first thing is the waste bin to throw away the hubris preventing the inkling.

Vote for Al Smith and Make Your Wet Dreams Come True I promise I'll tie in the post title but indulge me a moment. Distinctive Brand Assets sounds like an esoteric, say nothing concepts dreamed up by academics or brand charlatans. These are non-name identifiers like colors, taglines, characters or sounds helping your audience recognize your brand and think of you when it matters most. And you don’t have to spend millions on Super Bowl ads to create these. The bad news? If you don’t use them (or use them poorly), you’re missing out growing your donor file. These assets do more than just make you recognizable; they *encode* your brand into people's brains. Think of McDonald's golden arches or the WWF panda or the Salvation Army Bells or the jerry can and charity: water. Why distinctive assets matter in fundraising: --Efficiency: A donor can better recognize your nonprofit or campaign at a glance, across all touchpoints. --Emotional Connection: Distinctive assets help build recognition and emotional triggers. --Stand Out: Brands with strong assets are 52% more likely to be recalled than competitors And because it's the silly season we'll bring this down to earth with some presidential campaign slogan examples that have stood the test of time or, well… not so much. --“I Like Ike” (Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1952) Why it worked: Simple, catchy, emotionally resonant. Ike's slogan was short enough to fit on a button, had a memorable rhyme, and created positive sentiment. --"All the Way with LBJ” (Lyndon B. Johnson, 1964) Why it worked: Another rhyming gem, this one created a sense of unity and commitment. It was highly memorable and used Johnson's initials—always a good move if you want to be distinctive. --“Vote for Al Smith and Make Your Wet Dreams Come True” (Alfred E. Smith, 1928) Why it failed: Wow, where to begin? He was using innuendo to reference his anti-Prohibition stance. It’s a great lesson in how not to be distinctive—don’t confuse or offend your audience. The winning formula for Distinctive Assets --Famous - you need lots of people to recognize it --Unique - you need those same people to uniquely associate with your brand This requires consistency over time but also, a solid choice to start with. A color is very hard to make famous and unique. Characters work best, followed by sounds and slogans. Ideally, you pick something with latent, untapped connection to your brand. But consistency is still king. There was nothing inherent about the WWF panda nor the Salvation Army bells. It’s easy to fall into the trap of creating bland, overly generic taglines and visual assets because you think your message alone should do the work. But if we’re honest with ourselves, our audience is navigating through thousands of messages daily and we need all the help we can get.

Peloton Fundraising Many lament comparisons between the nonprofit and commercial sector. I'm of the view the two are more similar than different but don't take my word for it, just ask Peloton. This is from a WSJ article on the company with my headline takeaways. ◽Takeaway: One size fits all is bad. Matching message to different needs is key. --The CMO said “We believe that we were hitting some diminishing return in our previous strategy, because we’ve been talking to the same people with very similar messages," --The fitness company’s marketing chief plans to get growth back on track by appealing to specific groups of customers. ◽ Takeaway: Continuous, always-on ads are inefficient. Pulse instead, on/off periods. --TV commercials that previously aired year-round will now be rationed ◽Takeaway: If your experience/product sucks, acquisition is wasted spend. --An industry analyst says, "They’ll be better off focusing more on churn and retention, and that could allow them to drive growth.” ◽Takeaway: Resources are always scarce. --Weinberg (the CMO) had less money and fewer staff to help her allocate it than her predecessors. ◽Takeaway: Price promotions (matching gift) and giveaways merely shift dollars forward and worse, undermine intrinsic reasons for giving/buying. Short-term, direct response drives Current Demand, doing very little for Future Demand, which only comes from brand building. --Peloton spent the past few years trying to win over new users with discounted hardware and other promotions. --Teams’ targets were tied to short-term sales metrics, leaving little budget available for longer-term brand building marketing, Weinberg said. The short-term mindset also left Peloton targeting the same amorphous group of customers over and over again—fitness enthusiasts. ◽Takeaway: You must do deep, insights based research to unearth needs for growth. --“And we’re really shifting to ask, what are the other audiences for which we have excellent product market fit?" ◽Takeaway: The why of giving/buying is never about the "bike" (issue, program). --Speaking about new, upcoming brand ads, “It was,” Weinberg said, “the first time we did something and didn’t talk about the bike.”

