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.