A cut above

As you can see from my picture, I don’t wear funky glasses. Or black polo necks. I don’t even have a pony tail.

What a rubbish creative director I must be, you’re thinking. 

But, not having a pony tail does have its advantages: it means I get hair cuts. Which in turn means I hear stories like the one my hairdresser told me on Saturday.

As I sat there sipping a cappuccino full of my own hair, she told me how she'd been walking through one of Cheltenham’s two shopping arcades (we’re so spoilt) when a bloke thrust a large bottle of dirty brown water in her face.

“Would you drink this?” he asked her.

“No, I wouldn’t!” she replied.

“Ah, let me talk to you...” he continued.

He was a face-to-facer from Christian Aid.

He told her about people in the developing world who have no choice but to drink dirty water, teeming with cholera bacteria.

And he signed her up for £8 a month.

Pretty impressive, huh? I certainly thought so.

It’s impressive that Christian Aid are bringing the problem and the need for what they do, to life in such a simple and dramatic way.

And it’s pretty impressive of Helen (my 25 year-old hairdresser) to give £8 a month.

Plus, it also made me realise that some of the standing orders I have for charities are for less than £8 a month, and I really ought to increase them. So her charity has inspired further charity, as is often the way.

So, it really is the season of goodwill to all men and hairdressers.

It got me thinking in another way too: how Helen’s story is also the embodiment of a fundraising fairytale. One many of us have heard, but worth re-telling at Christmas.

It goes something like this:

Once upon a time, a long time ago, charities recruited new donors using DRTV, press ads with coupons, mailings, inserts and doordrops.

But then one day, someone discovered something new. 'Face to face.'

You stopped someone in the street and had a conversation with them. It had two benefits: firstly, it gave you the chance to tell someone much more of the story – the reason to donate – than you could in a 90 second TV ad. And secondly, it was much harder to say ‘no’ to a person than the TV.

And lo! a new form of fundraising was born.
 
Although some of the face-to-face people who stopped you were a bit full-on. These big bad wolves were known as ‘chuggers’ – charity muggers.

But apart from them, everything seemed lovely. Deep and crisp and even.

Except... three things started to happen.

Firstly, the chuggers gave the whole industry a bad name – annoying, rather than engaging their audience.

Secondly, many of the people who’d been recruited face-to-face started to lapse, much sooner than donors recruited through other media did.

And thirdly, many of the people who’d been recruited face-to-face turned out to be completely unresponsive to any further contact, utterly ignoring appeals to give an extra cash gift or increase their monthly donation.

Presumably because many of them were 25 year-old hairdressers. 

An audience a charity wouldn’t normally target in a gazillion years.

But there is a 'happily ever after' to the fairytale.

Towards the end of the Noughties, as we approached the... what’s the next decade called, the Tensies? – charities and their agencies began working together on integrated, insightful acquisition campaigns once more.

Like the one Tangible did this year for a charity which brought them 54,000 new donors. 54,000 donors who were all recruited through direct marketing, and so who are much more likely to continue to respond to direct marketing, massively increasing their lifetime value.

So, Merry Christmas one and all.

And here’s hoping Santa brings me one of those fabulous black polo necks.

All at sea

More gold than a Dubai hotel's bathroom. More gold than Mr T's jewellery box. More gold than Clifford Price's dentist.

That’s what a campaign for the RNLI achieved at the DMA Awards last week. 9 golds and the grand prix.

I don’t know if that’s a record, but it can’t be far off. (One of the few it didn’t win was ‘Best Launch’, as someone wittily pointed out.)

Anyway, if you get a chance to look at the work, you should. It’s very good. Very clever, very creative and a worthy award winner. Because awards should reward new ideas, innovative approaches and the like. 

And in the case of the DMAs, they always consider the results to be very important too. So, the results of this campaign for the RNLI? 8,000 texts for one – and ok, 8,000 is not a particularly impressive number, but also a million of the target audience viewed videos online.

Now a million is an impressive number. 1,000,000 of their target audience.

Their target audience being – wait for it – ‘15 to 20 year olds’.

Now I don’t want to rock the boat (pardon the pun) but... why?

