You Can't Find A New Land With An Old Map

You can't find a new land with an old map

I was struck by a few recent experiences that painted an incredible picture of the challenges and opportunities in today's market place.

Several weeks ago I was sitting with a friend who has been in the business a very long time, we were discussing the level of job satisfaction for many professionals in our industry. We didn't see many challenges through the same lens at all. Our perspectives were completely different. At one point, with a bit of frustration he said Jay you have all the answers. To be fair I love a good intellectual debate fueled with passion about the business of philanthropy. However,  I am always seeking answers because I think that they are continually changing and in addition that our questions become stale. While doing the same thing and expecting different results is insanity, it is equally insane to keep doing the same thing and expecting the same historical results. 

Last week I was captivated by this interview with Russell Brand. I was impressed with his ability to

stay on task and simply challenge the status quo. To begin conversations about new governing models was not what I was expecting to hear from this comedic actor. I encourage you to watch the clip from beginning to end, it wraps up with some how real powerful language. Now I am not on the same page with Russell regarding the need for a revolution for the philanthropic community, but there is great energy in passion. 

Putting these two experiences together helped me realize a couple things. While my friend could've been frustrated with me the biggest story is that the answers he has always known to be true are becoming less relevant in today's marketplace. The way we've done business over the last five decades will not address the unique challenges we face in today's marketplace.  Look around and study closely the “experts”, most of what is being sold is repackaged yesterday’s news.  Do you need to bring Russell's message into your organization?

Take a look at your own world. Are you measuring the same things that you did 10 years ago?  Are you always testing old assumptions? Over the next 4 weeks I am putting together several mini-sessions that give you the tools to challenge the status quo in your organization with new questions and new metrics that challenge decades of conventional wisdom.  If you are interested click here.

Russell Brand

Donor Voice vs Penelope Burk

I recently read a blog post over at thedonorvoice that tried pointing out the inaccurate assumptions regarding pace of solicitation that Penelope Burk had made in recent research. This particular post highlights for me the vast amounts of “myths” in the market on this critical topic.

If you are a practitioner who believes that cadence will play no role in retention, I encourage you to test this for all of our benefit by setting up hourly automatic solicitations for your entire donor pool. I suspect not many people will choose this path and most of us would agree for quite obvious reasons. The assertion that pace will play no role in retention is the equivalent of suggesting one could not overdose on heroin. Although sharing data that provides no insight into how to improve the retention problem I guess potentially gives organizations the opportunity to be lost but making great time.

Having spent most of my career building advance models focused on retention and increasing donor retention by over 280% I can tell you that both Penelope Burk and the folks at thedonorvoice are correct, the problem is that they are also both incorrect. If you've never produced retention it is possible to look at statistical studies regarding groups of people and arrive at what would be perceived as logical conclusions. The problem in practice is that while groups of people are predictable, individuals within that group are not.  There is just no 100%, ever.

Retention is achieved through a personal understanding of how each donor will react to designed touch

points. There is no 100% assumption that you can safely drape over any group without a certain degree of statistical error. You just have to determine if the risk of error is worth, well, the risk.

Donor retention is both a serious problem and an incredible opportunity. Our systems, models, and strategies for five decades have been designed to generate transactions not customer satisfaction. We have built a fundraising culture almost entirely on acquisition. Continued focus on transactions only will do very little to impact the retention of your most valuable assets. 

If you are interested in how to have real impact check out this read from Tom Asacker.

In the meantime the point this info graphic makes reminds me.

Fosbury Flop Your Culture

I was recently reading a thread inside of the LinkedIn group, it was a group of predominantly young professionals. Their conversation centered around using Instagram  as an annual report platform. At one level it was encouraging to read about such creativity on another it was evidence of the strength of the gravitational pull to keep things the way they have always been.

Limiting creativity to exist in our old structures will be incremental at best in improving the experience our donors appear to be craving. For example when you look at this image what do you see? An old woman?

Most likely you've seen this image 1 million times before. You know that one view is an old woman and another view is young women. Knowing this from your experience your mind can quickly turn off its ability to see something new. For example as you look at that image do see the pixels? Do you see it being displayed on the computer screen that was built somewhere? Do you understand what was going on in the lives of the people who built that screen? Where did it travel from to be in your hands? Experience is an incredibly powerful thing, but the opposite of every truth is another equal truth. Experience can also be very limiting if you aren't able to keep it in check.

