Now is the time to take action... but first make robust evidence-based plans

Many people already have big plans for the next academic year. Needs are high. The capacity to give is down. Plans need to be spot on to achieve their goals. Yet there is very considerable uncertainty. This sounds like a recipe for pressure. It doesn’t have to be.  

Making plans in a time of such uncertainty is daunting. How will people react? Will we have students on-site to make calls? Will alumni be looking at emails or are they distracted by their own problems? Will institutions be ready to ask even though, whilst many will support, some may complain? At such a time, there is a way to cut through the uncertainty and that is to achieve high certainty on those areas one can control.

Naturally, well-considered plans will get subverted by circumstance but are likely to still deliver acceptable results. When times were easier, many campaigns were based on trial, supposition, and experimentation. That was a reasonable approach as it was possible to be confident they would both work well enough to produce an acceptable ROI and could be developed organically by experience. Such an approach now would not be prudent. The need now is for a planning methodology that is more evidence-based. It is quite possible to examine plans swiftly but forensically, making reliable predictions and thus, in advance, to know you can deliver your goals. This will give great professional security and peace of mind in such troubled times.

So how can we undertake such modelling? The first consideration is upon what you are going to base your predictions? When we are undertaking such a project for a client, we can look at this issue based on an institution’s historic results, or on industry-wide results or an examination of potential using your data demographics and comparing them to the tens of millions of data points in our data warehouse of past results across all our campaigns. The second and third options come via having our software, but there is nothing to stop you undertaking an analysis based on your own past results: they are there in your database.

To understand those results, you do need to compare apples with apples. There may be work needed to get some records, such as outcomes, similarly labelled one campaign with another. You may need to pull all of these out into excel and rename some of them to achieve common usage. This is particularly true if you have had multiple consultants and in-house managers run campaigns, all using their own short-hand or labels.  

You also need to have a coding system to define the giving status of every prospect. We have one called COGS which stands for ‘culture of giving score’ and which places every prospect on a ladder of giving engagement. We offer COGS on a free to use basis, so get in touch if you would like to see how this works. Once you have a system, you can look at past results for particular segments, both giving rate and income. Armed with this, and with analysis of this year’s pool, you can then consider how much you could potentially get from each segment.

Of course, this is only a theoretical potential. For any type of campaign, consideration needs to be made on how many people you can actually reach. For example, it’s great to make estimates on what people may give to an email campaign based on past results, but if you do not then account for the fact that only 10% will actually open the email, you will over-state your assessment many-fold. This is never more important with phone campaigns where it’s almost always the case that there are more people to be called than you have time to complete. So you will need to moderate your estimate based on a reality check of how many the callers can actually speak to in a given period. Then there must be a realistic appraisal of the chances of reaching particular groups of people. For example, if you have 100 regular donors, it’s probably the case that if you called every one of them six times, you would only reach 40-50 of them. If the category is people who previously could not even be reached, the chances of getting through will be far lower. Knowing this, and the total number of calls you can possibly make in the time, you can then consider how you will prioritise calls. This will give you a sense of how many of what type of call you are likely to make and, using your historic results, sensible estimates can be made.

The other point to carefully consider is where your cut off lies in chasing unlikely gifts. By looking at the types of people who have said no to different approaches, you can predict the segments who may well unsubscribe or request no further calls. You can then decide how far you are going in chasing the odd gift in unfertile ground. It’s particularly important to do this for Direct Mail as sending mail to segments who are really unlikely to give is very expensive.

All of the above will take a bit of time. If you are using our software, this type of analysis is out of the box. But even if you are not, the time investment is truly worthwhile. Having a plan that is researched and documented gives you confidence. It lets your obtain buy-in from colleagues. It gives you a roadmap to work to in the knowledge that you are on track. Perhaps most importantly, it allows you to weigh different approaches, segments, scale of campaign and timing against each other. There are real possibilities that you will not be able to meet the wishes or even demands being placed upon you. If you can show all options have been considered and that you are delivering the very best outcome that is possible, you can realign expectations.

Is the above the full gamut of all that is possible in modelling? Not even close. By examining giving patterns you can predict future major donors and legators. Look across enough data and you can look for unidentified individuals with all the characteristics of high capacity and propensity that have so far been missed. You can build fantastic models of future income and prioritise those individuals with the highest lifetime value. Even more liberating is to stack campaigns, making allowances for how one campaign will affect the next, making it better or worse, changing the pool to be approached and amending ROI. Modelling to this level will transform what you can achieve.

Such advanced modelling is theoretically possible without advanced software like ours, backed up by an enormous data warehouse and myriad algorithms developed over years of analysis, but it would be daunting to do in Excel. But in difficult times, we must never make the perfect the enemy of the good. Making a firm start on structured modelling to the best extent you can, will transform the success of campaigns. It will give you belief and it will give you results. And as you see those results, let’s talk together, because with our additional insight, extraordinary enhancement of your programme is possible. Or call us now, we can help you establish robust plans that will deliver in these challenging times. The most important thing is that you take action now.