Why bother engaging 15 to 20 year olds with the work of a lifeboat charity?

Not to raise any money, certainly – not a single monetary reference is made in the results. It wasn’t the objective; the objective was to ‘engage’ them.

BUT WHY?

I don’t understand. Am I missing something?

Engaging them wasn’t in order to raise money from them... it wasn’t to get them to do a sponsored event... it wasn’t to get them to volunteer... it wasn’t to ask them to use their pester power on mum and dad... it wasn’t to encourage them to be safe at sea...

As far as I can tell, the aim was to engage them for engagement’s sake.

Of course, it may be that these 15 to 20 year olds stay engaged with the RNLI and do eventually become supporters of the charity. In 30 to 40 years’ time. (Although I don’t know if the RNLI can stay in touch with them – they viewed videos, after all, which doesn’t require any data capture.)

I know I’m sounding a bit snippy, and I don’t mean to be, because it is a really imaginative and captivating piece of work, and I can see why DMA judges went for it in a big way.

I just don’t know what the point of it was. 

Instead, I can only imagine what great things the agency would have achieved for the client if they'd put all that effort and enthusiasm into targeting people who might actually become donors.

Feeling testy

Harry Hill would put it well.
 

“I like your short, to-the-point one page letter. And I like your long, involving four page letter too. But which one’s better? There’s only one way to find out...

“FIGHT!”

One of the best things about direct response media is being able to pitch one approach against another, and see which works best.

Rather than just theorising about what might work better, we can test our theories – and get empirical evidence as to the way forward.

Having said that, I think testing can be a very dangerous thing.

Or at least, the way we interpret the results of a test can be – in the same way that a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.

I shall explain my heresy, but first, here are five of the dozens and dozens of tests I’ve been party to (and these are just in mailings, let alone other media):

1: involvement devices / incentives
a) Whether or not they increase response (yes, most of the time, especially for acquisition)

b) Whether that increase in response outweighs the extra cost – ie does it improve or worsen return on investment (improves it most of the time)

c) do they buy poorer quality donors, who have a poor lifetime value and often lapse (sometimes difficult to tell, but I certainly think the involvement / incentive should be relevant, rather than just arbitrary ‘labels or pens’, so you’re developing brand engagement, not just creating guilt-induced reciprocation).

2. reply envelopes
Testing a reply envelope with the return address printed on it versus a window reply envelope so you have to insert the donation form correctly to display the return address (the window reply envelope won)

3. donation forms
Testing an A5 donation form versus an A4 donation form (the A4 version won)

4. mailsort light
Testing a mailsort light teaser versus a mailsort light follow-up (the follow-up won)

5. need or solution
Testing need-led versus solution-led creative (need won).

All pretty straightforward, simple stuff. The problem, I think, is when we extrapolate the results of a test to create The Way Forward For Every Campaign For The Rest Of Time.

The easiest example of where I’ve seen this happen is to leave fundraising for a moment and look at financial services, another sector I’ve a fair bit of experience in.

And in financial services, so many mail packs to existing customers have blank outer envelopes. Because it’s from a company you’ve got some kind of financial product with, you see the logo and you’re likely to open it just in case it’s something about that product.

So the pack has a very high ‘open rate’.

What’s more, they’ve tested blank outer versus a message on the outer. And the blank outer got a better response.

So now all their packs have blank outers. Because testing has ‘proven’ that blank outers work better than outers with a message on.

Except of course, it hasn’t.

Testing has proven that, at that time in history, a blank outer was more successful than that particular message you had on the outer. It doesn’t mean a blank outer is better than any message. What if – just imagine – you had something genuinely good to say? Maybe a better line, with a stronger promise, would outperform a blank outer.

You still might get fewer people opening the outer than a blank one but those who do open it are already warm to the message inside. They’re already interested in the story, which you can continue in the pack, rather than (in the case of the blank outer), beginning.

So, when it comes to testing, we've got to be careful:

1. Things change over time, and what didn’t work yesterday might work today.
2. Messages can lose efficacy with uniform repetition – if we keep saying the same thing in the same way, it’ll become wallpaper and be ignored – even if it was the 'best' way of saying it.
3. We mustn't overreach what the results of the test are actually telling us.
 
