Improving your fundraising without the risk

Howard Lake | 17 February 2009 | Blogs

• Tagged with:
• Individual giving
• Management

We can all improve our fundraising performance but the options we have in today’s climate seem to be polarised.  Completely entrench and try and wait the recession out or ‘revolutionise’ to make a big splash and out-shout the competition. 

I’m not sure either is preferable and instead offer the following for your thoughts and comments.

The temptation is often to seek outside help – not necessarily a bad thing as long as it’s the right kind of help.  The wrong kind of ‘expert’ doesn’t spend much time trying to understand your organisation and your specific needs, so what do they tell you?

1. "Eliminate Campaigns A and B!"
2.  "Replace them with Campaigns X and Y!"

Having followed the recommendations, you analyse the results six months later to find that the revolutionary ideas didn’t work as well as expected.  Therefore you revert to what you had been doing previously for the next tranche of activity.  Whilst this might be better than trying something completely new, it does mean you are back with the mediocre results you were trying to improve upon in the first place.

In my experience, transformational change programmes often fail because of a simple misconception; true revolution rarely actually happens (and if it does, it often requires significant awareness campaigning to bring the audience along the journey too).  What seems to produce much better results is piling up small wins on top of each other to improve results overall.

A touch of evolution that you control instead of revolution!  So, how do you pile up the small wins?  Play the "Defeat the Champion" game (a.k.a. A/B Testing).

Think of A/B testing like a boxing championship; the organisers consistently line up fighters to see who can defeat the champion.  But this is done one match at a time so the focus is only ever on the next result – the incremental improvement.  For instance:

1. The winner of a World Title Match fights the next top contender
2. The winner of that Title Match fights the next top contender 
3. Repeat step 2.

Link this to fundraising activity and campaigns:

1. Determine what you want to improve (e.g. better direct marketing results)
2. Determine your current champion (e.g. the existing new donor acquisition pack)
3. Play the "Defeat the Champion" Game (e.g. create a new pack to send to a representative sample of the same audience group, perhaps in a 50/50 split with the existing pack)
4. Compare the results in terms of overall number of responses, amount generated, average value per donation etc. and see if you have a new champion
5. Repeat this exercise with the next campaign so you are continually seeking to evolve your results and don’t risk ‘throwing the baby out with the bathwater’.

You can play the game with almost every aspect of your fundraising activity:

• the best direct mailing or emailing campaign overall
• the best creative design
• the best audience to target
• the best level of ask for any given campaign 
• the best time to communicate with the audience
• the best celebrity to associate with the activity
• etc.

Key to success is not changing too much at once and keeping a control measure in place.  That is, try to only change one significant factor per test and keep an element of the current champion in every campaign so you have a baseline to compare performance.  If you are delivering integrated emailing and SMS campaigns and you change the target audience, data supplier, timing and creative, how will you know which factor impacted on the results?

The moral (if there is one):

1. Don’t eliminate things that already work 
2. Instead, try to produce things that work better and use the current champion’s performance as your benchmark 
3. Invest future resources into what you therefore know works best and incremental improvements simultaneously

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.