Hello, no-one!

 

I write a blog!

Goodness gracious, I’d completely forgotten. And all those avid followers I’d built up have doubtless deserted me. Reluctantly relocated to read some other rude boy’s rabid ramblings. Even though my alliteration is better.

So I shall write this to me, myself and I. So… me, what have I been up to?

Well, I was invited to a couple of fundraising focus groups last week. Not to take part, I was on the other side of the one-way glass, looking in. Munching through a lovely buffet.

The focus groups were for a very big charity, and the purpose was to discover which proposition (out of eight, all creatively dramatised) would be most likely to get the people in the group (all regular givers to the charity) to increase their monthly gift.

Anyway, I was very glad to be invited along. Not because I believe in the power of qual research of this kind: I don’t. I think focus groups are a load of drivel.

However, while I think those things are useless at giving you a useful answer to the question you ask, they’re nearly always great at giving you an insight you can do something with.

And I’m sure you agree with me that focus groups are generally rubbish, but in case you know someone who doesn’t agree, here are five reasons why I think they’re (usually) fatally flawed:

1. Last week we asked supporters which of eight propositions they preferred. EIGHT? I can barely hold three ideas in my head, let alone one for every finger of both hands.

2. Supporters don’t spend 10 minutes analyzing an envelope before deciding whether or not to open it. So why do we get focus groups to do exactly that?

3. Nor do real people decide whether or not to read your words on the basis of whether they consider your missive to be ‘on brand’ or not.

4. We all know that emotional reasons to respond outpull rational ones. So why do we ask people in focus groups to rationalise their response, artificially reducing the importance of the emotive element?

5. And besides, what people say and what they do are often wildly different. The number of times I’ve heard people in focus groups say “Oh, don’t send me those expensive mailings with gifts in and the like, they are so wasteful, I’d never respond to that. Just tell me you need the money, and I’ll give it.”

If it was as easy as that, we’d all be getting 100% response rates. Which we’re not. And a relevant gift wouldn’t ever uplift response. Which it can.

And the number of times I’ve heard someone say something like ‘Oh, the research has shown that people really like pictures of bananas’ and what they mean is ‘One person, in one focus group, vaguely mentioned they like the picture that had a banana in it. But that’s probably because they’re a greengrocer’. But that kind of Chinese whispers you get from focus group exponents becomes a new ‘rule’ for the client: we must show pictures of bananas.

But, as I said 200 words of rant ago, you do often get fantastic insights that would never have occurred to you otherwise. At these focus groups, for example, someone said that they had downgraded their gift when they’d lost their job. Not cancelled their direct debit, just reduced it.

They said if they’d got a pay-rise, then maybe they’d have increased it.

Which was a bit of a eureka moment for me, despite it being blindingly obvious.

Because something else we all know is that timing is much more important than the creative execution. As is personal relevance.

So with an upgrade mailing, maybe rather than worrying about the colour of the donation form, perhaps it’s more important to work out when your audience is most likely to be feeling flush. Maybe, if it’s the pay-rise time of year, we could reference that if they’ve been lucky enough to have a pay-rise, they might want to give £2 a month of that increase to the charity, in addition to their current gift?

Oh me, what am I saying? I’m a creative director: I should stick to what I know. The vital importance of the colour of the donation form!

Why babies try harder than you

Babies push themselves to the limit.

Take mine, for example (not literally – I’ve grown moderately fond of her).

At five months old, she can’t crawl, but she wants to. Tries like her life depends on it, grunting and straining as she tries to persuade her knees to propel her forward (even though that’s physically impossible, since her fat belly means her arms and legs are off the ground).

She puts the same effort into walking, though that’s even further off. Give her a book on astrophysics and as long as there are a few pictures, she’ll happy gurgle away and try to turn the pages as she studies it with dribbly intent.

And at bedtime, even though she’s tired and yawning and rubbing her eyes, she doesn’t want to go to sleep. She wants to squeeze a few more drops of life out of the day, see something new, learn something new, do something new.

So what happens to all that get up and go? How come humans start off so driven, so determined, so keen to push the boundaries of what’s possible... and grow out of it as they grow up?

For instance, we’re looking for a graduate or junior copywriter at the moment. A great opportunity for someone to learn the magic of fundraising copywriting. To discover the magical art of persuading an audience to donate to a charity just because they read what you wrote.

Yet some of the prospective candidates have so little drive, they couldn’t even be bothered to check the spelling, punctuation or grammar on their CVs or covering letters. Pretty bad on any CV you'd think, but particularly so for someone who's applying to be a copywriter.

