Raising money — or creating a monthly donor program — without conducting research is like trying to build a house without blueprints. It is sometimes said that research is what you do before you spend a lot of money, and testing is what you do afterwards. Good research will help you develop your most viable offer.

To a fundraiser, research means:

  • Understanding who your donors are. When you know who they are, you’ll know how to effectively communicate with them. You’ll discover where they live (more than just an address), what they read, their religious affiliation, etc. You’ll be able to compile demographic, psycho- graphic, and behavioural pictures of your donors.
  • Understanding their giving patterns. When you analyze how they give – dollar amount, recency, and frequency – you’ll be able to select the best prospects for a monthly giving club. You can also look tat the types of appeal they respond to and tailor your monthly invitations accordingly.
  • Understanding why they give to your organization. You can discover what motivates a single-gift donor versus a monthly donor, and you can shape future offers around this valuable information to convert more single-gift donors to monthly pledgers.
  • Finding which outside lists produce a higher proportion of monthly donors than others. For instance, you may find that your local environmental activist organization is a marginal prospect list, but it supplied a disproportionate number of individuals who later became monthly donors to your cause. Since these individuals have such a great Long-Term Value, you may decide to test other environmental lists, and continue using what originally seemed to be a marginal list.

 

Research comes in two flavours: primary and secondary. Primary research may be either qualitative or quantitative. Qualitative research (including one-on-one interviews and focus groups) always involves smaller numbers and more in-depth information gathering. Quantitative research (larger numbers) may be done by mail or phone.

Secondary research involves sifting through other information that has been compiled, analyzed, or published elsewhere. It may be found in publications such as academic journals or in published government research and statistics. Some direct marketing and fundraising periodicals provide valuable second-hand research. (The newsletter Who’s Mailing What is particularly helpful.) Another form of secondary research, collecting direct mail samples, can be invaluable, because packages that work are mailed again and again.

Both primary and secondary research are indispensable when launching a monthly giving program. You must “know” your audience before you invite them to make such a big commitment: their gender, age, income, giving history, and any other relevant information you can obtain about them. The more you know about the demographics and psycho-graphics of your target audience, the higher your response rate is likely to be.

In designing a monthly giving program, you’ll probably find that it’s useful to gather the following information and analyze it closely:

  • samples of all of the organization’s mailings from the previous three years
  • information on the segments mailed
  • what kind of statistical results they yielded

 

This way, you can determine which themes or projects did well and which did poorly. You can recognize patterns and identify the elements that seemed to have the most powerful impact on your donors. On the basis of these observations – and of other, solid research findings – you can design a monthly giving program calculated to be compelling to your prospects.

Harvey McKinnon & Associates specializes in direct mail, monthly giving programs, and fundraising audits. For more information, contact Harvey McKinnon, 218-2211 West 4th Ave, Vancouver, BC V6K 4S2. Telephone (604) 732-4351. Fax (604) 732-4877. eMail info@harveymckinnon.com. Visit: www.harveymckinnon.com.