Fundraisers: Watch Your Backs

Let's say you punched me in the nose. (Don't worry about why you did it. For the purposes of this allegory, the reason doesn't matter.)

Immediately after you sock me, you go into a defensive pose. You crouch down and put up your guard, and prepare for me to respond in kind. That's the natural, normal response. You punch someone, of course that person is going to punch you back.

But what if I don't do the "normal" thing? From your perspective as the puncher, it might seem a very odd response. But my perspective as the punchee might be quite different:

1. Maybe I was raised by Quakers.
2. Maybe you're twice my size.
3. Maybe I deserved it.

There are any number of perfectly normal reasons you don't get what seems to you to be the normal, rational response.

For fundraisers, making normal assumptions can be a costly mistake. It happens all the time in acquisition testing.

Let's say you mail your control package and a couple of well-thought-out strategic tests. And let's say one of the tests wins. This is great. You have a new control. You invested all that time and money, and risked something new, and it paid off.

But did it really? Actually there could be any number of reasons your test beat the control — that time.

1. Maybe there were some anomalous issues with the list.
2. Maybe your quantity was too small to be statistically reliable.
3. Maybe it was just one of those things.

Accepting test results from a new package makes plenty of logical sense. But it's also rife with peril. It's just not possible to think of every scenario that could have made that package yield false positive results. And rolling out a package like that can lead to big headaches.