Some Personal News

#6 Planning is Everything

Sep 11, 2022

Happy Sunday! Let’s dig in.

A couple of organizations of different sizes with fantastic missions reached out this week asking about Giving Tuesday planning. So in today's edition of SPN, I thought I’d share some ideas and approaches to GT, and try break it down into 6 parts. I’ll tackle the first three today and the other three next week.

Planning the campaigns
Marketing channels
Prepare your assets
Dig into the data (next week)
Test new content (next week)
Submit for approval (next week)

If you don’t find this content valuable, you can permanently unsubscribe at the bottom of this email. If you like it, subscribe and don’t miss the weekly post:

News to Peruse

Google added some color to what makes a meta description “bad” or “better”. Included among the “bad”: keyword lists, extreme shortness, and news articles that share the same description. “Better”: specificity and whole page summaries.
Meta needs to ensure that it’s taking responsible steps in its metaverse development, yet it seems they disbanded their Responsible Innovation team this week.
AI media generation took a huge step forward. Stable Diffusion is a machine learning model that generates digital images based on your description. Check out the examples in the link above and have a go yourself here!

1. Planning the Campaigns

Insight: Sharma Brands

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, for example, 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, so 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. Marketing Channels

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. Please not another stainless steel flask. Get creative.

Part 2: Know your Channel Mix.

In previous newsletters I’ve mentioned exploring new channels and DSP’s. Uber and Lyft inventory (edition #4), Apple’s burgeoning DSP play (edition #3) and in last week’s edition #5 I shared that DOOH is ramping up with a handy integration into Google’s DV360. Check out the Roblox update in the Interesting Reads section.

Which advertising channels can you deploy investment into without seeing CPM inflation? I'm curious to know from you if there are ones that come to mind (there has to be) that I don't mention below. This thinking is more of a short-term arbitrage, as the prices could theoretically increase at any time.

Trackside 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. Prepare your Assets

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, differently than 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.

Interesting Reads & Listens This Week:

How Roblox - a gaming platform known for its popularity with children and its 50+ million Daily Active Users - is growing up and re-thinking it’s approach to community and advertising. An untapped space for advertising or micro-influencer partnerships?
Episode: #266 Henry Ford’s Autobiography
Henry Ford’s book, My Life and Work, is a manifesto more than an autobiography. As the pod host put it, “It’s like one of history’s greatest entrepreneurs having a one-sided conversation with you and saying, ‘This is my philosophy on building organization’s and here’s what I think you should do.’”
Nat Eliason makes a compelling point that we should stop getting fooled by productivity porn.