Domain | Integrated Marketing Agency, London.

An hilarious classic from the Onion has an important lesson for Fundraisers…the perils of intangibles
http://tinyurl.com/36v52jm

New blog from our Senior Copywriter, Steve L, discusses how not to do charity surveys http://www.domain-london.co.uk/2010/05/1061/

Surveys are an effective fundraising tool for many charities. Asking a person their opinions can, across a range of organisations, stimulate the giving instinct. What’s more, surveys can provide charities with valuable information from which to tailor and personalise future communications.

And this shouldn’t come as a surprise, after all we all want to know that our thoughts and feelings matter and are taken seriously.

But, you have to do it properly. If you’re asking people’s opinions, you have to tell them why you want to know about their experiences or views, and what you’ll do with the information.

A charity recruitment survey that landed on my doormat last week, sadly, failed to adhere to these basics and could have done more harm than good; potentially leaving people with a bad taste in the mouth and a poor view of the charity.

The ‘Survey’ part of the mailing was a blatantly transparent solicitation for funding and singularly failed to offer a mechanism to deliver on the request on the envelope to ‘Make your opinion count’. The survey consisted of just five questions, and questions 1-3 could have been amalgamated under the heading ‘Did you know how great we are?’ All three highlighted an area of the charities work and basically asked ‘Did you know we do this?’ Organisation-centric copy at its worst. Question 4 was then ‘Did you know that for £4 a month…’, and question 5 ‘Did you know it cost just £25 to…’.

Oh dear.

Anybody deciding to ‘Make their voice heard’ might have felt a little cheated, to say the least. A request for their opinions turns out to be nothing of the sort, instead being little more than an attempt to gain supporters by stealth. This sort of thing gives direct mail a bad name and might even be an issue that needs to looked at by the Fundraising Standards Board.

If you’re doing a survey, you need to have a reason for doing so beyond the imperative to raise funds – you need to demonstrate that people’s opinions do actually matter.

Perhaps the results of the survey will help to inform your programmes or policies, be a platform from which to campaign, or at the very least to help you communicate better with your donors. Promise to send respondents the results or post them online. Respect your supporter’s intelligence, value their opinion and the donations will look after themselves.

Govt plans to scrap access to the Electoral Roll could spell disaster for charities… it’s the only cost effective way to check data

A new blog from our Senior Copywriter discussing whether we should engage people’s hearts or minds. http://tinyurl.com/3akkztc

A perennial question asked of fundraising creatives is to target our communications at either the audience’s hearts, or at their minds.

So we’re told we should lead on emotions, or facts. Our case must be either heart-rending, or logical. We must target people’s feelings, or their intellect.

Outside of the charity sector organisations talk about winning ‘hearts and minds’, yet fundraisers seem increasingly inclined to choose one or the other.

I’ve heard all sorts of cases being made that individual communications should target the mind over the heart or vice versa. Are people who give lower value gifts really more likely to respond to an emotionally charged case study? Are higher value donors only able to reach for their credit card when they are presented with a cold, hard logical case for giving? There’s likely to be something to these arguments, but…

…while we must always look at how different audiences have responded to previous communications, there’s a real danger in a reductionism that decides an audience, or audience segment, can only respond to one type of appeal.

And, as the contents of a number of briefs I’ve received over the years has proved, this ‘motivational bias’ can all too easily become institutionalised. With donors safely pigeon-holed as responding to either an emotional or intellectual case, we don’t have to make the effort to think about individual appeals creatively, or engage on the basis of proposition.

But have you ever met anybody who you could safely say acts solely on their emotions, or purely on their intellect? I haven’t. All our actions are the result of a complicated, ever-changing interaction between the various aspects of our personality. If we witness a road accident our emotional selves will rush to see if we can do anything to help the victims, while our logical selves will be phoning an ambulance. On Monday I might watch Channel 4 news but on Tuesday I’ll switch over for Eastenders.

So your high value donor might demand a rational case that tells him or her exactly how their donation will be used, but at the same time the deal-clincher might be the photograph of a smiling beneficiary that you’ve helped in the past. Similarly, your £8 a month Direct Debit donor might have a visceral emotional reaction to the story of a child in distress, but they’ll still need you to show them how their monthly gift will actually influence the situation you’ve described.

So while we can prioritise a cerebral or emotional case according to audience and proposition, we must avoid the trap of thinking creative has to be purely one or the other. Use all the information you have to understand your supporters, but don’t let the data reduce them to one-dimensional beings.

Successful fundraising needs to win over people’s hearts and minds.

BBC Two’s Mary Queen of Charity Shops: Revisited provided fascinating insight into how to boost charity retail sector – well worth watching

With Sport Relief pulling in £3.4m via text message donations, isn’t it time other charities embraced mobile fundraising?

http://twitpic.com/1cd7p1 – Just done this interesting campaign for Tearfund – we created some cambodian banknotes, this one went on the env

A happy easter from all of us at domain