If it was as easy as testing something, then using it that way forever, by now we'd all be telling the same story in the same way and every communication would look identical.

But of course, they don't. There's still plenty of art in what we do, to go with the science. That’s what makes it so blimmin’ interesting.

No jacket required

In a nod to being a bit recession-friendly, my invite to last week’s Cream Awards said ‘casual attire’.

I took them at their word. 

And, to a man, so did every other bloke there. We all turned up in what we’d been wearing at the office that day. A scruffy, crumpled sight we looked too.

Yet the word ‘casual’ apparently hadn’t registered with any of the women there. 

Their brains had just filtered that mean, ugly little word out.

So they turned up more glammed up than the women in the Boots ‘Here Come The Girls’ ads. Either they’d gone home first and spent a good deal of effort making themselves look fabulous, or they all worked at an agency in a Jennifer Aniston rom-com.

Whatever the reason, the difference between the two sexes was striking: it was like we’d dressed for two completely different events.

Clearly, we’d interpreted the same short paragraph of copy quite differently.

It reminded me that a few years ago, Tangible tested male versus female copy in a fundraising mail pack.

It followed research that suggested men and women responded to copy differently, and so crafting the copy to suit each might affect response. Women wanted more emotive, story-telling copy, it claimed, whereas men apparently favoured bullet points (perhaps because ‘bullet points’ sounds so macho).

In fact, the results weren’t statistically significant – but that may have been to do with the copy, rather than the premise behind it. Because it’s an interesting idea, that we should tailor our message – our conversations with our donors – a lot more than we currently do.

Most charities still only tailor their message on a purely transactional basis – how much someone gave, how recently, whether they give individual gifts or are direct debit regular givers. Which seems quite crude in this day and age. Surely we should be looking at more and more ways of making what we say more relevant and personal to each individual donor.

When I was a copywriter starting out in direct marketing, I was told, “just write to one person.” Nowadays, we need to write to lots of ‘one person’.

Gender may not be the answer – but at least it’s something we do often know about our audience. And men and women certainly do interpret language differently – as a hundred comedians (and comediennes) have often pointed out.

The sale signs currently springing up where I live in Cheltenham are another example. I see the word ‘sale’ and interpret it as spending money. To my girlfriend, the same word means ‘saving money’.

Although... maybe we’re both right. Because it turns out that men spend £350 million in the January sales on clothes they’ll never wear. Whereas women only fork out £230 million on sales clothes that stay unworn – a saving of £120 million.

Actually, I’ve got a jacket I bought in the sales last year (half price, bargain) that I’ve never worn.

Maybe I’ll follow the award-winning women’s lead and make an effort. 

I’ll wear it at the upcoming DMA awards.

Hats off to Pioneers

There aren’t enough new ideas in fundraising. Or marketing.

Which is surprising, since there is an awful lot of industry going on, and lots of very bright people involved in that industry.

I have a particular interest in new ideas of course, especially in fundraising, since I’m the creative director of a fundraising-specialist agency. (Sorry about the repetition of ‘fundraising’ – I’m trying to improve my search optimisation.)

And through personal experience, I might humbly suggest that actually, there are loads of new ideas. It’s just that the vast majority of them never see the light of day.

It was Howard Aiken who said, “Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats.”

And I’m sure many of us will nod sagely to his aphorism: ideas are very delicate things, easily crushed by an unkind word or doubting mind. Nowadays, coming up with a new idea is much easier than protecting it and championing it resolutely enough, bloody-mindedly enough to see it through, and make the idea become a reality.

Which is why innocent’s Big Knit always makes me smile.

For one thing, it is a lovely idea. Lots of different styles of knitted hats, on the top of little smoothie bottles. I’ve got several in my drawer that I’ve had for a couple of years (the hats, not the smoothies – as we know, that fresh fruit with nothing added would have fermented and exploded by now).

But what really impresses me is knowing how hard the idea must have been to make reality. Even at innocent.

