Some Personal News
#24 Thinking in terms of Donor Engagement eats Audience and Channel banter for breakfast
Happy Sunday. A very warm welcome to all the new subscribers. I’m thrilled to have you as readers and truly appreciate your feedback and support. In this edition, I return to a popular post from September about how I’d organize a fundraising team in-house vs agency. This time around I take a closer look at optimizing for Donor Engagement. Also, with the DoJ suing Google this past week the regulatory noose is tightening around the neck of Adtech. So I take a look at how the digital advertising ecology is changing and how our paid media choices could be impacted.
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The DoJ May Impact your Paid Ads Strategy
The California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA) is now ‘live’, Meta recently got walloped with a hefty fine and just this week the DOJ sued Google. It feels like the big event everyone anticipated is finally here.
We need to amp up our interest in the Privacy + Ads dynamic. If the lawsuit results in Google being forced to make significant changes to its advertising platform, it could have a significant impact on how we use paid media to reach donors on the platform.
The weather is still set by ATT on the one hand (Apple's user privacy feature. It requires apps to request user permission via a pop-up prompt to access the Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA) and track the user or the device) and the imminent demise of cookies on the other. But Google faces a few issues. Their “topics” concept to replace third-party cookies has been rejected by the W3C consortium but Google don’t seem minded to change. And the UK regulators - who have been working with Google on their Privacy Sandbox - have so far remained tight lipped.
The DOJ delivered some fighting talk this week: “For 15 years Google has pursued a course of anticompetitive conduct that has allowed it to halt the rise of rival technologies, manipulate auction mechanics, insulate itself from competition, and forced advertisers and publishers to use its tools. Google has engaged in exclusionary conduct that has severely weakened if not destroyed competition in the ad-tech industry.”
MY TAKE: The paid media pie continues to grow and diversify (Meta (18.4% of the market), Amazon (11.7%) and Google (26.5%)). This means that 43.4% of the paid media market is shared with a diverse group of others. This is very different to what anything looks like in a monopoly. If I were the US Government I would have focused on Search because Search is a monopoly for Google. While Google would try to argue that there are other ways of acquiring information, the facts seem to suggest otherwise different. If you could prove that the Search monopoly led to pricing power in Ads I think that’s a much more nuanced but logical argument that could work.
In the short-term, it might mean some cost-savings as Google starts to respond to the allegations and some brands may switch their spend to other outlets. If this happened, I’d double down on my spend with Google.
This Twitter thread gets into the details of the 153 page DoJ document - saying Google is royally screwed. Well, let’s see. I don’t see anything here that won’t have been expected, although the paper is very well written.
Here’s a contrarian view, which is worth considering. Be sure to read the comments from some smart people sharing their 2 cents. Amongst them is the idea Google will seek a deal where they divest some of the empire.
The CEO of the Trade Desk added his voice to the debate - knowing TTD would likely benefit from a reshuffled marketplace. This week saw a good piece on How The Trade Desk went from media agency BFF to frenemy with many (anonymously) complaining about TTD fees and their practice of direct outreach to clients while circumventing agencies.
If it's not enough to have the regulators on the case, the FT think Apple is engaged in a silent war with Google as they improve Maps and Search. And online ads. “If Apple could build something that was essentially as good as ‘Google classic’ — Google circa 2010 when it was a simple search engine less optimized for ads revenue — people might just prefer that.”
With search queries now even more valuable than 1st party data, could an improved Apple search service finally trigger Apple saying “no” to the circa $10bn that Google pay to be the default search engine on iOS? It plays to the Apple privacy stance and would hit Google really hard.
But as we saw with the effect ATT has had on Meta (and Snap) it doesn't seem Apple care that much about these consequences. As the FT piece points out Apple are hiring ad and Adtech talent, and making progress on their own demand side platform (software that allows us to buy advertising with the help of automation EG Google Display Network for Google Ads). The gloves are coming off.
The digital advertising ecology is changing. The UK-based advertising trade org ISBA and PwC published a report last week and reminded us that the current system has a few problems. For starters the current dynamic sees rampant fraud and wasted money. It also demonstrates that the answer may lie in PMPs (Private Marketplaces) or their controlled equivalents. Cutting down the ‘long tail’ will likely improve all aspects of delivery, including brand safety, even if the CPMs are higher. Better value is bound to follow.
The good news is the Unattributable spend / Unknown delta has dropped to 3%. And Publishers now get two thirds of the ad spend - up from a little over half. It has some smart recommendations for best practices - including my favorite:
Advertisers, agencies, Adtech vendors and publishers should consider investing more in well-curated PMPs, given their higher impression match rates and publisher revenues (and, although outside this study, lower risks in fraud, viewability, brand safety and data leakage).
Tap your agencies on this. They should have an opinion and some recommendations. PMP deals seem the best way to maximize the effectiveness of digital ads. Especially if you focus on the creative as part of this process.
Direct Mail and Digital Should Live Under One Roof
One morning last week I found myself in a conversation about what the guiding principles should be in re-org’ing a marketing and fundraising team.
