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Online Donor Cultivation: The Quest for Metrics

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By Michael C. Gilbert, April 2005
 

The critical technology challenge facing most nonprofits these days is for them to find ways to leverage their communication strengths into online strategies. And in order to refine our online cultivation and stewardship practices, we need to further develop and understand our "intermediate metrics" and examine ways in which our offline practices and metrics might apply online.

I had the privilege of attending the Public Radio Development and Marketing Conference in Austin, Texas last year. I decided to take a look at some of the presentations on cultivation and stewardship, with an eye to their online implications. In this article, I'll explore the themes that caught my attention and try to offer some practical applications of those themes. These thoughts were previously published in a slightly different form in the newsletter of the Development Exchange (DEI).

Intermediate Metrics: What Are They? Why Are They Important?

I define "Intermediate Metrics" as those metrics that measure the steps that move a person from simply being a name in a nonprofit database to being a cultivated donor to that organization. All of us want to know what the factors are that will help us predict whether someone is likely to give, because that information will guide us in our communication with them. Intermediate metrics are, in essence, tools for assessing the progress we are making in cultivation. I'm very interested in these metrics and encourage nonprofits to look at these more closely.

Online fundraising is particularly well suited to tracking such metrics and therefore moving people along toward giving. This is because the cost of communication is so low and the level of interactivity so high, that we can easily track things that would otherwise be very expensive to discover.

For example, in my own work as the Publisher of Nonprofit Online News, I can suggest that the following intermediate metrics are all predictors of giving that can easily be applied to the online newsletters many nonprofit organizations:

• Do they receive an email version of the newsletter?
• Do they regularly click through to articles?
• Have they written to me personally? Did they get a personal response?
• Have they participated in surveys?
• Have they bought a publication?

 
These questions, and their corresponding metrics, suggest courses of action, which is an essential criterion for a good metric. We have looked for ways to increase the number of people who sign up for our email newsletter by giving such subscribers more power over how they get the news. We test articles, number of articles per issue, placement, and so forth, looking for ways to increase click-through. As we do these things, we discover other intermediate metrics, of course, and the cycle of learning continues. Continual testing and reviewing intermediate metrics is important.

The Giving Path: A Model To Build Upon

Being an outsider to public broadcasting, I was particularly interested in the presentation on The Giving Path. It's a model that public broadcasting already has defined to describe the steps a listener goes through on the way to becoming a contributor. It's an excellent place to start in our quest for intermediate cultivation metrics. The five steps are:

1. Become a regular listener.
2. Become aware of a station's need for their support.
3. Come to agree that the station's need is valid.
4. Accept responsibility for helping the station meet its needs.
5. Act by pledging or making a donation.

 
Notice how much more donor centric this list is than the measures in the Nonprofit Online News example. This is both a strength and a weakness. The strengths are that (1) these are probably far more meaningful predictors of giving and (2) they really do represent a path toward giving, rather than an unrelated collection of measurements. The weakness is that we have to keep working to find ways to make these steps measurable.

But The Giving Path is clearly an excellent place to start in our quest for intermediate cultivation metrics, as we bridge the gap between the things we can measure (as illustrated by the Nonprofit Online News example) and the things we want to measure because we know they are meaningful.

For example, let's say we were to use The Giving Path model here at Nonprofit Online News. Here are two tactics we would consider in bridging that gap:

• We can test whether our newsletter readers are aware of our need for their support and what they think of the validity of that need. Perhaps each issue of an online newsletter can have a "quiz of the week" that tests people's knowledge of our work, often with issues of support in mind. People who respond to the quizzes would be a metric and so would the answers themselves. I do think we would need to offer small incentives, but it's amazing how compelling such quizzes can be all on their own.
• In our email newsletters and on our websites, we could consider the use of informational sidebars and other online communication techniques to communicate the cost breakdown of a program. This information could often be in the form of a question, such as "Do you know how many miles we flew to bring you this report? Check out the answer." The corresponding click-throughs on such sidebars can be tracked.

 
There are probably far more seamless techniques that could be developed, by looking with a critical eye toward both the Giving Path and the things that can be measured online, and bridging the gap between them in order to produce meaningful intermediate metrics.

Treat All Donors Like Major Donors

I also think there is lots of potential in translating mainstream major donor cultivation and tracking techniques into online communication. Put simply, major donors are no different emotionally than smaller donors. Anything that you do to listen to and care for a major donor probably has a corresponding online opportunity that touches the same feelings in everyone.

Major donor cultivation is completely one on one oriented and focused on each donor as an individual. As such, its techniques -- face to face meetings, advice seeking, peer events, and so forth -- are typically very labor intensive, but worth it because of the high returns. However, I have been arguing for some years now that online fundraising, because of the reduced cost of communication, has the promise of allowing us to treat all our donors a lot more like major donors. Never completely, but certainly more like them than like small cash cows that only get touched when milked.

Probably the key to using many of the techniques of major donor fundraising with prospective smaller donors is to develop an efficient framework for answering large amounts of personal email from stakeholders. Since the cost of most such communication is labor, the efficiency of the email communication loop will determine the costs of managing those relationships. A number of donor database systems, including some online tools, have given this some thought, but the essential basis is in your use of the tools at your disposal, not the tool itself. You need to have a clear and complete history of communication for each donor and guidelines based upon intermediate metrics to decide each next move.

Respect for Donors: It's Important Online & Offline

I always enjoy hearing from donors themselves and there was at least one session of this nature at the Austin conference. There are many different stories that donors tell about their own path toward involvement and the experiences they had along the way that opened the next door for them. But the theme that has often interested me the most is the one of respect. Respect can be shown to a donor in hundreds of little ways in our online communication, for example:

• The speed and courtesy of a response by email.
• Developing a sense that an actual person is awaiting their replies to calls to action.
• Honest and transparent communication.
• A clear human and personal touch.

 
I would go so far as to say that it's possible to be transparent about the entire desire to demonstrate respect, to put that out there, and to find ways to measure and assess our progress in doing so. We live in a society where our commercial relationships are full of disrespect and inhuman, bureaucratic behaviors. When we experience a relationship that runs counter to this trend, in even the smallest way (like my local barrista knowing how my usual coffee is prepared) we become very loyal to that relationship. Nonprofits, who are doing work from the heart, have a history and culture of trust that is well suited to pursuing a dialog about this with donors.

Additional Observations & Short Takes From Presentations

In a presentation focused on print communication, Sheila Gerzoff and others reviewed the Three Ms: market, message, and medium. None of these are lost in the world of online communication. The media available online are different, of course, by their very nature. But the disciplines of understanding one's market and crafting one's message are as important as ever. Of course, the opportunities for developing a database backed understanding of our market is now much greater, as are the opportunities for doing frequent and almost microscopic testing of our various messages.

In Marketing on a Shoestring, I found myself wondering about the role of the Internet in saving nonprofits money. There is a very sensible risk aversion in radically moving our fundraising asks online until we know that we at least won't lose substantial amounts of money in doing so. We need to know that the returns will at least be similar if we begin to really push people into communicating with us through cheaper means. I recommend that every nonprofit do a cost analysis on what they might save in paper, postage and telemarketing costs by making greater use of email and the web for message delivery. That analysis will show what kind of money is on the table, independent of the prospect of increased donations from the more intimate communication loops available online.

A number of conference workshops dealt very specifically with online opportunities and specific techniques. Both DEI's website and the Interactive Media Association's Web Pledge Tools share lessons learned.

If you found this article interesting or helpful,
please consider making a donation to Nonprofit Online News.
It will probably feel good!