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.