Some Personal News #1

With End-of-Year Giving Season fast approaching and the cost of media rising, this weekly newsletter is geared towards digital practitioners at non-profits building a digital fundraising machine. It’ll explore ideas on how to build an efficient and scalable approach to fundraising that can deliver incremental revenue growth. Also included will be relevant news that might impact your fundraising and marketing approaches, some frameworks that could bring clarity to strategic planning, and some interesting jobs that bounce across my desk from time to time.

This week we're covering new donor acquisition, video testimonials and automating direct mail.

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News to Peruse

• Google Search Console Insights now supports Google Analytics 4. Given that Universal Analytics 3 says goodbye in less than a year this is a relief. Reminder to set up GA4 asap so you can compare year-over-year data. This affects everyone.

• The trend toward short-form content continues. YouTube’s trying to make that easier by providing an option to convert creators’ longer videos into Shorts. Any Short created using this feature will link back to the original long-form video, making it a great way to drive new traffic to your main content. (If you’re completely new to Shorts, a YouTube product manager answers Shorts FAQs here.)

• Twitter is releasing an ads API that lets advertisers run A/B test campaigns.

1. Retargeting Users with Direct Mail Automation

Kicking off a digitally-focused newsletter with Direct Mail? YES! When its average response rate is 9% it deserves to sit at the top of the pecking order this week.

Compare that to 0.4% for organic social and 0.6% for paid search…

I’m yet to see Non-Profit’s tap one of direct mail’s most effective use cases yet: automated retargeting.

Here’s a simple way to test it:

• Identify site visitors who abandon your donation cart and create two segments.

• Keep one group as the control. Send them your standard abandoned cart email flow.

• For the second group, skip the abandoned cart email and instead, send a postcard in the mail with a unique QR promo code (and a sentence about the impact your mission drives). Set this up to send within 12-24 hours of the cart abandonment.

• Test the conversion difference between groups.

Direct mail engages people who might not otherwise respond to digital retargeting. One study concluded that marketers see a 300-400% lift in conversion rates when targeting cart abandoners through direct mail.

I had a lot of success using Pebble Post and it looks like tools such as Lob will automate this whole process too.

2. Get infomercial-level video testimonials

Insight from Nothing Held Back

Good video testimonials work wonders in landing more donations. In fact, for 89% of enterprise companies, they can drive anywhere from 25% to 50% lifts in conversions. Why can’t we take this nugget and explore it for non-profits? 

Many organizations struggle to produce video testimonials quickly and cost-effectively. They spend months on video production, often recording donors at live events or sending videographers to film it all directly. But you can get informercial-level video testimonials without traveling anywhere or investing in expensive equipment.

Here’s how:

• Identify your top donors or segment of donors. These might be your monthly donors or donors with high engagement, or those in a particular location linked to an upcoming event.

• Create an enticing offer in exchange for a short video interview about your org and its output. Brand swag is useful here.

• Sign up for a free Calendly account if you don’t already have one. This will make coordinating interviews with your donors easier.

• Email your top donors with your special ask/offer and Calendly link.

• Keep your interviews short, no more than 15 minutes, and record them on Zoom. Ask questions to guide donors toward a cohesive narrative. Try these ones: 

  • Why did you want to donate [inspiration]?

  • What problem were you wanting to help solve?

  • What do you like about how we do what we do?

  • What surprised you about [our output/impact]?

  • What impact could donating [$x] have on solving [Y problem]

• Use a video editing software like iMovie to cut out any pauses, umms, and other unwanted sounds. Add music from AudioJungle to give each testimonial more life—check out using tracks from the Cinematic category.

• Publish the testimonials on YouTube. Then add them to your landing pages and use them in your ads, emails, and across social channels.

Once you’ve nailed down the process, consider automating your offer as an email sequence so you can collect testimonials on the regular. The more footage you collect, the more assets you have to leverage as social proof for your organization’s mission.

3. “How do I find my best performing audience segments and start acquiring new ones NOW?”

I was asked this recently and the answer in 5 steps is the following:

1. Run a series of reports in your Web Analytics platform to understand the best performing causes and basic demographic / intent data of your very best donors. 

2. Rank those resulting combinations of Donor Profile and Causes they donate to.

3. Create audience segments of those top performing profiles and push them into Google Ads for remarketing activation. 

4. Create a few creative options for each segment based on the content from Cause pages or donation forms on your website. 

5. Once the initial performance data starts flowing through, duplicate those retargeting campaigns and target the Look-a-Like segments of those audiences to instantly increase your reach and start attracting new high-value donors. 

Here’s how to action the ^above^:

A successful digital marketing campaign should work as a “match-maker” between your potential donors, causes they deeply care about at a given time, and ways your organization can support those causes. The first step towards building that vehicle is understanding who already cares about your brand enough to donate. Get back to basics. This will have an enormous impact on performance in the short term, while increasing the budget available for further initiatives. 

Google Analytics can help answer core questions like: 

1. Which pages on my website have the highest Conversion Rate? (which causes my donors are donating to the most?)

2. Which pages on my website have the highest Monthly donation conversion rate? (which causes are driving my most engaged donors?)

3. Which pages on my website have the highest return rate post donation? (which causes are driving my repeat donors?)

4. What are the Affinity and In-Market segments that characterize donors donating on all of those pages the most? Are those segments different between pages? (what is the intent of my core donors?)

5. In which metro areas and zip codes do these donors live? Is it urban or rural areas? Are they donating from mobile or desktop? (what else can I learn about the environment and time when my donors are most likely to donate)

Build out a “master spreadsheet” to house the answers to these questions. Most teams I work with can identify 25 - 100 unique combinations of donor profiles and causes their donors care about. But focus your effort and just identify the 3 most prominent ones. I use a “potential ranking system”, and assign each segment a separate rank for a total number of donations, average donation value, and conversion rate. See the spreadsheet I created below if it helps to visualize the segmentation and ranking effort:

Next step - convert those who look like the best donors and have already been to the website within the last 30 days but haven’t donated yet. Rather than the generic “All Website Users” retargeting tactic, try the following instead:

Push “Segment Definitions” from Google Analytics as “Audiences” to a Google Ads account, and then manually create 15 options of creative (5 per segment)  that align with the identified causes. This is max no more than 2 hours of work and it helped me achieve a 3x improvement in Conversion Rate.

You can easily create these audiences in the Admin -> Audiences section of your Google Analytics property, where you can export them directly into Google Ads right after setup: 

The last step is to create look-a-like audiences off the segments in Google Ads and launch those same creatives for them. Done! This technique has helped me immediately drive tens of net-new donors per day, whatever the size or budget of the operation. 

Digital Fundraising and Marketing Job Opportunities

In the future I’ll build out a Jobs Board. For now check out these three fantastic roles.

• Fundraising Manager, Individual Giving (India):
  Last month UNICEF India achieved the biggest monthly donor recruitment of any UNICEF country! They’re looking for an individual giving specialist to lead all areas of income generation from the general public. Role description: here

• Director, Digital Strategy (pref. Latin America & the Caribbean or Africa):
  Reporting to the Chief Development Officer, lead Fòs Feminista’s digital growth and platform strategy across all digital channels, including social, email, web, paid media, and SMS. Role description: here

• Senior Director, New Funding & Innovation Partnerships:
  A global fundraising role responsible for setting the vision and plan for IRC’s engagement with non-traditional income-streams, and inform the organization’s strategy in key areas of innovative funding. Role description: here

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Got a question, need help fine-tuning your digital engine or building from scratch, or want a second opinion - reach out!

See you next week,

Tobes