Not So Secrets To Online Fundraising (5Q GROK Webinar Series)
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5Q and guest speaker, Jacob Smith of Masterworks, present how fundraisers don't have to reinvent the wheel to be able to expand their online fundraising efforts. We'll look at the fundamentals of successful online fundraising: - Define Success: Know where you are headed before you start - Reverse Engineer Success: Chart the most efficient path to get there - Measure Success: Know when you have arrived - The Four Areas of New Media: Web site, email, online promotion, and offline integration
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Not So Secrets To Online Fundraising (5Q GROK Webinar Series)
- 3. In one year what will we be looking at to decide if this is a success?
- 6. By FlickreviewR By Magnus Manske
- 16. EXAMPLE:1MEAL … 1 HOPE SEATTLE’SUNIONGOSPELMISSION
- 22. Resources • TheAgitatorhttp://www.theagitator.net/ • Masterworks’Blog • DivergentThinking: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnOnaKHZ3_k • PeopleToPeopleFundraising:SocialNetworkingandWeb 2.0forCharities byTedHart
Editor's Notes
- It seems obvious, but this first tone-setting step is often overlooked.
- What success is not. Being first in search engine results. The board likes the site. What success could be. Donations. This is the fundamental tactical question for any program. You have to be ruthless with your answer, and I use that word intentionally. The best advice I ever received from a mentor was from my college internship supervisor: “Decide what you want and ruthlessly pursue it.” That doesn’t mean you act against your values or knock people out of the way. It does mean that you have to decide on success and you have to decide not to do things that are taking you away from your goal. I believe most of strategic thinking is not choosing what to do, but eliminating distractions once you have made that choice. Choosing is hard because choosing to do something well means not choosing other things. So we have to be ruthless about our decision making, but compassionate in how we make those decisions. For our purposes today, success is increasing online revenue, with that definition of success in mind…
- we can turn to reverse engineering success.
- With a destination in mind it is a lot easier to figure out if the “vehicle” you are in can make the journey. For example, the mini is a great car, but if this is what you are facing on your commute…
- Then you will quickly realize what you really need is something more like a…
- Landrover. Now that is as obvious as what you need to do to maximize online revenue “Engineer” can make it seem much more complicated than it needs to be, if increased revenue is a goal then you want to motivate people to donate. This gets back to the title of this talk: success online is not some secret formula that takes on online alchemist to brew up in some back room, what it does take is divergent thinking.
- A good mental model to think about divergent thinking. For a long time it was easy to reach the majority of Americans on TV, you bought time on NBC, CBS and ABC. Then Fox came along and now, well you’ll get the picture here in a second as the screen feels up with television logos. That’s right where we are online. A strong website and email program isn’t enough anymore. You need to be in Facebook and Twitter and Linked in and doing SEM and Banner Advertising and e-miles and acquisition emails and… well you the picture. That gets back to that divergent thinking. In our profoundly multi-channel world the only way to succeed is to be in as many channels as possible and integrate your message across those channels. This was supported by a study recently released by Convio on fundraising trends to capture the next generation of donors, something I know that every ministry we work with is working on. When you have to be in dozens of channels at once, you need some way to figure out how to allocate your resources across those channels…
- And that brings us to the third piece in our formula, measurement. Again something that is obvious but is often overlooked.
- Based on your definition of success, create a set of metrics that show that success. Ideally only one or two so success or failure is unambiguous. There is so much data available it can be tempting to look at too many metrics. Our experience is that those metrics are great at figuring out the “why” of something. Why did an effort succeed or fail, but when you are managing two dozen campaigns at once, they “why” may not be the most important thing at this moment. What is likely important is shifting resources among these efforts as quickly as possible. In order to do that correctly, you need to establish baselines, that means measuring weeks before you start an initiative, not just a few days. An obvious metric is online revenue, while an even better one is net revenue online. Another metric we use…
- Is called gift conversion where you look at the # of online gifts divided by your website visitors, and while there aren’t industry standards for this number it is a good thing to look at month to month or even week to week to determine how things are going
- Those high level metrics we call “dashboard” reporting, these are important for high level decision makers. When I was growing up I heard the story about how most race cards don’t have digital dials, this picture is from 1974, but up to today many gauges in race cars are analog because digital gauges take too long to read. How is this possible? The analog gauges are installed so that when the car is running right the needle points straight up and down. So if you look at them in the instrument cluster they may look crooked. But the driver needs only glance at the gauges to see that everything is where it should be. That’s how you need to design your dashboard, the average should fade into the background and anomalies, negative or positive should jump out at you. You need to be running these dashboard reports on a regular basis.
