What’s the collective noun for a group of bankers (and why didn’t we think of it sooner)?
Howard Lake | 24 April 2009 | Blogs
You’re almost guaranteed to discover something new when you attend one of Alan Clayton’s presentations.
Alan’s speciality is donor motivations and at a seminar tis week hosted by Relationship Marketing, he presented for the first time his thoughts on what drives people to take part in challenge events. He detailed a psychographic segmentation of challenge eventers, listed into eight categories – including ‘life changers’, ‘fun seekers’ and ‘excuse needers’ – and spoke about how to communicate with each type of eventer.
As part of this classification, Al introduced us to ‘The Wunch’, a collective term for a group of bankers.
Alan reckons there is a huge potential to attract members of the Wunch to challenge events. The Wunch comprises the suits who used to brag about the biggest expense account, the best and fastest car, and the size of their bonuses. Now they are having to shy away from the exuberance of the nineties and early noughties.
But they still have the need to puff up their chests and show to their friends how good and caring they really are. They are doing this by raising the most money that they can. This is where their bragging rights come from these day.
It’s a great example of how to get inside donors’ heads and it’s all sound marketing technique – after all, psychographic segmentation (segmenting by need or motivation rather than, say, age or gender or recency-frequency value) has been around for some time in the marketing industry.
But seeing Alan present his categories made me wonder why fundraisers have been so slow to take these ideas beyond individual giving – and especially DM – where many fundraisers seem most comfortable with them. Why haven’t we applied it to other types of donor, such as eventers?
Is it because our events calendar is too hectic and we move from event to event and don’t have time to steward these supporters that potentially can do so more for our causes? Is the pressure from on high too much just to meet target and ensure that all the spaces are filled?
Or maybe there just isn’t enough cross-pollination between the DM fundraisers – who have all this expertise in segmenting donors – and other types of fundraisers?
It makes me wonder just what other opportunities we are missing because we’ve never consider we can be a bit more sophisticated in the way we understand what motivates someone to get involved with us.
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.