My People!

In a recent article I told you finding the right donors is the ballgame when it comes to a profitable regular giving programme. Sure there are many other drivers of increased ROI, but without the right donors in the first place, these are playing around the edges.Given that we’re staking an awful lot on this statement, the team at Engage & Experience felt we should share more of our thoughts on this.

So who are your people? Well, we can (and should) spend a great deal of time developing an understanding of our brand, and how the public perceives it, what problems we solve, what types of people support us, why they are driven to back us. In the end though, it comes down to three things:

• Your people care a lot about the difference you are making in the world.
• Your people are financially capable of contributing.
• You ask them!

We all know that when acquiring thousands of new supporters each year, you cannot expect everyone to share these traits in complete abundance. What you can do is maintain visibility over what’s happening and pull the right levers to adjust your acquisition targeting, you’ll start to find that more of your donors are a better match.

This article dives into the front end of the regular giving lifecycle, looking at how you organise your processes and data to get as much information for making adjustments as you can. The metrics we have at this Lead-to-Cash stage are instantly available and give you enormous power to shape the success of your entire program. Reacting to changes and making quick tactical adjustments will boost your performance in all downstream metrics and you don’t have to wait months for your retained donor metrics to make improvements.

Lead-to-Cash

Lead-to-Cash is your funnel. Not the top of funnel activity that drives brand and cause awareness - although this is very important for ensuring quality further down the funnel. The Lead-to-Cash phase is the bottom of the funnel from lead-generation through to fulfilment of the first gift instalment.?

Maximising the efficacy of each touch point and driving up the key metrics in the Lead-to-Cash phase yields more and better donors, with as little loss as possible. Having clear visibility of all activities in this phase gives you the ability to continuously refine your tactics.

Reporting of your Lead-to-Cash phase across various channels and activities might look like this (numbers are made up and in some cases, designed to be questioned):

What this level of visibility gives you is a quick way to powerful decision making. Which activities (particularly your targeting) can be improved in terms of quality? What should you do more of? What do you learn about your funnel targeting and what does that mean in terms of who your people really are?

Your people are out there, you just need to find them.