Daylight robbery

I'm aware that I risk mixing metaphors by using the image of the vulture after the heading above, but both are apt. You decide which works best.

I am frequently surprised by stories of publishing companies selling advertising space in various journals and magazines with the promise of great returns.

The sales tactic will be familiar to many readers.

"We have just had a cancellation, this is well below rate card, etc..."

Sadly, many fundraisers seem too soft to say no - or too inexperienced to ask for evidence that these ads work. And the publishers exploit their gentle nature mercilessly. I know of one small to medium sized charity that was spending £80,000 a year on advertising in solicitors' journals - as they are somewhat ambitiously called - without anything to show for it.

One of our clients surprised us a couple of years ago, when he announced, "oh, but you're wrong ... we did get a response from a solicitor's journal; we put a different 'room number' in the registered address shown in each ad so we could track any response". Astonished, we asked for more detail. "Well, in fact," he continued, "it was just on the envelope from the solicitor - the will inside featured an entirely different address."

We have given up hope of ever seeing evidence that these ads work.

Crucially, we can think of many better ways for a legacy department to spend even £500 - never mind £80,000.

But why my sudden catharsis?

Well I received an email today from one of the publishers in question, and I have reproduced a slightly edited version below to show that the [insert animal shown in photograph above] even try their [insert blog title] with agencies:

"I know that you are very busy this week, but I wanted to contact you as I have a last minute position available in the XXXX publication and as we spoke previously, I wanted to offer it to you first.

I spoke to your colleague XXXX who suggested that I contact you via email first.

The campaign has actually closed for this year, but one of my Fundraising clients phoned this morning and pulled out on a full page, as they are undergoing a re-brand and are unable to provide copy for me in time, really leaving me in the lurch and in a lot of trouble with Editorial. [I laughed out loud at that bit]

I know this year is going to be so important for fundraising and I have come to you at the very last minute, so that is why I are [sic] offering you this final last minute deal for a full page within the XXXX for the coming year.

We can offer you a full page, colour, glossy advert space within our limited preliminary section for £x for the coming year, and this is well below the rate card price of £y.

I can offer this to you at this price as it is a last minute deal and because I want to fill the space with a company that can provide a valuable and important service for charities. This means that you will be getting the same, full exposure as your competitors within the XXXX, but you would be paying a fraction of the cost.

I know you have been incredibly busy this week, but I am so confident with the XXXX publication, we have actually grown 14% in the last year, which really speaks for itself.

As I mentioned earlier, we are ready to sign off on the publication, so this would be your last opportunity to be a part of XXXX.

We can give you an extension on the copy deadline up until the 14th, so that you can sign the copy off when you are in the office.

I will call you back tomorrow to discuss this further."

Clearly publishers need to earn a living too, but my objection is the way in which, without exception, they are happy to take money from charities without being able to offer any guarantee of likely returns.

Fundraisers - take a stand against this!

From a £1 pack to a £2.5m legacy

In reply to Mark’s post about the pound pack, I thought I would offer two additional perspectives. The first is as a client who bought it, and the second is regarding its power in legacy fundraising.

When I arrived at ChildLine, my incumbent agency was Bluefrog. I remember the concern I felt when I looked at the database and found thousands of donors who had only ever given £3.

“What sort of mickey mouse agency is this,” I remember saying.

I was similarly sceptical when they came in to explain how it worked. I sat with arms folded, wondering how much more flannel they would spout.

But when I had seen a live campaign for the first time, my views changed entirely.

Like many others, I had dismissed the idea at the first hurdle. I was preoccupied with the low value cash gift, and failed to see the bigger picture.

In time, however, ChildLine had one of the most advanced and finely tuned mail acquisition programmes in the industry, generating thousands of prospects, thousands of mid value regular givers and thousands of core cash givers with each campaign.

And 'campaign' is the critical word in that sentence, as the pound pack approach is much more than a cheap tactical trick, but is instead a carefully refined strategy.

