Where Do Online Donors Go Once You’ve Got Them?
As part of our recent benchmarking at Pareto Fundraising, we were asked to look at the subsequent behaviour of new onetime cash recruits. In other words, looking at donors that are recruited online, where do they go once on board? What about direct mail donors? Do they follow the same stream or veer off into other vehicles?
Here’s what we found
Direct mail recruits tended to keep doing what they did originally. Ninety per cent subsequently kept giving through the mail. No surprises there.
The same mostly rang true for telephone recruits, 85 per cent continuing to give via the phone and almost 15 per cent through the mail.
For online recruits, there are slightly more varying (and perhaps surprising) results. Around 75 per cent continued giving through the method of recruitment, around 15 per cent then gave through the mail, and the remainder through a combination of other channels.
What’s the upshot of this?
Whilst some of this may appear on face value a little startling, all is not what it seems at first. In other words, the reason a large chunk of online-recruited donors moved across to donate offline does not necessarily indicate too much about their giving behavior.
It tells us more about their giving requests and cultivation. Many of our charities have much more sophisticated and coherent offline fundraising streams. Therefore, if the numbers are small, we tend to include donors in the bucket that allows the most flexibility, largest volumes, and has the most frequent communications.
And often that’s the mail.
I’m not suggesting it isn’t noteworthy – it dispels somewhat the myth that online recruits won’t give offline, but contextually I think it says more about programs than behavior.
So what should you do?
Test. If you have, or are planning to recruit, a significant stream of donors from one particular channel (let’s take online for a moment), then you need to be looking at how best that group responds when treated in different ways.
As suggested above, it appears that the behavior of various groups is dictated by our treatment – in other words, what we send them and how we send it.
At the moment we’re undertaking a head-to-head split test looking at whether a group of online recruited donors responds better to an online solicitation (in this case a survey) than to an offline (mail) solicitation (again, a survey).
We want to find the optimum way to treat this group. Initially we want to determine, with a survey ask that includes a cash request, what generates the best overall net return. Down the track we’ll measure the optimum suite of communications for this constituency, which could actually be a mixture of offline and online pieces.
Regardless of method of recruitment, always look for the best way to move onetime cash donors across to monthly giving. Monthly giving for our clients grew 9% in 2009, at the height of the recession.
Always look deeper. The data shared above could easily be misunderstood. It certainly wasn’t suggesting that online donors are necessarily ripe to move offline.
Remember that the decisions we make have more impact than environmental factors outside our control.
By: Jonathon Grapsas
“This copywright article originally appeared in Canadian Fundraising & Philanthropy, www.canadianfundraiser.com, and is reproduced with permission.”