House appeal

An appeal sent to the house file for Royal Hospital for Neuro-disability as part of the donor loyalty cycle which includes regular appeals, newsletters and gift acknowledgments.

Regular warm appeals are a vital part of retaining donors. In addition to raising much needed funds for projects, there is a direct correlation between the frequency of appeals sent and donor retention. As appeal frequency drops, so does donor loyalty.

New donor acquisition pack

Another new donor acquisition pack, this time for overseas disability charity, CBM with the objective of securing higher initial gifts. By keeping the lower gift amount of £20, it did not discourage donors who wanted to respond but not at the higher amounts.

A donor’s first gift amount is a key indicator of their long term value to the charity. To this end, we strongly believe that recruiting donors with a low first gift is a false economy and may end up costing more to cultivate than the donor returns over their time with the charity.

New donor acquisition campaign

Featuring Sir Trevor McDonald, this appeal package was very successful in recruiting new donors for the Royal Hospital for Neuro-disability. The third party endorsement provided a higher than expected % response rate and higher than anticipated average gift.

The appeal pack used a case study that demonstrated the work of the hospital in caring for people with brain injury. Sir Trevor McDonald wrote the uplift piece which accompanied the main appeal.

The % response was excellent as was the average gift. We know that a donor’s 1st gift amount is a key indicator of their subsequent long term value, so this was an important criteria for success.

Public and Poverty – a response to Andrew Darnton and Martin Kirk

In their ‘Finding Frames’ paper which was published by BOND in January 2011, the authors question why the general public are not more engaged with the issues of poverty now than they were in 1974. This despite decades of initiatives such as Band Aid, Make Poverty History, Jubilee Debt campaign, Comic Relief and so on. What is of more concern is that DFID found through their research that the segment of the public that are most engaged has shrunk by a third since April 2008 – now at 14%.

I want to thank the authors for much of their thinking, but also to challenge some of the conclusions and to add to the debate. As a fundraiser involved in the development world, I am passionate about the issues of poverty and how those issues are communicated to the UK public.

The Implication of the NGO sector

The NGO sector is implicated in the state of public engagement. The paper states that “the sector’s engagement models have achieved big numbers and ever-increasing incomes, but with what impact on the quality of public engagement?”

It is interesting that back in 2002 I gave a paper at the Institute of Fundraising’s Annual Convention on the negative effects of low value, high volume fundraising as practised by charities such as Oxfam. My premise was that it would be better for these organisations to recruit fewer donors but of higher value. The premise was supported by data and analysis that showed that higher value donors are more expensive to recruit but all of their loyalty and giving metrics make it worthwhile investing in bringing them on board.

The presentation was met with a certain level of disdain from fundraisers who are focused on the acquisition of volume at all costs. There is a mentality that the larger our supporter base ergo we must be more successful. That is a worrying and incorrect conclusion. I include Oxfam as one of those who are more interested in building a large database of supporters (£2 per month will change the world) at the expense of other, longer-term objectives.

Now, Martin Kirk might be interested to know that in 2009 I undertook a major piece of analysis on the Oxfam database, the details of which I am not at liberty to disclose due to client confidentiality. However, there are some interesting principles that relate to this paper and the points that he raises.

• If a charity is focused on building volume at the expense of value in it’s donorbase, then it is likely to recruit those donors at the lowest possible entry point. I find it incredible that this is still the case with so many charity acquisition strategies. Take the Red Cross ‘address label’ pack which is costly to produce, gets a very good response and has a sharp drop-off rate. Why? Because low value donors recruited in this way,  and the £2 per month donor proposition used so extensively, is a transactional type of fundraising as opposed to cause-driven fundraising.

• One of the problems faced by larger charities is the tendency to work in silos. So the fundraising team are working on one side of the building and the programmes team on the other and the left hand either doesn’t know what the right is doing, doesn’t care, or in extreme cases works against it. Let me put a question to Martin Kirk. How involved are the overseas programmes team at Oxfam in the development of the fundraising strategy? Is there collaboration and co-operation in the planning and writing of the appeals and in the overall direction of the supporter journeys? Are members of the overseas programmes team present at briefing meetings, planning meetings and debrief and review meetings?

I would be interested to know how supportive the overseas programmes team at Oxfam were about the ‘100% Campaign’ that was run in February 2011? To me this was a cheap marketing trick that would have done little to educate the public in the issues that Oxfam are engaged in. Why give to Oxfam just because 100% of your money is going to Oxfam? Transactional fundraising that is not going to ever [likely] get a second gift.

• There is another worrying trend in the sector which is to bring in non-sector Fundraising Directors who think that selling ‘poverty’ is the same as selling books, or coffee. It isn’t. And, what is more, this leads to the transactional model of fundraising made in the first point above. Fundraising is a different transaction to any commercial transaction and unless that subtle relationship between charity and donor is understood, there will be a breakdown in the engagement with the public which is being discussed.

Andrew and Martin, I would encourage you to get on to the direct mail lists of some of the leading overseas development charities who are raising funds in the UK from the general public and ask yourself how they are communicating with you. Are they engaging you in the issues that you raise in your paper? Are you being viewed as a cash provider, or as a valued partner?

I am not saying that these NGOs are wholly to blame for the slide in public engagement that you talk about, but certainly they are responsible for much of the low-level transactional fundraising that sets aside donor education and engagement. Maybe, in the same way that some believe that charity begins at home, some honest strategic thinking and evaluation should also begin at home.
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