At ChildLine, in common with most other charities who used it, initial mail response was around 10%. (Bluefrog is still achieving 12% and more, e.g. for a cancer charity in November 2008.)

A significant percentage of these prospects can then be converted to regular giving via telephone and mail.

But what about those who don’t convert? At ChildLine, we developed the ‘nursery programme’ – a series of hard-hitting mailings that converted roughly 15% to the core cash giving file.

If, after six or nine months, they had still only given the original £3, we sent another pound pack. Response was well above 50%. And conversion calling to them generated more good quality regular givers.

Are you building the spreadsheet in your mind? It adds up.

What’s more, detailed trends analysis we performed on the database, broken down by recruitment source, showed the pound pack regular givers and core cash givers to be the most valuable on the file.

But why the mention of legacies?

A surprising picture is beginning to emerge of the power of this humble piece of direct mail. Three quick examples illustrate our discovery…

A young people’s charity which uses pound packs recently received a legacy of £500,000 from a taxi driver from Hornchurch who had given the organisation the grand sum of £1 several years before. He had resisted every attempt to upgrade, cross-sell or convert him. He had received Christmas card catalogues, legacy mailings and appeal letters. But his £1 remained his sole gift.

A large children’s hospital tested a pound-pack-to-newsletter-to-legacy-mailing strategy about five years ago. Responders to the pound pack simply received a newsletter to affirm their gift, followed by an ask for a legacy. Carefully targeted lists meant a strong response at every stage – and they have already recouped three times the original investment in legacy gifts from those responders.

Finally, only last night, at Remember a Charity’s advertising launch event, one of our clients – an armed forces charity – was telling me about a lady who responded to their pound pack two years ago. She had only ever given £1 to the charity, but when she died late last year she left £2.5million to them in her Will.

It would appear that the immediacy and interactive nature of giving pound coins via a simple card in the post engages even those prospective donors with little cash but great asset wealth – who may otherwise not make it onto a charity’s database.

Perhaps the most important lesson here is the reminder to treat every donor with care and courtesy – even those who only give £1 and who resist every subsequent ask for money.

From anything to everything

A recent conversation between one of my colleagues in our legacies team and one of our clients’ donors went as follows: “Oh thank you for calling; I simply wanted to ask … how much can I leave to [charity name]?”

Slightly taken aback, but sensing a golden opportunity, he managed a calm reply: “Well, from anything to everything.”

“Oh good,” the lady said, “I’m so pleased. In that case, since I have no relatives, I shall leave you my entire estate of property, shares and cash.”

It struck me that this happy tale perfectly represents the way legacy fundraising is the confluence of three different streams of fundraising.

Over the years, this lady had been invited to supporter events, including project visits, but in fact had declined.

She had received direct marketing messages, including a recent letter, to which she replied with feedback on the reasons for her support, and an indication that she intended to include the charity in her Will.

On her reply form she had also ticked the box requesting an in-depth conversation with someone from the charity – entering into more of a major donor or planned giving type relationship, where her philanthropy could be unlocked with one-to-one contact.

As Stephen George of the NSPCC pointed out in a seminar at last year’s International Fundraising Congress (ifc) in Amsterdam, legacy fundraising often falls down because the fundraisers either come from a direct marketing background, and know little of major donors, or vice versa. And even fewer come from an events background – an area about which Iain McAndrew of Save the Children is so fervent an evangelist.

It is this combination of different facets that makes legacies such a dynamic and interesting area of fundraising. But for the same reason it is also one of the most challenging.

Given the potentially broad reach of the Remember a Charity social marketing strategy, about to be seen in a new advertising campaign, I anticipate charities seeing an uplift in enquiries and responses across the full spectrum of legacy fundraising.

If you find yourself in this position, will you be ready?

Remember a charity

Controversial charity consortium, Remember a Charity (RAC), is launching a fresh advertising campaign.

After a two-year absence, our televisions and radios shall once again crackle with this most serious of subjects. Or cackle this time round, as one of the most ingrained conventions of legacy marketing is upturned: humour has been injected into the creative.