Engagement Scores: The Empty Calories of Fundraising/Marketing Click. Like. Follow. Attend. Or is it attend, follow, click, like? Non-financial behavior may be useful but there are too many bad ideas being trotted out in the name of Engagement. Two notions in particular should be relegated to the dung pile of engagement hustlers look for ponies. Bogus Idea #1 1.Engagement is a set of behaviors. "Engagement is not a metric, it's an excuse". This from Google Head of Digital Analytics, Avinash Kaushik. Ouch. He goes on to say, "creating relevant engaging digital experiences is a huge part of my job". How to square that circle? We've seen groups cobble together non-financial behaviors and call it an "Engagement Score". Engagement isn't a behavior. It's a state of mind, a splash of passion and enthusiasm creating a more mentally engrossed supporter. There's yet to be any evidence-based work showing what your charity should do differently to foster "engagement" versus what you should be doing to foster Satisfaction, Trust and Commitment. Jumping to the end and cobbling together non-financial behaviors to ponder why you have more/less of this vaporous element is dangerous, circular logic. If 'engagement' is operationalized as a random set of behaviors then the only way to increase it is to bombard people with stuff as a necessary precondition to move their engagement score. There are lots of people mentally engaged with your brand who will only infrequently reveal themselves with their mouse or feet. There are also lots of people who will tune you out in our effort to "engage" them. Bogus Idea #2. Engagement metrics cause business outcomes.  If Google says engagement metrics are an excuse, that's nothing compared to what Facebook's head of marketing science, Brad Smallwood, says. He calls engagement data “irrelevant”, saying it has “no more chance of predicting actual business outcomes than a random guess.”  Double ouch. And yet Facebook included an "engagement" metric in their 2007 dashboard, which was a rolled up smorgasbord of irrelevance. Not to be outdone, Forrester, in that same year, proclaimed "engagement" as marketing's new key metric. There is often correlation with non-financial behavior data and giving data - e.g. sign up for newsletter correlates with giving, taking advocacy action correlates with giving. This correlation should be as surprising as it is useful - not at all.  Engagement is neither a causal path nor necessary way station to business outcomes. Princeton philosopher Harry G Frankfurt wrote an essay, "On Bullshit". The purpose of bullshit is "not to communicate, but avoid communicating; to sound impressive while saying nothing too specific; to give you room for maneuver if scrutinized." The next time someone talks about making your marketing/fundraising more engaging or needing to engage your supporters more, or wanting to create an Engagement metric it's probably wise to reflect on Harry's words.

Survivor: Society Edition Imagine a reality TV show where the contestants aren’t competing for food or fire, but something more complex: how to split people into groups to minimize conflict within and maximize tension between them. The host explains the rules: “Your challenge is to create islands of harmony, but with enough contrast to make sure the rivalry between islands is intense.” Sounds like a twisted social experiment, right? But in a way, this is what happens in real life. This is the essence of underlying polarization in society. Society’s deepest divides aren't what we see on the surface like race, gender, or even political affiliations. These parts of who we are are surprisingly weak at explaining meaningful differences in our society. In fact, dividing people by race or gender or age barely scratches the surface, accounting for just around 1% of overall differences on what people think and believe and hold dear - i.e. our values. If a contestant in our Survivor show assigned islands by any of these demographics they'd lose before the opening credits finished rolling. There'd be a lot more bickering on each island than between them. Even political parties, which have become increasingly polarized, only capture about 15% of values differences. This political party contestant would be voted off by Day 2. But if there were an enterprising social scientist and budding fundraiser on the show who decided to group by values they'd see harmony on each island soar. So, what does this mean for how we understand society—and more importantly, how we engage with it? Values are the core of our identities, the invisible lines that dictate who we are, what we believe in, and how we choose to live our lives. The two people on the right would fit right in on the same island since they're both caregivers for someone with Cancer, dog owners and, conservationists Surface level groupings like race or gender (or worse, active, lapsed, sustainer, mid-level, etc.) are like reality show islands based on the color of people’s shirts. It might seem logical at first, but it doesn’t tap into what really matters. The result? More internal conflict, less real connection, and missed opportunities to create meaningful unity or purposeful rivalry. In our reality show of society, the best strategy isn’t to avoid conflict but to understand where it comes from and how to harness it while not leaving people off your island because they don't look the part.

