Direct marketing is so darn illogical. I’ve been doing this for over 40 years, and common sense seems to be, well, not as common as you might think.
“Going with your gut,” or trusting your intuition, is an easy trap that both experienced veterans and younger “superstars” can fall into. Without long-term testing and accurate analysis, trusting what seems logical can be disastrous. Here are three glaring examples of the kind of logical assumptions that are just plain wrong.
1. Don’t ask first-time donors for a second gift too soon.
Every year New Year’s resolutions are made and broken within the first few days of the year. Here are five strategic resolutions marketing professionals in Christian nonprofit organizations should consider. They can change your entire year.
1. Lose weight. Purge dead weight from your donor list to save money and improve performance. Start with an intensive address correction initiative.
What does an old guy pour his energy into when he’s getting near the end of his career? What about someone who has helped build the leading marketing firm dedicated to Christian nonprofit organizations? And someone who still lives and breathes direct marketing?
How about capturing all the important learnings over his 23-year tenure and corralling them into an easy-to-use stable of essentials that both institutionalizes the learnings and provides a safe repository for the latest developing learnings.
Ta-da!!!! Introducing the “Strategy Essentials Toolbox."
The leadership team at Masterworks has given me, Masterworks’ Founding Creative Director, the opportunity to take each one of our major strategies and analyze all the factors that make them work so well. We’re creating an online “toolbox” that will be easily accessible as client teams work on various projects for our more than 30 clients. So, no matter who is sitting around the table at that Creative Meeting, every client gets the benefit of all our learnings over the past 23 years. It’s a toolbox full of the essentials with plenty of room to add new tools as they are developed and tested.
Walmart just proved it’s possible! According to Phil Terry in his blog, Daily Artifacts, “Walmart made a common mistake repeated hundreds of times in the business world: they relied on what customers said in a survey versus what they actually do in the stores” and online.
Customers were telling Walmart they wanted more space in the aisles and less clutter. “But as Sam Walton, founder of Walmart, knew they wanted broader selection even more.“
Besides losing an estimated $1.85 billion in sales since remodeling their stores in 2008, Walmart spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the ill-conceived store remodeling project. Wider aisles. Shortened shelves. 15% of inventory removed from the stores. Slimmed down merchandise on “end caps” (displays at the ends of aisles).
We’ve known it for decades. People who consider themselves “religious” are more generous than those without strong faith.
Now, a new study takes that knowledge a step further. According to a survey conducted by Cygnus Applied Research, a Chicago fundraising consulting firm, “Actively religious donors under 35 (years of age) contributed 5 times more than donors that age who described themselves as ‘not at all religious’ or ‘somewhere in between’.”
Conducted among donors from 34 different charities in 2010, there were more than 3,500 responders. Another related conclusion was that actively religious donors in general were more likely to volunteer and to serve on charity boards.
Blogging can be a pain, especially if you’re not a writer. But if you can get it done, and do it right, it can be a powerful platform for communication.
A recent study from eMarketer projects that “by 2014, blog readership will rise to more than 150 million Americans.” That would be 60% of the Internet population in the United States. WordPress, which powers many of the blogs read today, actually hosts 11.4 million blogs on their platform. On an average day, according to WordPress, 350,000 new posts are published and 400,000 new comments are left. I guess that means — if you get one new comment a day, you’re almost average. Two comments and you’re stellar.
So, why get involved in all this chatter? Here are seven good reasons:
If you talk with most client-service people, they’re adamant — it’s never good to cause your client any distress. Never surprise them. If there’s bad news, be sure you’re the first to tell them. Never “rock the boat” by making them uncomfortable. Be sure you “capture their voice” and “communicate their brand.” Precisely. Consistently. Fanatically!
And that’s all correct to a point. I would never purposefully do something to cause distress for a client.
But . . .
Who could resist joining in on a webinar with that title?
And while I didn’t learn much that was applicable to nonprofit fundraising, the hour spent was worth it for three facts they emphasized:
- 45% of Facebook users are over 26. (They are either age qualified as part of an appropriate nonprofit fundraising audience, or they will grow up to become our audience.)
- 41% are scanning brands to let friends know which brands they prefer. (Now that’s an open door for sharing their passion for a ministry.)
- Videos sent by friends are watched three-times longer than those sent by businesses, organizations or people they don’t know. (If you’re going to pay for video, make it viral!)
Current social media in the nonprofit arena is like a middle school dance: lots of noise, a few pack leaders who have experienced success and all the rest who really don’t know what they’re doing. The important thing is to get out there on the floor and move with the music.
In the “good old days,” some words were sacred. And only believers used them. Take the word “evangelism,” for example. It belonged to the evangelicals and fundamentalists. They knew what it meant and appreciated its eternal significance.
Today, sacred words are being “highjacked” and used for some of the most secular purposes. A recent article in Direct Marketing News encouraged marketers to “Learn to wield the power of evangelism.” Talk about cheapening the word! Instead of saving a soul for eternity, the article was encouraging marketers to recognize that their best customers may not be those spending the most money on their products. Instead, those “primo” customers could actually be those “evangelists” who enthusiastically and genuinely promote what you sell on product review sites, message boards and social networks.
Aside from being shocked by the audacity of the linguistic thievery, the points made in the article for product marketers apply to faith-based nonprofits with donors.
Direct mail and Mark Twain have at least one thing in common. And Twain said it best when he responded to ugly rumors by declaring, “The report of my death was an exaggeration.”
Mark’s cousin was sick, and somehow from that, the world-renowned author was pronounced dead.
Direct mail has suffered the same defamation — repeatedly and erroneously given up on as a fatality in the digital revolution.
