Embed Size (px)
Citation preview
tActivists don’t like silos:How To Apply a Multi-channel Approach to Converting Them to Donors
Presented by:Laura Connors, National Parks Conservation AssociationBarb Perell, Avalon Consulting
NPCA Overview
Acquisition Program
NPCA OverviewOur MissionTo protect and enhance America's national parks for present and future generations.
What We DoAdvocate for the national parks and the National Park Service.
Educate decision makers & the public about the importance of preserving the parks.
Help convince members of Congress to uphold the laws that protect the parks and to support new legislation to address threats to the parks and fight attempts to weaken these laws in the courts.
Assess the health of the parks and park management to better inform our advocacy work.
NPCA Members
Our Constituents
340,000 members, give $15+ to receive magazine 44% age 65+ 60,000 with email addresses
39,000 online donors
330,000 online subscribers/activists38% age 65+114,000 have taken at least 1 action
All support NPCA because they love national parks!
FY03 FY04 FY05 FY06 FY07 FY08 FY09 FY10 FY11$0
$2,000,000
$4,000,000
$6,000,000
$8,000,000
$10,000,000
$12,000,000
$14,000,000
Mail TM Web Email
• Direct mail remains the major income channel.• Web giving shows great potential for growth with a more structured solicitation program in place.
Income by Channel
DM, TM & Web
Web Only DM & Web DM & TM DM Only$0
$10$20$30$40$50$60$70$80
65%
70%
75%
80%
85%
90%
Income/Member Average Gift Retention
Members included were active within 12 months at the start of FY11, had a highest previous contribution of less than $1,000 and had given 3 or more direct marketing gifts over their entire membership lifetime.
Why Multi-Channel Giving
Acquisition Control Packages
Activist Conversion Test
Mail, Phone, Web
Test Channels to Convert Online Activists
• Wave one of the Online Activist Conversion test was conducted to gauge the response of activists to email acquisition, telemarketing acquisition and direct mail acquisition contacts.
• We wanted to see which channels and which mix of channels was most effective in converting online activists.
• The online activist file was modeled and the 45,000 names most likely to respond to an acquisition ask were split into three groups of 15,000 each.
Online Activist Strategy• Wave one of the Online Activist Conversion test was conducted to gauge the
response of activists to email acquisition, telemarketing acquisition and direct mail acquisition contacts.
• We wanted to see which channels and which mix of channels was most effective in converting online activists.
• The online activist file was modeled and the 45,000 names most likely to respond to an acquisition ask were split into three groups of 15,000 each.
Online Activist Conversion Results
• The pre-emails had a 0.05% response rate for both groups and $23.07 avg. gift (higher than the non-modeled group)
• The group that got the direct mail acquisition and the pre-email had a slightly higher response rate.
Online Activist Conversion Results
• On the TM acquisition both groups (A=email and mail, B=just mail) had nearly identical results on the phone.
• The post-email was the last contact in the series. Group B (mail, phone, email) had a slightly stronger response rate than Group C (just 2 emails)
Overall Results by Channel
Main takeaway: online activists are not necessarily online-only people. Yes, they perform online, but it’s OK to put them in other channels because they do respond and you want multi-channel givers. Notice group C didn’t have as many opportunities to give and has the lowest overall revenue/donor.
Regular Conversion Program
Online
Message testing – institutional vs. urgent issue
Day of week testing – weekday vs. weekend
Testing lapsed donors in acquisition vs. appeal
Testing top activists in appeals
Regular Conversion Program/Testing
Automate an Online Welcome Series
The Online Welcome Series includes the following:
Week 1: Welcome
Week 2: Quiz
Week 3: Take Action
Week 4: Ask
Acquisition (non-donors), Sustainer ask (donors)
Week 8: Sustainer ask (non-donors who didn’t respond to the acquisition)
Online Welcome Series (cont’d.)
• Because we communicate with a new prospect within a week of acquiring their email address, our unsubscribe and bounce rates are consistently low.
• Open rates average 17.56% and the series has an avg. 6.21% click through rate.
• Click through rates are particularly high on both advocacy and survey emails.
• New members are joining with an avg. gift of $21.41 and a response rate of 0.17%.
• By comparison, other acquisition efforts avg. a 0.04% response and $28.92 avg. gift.
• Lay out detailed logistics first and ensure your data flow works in terms of who gets what messages when, whether and when welcome series recipients should be suppressed from other communications, etc.
• Can be tricky to make changes (i.e. you may have to re-set all queries), so you’ll want to use evergreen copy and art.
• Because of so many moving parts and often smaller quantities with each send, it can be difficult to do head-to-head testing on the series.
• Meticulous tracking is needed on opens, click throughs, response, bounce and unsubscribe information to ensure you know what’s working and what’s not.
Online Welcome Series Challenges
Coordination with Advocacy
How to play well together
List acquisition through advocacy
• Acquired new activist through funding issue.
• Chose not to put them through generic welcome series and instead sent them continued communications related to the specific issue that brought them on in the first place.
• Same goal accomplished, but also helped achieve advocacy goals.
Coordinating conversion and advocacy
• In addition to holding these new activists out of the Welcome Series, we had to be cognizant of other acquisition strategies not interfering.
• Donors had received a direct mail piece with a follow up email petition and an email follow up ask, but non-donors had been receiving messaging on our funding issue, so it didn’t make sense for them to get the same message as donors.
• We coordinated so there wasn’t audience overlap and that the non-donors still received the funding petition AND received a follow up ask slightly tweaked to fit with the funding petition message.
• The result is that we didn’t confuse the non-donors who were getting funding action alerts and didn’t confuse donors by continuing to coordinate the messaging they got in the mail.
Coordinate donation asks with actions
• Tested asking for a donation right after an action vs. 1 week later.
• Non-donor activists responded more to the immediate ask
• Coordinated fundraising asks followed by action alerts and immediate fundraising ask after completed action.
Test conversion messaging
• Tested acquisition messaging between institutional and urgent issue.
• There was no significant difference in performance between the two, proving we could message newer prospects on urgent issues if they came up rather than rely on just institutional messaging.
• Was an opportunity to message on urgent Grand Canyon issue since we weren’t going to be in the mail on that issue for months. It also allowed better coordinate with heavy advocacy messaging around the same issue.
• Test what channels and what mix of channels convert your activists best.
• Regularly send online conversions to non-donors on your list, testing messaging and techniques along the way.
• Automate a welcome series to communicate early with new email list subscribers
• Recruit new activists through through 3rd party sites and message to them on the action they joined you on.
• Test asking activists for a donation immediately after they take action.
Acquisition Best Practices: Online
Thank you!
Questions?
Barb Perell
Vice President of Online Services
Avalon Consulting
Laura Connors
Deputy Vice President for MembershipNPCA
