62. Some Personal News
In Preparation for a Challenging Q4: Discovery, Experimentation and Planning
A very warm welcome to all the new subscribers. I’m thrilled to have you as readers and truly appreciate your feedback and support.
SPN’s on a Wednesday are intentionally focused on just one topic + Open Roles & Opps. Today’s is Planning and Preparation. I’ve broken down 5 topics and outlined what I’m actioning now ahead of Q4.
Campaign Planning
Channel-mix-ology
Asset Prep
Data & Insights Discovery
Content Experimentation
As with every edition of SPN please reach out with any questions or comments. I respond to every single one.
1. Campaign Planning
Q4 is my favorite time of the year. You’re getting a ton of traffic, which allows you to run more tests and therefore gather insights at a greater speed, and people’s intent to donate is at an all-time high.
With each campaign, you need to optimize for:
Delighting existing donors
Introducing new donors with a good mix of educational content
High average donation value
Does your organization Match donations? On Black Friday why not focus on attracting high average donation values with a high Match offer? Your prospective and current donors are already in spend mode. It’s on you to be present.
What can we learn from e-commerce? Often they’re offering 30-50% discounts, which they’ll justify by their high average order value + high margin. Discounts aside, can you bundle specific products or value propositions that attract 2-3x your normal average donation amount?
Saturday and Sunday, run something different. Saturday is known as “Small Business Saturday”. Thank you AMEX. Why not use that messaging to your advantage? Any business doing less than $100M is a small business. What corporate partnership/joint campaign could you put into market?
To those donors who donated one-time Friday-Sunday you want to ensure you’re retargeting them with “Thank You” messaging + an ask to donate monthly as you run into and through Giving Tuesday. (There’s plenty to mop up on Wednesday. Set budget pacing accordingly).
2. Channel-mix-ology
Generally all the world’s largest companies deploy their biggest sum of advertising dollars in Q4. Naturally, CPMs rise through the roof and across the board, especially paid social. Regardless of the size of your org, how can you be navigate this? I think there’s 2 big considerations:
Part 1: Build your Audience.
If you're an organization planning to go hard around Giving Week to New Year, then you need to be building that list up right now. Optimize that on-site email/SMS capture. Think about what you can give your donors as a fair trade for those CRM records. Get creative.
Part 2: Explore your Channel Mix.
In previous newsletters I’ve mentioned exploring new channels and DSP’s: Uber and Lyft inventory, Apple’s burgeoning DSP play and DOOH, which is ramping up with a handy integration into Google’s DV360.
Which advertising channels can you deploy investment into without seeing CPM inflation? Are there ones that come to mind (there has to be) that I don't mention below? I’m thinking more in terms of short-term arbitrage, as the prices could theoretically increase at any time.
Truckside Ads: Adgile wrap trucks running delivery routes with billboards, and then allow you to retarget the mobile device IDs that were within the visibility of the truck on its route.
The cost of the truck wrap campaign isn’t going to increase depending on the time of the year, or if Adgile signs some big brands for Q4. It might not be the case for next year (depending on the supply of trucks), but I would take advantage this year.
Direct Mail: The cost of paper, postage, and ink doesn’t increase just because Coca Cola wants to deploy a ton of money into direct mail. Your CPM won’t go up.
On the flip side, you’re competing for attention when someone opens the mailbox, but direct mail is still a really safe channel to invest in.
Affiliate: Luckily, affiliates don’t charge a higher % of revenue during peak season, it mostly stays the same. If you go to publishers for writing affiliate content pieces, then you might see a higher flat fee (still before the % of revenue driven gets added on top), but generally, most affiliates don’t increase prices.
3. Asset Preparation
Landing Pages: If you’re not running landing pages for all your big Q4 campaigns, you’re doing this whole thing wrong. Each promotion or campaign should have 2 landing pages - one for new donors and one for existing donors.
These two audiences should be spoken to differently, and the page, in general, should be optimized for understanding the ask, getting in, and donating.
Ad Creative: Similar to landing pages, you should have ad creative that speaks to your new audiences and it should be different than what you serve your existing CRM/retargeting audiences.
And if you have the resources, then you should be exporting multiple hooks and formats (TikTok and Facebook ads shouldn’t look the same).
Emails & Texts: In addition to publishing your campaigns to existing and new donors (2 variations), you should have emails for donation cart reminders or segmented audiences (openers but non-clickers or clickers but non-donors yet), depending on your list size.
Test easing off on the urgency positioning in your content. There’s plenty of data to support how off-putting and inauthentic current prospective donors find it. If you’ve positioned your value prop correctly, ahead of time and educated your audience then they already understand how acute the need is.
4. Dig into the Data
Here are 5 buckets of data that I like to build ahead of sizable campaigns like Giving Tuesday and End of Year.
Create segments of my top 5% and 10% of donors based on their LTV.
Create audiences based on my highest-retained donor cohorts.
Create audiences based on successful donor acquisition campaigns (only works if you know which donors came from which ads).
Understand the donation flow of my best donors and try model it out —how did they hear about us, which channels did they engage with throughout their pre-donate journey with us, how much did they donate, when was their first donation, how much do they donate today, when were they up-sold to monthly or moved into major gift territory, through which channels are they most responsive today, etc.
Understand the best ad copy, types of creative (videos, animations, donor-generated content, etc) and CTA copy (on the website) that drives the highest conversion.
5. Content Experimentation
Q4 delivers so much additional traffic. This is the time to really put this traffic to use by lighting up A/B tests with batches of visitors. Ideally your web visitors are all experiencing A/B tests and none the wiser because their web experience continues to be seamless and relevant to their intent.
On landing pages, insert new content modules (for example, a comparison chart of program growth or impact, fresh images to show benefits of donating to your mission, new considerations to layout the “CTA” button etc) to test.
In addition to the numbers, look at website visitor behavior recordings with Microsoft Clarity (it’s free). Watch how users are behaving and make incremental changes to optimize your donor experience.
Open Roles & Opps
Breast Cancer Research Foundation: Chief Marketing & Comms
British Columbia Cancer Foundation (BCCF): Director Digital
Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee: VP, Development
Documented: Chief Development Officer
First Day Foundation: VP Marketing, Brand & Comms
Infectious Diseases Society of America: VP, Business Development
International Conservation Nonprofit: Vice President, Philanthropy Marketing (recruiter link)
Issue One: Chief Development Officer
The Trevor Project: Vice President, Community Philanthropy
UNICEF: Digital Communication Officer (Digital Platform Design, P2)
USCJ: Chief Development Officer
World Food Program (WFP): Chief of Advocacy, Brand & Campaigns, P5
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