donor insight

I gave a talk at the IOF Convention a couple of weeks ago. 

‘Using Supporter Insights Creatively’ was the topic.

And all the work in putting the show together made something apparent. Namely, that many of the best insights often come from a very different process to the one so many organisations pour time, effort, money and hope into.
 
Because we’re all obsessed with deriving insight from data analysis, research, focus groups and co-creation.

And of course, those routes can provide fantastic insights.

But. There. Is. Another. Way.

You won’t like it though.

Because it doesn’t sound very scientific. It doesn’t sound very safe. And it’s difficult to justify to the board as to why you think you should ‘put some spend’ behind it.

It’s called intuition. Or a hunch. Or a flash of inspiration.

You’re appalled aren’t you? What a heretical thing to say, that audience research and data analysis and co-creation aren’t the Holy Grails of audience insight.

Well, maybe they are.

But do you know that saying, ‘You can’t leap a chasm in two jumps’?

I think insights can be like that. If you just rely on insights you can prove before you try them, then maybe you’re not making a big enough leap forward.

Because you can get an insight into donor behaviour by looking back. But you might only get an insight into donor motivation (which can be much more powerful) by looking forward.

Here are three examples, from outside the fundraising sphere, of intuited insights:

1. New York copywriter Alec Brownstein was looking for a job. He wanted to get the attention of New York’s five most prominent creative directors.

What did he know about them? Not much. But he intuited that they were probably rather vain and self-important (unlike creative directors in Cheltenham, who are very modest).

In fact, Alec thought that New York creative directors were probably so vain that they regularly googled their own name.

So he placed an adwords banner which would appear above the search results when one of those five creative director’s names was googled. An ad saying ‘Googling your own name is fun. Hiring me is fun too’ with a web link.

Four of those creative directors interviewed him. Two of them offered him a job. He accepted one of them.

The ad had cost him $6.

2. James Dyson did research his first Dyson vacuum. He ran focus group after focus group to get people’s views. And they all told him the same thing, again and again:

We hate the clear drum. Get rid of it. No-one wants to see the dust and fluff they’ve picked up.

But James disagreed. In his gut, he felt that people would like seeing just how powerful and effective their Dyson vacuum was. So he kept faith with the clear drum and launched it like that. And became phenomenally, market-leadingly successful.

3. Finally, an example from the men’s toilets. The men’s toilets at Schipol airport in Holland.

Where apparently, poor aim at the urinals was a problem.

So: an insight into how to get men to aim better was needed. 

But they had no useful data to analyse. It would be difficult to get people to take part in a survey or focus group. And you couldn’t exactly stand in the toilets with a clipboard, observing men’s behaviour. 

They had to come up with an intuitive, flash-of-inspiration insight into the way men’s minds work.

So they did.

Which led them to engrave the image of a fly on the urinal bowl.

And men, being men, aimed for the fly. And ‘Poor Aim Syndrome’ went down by 80%.

Resulting in less cleaning, which meant less cost, which meant more profit.

And nicer toilets.

So, insight: it’s really important and it can make a massive difference.

But sometimes we don’t need to be researchers or analysts to get the best insights.

We just need to be experts in the human condition.

Psychologists, sociologists and – above all – people brave enough to, occasionally, try something without needing a giant research paper full of charts to back it up.

Not only can it lead to bigger leaps, it’s usually quicker and cheaper too.