One would-be wordsmith even spelt her own name wrong (at least, she spelt it two different ways on the same document).

On the other hand, we’ve also had one candidate who speaks seven different languages. So maybe there is hope. Maybe there are still a few souls who’ve kept the energy and ambition they had as babies.

Of course, one of the reasons we lose the drive we had as babies may be the fact that we go on to have babies of our own. Take mine, for example (again, not literally).

Before we had Daisy Boo – the easiest, sweetest, most straightforward baby to look after you could wish for – I had the drive to write two books in a year, while doing a pretty demanding job. Now I’m so knackered from a day of entertaining her that I don’t even have the energy to finish this sen

How to Guarantee a 100% Response Rate

Here’s a story I’ve nicked.

Hey, I’m hardly the first blogger to steal someone else’s material. At least I’m admitting to it.

It was told to me by a senior client the other day.

He was talking about the nature of good deeds: of ‘doing charity’, if you like. And what fundraisers all talk about as the reasons people donate or do other good deeds.

And he compared those reasons we give with what would happen if you were in this situation:

You’re walking through the park.

The sun is out, the sky is blue. There’s not a cloud to spoil the view. It’s peaceful, there’s no-one else around, just the sound of the ducks and – what’s that?

A child, crying out in distress.

Then you see them: they’ve fallen in the pond. They’re drowning.

What do you do?

I’ll take a wild guess: you jump in to save them. Which, in charitable terms, is ‘a good deed’.

But what went through your mind first?

Did you ask yourself ‘Can I afford to do this? After all, this is going to cost me a very expensive pair of shoes, can I afford to act?’

No, you didn’t.

Did you ask yourself, ‘Have I got the time to do this? I was on my way to a rather important meeting.’

No, you didn’t.

Did you think, ‘Here’s a chance to meet my need for self-actualisation.’

No, you didn’t.

Perhaps you thought, ‘This is going to be a great story to share with people, so they can see what a good person I am.’

No, you didn’t.

Did you think, ‘I bet the child will be really grateful. Their parents too. I’ll probably get a lovely “thank you”.’

No, not that either.

The truth is, in that situation you don’t think anything. You just act. Because you can’t not act.

The way it was expressed to me was ‘You don’t save the child from drowning because it makes your day, you do it because it makes your day possible. Because it would be impossible for you to walk on past.’

You do it because you have to. Because a child’s life is at stake. Because every fibre of your being propels you into immediate, life-saving action.

There’s something interesting there, don’t you think?

A child’s life is at stake, so you act – without needing any persuasion whatsoever. It’s a 100% response rate.

Yet there are lots of children’s charities, all talking about saving children’s lives, none of which (I’m fairly sure) get anything like a 100% response rate.

But if you could find a way to tap into that innate human instinct to save and protect…

…to find a way to make the situation feel as real as it is when you’re walking through the park and you see a child has fallen in the pond…

…well, then we wouldn’t need all that clever fundraising marketing malarkey.

And we’d all be getting 100% response rates.

Bookish

I like to spend my Sundays base jumping, slack lining and extreme ironing.

I mean, I’ve never done any of those, but I’m sure that’s how I’d like to spend my Sundays. I just haven’t had much chance, since for the past year I’ve spent every Sunday writing a book (that’s one book in total, not one book per Sunday).

You ever written a book? They say everyone’s got one in them. Although for many books, ‘in them’ is where they should have stayed.

Not mine though. It’s definitely better out than in. Because it means I can pass on more than 15 years of copywriting experience for less than fifteen quid. I know, less than a pound a year – that is extraordinary value. A form of charity in itself, really.

Five things that occurred to me while toiling over it:

1. Writing a book about writing means your writing has to be pretty well written. Which makes you agonise over every single word. Which is not an easy way to string together 60,000 of them. (And I still managed to get a couple of Greek words wrong.)

2. Copywriting is such a niche subject, it’ll never sell bucket loads of copies. So divide the modest royalties by the enormous number of hours it took to write / edit / proof and the hourly rate would be considerably less than if I’d just spent my weekends strawberry picking.

3. Doing a job where you spend many long days sat at a keyboard writing does not make you keen to spend your weekends sat at a keyboard writing.

4. I am an alarmingly avid admirer of alliteration.

5. The minute the book goes to print you think of five really good things you should have included but didn’t.

Anyway, the book, wittily called Copy. Righter. has a fair few references to fundraising in it and includes several full examples of copy I wrote for charities (who kindly let me reproduce the work) which I then pick apart.

There are chapters about brands, media, concepts and the psychology of persuasion, as well as riveting pieces on what we can learn from Aristotle, a fibbing gorilla and Deal or no Deal.

