72. Some Personal News
December's Project Plan for EOY by Week and Channel + the “First Moment of Truth”
A very warm welcome to all the new subscribers. I’m thrilled to have you as readers and truly appreciate your feedback and support.
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Today’s SPN includes the following:
How do you do on the “First Moment of Truth”?
Creative finally credited as a driver of performance
EOY Project Plan - December by week and by channel
As with every edition of SPN please reach out with any questions or comments. I respond to every single one.
Let’s dig in.
First Moment of Truth
In an effort to curtail my mid-week cocktail drinking I recently added San Pellegrino to the weekly shopping list. Since when did SP change their packaging to slimmer cans and drop the foil lid? A schoolboy error if ever there was one!
P&G have a foundational concept in their marketing - the “First Moment of Truth”. It refers to the moment when a consumer chooses a product over a competitors. In other words, it’s the “a-ha moment”.
When SP chose to up the ante in the soda market I marveled at the innovative foil element they’d added to their lids. It was distinctive and it was differentiating.
It also created a new problem for all their competition - the notion of a dirty can lid. Who knew who (or what) had touched the surface of the can you were about to put in your mouth?
The foil increased the real estate on the can for branding too - which SP leveraged to waft premium product vibes in my general direction. Besides looking good, the packaging concept seemed to work for sales too. A quick Google search says +30% in some markets.
It remains such a great example of creative thinking driving business success, and hopefully has more life left in it than living on the sidelines as a business school case study.
I’m sure there’s a compelling excel model somewhere showing how much more cost effective the new cans are, but surrendering at the First Moment of Truth seems a mistake.
Why am I talking about a beverage and its foil lid? Because positioning and differentiation matter hugely. Why should somebody choose to support your Org?
Whether or not the foil had a functional purpose it distinguished SP from every competing beverage on the market. No one else had a can like that, and it had become a unique brand asset.
What’s yours?
Look at it through the lens of a Prospective Donor - how do you do on the First Moment of Truth?
Creative
I listened to an interesting talk this week between Nicola Mendelsohn (Meta) and Smartly.io CEO Laura Desmond. They talked ads - media buying and agile creative.
One thing was abundantly clear and supported learnings from the latest Facebook earnings mentioned in last week’s SPN - their ad tools are back and firing on all cylinders.
It’s great to see creative finally being credited as a driver of performance - enhanced by AI being able to refigure a brands assets to maximize results.
I wonder if this isn’t just a step on the way for a longer journey. AI is essentially developing creative anagrams - using a pre determined set of assets we can create all these ad variants. But few are introducing wild cards or new thoughts and hence coming up with totally new answers.
To stretch the anagram simile, playing scrabble works best with new letters. How do we introduce new letters into the AI tools?
December Project Plan
EOY beckons! And since Holiday tunes are now pulsating in every store I walk into, I wanted to share a short no-panic project plan that helped me increase annual fundraising results every year for 5+ years.
I’ve referenced the Donor Lifecycle stage definitions shared before - check out these earlier posts from edition 27 and edition 34 for a refresher and further context.
This post feels like it could be bookmarked and returned to a number of times. Let me know if that’s the case and what questions you have.
Donor Lifecycle Stages
Between now and December
Lock in your Match Partners, define your creative messaging (non-emergency) calendar, and align on weekly targets – based on the YoY growth you’re aiming for.
Week 1, December 4-10th
Top-funnel, Display and Paid Social: Increase spending on your Cash Suspect and Cash Prospect audiences to front-load the top-of-funnel budget ahead of the heavy fundraising weeks. Commit 30% of your monthly Prospecting budget in Week 1.
Mid-funnel, Non-Branded SEM: Maintain your budgets and focus on maintaining CPCs – even if it means a slight decline in impression share and overall clicks as the media cost rises. Preserve some of your dollars!
Bottom-funnel, Branded SEM and Retargeting: Maintain flat CPCs, and focus on negating irrelevant keywords and any last-minute optimizations to the Quality Score for SEM. For retargeting specifically, exclude the bottom 10% of non-converting visitors – reducing spend by 10%.
Reactivation, Email: Keep the send’s budget and frequency the same, focusing on Suspect and Prospect audiences. I like to email the Current Cash and Current Monthly donors during Week 1, focusing on thanking them for their contributions to date – without including any CTAs.
Reactivation, Direct Mail: Here and below I refer to weeks as the time when it hits the mailbox, so sends should be happening according to your delivery timeline. In Week 1 for direct mail, I like to do similarly to email and send a Thank You note to Current donors and Lapsed ones, not including any CTAs.
Website: Between December Week 1 and January 1st, lock the website in its current state and avoid making any changes. Website testing and optimization is for October and November.
Reporting cadence: Weekly.
Metrics to pay the most attention to: Conversion Rate and Share of New vs. Returning users. While the latter should skew towards New Users, your CVR should be going up steadily or staying flat in December. If it’s going down, decrease spending on top-of-funnel audiences and reallocate to mid-funnel.