Anywhere else, I think it would have been more than hard. It would have been nigh on impossible. There would have been just too many naysayers, telling you it wouldn’t work, it would be too labour intensive, it wouldn’t be hygienic, it would be too fiddly for supermarkets to bother with etc etc etc.

But somehow, they persevered. They did it. And it’s grown year after year.

It’s simple but inventive. It makes you smile when you see it. And it raises over £250,000 a year to help elderly people in the UK keep warm over winter.

Although, small point, in innocent’s book, ‘a book about innocent’, they say that when it started, they ‘would donate 50p to Age Concern’ for every hat-wearing smoothie sold. This year, on their website, they say ‘for every behatted smoothie sold, innocent and Sainsbury’s will give 35p’.

I’m not sure where the 15p has gone. Maybe wool's got more expensive.

Pitch Imperfect

Let me tell you about the worst pitch I’ve ever been part of.

It wasn’t for a fundraising client, it was for a commercial one. Why be coy: it was NatWest. Their insurance division (you’re right, my life is glamorous).

We spent ages on the creative. And we developed something so sharp, nothing would ever be the same again. The sector would be redefined forever.

We’d even managed to convey the benefits of insurance without saying ‘peace of mind’. Impressive, I’m sure you’ll agree.

Anyway, we were at the office ’til about one in the morning. And then back in at eight the next morning for a final rehearsal. Me and the art director who’d worked on the creative had a bit of a show prepared, to bring it to life and make it as lively and interesting as possible.

So, with too little sleep, too much coffee and the smell of spray mount clinging to our clothes, we went in to the pitch. I always think pitches are exciting; you’re competing against other agencies, you want to be the best, and it’s the biggest adrenaline rush you get from an office job.

In some ways, a pitch is like an exam.

And this pitch was no different. Except it didn’t seem to be us taking the exam, but the client.

Because all eight of the people we were pitching to spent the entire time taking a multiple choice written test. Ticking boxes, choosing numbers, marking things off in a complicated, gridded series of pages.

They were using score cards.

Have you seen these things? Someone decides – in advance – what they want to see, and writes that out in as complicated and pseudo-scientific, faux-logical way as possible. Then everyone in the pitch uses the same score card, to, presumably, write down the same things.

Instead of seeing what answers the agency has come up with, what insights and ideas they have, you simply note down if what they’re showing you matches what you decided you wanted to see before you entered the room.

But the worst thing was, they spent so much time writing, they barely looked up. They didn’t make eye contact, they didn’t laugh at my (very funny) jokes and they didn’t utter a single word the entire time. They barely saw the creative work.

We held it up for as long as possible, waiting for someone to throw it a glance, but those A2 boards get heavy after the first 20 minutes.

Very depressing. Insulting actually, to have put all that work in only to be completely ignored.

We didn’t win the pitch of course.

They went with a completely different kind of agency – one that was part of a printing company and which did terrible creative work, but printed that terrible work very cheaply. Apparently ‘cheapness’ scored more highly than ‘value’ on their exam.

Why am I recounting it now, in a blog that’s about fundraising?

Well, although the agency I’m at specialises in fundraising, we have some commercial clients too – it’s really useful to see some of the things they do, their understanding of brands and so on.

And some of their thinking crosses over into the fundraising sector.

But, so far, no charity pitch I’ve been involved with has used score cards. And I hope it stays that way. No pitch, no piece of creative work and no important decision should be based on what some tick boxes say about an event you were too busy recording to actually engage with.

It’s like those people who go on holiday and video the whole thing the entire time. They record their holiday instead of experiencing their holiday.

And when you’re on holiday, and you see people like that, how do you feel about them? Probably the same way as I do about those guys from NatWest.

Font of all knowledge

Here’s a head-scratcher for you.

When was the last time you read a printed magazine or newspaper or book where the body copy was in a sans-serif font?

No, I can’t think of when either. Because most use serif fonts. Because in printed, long copy, serif fonts are easier to read.

Which poses an even bigger head-scratcher.

Why have so many branding agencies given their charity clients only sans-serif typefaces to use in their long copy fundraising letters?

