Cheltenham is posh. Certainly posher than Posh (who’s from Essex).
In fact, Cheltenham’s so posh, it’s surprising it’s taken upmarket kitchen nik nak seller Lakeland so long to set up shop here. But they just have – and the other day I had a browse in the forlorn hope of finding Christmas present inspiration.
I didn’t get any presents. But I did get myself a folding chopping board.
It’s made of some kind of tough plastic that has sides which can fold up. So when you’ve chopped your organic, specially-selected, ethically-sourced, sun-dried, on-the-vine apricots (it is Cheltenham), you can just pour them straight into your Le Creuset tagine.
No more holding the chopping board with one hand, sweeping across it with your £150 Tojiro chef’s knife in the other and watching half the apricots go in the tagine and half all over the Aga.
Genius. In fact, it’s one of those things that make you say, “Why has no-one thought of it before?”
I heard another of those “genius / why hasn’t it been done before” moments last week.
Liz, our Data Intelligence Manager (DIM seems a cruel acronym), was demonstrating a rather brilliant new Tangible innovation. In as unpromising an area as charity doordrop targeting.
Basically, it’s a clever way of getting more income and a higher response rate from your doordrop campaigns.
By... wait for it... asking people for less.
Ok, not always less, sometimes more. It depends. Let me explain.
As we all know, doordrop targeting is usually done on the basis of finding areas that have a high proportion of ‘lookalikes’. People whose profile – according to ACORN or Mosaic – is like that of your existing supporters.
So you find those areas, and give them a doordrop with a cash ask. Prompt values of £15, £20 and £25 for example.
What we’ve done is take it a stage further, with an innovation called RAISER.
I know, catchy. Stands for ‘Right Ask In, See Enhanced Returns’.
In essence, RAISER overlays the giving history of the charity’s existing supporters in that doordrop area. Which might tell you, for instance, that existing supporters in a certain area give an average of £11.
So with hindsight, it seems a bit silly to send them a doordrop where the minimum prompt value is higher than the average gift of existing supporters in that area.
Thanks to a heads up from RAISER, we can correct that.
For example, a recent campaign Tangible ran did have areas where the average donation was £11.
To recruit new supporters in that area, we tested the standard doordrop (with the £15, £20 and £25 prompts) against the RAISER-inspired version (with lower prompts of £10, £15 and £20).
The RAISER version got 50% better response. Giving us many more donors who we can now contact again and begin a tailored stewardship programme that maximises their engagement, loyalty and value.
And even though those donors were giving a lower average amount, the RAISER version got 20% more income too. What’s more, as well as doordrops, you can use the same technique on cold mailings and even on regionalised inserts.
So: 20% more income and 50% more supporters. Like I said: genius. And why hasn’t anyone done it before?
And there you have it. A folding chopping board and RAISER. No wonder Madonna sent her child to Cheltenham to learn.
Right, I’m off to check on the tagine. Spills are a bugger to scrape off the cast iron of an Aga Rangemaster.
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