How many communications is too many?

With the unfortunate death of Olive Cooke and the resultant FRSB’s recommendation that the IOF should specify the maximum amount of communications charities should send their donors, I thought I would share some thoughts.

I have to say I've been staggered by the sheer volume of communications I have received over the last five months from monitoring the ‘top 10’ charities. From a one off cash gift, from ten charities I've received 105 separate communications and that doesn't include multiple emergency appeals. That averages 2.1 per charity per month. This is skewed somewhat by the development charities, between three they have sent just over 50% of the total, averaging 3.7 per month.

However, and this is a BIG however, only 20% of this number has been direct mail, so less than 0.5 pieces of direct mail per month. The rest of the communications are 90% email.

Mark Astarita’s comments in Civil Society were interesting, he talked about how many Nepal emergency appeal emails British Red Cross should have stopped at, and the potential ￡2m income risk that limiting the number of communications could have had. Yes I did receive lots of Nepal crisis emails from all the development charities but here’s the thing, generally speaking ‘Dorothy donor’ doesn't donate via email, and for the ones that do, email are arguably less intrusive than telemarketing and direct mail. This is reflected in the difference in response rates between the channels.  So to me it seems unreasonable to include emails within a proposed restriction as they are not directly impacting vulnerable groups as much as other channels.

The problem is not how many communications each charity sends an individual donor but the cumulative volume across all charities that goes to that same individual. In general two types of people will donate to charity, those that have a proximity to the cause and those that are charitable in nature, or both.

I have no doubt that Mrs Cooke’s records whether as a current donor or a lapsed one are on many charity databases. And this stems from the way cash donors have been recruited over the last twenty years. Initially through the heyday of lifestyle surveys “Would you consider donating to any of the following charities..? To swapping and renting of data which is still very much the backbone of any acquisition cash campaign. If you’re an existing donor with charity A there’s a good chance you will also donate to charity B, C, D etc.

Every charity is fishing in the same pool of donors so of course over a period of time a large percentage of donors for one charity are also on a whole host of other charity databases. So you can imagine one donor, a relationship with ten charities a mixture of active and lapsed, you could see quite quickly that one donor could receive fifty plus pieces of direct mail plus dozens of reactivation and upgrade calls a year, not to mention all the additional cold. This will only increase as charities start to implement complex cross sale programmes. The FRSB’s plans for data sharing to be made clearer is too little too late. Even if they banned the swapping of data it would take years to filter through.

So what can be done? I'm afraid short of charities de-duping all their warm appeals against each other then not a lot. From a donor relationship perspective charities could do more on internal ownership. I do think the volume of communications I've received has been excessive. Direct mail ownership is a lot easier to control but I've seen a lot of e-mails coming through from events, online shops and campaigns. I may have ticked that I'm interested in these areas but all in the same month? From one charity I received EIGHT communications in one month. That can’t be doing the relationship between the charity and the donor any good at all. Donor programmes need to be planned holistically to ensure an optimal journey and volume of communications sent.

Thanks for reading,

Richard