Are brand agencies filled with funky young things who only come up with designs that they like, rather than what’s appropriate for their client’s target audience?

Test after test proves that long copy is easier to read in a serif font – the serifs help you recognise the shape of a word more quickly and easily. And if something’s easier to read, it’s more likely to get read. Which tends to help response.

Plus, serif fonts are particularly suitable to charity audiences – people who actually read newspapers and books. People who grew up with serif fonts before Arial took over the world.

And serif fonts have more gravitas than most sans-serif fonts too. When your letter tells a powerful, evocative, heart-wrenching story, the font should help tell that story too. Rather than making your great letter look like a clinical business memo.

So: more easily read, more suitable to the audience and more suitable to the subject. That’s three advantages of a serif font in body copy.

We can thank the branding agencies for the last advantage. Now that they’ve made everyone else use a sans-serif one, use a serif typeface and you’ll stand out from the crowd.

Full Stop Ahead

To make the tedious experience of supermarket shopping even more so, Waitrose has a fundraising gimmick well past its sell-by date.

Do you know the one I mean? The little green buttons that look like the NSPCC Full Stop symbol?

The idea is, every time you shop you get a little green button with your receipt. Which you then place in one of three bins you pass on your way out, each bin named for a different local charity of the month.

At the end of the month they count the buttons, and divide £1,000 between the three charities proportionately to how many buttons they have, before starting all over again with three new charities.

Despite the cost of creating it, I thought it was a moderately good idea – it’s good for Waitrose, of course, to involve customers with the supermarket’s philanthropy, and everyone likes the idea of being able to choose where money goes.

But.

My agency is a hundred yards from a Waitrose, so I go there several times a week (I know, I’m living the dream).

Which means that I’ve been asked to do this little button task several hundred times. Which has become rather irksome. You queue to pay, then have to queue again to place your button in the appropriate bin.

What a curmudgeon I am, you might think. And you’re probably right.

But here’s the thing.

Waitrose posts the results of previous months’ donation-splits up on the wall near the bins. And you know what? It turns out that the whole button routine doesn’t make that much difference.

If you divided it equally, of course, each charity would get £333.33 a month. Whereas, with the whole labour-intensive button process, what actually happens is one charity might get £280, another £340 and another £380.

So one charity is getting £50 less than an equal share. Another is getting £50 more. Probably based on which bin is closest to the tills.

It’s a bit deflating to discover that the efforts of thousands of Waitrose customers – including me – adds up to so little. 

Suddenly I’m left feeling that they should just donate it equally between three charities each month, and instead put up posters that tell you a little more about each good cause, with the web address for each, rather than making me jump through this needless hoop of choosing a charity based on a couple of sentences about it, written on each bin.

I guess, like every year’s must-have Christmas toy, a new idea can become old and tired pretty quickly.

And when that happens but you keep persisting with it, you’re in danger of undoing all the good will you built up with the new idea in the first place.

Overall, I say well done to Waitrose – fundraising needs new ideas. But this one isn’t new any more, so please: let the end of the year be the end of your little Full Stops.

Don’t drive me to Lidl.

Social disease

A digital guy I know was showing me some really clever new stuff online the other day.

But then we got to talking about money – about making it.

He admitted that for charities, making money online remains incredibly difficult.

He agreed that online media were undoubtedly a great way to enrich a supporters’ experience, and so perhaps increase their lifetime value.

In fact, at the agency I work at we do quite a lot of work in this area, creating online opportunities for donors to develop a stronger relationship with the cause they’re supporting.

But we’ve a long heritage in fundraising. We know how it works, we know how to engage and motivate our audiences. And we’re ‘media neutral’, so we can recommend the media mix that’s going to work best.

But there are a lot of start-up digital agencies (with a vested interest in online) who are pushing digital as the main channel that charities should be putting their time and and money into.

And social media – how they love to bang on about that. I’ve just read another hyperbolic article from a digital agency saying ‘any company that doesn’t have a Twitter strategy will get left behind’.

Really? Two small points:

1: Here today...

ITV bought Friends Reunited for £175 million. Then sold it less than four years later.

For £25 million.