Week 2, December 11-17th
Top-funnel, Display and Paid Social: Maintain the same level of spending – the second week should also represent about 30% of your total monthly budget for this part of the strategy, building demand.
Mid-funnel, Non-Branded SEM: Aim to keep the same impression share as in Week 1 – even if it means a slight increase in CPCs. The second week is not yet the time for playing offense, but avoid losing too many positions.
Bottom-funnel, Branded SEM and Retargeting: For Branded SEM, as your negative keyword list is now as tight as possible for the 2023 EOY season, keep the impression share at the Week 1 level – even if it means a slight increase in total costs. For Retargeting, increase the spend to pre-10% exclusion – increasing frequency subsequently.
Reactivation, Email: Send general support request emails to your current donors, asking them to support the Org before the New Year and share your fundraising goals for the remainder of 2023. Sharing donation asks with current supporters ahead of the final week’s frenzy has proven to work best for me every time. Week 2 is also the week to hit your maximum comfortable frequency, reducing it as you approach Christmas and NYE.
Reactivation, Direct Mail: Share a soft donation ask with the Current donors and send the first batch to the Lapsed and High Propensity Prospects. Focus on a value message instead of urgency against the goal.
Website: No changes.
Reporting cadence: Weekly.
Metrics to pay the most attention to: Share of New vs. Returning and Average Donation Value. Your share of returning users should start growing as you shift spending to mid- and bottom-of-the-funnel, and average donation value should be (at least) in line with last year’s figures.
Week 3, December 18-24th
Top-funnel, Display and Paid Social: Drastically reduce the budget to about 10% of your monthly allocation. This week is unlikely to generate new demand and you want to preserve the funding available for the final week’s push.
Mid-funnel, Non-Branded SEM: Keep the same strategy as the week before, not playing active offense and maintaining the impression share – while slightly increasing the total budget to accommodate.
Bottom-funnel, Branded SEM and Retargeting: For both Branded SEM and Retargeting, get ahead of the curve – and maximize the impression share from this week until the very EOY. Your Branded SEM Impression share should be at least 95% for this and the final week.
Reactivation, Email: Stop any sends for this week to Suspects and Prospects while continuing regular - but not too frequent (no more than once a day) - sends to Current donors, keeping them updated on your progress against the annual goal.
Reactivation, Direct Mail: Deliver the second send to Lapsed Donors and Prospects, excluding Current Donors and instead send two pieces to them in the week after.
Website: No changes.
Reporting cadence: Daily.
Metrics to pay the most attention to: Average Donation Value and Conversion Rate. Average Donation Value should stay flat or up YoY, while CVR should remain flat or up WoW.
Week 4, December 25-31st
Top-funnel, Display and Paid Social: Do the last push – this week should represent 30% of your total monthly budget for the tactic.
Mid-funnel, Non-Branded SEM: Switch to total offense and aim for the maximum impression share within your core terms that the budget permits.
Bottom-funnel, Branded SEM and Retargeting: Continue the total offense tactic and maintain the 95%+ Impression Share.
Reactivation, Email: Maintain the same frequency with Current Donors with little-to-no urgency message – while actively pursuing Suspects and Prospects. Only Suspects and Prospects should get hard-hitting, high-urgency CTAs in the last week.
Reactivation, Direct Mail: Prioritize at least two pieces hitting the Current Donors mailboxes, one early in the week and one ideally on December 30th.
Website: No changes.
Reporting cadence: Hourly (or as frequently as your system permits).
Metrics to pay the most attention to: Funds Raised (revenue) and Average Donation Value. Monitor your total revenue closely, shifting the budget from Top- and Bottom- to the middle funnel if you see any softness – your middle-of-the-funnel tactics, especially non-branded SEM, are the leading indicator of last week's performance.
Wrapping Up
Writing that out got me excited for December! These tactics aren’t all-encompassing, but this approach allowed me to maximize funds raised throughout December, while not burning Current donors with excessive asks. I hope you found it useful.
Now onto the fun stuff!
Reads of My Week
Meta experiments with custom AI chatbot creation in-stream.
LinkedIn passes 1 billion members and launches new AI chatbot to help you get a job.
The Trapital Report - trends that matter in music, media, and culture.
“The Fall” by Michael Wolff - a combative view of Murdoch’s endgame.
Omnicom made its largest acquisition ever buying one of the first agencies to get into “Retail Media Network’s” - a vote of confidence for the channel short- and long-term.
YouTube is now cracking down on ad blockers globally.
Ciaran O'Kane has written a good piece called the Ad Tech Optimist -nice glass half full thinking that deserves attention.
This Vanity Fair article on AI is a helpful round up of the issues and the risks.
And, this Guardian explainer on how chatbots work by tokenizing words is useful.