Delivery or Carry Out? Domino’s, the pioneer of the 30-minute delivery guarantee and pizza tracker, is no longer just the delivery giant you remember. In a surprising shift, Domino’s delivery business is shrinking. Rising inflation, along with the growing desire to avoid delivery fees and tipping, has led more customers to opt for a different choice: carryout. In fact, carryout sales now account for 40% of Domino's revenue—a key growth segment that’s keeping the brand relevant. Domino’s has doubled down on this trend with innovations like Apple CarPlay integration, making it easier for customers to order from their cars. What's even more striking is how separate these two customer bases are: only 15% of people regularly switch between delivery and carryout. Each segment requires different advertising strategies, e-commerce platforms, and logistics. This divide isn’t just about pizza. It’s a lesson in business growth, reminding us that different customer segments require different strategies This distinction mirrors a challenge we face in the donor world: understanding payment preferences. While Domino’s navigates delivery versus carryout, we need to tackle traditional versus modern payment methods to help achieve "carry out" growth. Let’s face it—checks are practically extinct in consumer transactions, accounting for just 3% of all U.S. payments, according to the Federal Reserve. For a large portion of the population, that number is close to zero and has been for years. These are strong, built-in payment preferences that can make or break response rate. So, why send direct mail with reply forms and business reply envelopes to people who don't write checks? Is it because you aren't aware of their payment preferences? What if you could know these preferences with high accuracy—which is indeed possible—would that change your approach? What would it take for you to start honoring these strong payment preferences? Perhaps it's time to stop offering delivery to carryout people.

Is Your Charity Delivering the Goods? Donor’s need to feel like their donation will do some good because we all crave a sense of competence. The question is, what's the best way to signal and communicate this? Here are three: --Outputs: Immediate, tangible results examples of what the charity directly provides - meals delivered, blankets distributed, or books supplied. --Outcomes: These are the short-term benefits or changes that result from the outputs. It’s the difference those meals make - e.g. improved nutrition --Impact: The long-term, broader effect of the charity’s work. It’s the ultimate goal, reflecting lasting changes in people’s lives - e.g. children's improved nutrition leads to better school performance. Prior research has two conflicting findings, --Donors assign little to no value on Outputs --Donors do but Outcomes > Outputs and Outcomes = Impact.  The rub is that Outputs are easier to come by for charities. But what if we can remedy pt. 1 and put Outputs (easier for charity staff to source) on part with Outcomes by thinking of Outputs as either Goods or Services and messaging each one differently? Goods are very tangible. You can see a food box, blanket or water well, you can touch it. Tangible makes it feel psychologically close, priming a concrete "how my dollar is used" mindset that's focused on the near term. This subconsciously makes me think about the charity's Ability to deliver the goods and increase confidence my donation is not wasted. Services are more abstract, often conveying an interaction between charity and beneficiary or perhaps the outcome. This feels psychologically further away and primes a mindset more focused on the long-term. This subconsciously makes me think about the charity's Effort to stay the course, delivering these longer horizon benefits and thereby increase my confidence the donation isn't wasted. Here's an illustration: --Goods-Oriented: Your donation provides 5 meals to families. Since we're able to source and deliver groceries efficiently, every dollar goes further fighting hunger. --Services-Oriented: Our nutrition education empowers families to make healthier choices. Our team works tirelessly delivering these programs for lasting impact on our community's well-being. To recap, Outputs are either Goods or Services and they conjure up very different mindsets, requiring different messaging to signal confidence in the charity. Goods = Tangible and near term, message concretely on Ability Services = Abstract and long-term, message abstractly on Effort Here's the 2x2 experiment that correctly and incorrectly matched Output Type and Message. Showing donors their donation will be put to good use matters. But what's often considered the lowest common denominator version, Outputs, can do the job if we get a tad more nuanced in distinguishing between Goods and Services output and message accordingly to match the moment.