In other words, a one-way ticket on that particular bandwagon cost them £150,000,000.

Ok, that was a soft target. Everyone knows Friends Reunited is old news. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube – they’re the big successes. Aren’t they?

Well, for their founders, perhaps – Facebook’s co-founder is the youngest-ever self-made billionaire.

But the phenomenon he created actually loses money. Big buckets of it. Its electricity bill alone is estimated at around £600,000. A month.



Twitter loses millions too. Only rivers of cash from venture capitalists keep it flowing. Though for how long is anyone’s guess.

And YouTube is apparently going to lose about 300 million quid this year.

Now, I’m not a genius economist (actually, there don’t seem to be any genius economists right now). But I do know that no business can lose that kind of money forever. Either they’ll have to close one day, or they’ll have to drastically change their business model in order to make money.

And who knows what effect that will have. MySpace plastered itself with ads to become profitable – and has been shedding users at a frightening rate ever since.

2: The culture of free.

One thing all the users of these sites have in common is that they like getting it for free. More than that: they expect it to be free.

That’s why most Spotify users choose the free version rather than the (very reasonably priced) paid-for service. And why Spotify is yet another popular online service that loses money.

So what happens when you try and get that audience to pay for something? Or, in the case of a charity, ask them for a donation?

The answer is, it’s really hard.

Like I said, despite the huge audiences on those sites, the digital guy I spoke to didn’t know of a single example of where social media was proving a significant way of recruiting people who go on to become genuine, valuable donors.

But I’ve lots of examples of how that’s still being done – very, very successfully – using so-called ‘traditional’ media.

Sabre-tooth fundraising

(Or: A logical argument for being less logical.)


Everything we see goes from the optic nerve to a part of the brain called the amygdala before it goes anywhere else.

The amygdala deals with emotional responses. It’s one of the oldest parts of the human brain and developed thousands of years before the prefrontal cortex (which deals with rational thought).

Oh dear, here comes a sabre-tooth tiger…

Our brains work this way because, back in olden times, we often needed to make an immediate ‘fight or flight’ decision. Our brains had to decided whether or not to flood the body with adrenalin and endorphins in order to survive from whatever was trying to eat us.



Nowadays not much is trying to eat us. But our brains still work in the same way. Which means we process information emotionally first, and rationally second.

Powerful emotions

Not only do we process information emotionally and sub-consciously first, it can actually be more sophisticated and powerful than rational, conscious processing.

That’s because emotional thinking comes to a decision based on all of our past experiences – thousands upon thousands of moments that make up our life’s wisdom, expressed as a single, near-instant feeling.

Whereas rational thinking can only hold 5 - 9 different pieces of information at any one time.

It’s why, in an area that we’re fairly expert in, our gut instinct can be so powerful – and so often right.

So when, as professional fundraising marketing advertising brand charity experts, we’re considering a fundraising idea or piece of creative, we should trust our ‘gut feel’ more often.

In other words, to be good... takes guts.

Same old same old

I was re-re-re-reading George Smith’s book the other day. ‘Asking Properly: The Art of Creative Fundraising.’

Written in 1996, he spends a fair chunk of it decrying the shabby state of fundraising.

The unconvincing, hackneyed copy. The tired techniques. The insular thinking.

He even deplored the fact that he and other fundraising luminaries were being lauded as gurus. Because it meant their every musing was slavishly followed and infinitely repeated. Without anyone bothering to do any thinking of their own.

Mind you. That was then. Surely, all these years later, things have moved on considerably?

Ha.

In fact, when you read the book, it’s depressingly clear that all the stuff he considered old hat back in 1996 is still being trotted out today.

There’s just an awful lot more of it. And a lot of it is awful.

But. There are some bright beacons of hope. There’s some really wonderful, exciting, captivating stuff being done too. Stuff that the fundraising sector can be very proud of. Stuff that shows us the way to a brave, bold, brilliant future.

Perhaps together, you and I could look at today's fundraising and sort the fertile from the feckless.

The fab from the flab.

The feisty from the fusty.

It won’t, I promise, always be this alliterative.

But it will, I hope, always be a fecund experience for the both of us.