In the summer of 1968 Dick Fosbury changed high jumping forever. His unique methodology for jumping the high bar changed the sport and had the Olympic Committee scratching its head. Dick discovered a better way and changed the sport, for the better.

It's possible that your donors are looking for you to create a Fosbury flop experience for them. Not that they are looking for you to jump over them backwards, but they are hopeful that you have the ability to create a new way for them to experience philanthropy. Will you tweak the past or create a completely new experience. Which do you believe will engage your best customers?

Extending Donor Retention 5.9 Million Years

I know it sounds like a ridiculous idea extending donor retention 5.93 million years, but that number comes from translating the number of hours to years that gamers have played World of War Craft, an online game. To put that number into some kind of perspective it was about that long ago when humans in the process of evolution began to walk upright. The game was developed in 2004. So as of now people have spent more time playing this game than humans have spent evolving.

There are some powerful lessons that we have the opportunity to learn on the topic of donor retention by studying the thoughtful and highly impactful design of online games. An important first item to recognize is that successful games are designed for the player to

achieve and accomplish. They are not designed so that the game is the ultimate recipient of the experience. You could easily draw a parallel to the games that we create regarding giving. The success for the annual fund is defined by the organization achieving its goal not the donor (player). The capital campaign is another similar experience for the donor (player) to concede that the experience is ultimately about the organization achieving its goal of building or adding to endowment.

A couple of things to note about the most addictive type of games;

1.     The most successful types of games have no pre-defined ending.

This is an interesting parallel to donor retention and understanding how to create a culture that designs the donor experience. To be able to customize a donor's connection where they give for the sake of giving and also accomplish a sense of personal growth, is at the root of building a culture that will create significant donor retention. Making sure that your organization is building competencies that understand life stages is crucial to be able to assess and put a number to lifetime donor value.

James Carse wrote an intriguing book titled Finite and Infinite Games. Finite games are played to be won and infinite games are played the sake of play. We could learn much from the idea of designing a donors experience to long-term personal growth while connecting their support to an evolving mission that is experienced through a community of like minded individuals

 
   2. Addictive videogames feed a need of making social connections

This is another area where the nonprofit community has such opportunity. It is the rare nonprofit that has one donor. Our donors create a community that we could leverage to ensure that our customers are experiencing being part of something bigger than themselves. Feeling part of something significant is a key element to increasing donor attention.

It would benefit every nonprofit professional interested in increasing donor attention to spend time understanding the design of games. Jane McGonigal's book reality is broken is a powerful roadmap to sustaining relationships with donors.

This game thinking will be covered in great at the Donor Retention BootCamp.

Re-Imagining How To Decrease Donor Retention

Just Adjust Donation Page

If you have never seen the movie Patch Adams see if you can grab it on Netflix in the next few days, or just watch it again. Today I was looking at a blog post about improving online donations. The point of the piece suggested that you focus on adjustments to the donation page and mixing up the dollar amounts that your prospective donors could give. While reading this piece I was struck at the traditional thinking that suggests it is best to focus on the stuff rather than person. This is where images of scenes from Patch Adams came drifting into my mind. We have over and over again focused on the transactional elements as a way of fixing or improving our support. This thinking has continued to lead us to incredibly poor donor retention rates, which ultimately translates into unsatisfied donors. Which = Lowering Lifetime Value

In the movie Patch was a medical nonconformist who believed that if you treat a disease you win or lose but if

Make A Wish Foundation

you treated the person you would always win. Our nonprofit industry can learn a lesson from both the results of our past instincts and from Patch Adams.

There is a completely other way to address the business of raising money. It is one that is human focused, with targeted specific outcomes and a model that has actually produced some of the highest retention rates in North America over the last decade.

The good news for the nonprofit idustry is there is a nation of donors waiting for their lives to be committed to causes they are incredibly passionate about and they also wish to share their enthusiasm with the world around them. The only thing standing in their way is decades of traditional thinking: as the gentleman in the scene below puts it:

“If you focus on the problem you can’t see the solution”

In the past week I have read that the solutions to our retention challenges and to increase giving is to focus on the timing of asks, increase the channels in which we communicate and make adjustments to our donation pages.  There seems to be a new industry developing on how to re-imagine or repackage  strategy to decrease donor retention.