“Which channel is better for sending out a fundraising appeal? Email or Direct Mail?”
Ask this question in a room full of fundraisers, and you’ll inevitably stir up a heated debate.
Depending on how you’ve built your fundraising program and the state of your data, you might end up with a variety of answers to this question. I’ve heard many responses to this question including:
- “My data is a mess. It’s too hard to attribute each channel. I’m going to move on to something else.”
- “Direct mail is so much better. Online donors aren’t worth it.”
- “It depends! My offline donors respond better to direct mail. My online donors respond better to email.”
Regardless of what this looks like for your organization, I’d submit to you that it’s the wrong question to ask in the first place.
Donors are Not Confined to a Channel
Donors are not a channel. They’re people. They may have a preferred method of giving, but most donors interact across many channels.
Think about your own personal behaviors for a moment.
When you donate to a cause that matters to you, do you prefer to stick a check in the mail? Or do you prefer to give on the website?
Since you’re reading this on LinkedIn, let’s assume that you prefer to give on the website. But what prompted your gift in the first place?
- Did you have a conversation with someone who is also a donor?
- Did you read a news article that prompted you to think about the organization?
- Did you see an ad (whether you’re aware of it or not) on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google, etc. that kept the organization top of mind?
- Did you get some type of post card or update in your mailbox from the organization?
The reality is, most people don’t just wake up and give their money away. There is almost always something that prompts the decision.
The challenge for most fundraisers and marketers is that we’re obsessed—even addicted—to channel attribution. Donors either give in this channel or that channel. That’s it.
But if you step into the shoes of your donor for just a brief second, you’ll realize that donors do not consider themselves as a channel. Instead, they consider themselves a person. And in modern fundraising, every touch point matters.
People interact with what’s in front of them.
Offline Donors with an Email are More Valuable
People certainly have preferences in how they give.
But people are influenced by every channel they interact with—even if they have a preferred channel for giving.
A question like “Which channel is better for sending a fundraising appeal” can dehumanize our donors, forcing them into a category. It missed the fact that each channel has value, even if the donor gives through a different one.
Let’s try asking a better question:
Why would someone who has historically given offline choose to give more?
This is a better question for several reasons.
- It doesn’t assume that donors are forever associated with a specific channel. We don’t want to fuel our assumptions. We want to seek to understand.
- It uses the word “why”. A “what” question almost always leads to a dead end. A “why” question begs an action-oriented response. Once we arrive at an answer, we can do something with it!
- The question is narrow enough that we won’t head down a long, winding rabbit trail to nowhere.
- The question is open ended enough that the applications may be far reaching. We might uncover answers that can be tested with other channels and segments.
The answer to this question likely has varying answers from organization to organization.
As I look at the data in the aggregate using Avid Benchmarks, there’s a meaningful trend that stands out:
Donors who have only ever given offline tend to give more if they also receive emails.
The data says that an offline donor gives 36% more each year if they receive emails from you.
That’s a big difference!
But it doesn’t stop there. Offline donors retain 12% better if they receive emails from you.
Let’s have some fun with numbers.
- Imagine your organization brings in $10M in donations each year.
- Let’s say your offline channels bring in 55% of your total donations.
- This would mean your offline channels account for $5.5M in annual revenue.
- If you could acquire the email address of your offline donors, you could theoretically bring in an additional $1.98M annually.
That’s a 19% increase in revenue!
But let’s not get ahead of our skis. We haven’t yet answered the “why” part of this question. All we’ve done is identify a trend.
Why Do Offline Donors with an Email Give More?
Simply having someone’s email address means nothing.
You could go scrape the internet, buy a bunch of lists, and append email addresses to all of your offline donors.
Does that mean they’re magically going to give you more money?
Absolutely not!
To get to the why, we need to understand how this trend actually impacts the person.
There are a few things that may be at play:
- When a donor gives you their email address, it represents a greater level of investment.
Buying someone’s email address from a 3rd party does nothing to build greater trust or affinity. But an offline donor who willingly gives you their email address is expressing greater connection to your organization.
As a result, it’s only natural that you’d see these donors give at a higher level.
- Having a donor’s email address gives you greater opportunity to cultivate.
Email is a cost-efficient way to keep your donor up-to-date with how their giving is making an impact. Should it replace your direct mail channel? No!
But email gives you the chance to stay top of mind with your “offline” donors without breaking the bank. And when you stay top of mind, you have a greater chance of seeing a higher response when you send your next direct mail appeal. - Having a donor’s email address gives you more chances to strategically send an appeal.
I’m not saying you should blast your offline donors with donation emails every few weeks. But when the need arises, you can alert them to a particular campaign or opportunity with much more agility than you could via the mail.
Now, they may never give to you online. But they might see your appeal, pull out the checkbook, and send you that donation.
Turning This Insight into Action
Data should always lead to action.
So what do we do with this interesting metric about offline donors and email addresses?
I always like to start with a hypothesis.
For instance:
Will acquiring more email addresses from my offline donors lead to a continual increase in revenue per donor?
This is a difficult hypothesis to test. It’s not as clean as a/b testing a red button versus a blue button. But you can still take action.
Your hypothesis should lead you to take action.
For instance:
Let’s build out a campaign to incentivize offline donors to share their email with us. After we cultivate them via email for 6 months, let’s look at their value versus those that did not provide their email.
Your action should lead to new conclusions—and more meaningful questions.
You might learn that cultivating offline donors via email does in fact increase their value. From there, you might build an automated campaign to try to acquire the email of every new offline donor.
Beyond that, you may ask additional questions like:
- Will cultivating online donors with offline channels lead to greater revenue?
- Are there other channels that I can use to cultivate both my online and offline donors?
- Is there a better email cadence to lead to further improvements?
A System to Power Your Multi-Channel Fundraising
At the end of the day, many fundraisers don’t have the tools to run effective multi-channel campaigns.
Understanding the true impact of each channel is nearly impossible when most of our fundraising tools are disconnected.
On top of that, it’s a tremendous amount of work to identify which audiences should be targeted in each channel—and then keep all your lists accurate and up to date.
Avid is a system that powers this entire process—taking the grunt work off your shoulders and delivering better results. It serves up meaningful data insights, empowers match back reporting for multichannel attribution, and manages & synchronizes your segmentation automatically.
If you want to see how Avid can help you understand the impact of each channel and empower multi-channel strategies, you can book a demo to take a look here »
