Work Smarter, Not Harder - your hidden donors can help you achieve your goals

Prospect pools will be worked harder, with fewer resources. As your institutional and student needs rise, solutions will be required to get more from less. An impossible equation? Not necessarily, given that most data sets have acres of untapped prospect resources ready to be engaged and asked. Those who access this potential will have outstanding campaigns in the post-Covid world.

People are thinking about how their development programme can do more than simply bounce back but be even better in the future. When things return to a more normal state of affairs, they want to ensure they are well equipped to deliver their institution’s goals. Many worry that they will find the current state of their information on alumni and parents simply will not support the level of activity that will be required.

The reality of many constituents is that only a relatively small proportion of all the alumni are ever properly asked. Indeed, up to 85% of alumni may not have noticed they have been asked because the asking was by a letter that never arrived, or was never opened, or an email that ended in a spam filter. Historically, there was a general principle amongst education fundraisers that everyone should be asked at least once a year. However, this was ineffective for two reasons: Firstly, mail only works with a certain demographic, so mailing those beyond it was not far short of not asking at all. Secondly, so much of the information was out of date, even if people might have responded, they never received the letter. With the increasing cost of mail, it has become common to not even go this far and to hope that a general email, once or twice in a year, will suffice for all those who didn’t get phoned or seen. Of course, some have added giving days, and these help to spread the word. But given 80% of the donations to giving days come in via email prompts, and many institutions only get an open rate of less than 5%, it’s hardly reaching everyone.  

When running a phone campaign, it’s extremely common to find that 200 to 300 donors cannot be included because their phone number is out of date.Solving the inability to visit or call enough people caused by a lack of time and budget is not that easy. Without the right software, using funnel marketing to more effectively reach your constituents through your social media and mentoring programmes is likely to be far too time-intensive to be sustainable. Equally, without such software, you will probably not manage the massive workload needed to increase your alumni relations and communications to generate the higher open rate required so that your asks actually get noticed.

What is immediately available, however, is sorting out the many issues that exist in your data so that, at the very least, you are sending information to correct addresses, know who should be in your f2f programme and have a good chance of reaching the best people by phone. Do this, and you can at least be reaching more of the right people. When running a phone campaign, it’s extremely common to find that 200 to 300 donors cannot be included because their phone number is out of date. Let’s imagine that one researched these people. If one found 100 of them and contacted as many as possible, that might well produce another 25 gifts. That could easily be an additional ￡5,000 to ￡10,000 of income - a huge impact for a relatively small amount of work.

How can we find such people? The first thing to ask is ‘who are we looking for?’ There are many, many queries that you can run on your database to reveal people where the data quality is impeding your performance. Here are five to get your started:

One

Donors for whom you have poor contact details. Look for all those who have given in the last five years. How many have updated their addresses recently? Emails? Phones? How many have phone numbers that have poor dialling codes so your callers will probably not get through and mark them as bad numbers? How many have numbers in one country and an address in another? How many lack mobiles, which is by far the best chance you have of reaching them? Your open rate on email may be 10% if you are doing really well. Your contact rate calling a mobile a few times can be as high as 50%.

Two

What do you know about your donors? It would be great to know the career details and interests of every constituent and that can be an ambition to keep working on. However, the biggest impact will be in researching donors and ensuring that the next ask is at the right level, for the right thing. How annoying to raise the money to fund a concert hall with great effort and then find out your ￡250-a-year donor runs a hedge fund and spends every Saturday at the Royal Opera House.

Three

What do you know about people who read ‘lucrative’ subjects at university that lead to well-paid careers? Just as your donors need research because they have proved they will give, so do those people where there is evidence that they may well be able to give at good level. Propensity can be estimated from demographics, but the best evidence is giving history. Capacity, however, is very evidenced by economic markers and we can segment our data and look in the right place for people who, if they do give, are likely to do so with bigger donations.

Four

What do you know about multi-occupants? You will have many people at the same address. Are they partners, siblings, friends, parents and children? Resolving this will allow you to focus on not diminishing your impact by sending lots of untargeted requests to the same address, turning your mail and calls into spam.

Five

What has happened to your big donors? Take a look at all those who gave gifts over, say, ￡2,000 over the last ten years but have not given much in the last three. Understand what has happened to them. Has their career changed or their family life? Or did they not get enough stewardship? There are probably a few quick wins and, even if there are not, understanding what has taken place will help you improve retention with other donors at this level.

There are many, many other ways you can look at your constituents. We have at least 60 we run regularly for clients, looking for data inconsistencies, data absences and ageing data. On an individual basis they seem relatively insignificant. So what if 20 of your Hong Kong alumni have no phone number? Probably this will only have a modest impact. However, when it’s 20 in Hong Kong, 400 out of date addresses in the UK, 350 kids still using their parents address in their 30s, 250 with landlines not updated in five years, etc, etc the effect is profound.

Right now is the time to run surveys, paw through LinkedIn, connect to people on Facebook and update interests. Even more, it is the time to interrogate your data and find the 500 people who could make a big impact if you ensure that everything possible about them is up to date.

We are experts in data integrity and we are here to help. If you want some ideas on where to begin an exploration of your prospects, get in touch. There are some gems hiding waiting to help you achieve your goals.