Finding and Keeping Felicity
Howard Lake | 1 October 2009 | Blogs
In the build up to this year’s IFC (www.resource-alliance.org/ifc), one of the stories that has leapt out at me is the emergence of ‘Felicity’ donor – the 38½ year old female donor that is recruited through face-to-face (F2F) fundraising and just keeps giving.
According to Daryl Upsall (Daryl Upsall Consulting SL) and Owen Watkins (Unicef) who are delivering a F2F masterclass at the Resource Alliance’s IFC next month, this donor demographic is the ideal F2F fundraising target, not because she is most likely to donate, but because she is most likely to keep on giving.
The announcement of Felicity donor does not come as so much of a surprise– what does is the length of time it has taken us to come up with this definition. After all, F2F has been a regular and important part of the fundraising mix in the UK for over 10 years now.
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I remember back in the heady days of the late 90s when early investment in the technique by relatively small to medium size organisations such as AICR, AFBP and NDCS transformed charities, enabling them to reap the rewards of the method. At the time, we thought that F2F would give us those younger donors that we all strived for. It did, but the challenge has long been in getting them to stick around.
So… in comes Felicity. Whilst Felicity isn’t quite the young donor we were striving for, she is mature enough to commit to the organisation and substantially younger than ‘Dorothy’! What is more, she is least likely to cancel her Direct Debit over the following weeks.
But, Felicity brings two major challenges of her own.
How do we recruit Felicity? In an ideal world, we would need fundraisers to mirror Felicity’s demographic themselves, (to be women in their late 30s, well-educated etc) but in reality, rates of pay are likely to preclude this. Instead, we need to shift the emphasis in F2F campaigns from attracting new and younger donors to those that are going to keep on giving.
Secondly, Felicity is going to be more demanding. She will want you to talk to her, to let her know what you are doing to deserve her support. And, the fact remains that we can’t expect donors to keep on giving unless we do something about it. Attrition is a problem that can only be counteracted with good donor care and stewardship. It is essential that retention strategies are put in place, whether it be through welcome calls, vismails, email updates, texts and thank you messages. We need to shift the emphasis from acquisition to the lifetime value of each donor.
If Felicity is your future. You will need to implement rolling reactivation programmes and upgrades, regular thank you and updates calls. Whether it is emails and texts that she wants, to chat to you over the phone or good old fashioned snail mail, Felicity is in charge. Give her what she wants and the chances are that her lifetime value will exceed all your expectations. Felicity is high maintenance, but worth every penny.
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.