My 1st 2014 Brain Teaser: I’m in Love With 'Campaign Influence'

Happy New Year! That's right, I haven't gone away — just took a few weeks off at the end of the year to clear my brain and get ready for a fantastic 2014. With that said, I'm going to come out of the gate challenging all you marketers and even analysts with a brain teaser. I had to read this whitepaper three times to make sure I understood the formulas correctly — but I'm in love with the concept of "Campaign Influence."

In a nutshell, this is right up the customer/donor relationship management (CRM) alley. In other words, if you believe in CRM, keep reading. If you can't say you believe in CRM — but you do believe that a constituent is influenced by all the experiences and touches from an organization and those affect the giving decision process, keep reading. If you like brain teasers and like to be challenged, keep reading. And, if you want to really understand what is "next" when it comes to really applying proper ROI metrics to your marketing, definitely keep reading.

In this whitepaper by Full Circle CRM, Data-Driven Marketing Is Here to Stay, the authors dive in to the limitations of how we have been calculating ROI over the years. Granted, the paper starts out talking about things that happened in the 1990s, but it quickly gets pretty detailed and very serious about how the current ROI calculations only look at part of the picture. Also, be prepared: This whitepaper is really focused on business-to-business (B-to-B), but I don't care and you shouldn't either. Not only does it still apply for nonprofits; I argue it is even more important due to how we tend to do budgets.

Here's the general concept:

1. We currently measure ROI based on the cost of a campaign and the revenue generated by that campaign. If we spend $10,000 on a campaign and it raises $50,000, then we would calculate ROI this way: ($50,000 - $10,000)/$10,000 = 4. In other words, for every dollar spent on the campaign it returned $4 to the organization.
2. The ROI calculation is correct. It is accurate math. But what if the campaign was not the only thing that influenced the giving decision? In other words, what if there were several touches that occurred within a specific time frame in and around the direct ask that resulted in the donation? Is it possible that those touches influenced the actual decision to give?
3. If you can agree that there is really something true about bullet two above, then you have to wonder how much influence something might have on the decision-making process. For example, what if within two weeks of the direct fundraising ask from a health charity, the constituent received a newsletter with a patient survival story that highlighted the role of the organization and an e-mail that provided the latest statistics about the fight against the disease and the progress being made because of donor dollars? Wouldn't a marketer believe this helped drive/influenced the giving decision? In reality, we know it is the case.
4. The challenge comes in how you calculate "influence." In the whitepaper, it provides several methodologies for how marketing officers in the B-to-B world work through this calculation. But, in the end, to understand true ROI you have to know if the decision was influenced by other marketing touches, and those costs (or a weighted portion) need to be included in the costs to drive the revenue.

Now, for all of you who might be rolling your eyes right now (and I know some of you are just about to click and close this blog post right now), I urge you to really think through this. Why? Well, how many times have you had to kill marketing touches in your plan because they were focused on relationship building or awareness — but to the fundraising spreadsheets they looked like they didn't make any money. Oftentimes newsletters fall into this category, and marketers and fundraisers are stuck trying to understand what kind of impact the newsletter not being sent will have on their giving metrics. Trust me, these marketing touches are critical to the decision-making process.