In the first case, I'd received nine emails in December. That was after donating in July and having my employer match the amount of the donation. In the second, I had donated at or above my recent level and I'd gotten a partial match from my employer, but I'd received six different physical and email requests for an additional donation during November and early December.
I don't know who develops strategies for soliciting donors or what data they have backing up their strategies. I do know that no organization wants to irritate their regular donors.
I'm also aware that I might be more irritable that most donors. I got so annoyed with an organization I've donated to since the late 1990s that I had them remove me from all email and physical mailings many years ago. It hasn't kept me from donating, because they serve a fundamental social need that's important to me to support. (Feeding the hungry - it's an obscenity that anyone goes hungry in our incredibly wealthy country.)
So here's the strategy that I would suggest nonprofits consider:
- If a donor has donated once during the year, solicit them once and only once toward the end of the year for an additional. Make sure to thank them for the first donation.
- If a donor has donated twice, again, solicit at most once more. And thank them for both of those donations.
- If you're sending email to someone who has never donated, maybe think about why and whether sending multiple solicitations is going to work. Do you survey nondonors to see what they are thinking?
Maybe the repeated solicitations get more money from some donors; maybe they shake loose the first donation from others. I have no data, and presumably the organizations following these patterns do. I'm not a donor at the level of tens or hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars; I'm sure that those donors get kid-glove treatment from the organizations they donate to, and absolutely never feel harassed. I don't want that kind of treatment (even if I were able to donate at that level....), but I definitely do not want to feel bombarded by the organizations I donate to. And I don't think that is too much to ask.
"no organization wants to irritate their regular donors."
ReplyDeleteOh yes they do. Not only do they operate on the presumption that anybody who donates is therefore a soft touch and susceptible to further appeals, but they want to irritate donors into donating further under the delusion that if they do, the deluge will stop. It's the same line of non-reasoning by which cops browbeat suspects into confessing under the delusion that, if they do, the cops will let them go.
I've been thinking of tracking all the fundraising material I receive for a year and contacting the ones who send me the most. Especially the environmentally-oriented ones.
ReplyDeleteAnother way to PO your donors: I just heard from my son that his alma mater has stopped providing file storage and e-mail forwarding for alumni. It seems unlikely that this policy change will provide a net improvement in their finances.
Alan, it's January 1, so - maybe I will do this as well. Just file all the damn fundraising appeals instead of deleting or trashing them.
ReplyDeleteBrandeis pissed me off in 2022 by eliminating their graduate programs in music. When I was an undergrad, the graduate programs were among the best in the nation. They're not what they once were, but now it will be impossible to attract top-notch faculty. So much for leaving anything to Brandeis in my will.
Irritated donors don't donate in response to multiple solicitations. They are the ones who never donate again, unsubscribe from mailing lists, and write never-darken-my-door-again emails or printed letters to charitable organizations, that is, they are me.
ReplyDeleteYes, it doesn't work. But they do it anyway. And the more it doesn't work, the more insistently they do it, under the presumption that it will work if they only do it more insistently.
ReplyDeleteI've talked with people with this mindset. They have an entirely different idea of how human minds work than actual humans do.