And who has brought about such renewal?

As anyone who’s worked with him knows, Stephen George, the body’s Chair, and Development Director for Legacies at the NSPCC, is bursting with energy. And, although not single handed by any means, his leadership, imbued with this dynamism, has both held the consortium together and driven it in new directions.

A fierce advocate of research, Stephen refers to its importance in this new phase of activity in every interview or speech he gives.

A scratch beneath the surface of the new logo alone shows that care has been taken to pay attention to feedback from research.

But despite the now visible progress, RAC remains controversial.

Controversial for one reason: a two-year gap in advertising and a perceived lack of visible progress, combined with the challenges brought by recession, has focused the minds of most legacy fundraisers. RAC membership fees have been weighed even more carefully, and a number of members have pulled out, asking the question, “is it worth it – what else could I do with that money?”

But as the latest advertising campaign breaks, and the inevitable learning and research that will follow it emerges, non-members may well be left wishing they were involved.

Charity consortia often go through rocky patches, where the merits of membership are debated, and any advertising that is generated is scrutinised.

And there will be much to debate and scrutinise now.

The latest RAC campaign is built upon the principles of social marketing, where an attempt is made to change behaviour at a societal level, over time – think drink driving or stop smoking.

It works by using research to uncover the nuance in attitude that affects behaviour. In the case of drink driving, the most recent campaign was built upon an insight that people’s resolve not to drink too much is blurred in the moment they face a “just one more?” decision.

We wait with fascination to see the impact of this latest campaign on the world of legacy fundraising. It is a bold and exciting direction. And 'bold and exciting' is just what we need.

According to the RNLI's Charity Monitor, 41% of adults aged 65+ have made a Will. And 41% of those have included a charitable bequest. That still leaves three in five that don't ... and given that the average for the population is only 15% of Wills with a charitable gift, we face an enormous challenge.

But whatever controversy and criticism – or praise and admiration – this campaign generates, legacy fundraisers could do well to look at themselves first.

Will they be so focused on RAC, their enfant terrible, that the breaking campaign finds them not ready to capitalise on the enquiries and responses it generates?

Two weeks in. 2009: the challenge you can overcome?

This post from The Agitator got me thinking.

Reflecting on the knee-jerk reaction of some fundraisers to cut back in the face of recession, Roger comments: "The most practical course of education for most fundraisers would be experience on a well-run farm.

"They would learn the cost of not investing in seed corn (donor acquisition) … they would understand that an investment in weeding (donor cultivation) and good fertilizer (information and accountability for donors) is essential for sustainability.

"And, if they were fortunate enough to work on a farm with an orchard, they would come to understand that it takes three, sometimes four, or even five years to bring in a profitable harvest of fruit from newly planted and continually pruned trees."

Bluefrog’s experience in the past four months has shown us that despite the naysayers it is possible to fundraise successfully in the gloom.

Three conclusions stand out to me:

1. Keep recruiting. We saw Christmas mail acquisition for a cancer charity perform as well as ever before.
2. Keep asking. A Christmas appeal for a homelessness charity beat target by 30%.
3. Push legacies. I’m not talking about a ‘give now, pay later’ message; just a straight forward promotion of gifts in Wills. Every legacies campaign we’ve run with clients in the past six months has beaten expectations – most recently for a development charity.

However, don’t use recession as a lever. One test we ran with a medical research charity showed that when the recession was mentioned it lowered average gifts.

Another post from The Agitator. Tom asks what makes a ten-year donor. As he suggests, January 2009 perhaps more than any other new year before is the moment to find out.

What clues are there among loyal donors as to how to improve retention? And in particular, are long-term supporters lapsing now – or giving at lower amounts than usual?

We know that legacy propensity leaps when someone’s been around for a decade – by seven times for one children’s charity client. And that seems to confirm that there is something special about this group – their continued giving is more than simple inertia.

So go on! Talk to them, seek feedback from them and run analysis on their giving histories.

After all, some of them will have been giving since the last recession – or even longer.