30 Ideas to Enhance Fundraising Direct-Response Creative, Part 3
Use data to model your donors by factoring in behavioral, demographics, psychographic and consumer behavior data. It's invaluable information that unveils prospects and donors willing to give or give more.
24. Improve audience selection to target upgrades
Focus on data points such as recency, frequency, monetary information; volunteer participation; gifts-in-kind givers; rapid responders; potential giving capacity; and niches/clusters primed for upgrades.
25. No matter your file size, always test
You hear it time and time again — test, test and test. That's because testing works. You can achieve statistically significant results regardless of the test pool. And tests do not have to be costly. Tweaks to variable laser language, fundraising messages and ask strings are inexpensive but can make a difference.
One note: Smaller files should retest before rolling out new creative.
26. Get interactive … or ask for something else
Asking a donor to do something else besides make a donation can inspire giving. So utilize donor involvement devices such as advocacy actions like honoring a caregiver or loved one, signing a petition, voting, or sending a letter to a representative. The engagement can lead to donations.
27. Improve results through creative design techniques
Try adding an involvement device to an appeal that engages the donor in giving. For example, Best Friends Animal Society included an envelope to send a treat to a furry friend that the donor could sign and return.
28. Test enclosures
Inserts are common in direct-mail fundraising packages, but not always necessary. Resist the temptation to always include inserts. Ask yourself: Is the insert covering its cost, and is it distracting the donor and suppressing response? Of course, you can always test the contents of a package.
29. Report multichannel giving too
Fundraisers can't teach donors how to behave — in an ideal world a donor would use just one channel to make fundraisers' jobs easier in recording which channel spawned the gift. That's not how things work in today's world. Every channel affects every other channel. For example, studies have shown that 50 percent of all online gifts are "online white mail," often spurred by receiving direct mail. And one studied showed that 7 percent to 20 percent of direct-mail response comes through some other channel, such as email. You have to think about how the channels work in concert, not just record through which channel a gift was made.
