DVCanvass

Too Much of What Matters Isn't Measured At All Does the donor experience (DE) matter to retention? If so, we probably need to deconstruct the abstract DE term. Let's start with context, this example is a telefundraising campaign converting digital petition leads to sustainer. A Mental exercise: Name two parts of the call experience that have a statistically significant impact on sustainer attrition in the first 90 days. Did your list include ask amount? And does retention go up or down as the ask amount goes up? Ask amount matters but it's a counter-intuitive until it isn't. As ask amount goes up, so goes retention. Great, go big then? Not so fast. The rub is ask amount goes down during the call conditional on getting supporter "no's" or reluctance to the starting ask.  The higher amounts come from people who said yes straight away, the lower ask amounts from those who needed to be cajoled into saying yes. But for conversation let's assume this group of "no before saying yes" folks are still profitable. Is there a way to have our cake and eat it too or at least eat some of it? The repeat asks can undermine feelings of autonomy and control by the human on the receiving end of that experience.  Our testing shows retention going down as autonomy goes down.  But what we do we do about this? If it's just a measuring stick to nowhere then it's not a metric worth measuring. This is real data showing supporter feelings of autonomy after a TM sustainer conversion call tracked over time and broken out by those whose final disposition was "yes" to the sustainer ask (in green) and those who ended the call with a "no" (blue line). Two macro take-aways. 1. Feelings of autonomy impact conversion - blue line is lower than the green line. This is cause and effect. I felt like the fundraiser was undermining my sense of control and reactance kicked in, I was going to say 'no' over and over (if needed) to try and regain a key, psychological need. 2. Something changed the green (and less so, blue) trend line and it was a positive change. Pt 2 wasn't random. It was an intervention with the agency by the charity (with our guidance) to stop the negative downward trend of supporter autonomy. As it turns out, the agency had a new manager whose ethos was akin to Glengarry Glen Ross, always-be-closing. That hurts conversion and retention. But we were able to make relatively minor re-training adjustments (down to fundraiser level which is the next level down we have for this data) to increase supporter feelings of autonomy that increased conversion and retention. Cause meet effect... It's cliche but true, what gets measured gets managed. But too much of what matters doesn't get measured at all. And too much of what gets measured is done because it's simple, easy and the way things have always been done but serving no useful, business improvement purpose.

Please do join Cylest Brooks 🏳️🌈⚖️and her team and grow and learn while helping great charity brands. We're only behavioral science canvassing agency in the sector and that translates to more psychologically satisfying supporter experiences, which translates to the highest retention in the sector, 2nd to none.

The Volume Model Kills, Quickly The fundraising metric paradox, no single metric is useful in isolation and yet running your program on that single metric has the power to kill your program.  And the irony sauce to go with the paradox main course? It kills quickly but you notice it too slowly. There are plenty of examples, response rate or average gift. These are like one-hand clapping. Same for cost to acquire.  Lifetime value is the solve but how many organizations run that way. Hardly any.  And even if you look at LTV is that at a supporter level or channel? The latter is probably more likely.  And even if at a supporter level you're forever solving for the question of whether you're optimizing among the best of the best choices or just the best of the ones you've been executing - local vs. global. But set that larger, thornier question aside. Look at this chart for F2F. Guess who is making money on the high number of signups per shift and who is losing their shirt?  Agency and charity, respectively. But hey, the agency is mostly being held to account on a quoted number of signups at a quoted price per signup.  Yeah, they produced a pro forma whose rosy retention metrics fell apart the minute they were exposed to sunlight but that price per and contract tied to volume holds up as long as the charity lets it. Signups per shift is barely useful to understand your program while also paradoxically being powerful enough to kill your ROI. The same holds for the sustainer ask amount though the relationship isn't always linear. Having said that, if you think a $30/month donor retains at the same rate as a $20 donor (all other things equal) then I've got ocean property in Oklahoma waiting for you. That same property is available to those who think the one-off donor isn't quitting at roughly the same rate as the monthly donor just because we can't see the month over month falloff in our payment processor.  The same decision calculus is being made for one-off and monthly - did giving increase make me feel psychologically satisfied? - and in roughly the same timeframe. Back to our chart, what's going on in this data? Incentives matter and if you're judged on volume you'll deliver volume. Also, I'll wager dollars to doughnuts that the fundraisers are heavily incentivized on signups per shift and that incentive comp represents a sizeable chunk of their total compensation. You gotta eat and sometimes that means going full Ben Affleck, Boiler Room. Guilt and pressure or just super high energy can work in the moment.