- Just like in Settlers of Catan, it’s a board game for those not in the know, you have to juggle your resources to achieve victory. Doing all this reporting is just fluff if you don’t actually re-allocate your resources based on the results. Another area where you have to be ruthless. If a channel isn’t performing you need to take resources from that to a better performing channel. That doesn’t mean you discard it or abandon it, it could be a timing issue and keeping enough in every channel to be able to tell when a particular message is resonating is a key to this strategic viewpoint. After an effort you can look back at the deeper metrics and determine if there is a way for that channel to be more productive in the future. To recap…
- In order to succeed in anything online you need to define success, reverse engineer that success and measure results, in terms of online fundraising that means working in multiple channels and allocating resources to the best performing channels. To give a bit more of a framework…
- We talk about the four areas of New Media: Website, eCommunications (email text message), Online Promotion and Offline integration. Grouping your efforts this way give you a great framework for success. We believe you need to be strong in all four areas to achieve that bulls eye that you need to succeed in online fundraising. It is a bit easier to see all this with an example. I’d like to take the time we have left to talk about a campaign with a clear definition of success, where we are measuring the channels and allocating resources as well as working in each of these four areas. The campaign is….
- 1 Meal 1 Hope for Seattle’s Union Gospel Mission. We partnered with the mission to imagine this campaign three years ago and in its third year it is reached some level of maturity. The first area was the website…
- In September we launched a new look for their website include a primary homepage feature that rotates among three offers. The center offer when the page loads, is always a fundraising offer – possible because they have a clearly defined goal. You can see here it is a promotion for an online gift catalog that we added to the campaign this year. We’ll get to measurement here in a second, but they are on the Convio platform and use Google Analytics for their website metrics. Moving next to email…
- Here is a new look that we have tested into for UGM. We’ve found that simpler, single column mailings do better than the more “standard” two column look. We also tested from name, subject line, copy length and time of day to send over the summer so we would be able to use those results in this fall fundraising season. You can see the email uses similar design cues, most notably the red donate button. The messaging is also consistent for 1M1H which is focused on one meal for $1.92. For the mission, website and email are the most lucrative fundraising tools so that is where we focused most of our resources, but we do use online promotion…
- This is a sample page for the banner ads we are running. We use a network that allows us to get placement on sites like nytimes.com and foxnews.com at a significantly lower cost. The campaign is geo-targeted to the Seattle metro area and our network allows us to do demographic targeting as well. For example, we are only serving the ads to folks 18 and above. This channel hasn’t proven to have a strong return on investment, but we feel it is an important overall channel to drive brand impressions. This year we are tracking something “view through” actions where someone has only viewed the ad and then later gives, we think this will give a clearer picture of revenue. However, because this is not a huge revenue generator, we lowered our costs this year by combining the messaging for the banner ads with our paid search campaign so we could use one landing page. Since the mission is on Convio, it allowed us to still properly attribute all the gifts. Finally, offline integration…
- This is a sample from one page of the October newsletter. It is hard to reproduce a 8 1/2x 11 piece on a screen but you might be able to see in the top right a feature for the same online gift catalog that we saw on the homepage. That homepage feature went up the same time as this newsletter went out, driving people to a new component of 1M1H for this year. Now the key to this is that we have a deep relationship with the mission, including monthly dashboard reporting…
- This is a sample of their dashboard report. The mission’s primary goal is to raise revenue online and they have a secondary goal to connect with website visitors, the first page of their two page dashboard captures these two goals. A few important metrics to point out… You can see at the top we focus on this months and FY to date revenue for this year and last year. It is blurry but you can see of the far right the numbers are all green. Green means good on this report, that’s the needles straight up and down. You can also see we are reporting on Average and Median gift. The mission, like many groups has a smaller online donor base and a few individuals who like to give very high dollar gifts online. This can skew average gift up so we also report on median gift as a way to get a better sense of what people are giving online. Another key metric on the fundraising side is the gift conversion ratio on the right. This is a simple metric that takes the number of donors and divides it by the number of website visitors. We don’t have benchmarks for this metric, but we do watch it month to month and look at what in particular we were doing when it moves up to replicate that. Across the bottom are engagement metrics, less directly tied to fundraising, but important as a way to see how the “funnel is being filled.” Here you can see that some negative numbers are green. We’ve set up the dashboard so that when lower than average numbers are a good thing, such as bounce rate we show those numbers in green. So at a glance you can see that overall things are trending positive. I know that was a whirlwind tour but as you can see successful online fundraising requires being both focused and diverse in your approach. With that in mind here are a few resources I would recommend…
- In my opinion the best way to keep up with online fundraising is online, and the best source for that is The Agitator, it is required reading as far as I’m concerned. A little plug for the Masterworks’ blog. We just re-launched the website and are looking to get more folks around here blogging. I briefly mentioned divergent thinking, that link takes you to a < 10 minute presentation that is focused on education paradigms, but I think it is important for all managers to start to be able to recognize and cultivate divergent thinking And finally, the book we are going to be giving away here shortly, using social networks to do fundraising is a nascent piece of all this, that I didn’t focus on but Ted Hart wrote a whole book about it so… Finally, I’d love to be a resource for you…
- The best way to reach me is email there at the top. I also am on the twitters if you want kernels of wisdom and Steelers and Sounders and cycling nuggets. Big thing, if you remember by full name: Jacob Wayne Smith and use your search engine of choice you’ll find me. That’s all I have, now we are ready for questions and answers…