The last time I wrote about this topic, I shared the below diagram:
I also said that every box should represent at least one person, possibly with teams reporting to them as the total practice area grows. Check out the post back in Edition 7.
I want to double click into the red box above. For clarity, an example of “one-to-one media” is direct mail and “one to many” is digital media. The above setup is not ideal but the least-worst compromise when most organizational roles are already filled. On the other hand, it provides the right amount of coverage for every aspect of the program, and this is how most organizations are doing it currently.
Yet innovation – and great results – come from transformative actions with the outcome in mind. Our job is to create the optimal communications funnel to move the potential donor through every step of their engagement – from learning about the brand for the first time to becoming a loyal, long-term supporter.
The best organizational design matches the donor’s behavior. When individual KPIs align with the goal of the organization and donors, magic happens.
If I were building my team from scratch now without any legacy attached, I’d do it differently. Note below:
Let’s break it down from left to right.
Platforms and Tech person/team: Technology evolves rapidly. DSP, SSP, Ad Server, CRM, ERP, CDP, Cloud platforms, CMS, Analytics…the list goes on. Having a person to keep track of all of it, negotiate contracts, manage implementation and adoption and most importantly, build relationships with vendors and getting priority access to any new features would give the organization an invaluable benefit that is hard to overestimate.
Strategy and Analytics person/team: You can’t succeed in what you don’t plan, measure, and manage. While strategy and analytics are separate functions, they are no more than two sides of the same coin – required to work hand in hand to ensure a smooth learning agenda, experimentation, and, ultimately, allowing you to build a cohesive donor journey. And the Project Management person – while an easy-to-overlook investment – is a must-have to drop no balls.
The first two areas are easy to figure out and hard to question. But why am I suggesting merging all the media channels? And if so, why is website – arguably just yet another communication channel – still separate?
Answering that requires one more diagram. Traditional, linear representation of the donor journey can look something like the below:
However, we know the world is anything but linear. So, what if we amend the above to make the following circle?:
This feels much more accurate. Donors constantly interact with our brand’s properties in unpredictable, usually non-linear, distinct sequences of activities. Therefore, if I were building my team from scratch, I wouldn’t base my decision-making and team structure on channels. Channels are meant to change – new social platforms are launched every day, the adoption of email is constantly going down, giving way to web messengers, and many other changes that’d be impossible to keep track of. What doesn’t change is the fact that donors are still the centerpiece, and understanding their traits and behaviors is more critical than ever.
While executing media buying on a particular channel is tactical, building the “internal database” of insights is highly strategic. Combining all media buying under a specific person allows them to see the holistic picture and use media not only as an activation vehicle but also as a data-building one, for example leveraging geographic insights from a Display campaign to inform the next local TV buys or accompanying a DM drop with a heavy-up in SEM budgets in a specific ZIP code.
The only critical and unlikely to go away distinction is “retail-like” individual giving and highly personal, high-touch major donor giving. The behavior between those groups is so distinct, and cross-over from one group to another is so unlikely that prioritizing deeper insights within the group over a holistic picture is guaranteed to have positive ROI. And if that ever changes, you still have a Person In Charge of the whole program to notice.
4. Website, on the other hand, is a totally different animal. It’s meant to convert. It’s intended to be a one-for-all and has a separate CVR-focused testing agenda. So, while informing it with insights from every channel is essential, that should be done separately. Have a different testing schedule for content updates on the website compared to your media campaigns. That’ll help you always know what affected your CVR – website or media updates.
I referenced Direct Mail and Digital in the title of this post, but as you see, it goes deeper than just those two channels. Successful go-to-market plans are built on a foundation of understanding, thinking and planning in terms of Donor Engagement first. Teams, channels and audiences should be built in-service to this.
Jobs & Opps
If you’re searching for a new role or contemplating a change, let me know how I can help you.
American Heart Association: National Executive Lead, Marketing Communications, Donor Engagement
Boys and Girls Club of Boston: Senior Director, Individual Giving
Catholic Charities: Director of Online Fundraising
Comic Relief (USA): Director, Individual Giving
Girls for Gender Equity: Chief Development & Marketing Officer
Girl Scouts: Vice President, Analytics & Insights
Planned Parenthood: Director, Direct Response Marketing
University of Miami: Senior Director, Digital Engagement Marketing
Vivalon: Chief Development & Marketing Officer
Women’s Refugee Commission: Senior Director of Individual Engagement and Marketing
World Vision USA: Senior Director, Direct to Donor Marketing
Reads of My Week
Why creativity is the key to unlocking growth in 2023
Make your ad spend work smarter with incremental ROAS
A new form of UI is emerging with prompt-driven design
Cover Letter AI - Analyze your resume and write a cover letter that highlights info relevant to the job description
The human-AI partnership: ChatGPT and Reid Hoffman (founder of LinkedIn) talk about how AI amplifies human potential
DOJ's new suit puts Google's ad business at risk
Google’s response: TL;DR "Yes, we did wrong - but so did everybody, so why are you not judging them?"
Performance and innovation are the rewards of digital transformation
Luma’s annual report on the state of the Adtech industry
The state of the French tech ecosystem
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