Is Your Fundraising Dots or Patterns? We report avg gift as gospel.  This assumes outliers are distraction & the world is Normal. How many times have you removed "outlier" gifts to report average? Human height, blood pressure, intelligence and a lot of randomness are Normal. The power curve describes word use frequency, human settlement size, internet traffic distribution and any system with "power" users. In a power world the avg tells you nothing useful because you've got two interesting dynamics, the long tail and the highly skewed action at the other end.  Your 80/20 rule, Pareto. Is your world a power world? You likely get most of your $ from a small number of donors. Your gift frequency per donor/per year is highly skewed, following a power curve. Flip the power curve and it matches your return from solicitation volume. Big gains going from 0 solicitations to 1, hardly any going 12 to 14. Here's the challenge. Most of our systems are geared towards the Normal dist world.  We treat all donors the same, meaning we think there's an avg donor and we build test and control world around this non-existent donor. The Normal world is where efficiency and incremental gain live.  You build standardized process and design to serve "average customers". We force this Normal Distribution thinking with our hierarchical org charts, division of labor, cost accounting, etc. Here's the thing, it's really hard to move the avg; avg gift, avg output, avg cultural competence.  And here's the big thing, it's wasted time trying to move the middle if you're operating in a Power World. In a Power World the 'extremes' make a really big difference in outcomes. The simple example - a $10,000 gift to your appeal. Rather than treat this as anomaly or outlier, what if your time is spent studying this? In a power world things are more interconnected.  And doesn't your world feel more interconnected? Your supply chain, the geographic spread of your labor pool? Here's the best part. In a power world the cause of big change tends to be a single, generative idea. This is what some call scale-free theory or deep simplicity. What the hell does that mean? --In a normal curve world you process dots, in a power world we look for patterns. If you focus on campaign results versus LTV you're forcing a normal curve on a power world. --In a normal world we examine offer, the creative and message in a vacuum. We think the March appeal success and failure is isolated from Feb and April. --In a normal world we think adding channels is going to move the avg. In a power world you're simply shifting dollars. --In a power world, the thing that caused success and failure is mostly the same for a given context. That means unearthing the "why" of behavior is scale-free theory. It's got interconnected impact as it cuts across across acquisition, house appeals, sustainer, lapsed, mid level, major... In a power world, the cool stuff is happening outside convention.

Jiu-Jitsu Fundraising An enemy is crystallizing.  "Rally the mostly satisfied, even-keeled moderates to storm the bastille.", said nobody ever. Does your org have an enemy? The rich, the establishment, the pro-this or con-that, the anti-whatever you stand for? Or maybe there's just a big, prevailing message with lots of air time, exposure or shelf-life that undercuts the resonance of your message? What if you could use the heft of the opposition message to make your message do its job better? That's the equivalent of Jiu-Jitsu, the smaller opponent using the size advantage of his opponent against him. A very cool experiment did just this. It was in the world of candidate politics where everybody has an enemy. But the application for many situations is there for the creative, enterprising group. There are four ads, A-D, each representing a different test condition. --Control: Top left (A) was lifted directly from the 2018 gubernatorial primary and Gretchen Whitmer's campaign. --Traditional:  (B) was run in response by Shri Thanedar, one of Whitmer's opponents. It's a counterpoint without ever explicitly referencing the opponent's message. --Half Jiu-Jitsu.  (C). This ad was created by researchers to test Thanedar being able to use the "enemy" (Whitmer's) message's exposure, salience and memory associations against Whitmer. You can see it includes most of Whitmer's original ad and offers counterpoints included in Thanedar's Traditional ad.(B) --Full Jiu-Jitsu.  (D). A merging of Whitmer's original and Thanedar's traditional ad with header copy and the visual delineation. People in the two Jiu-Jitsu conditions rated Whitmer as less trustworthy and had less interest in voting for her and donated less when given the chance. And the full Jiu-Jitsu did better than the partial. And the Jiu-Jitsu ads had more staying power with lower sentiment toward Whitmer a full two weeks after the exposure. What's going on here? Your enemy's ad has exposure and that exposure gets stored in our memory banks. The Jiu-Jitsu ad takes advantage of that memory, conjures it up and creates a new linkage between the memory and a counterpoint. It gives your message extra salience and exposure without paying for it and it's turning an enemy's strength into a weakness. In a prior life I did work for Budweiser. Come to think of it, I still sort of work for Budweiser, I just don't get paid and it's a stretch to call it work, most would call it drinking. At any rate, we found Budweiser had so dominated the airwaves during NFL football games that consumers believed every beer ad they saw was Budweiser, even when it was a Miller or Coors ad. The associative memory was football = beer = Budweiser. That's powerful. I don't think the Miller folks were necessarily thinking about Jiu-Jitsu when they decided to go directly after Budweiser in their ads but that was part of their answer to breaking through. Up until that point, they were advertising for Bud.

Beware of Junk Science Myers-Briggs is the most popular personality test in the world. Fortune 100 and govt's love it. More than 1.5 million people take it every year. Our only issue with it as DonorVoice social scientists is this: It's garbage. It fails two fundamental requirements, it's neither valid nor reliable. As the kids would say, this is big, freaking problem. (I have no idea if kids say this but if they did it would come in the form of incomprehensible shorthand on my kids' tok-tik, instachat, snapgram accounts) This got the DV team thinking about all the other popular, equally junky, junk-science out there. Here's our Junk list and critique. #1. Myers -Briggs. Not valid, not reliable, otherwise perfect. #2. Net Promoter Score. NPS is a single, "willingness to recommend" question that must have the same kick-ass PR agent as Myers-Briggs because it's super popular despite also being garbage. #3. Generational Marketing. This is our tilting-at-windmills passion. The more data and evidence we surface that this is akin to your horoscope, the more the true believers, believe.  #4. Personas. Not a single person in Persona Group A matches the profile. Not one. Most people vary wildly from the theoretical average, especially when the Personas come from the Cluster F*$& of cluster analysis.  #5. Satisfaction as the measurement. Having satisfied donors is better than dissatisfied. But, the concept shouldn't be seen as the measure. The future is here, it just isn't widely "lived" in. Here are the existing, validated, already-in-use-by-charities replacements. (The numbering matches Junk Science above) #1. Personality Big Five. Personality is largely genetic and predictive of what a person will find interesting and choose.  #2. Commitment. This is an attitudinal loyalty measure based and the best loyalty predictor on the market because it also provides cause and effect answers.  #3. Demos are useful as proxy data and for targeting, which is all about efficiency. Demos are usually garbage for understanding "why" of behavior. We use demographic data as a proxy to score lists with Personality segment data.  #4. Identity. Each of our donors multifaceted, personal narratives. Much of charitable giving is tied to reinforcing one's sense of self - e.g. conservationist, Globalist, disease caregiver, Dog lover. #5.  Need Satisfaction. There are three, psychological needs humans subconsciously want met when interacting with a charity: autonomy, competence and relatedness. Your copy, scripts and design should be audited through this lens. You also want to measure supporter experience after each interaction. Make it part of your business process-- giving it equal weight to collecting payment details. But, don't just measure. Act on the data in the moment and in aggregate to fix broken experiences.  What else would you add? What do you disagree with?