All in all, it makes for a fascinating read. I should know – between first draft and publication I had to read it about eight times.

Treat yourself to a copy here or have a look at the book’s examples online here. Five star reviews on Amazon are very, very welcome. Thank you.

Pro Creation: recreating creating

There’s a good chance you’ve been on the receiving end of a creative presentation. Where someone shows you the ideas they’ve come up with.

Oh, it’s exciting. Someone with a large collection of felt-tips has spent the past few weeks beavering away in secret, tongue stuck out the side of their mouth as they furiously scribble down the genius in their head.

Then they’re in the spray booth, mounting all the concepts onto board to make them look dead posh and proper.

They turn up at your office with the concepts in a giant black portfolio bag that’s annoyed everyone on the Tube, but they refuse to show you what’s inside until they’ve spent at least half an hour building it up to a fevered crescendo.

Then, when you can bear it no longer – ta da! – they lift out the first board (with its back to you) and turn it round with a dramatic flourish.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how creative types present their ideas.

I should know, I’ve been one of those people for many years. I was even thinking of buying my own dry ice machine, to make the ‘reveal’ even more theatrical.

But there’s a problem.

It might make for an entertaining 90 minutes, but it’s not necessarily the best way to develop concepts.

So at Tangible, we’ve developed an alternative method which our clients can choose if they wish. We call it Pro Creation.

More choice, more input, more polish

It’s a really simple idea. Instead of working up three ideas fully and presenting them as a big surprise to our client, we show four ideas at an earlier stage, with a description of how each could develop.

That way, the client gets to see more ideas, and can give us their input. They choose the two concepts they want to see developed, and we go away and work those up fully and in accordance with their input, before re-presenting them.

For example

Say we’re creating a mini campaign ­– email, mailing and microsite.

We’d show four ‘adcepts’ with a lead headline and image, plus a written rationale for each and a description of how the idea would track through each element.

We’d discuss them with the client, who’d give us their input to help shape the one or two concepts they chose to see fully developed.

It’s a simple little innovation. And it costs no more than the traditional way of creating concepts.

But it means we spend less time working on ideas that aren’t right, and more on really polishing the strongest concepts to create the most effective, exciting work.

Several of our charity clients are using Pro Creation with us and they already prefer it to the old-fashioned method.

Still might get that dry ice machine, mind.

The whole is less than the sum of its parts

I bought a nice bottle of red a couple of months ago.

First time that had ever happened. First time I’d ever bought a bottle of wine from a shop and been delighted with my purchase.

In fact after many years of failure, I was starting to lose faith in my patented Wine Selector System (A x B - C = How Good The Wine Is, where A is the price, B is how funky the label is and C is minus 20% if it’s a screwtop).

But then, as I say, success.

I remember the wine well: a Grenache Shiraz by Rosemount (I had given it bonus points, D, because of the way the bottle became square at the base).

And then, by jingo, it happened again.

A week later (I’m not an alcoholic) I went and bought a different bottle of wine. And that was delicious too! A few days later (hey, it was for friends, not me) I bought a third bottle. Different again, delectable again!

I’d cracked it. Somehow, I’d discovered the skills of an expert sommelier, able to divine a top tipple better than Simon Cowell can sniff out bland boy bands.

It was fantastic, this sudden ability to discern fine wine from cheap plonk.

But at the weekend, after yet another success, the truth dawned on me.

I haven’t gained the ability to glance at a supermarket shelf and tell good bottle from bad at all. My abilities haven’t changed – my palate has.

All of a sudden, I simply like wine. All of it. Whether it’s Chateauneuf Du Pape or Blue Nun. Communion wine, Le Piat D’or, Lambrusco – I’ll gargle it all and declare I can taste a subtle hint of British strawberries, a whiff of fresh peat and just a soupcon of shoe leather.

I’d assumed I was making better choices, but in truth, my gob’s just got less fussy.

Now, with the barest hint of a contrived link, I’ve been thinking about something else people sometimes make a poor assumption about. Integrated campaigns.

The poor assumption being that it’s always better to integrate different communications.

But... what’s the point of an integrated campaign?

I would suggest that the reason to integrate different media communications is so the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. So that, for instance, someone sees your TV ad and your press ad and your email and then gets your mailpack – and as a result of getting your message four times, responds.

Which sounds both logical and wonderful. And if that’s your audience’s experience, then you’ve definitely got a campaign. And it should certainly be integrated.

But… what if that’s not their experience?

What if 80% of the people getting your mailing haven’t seen the email? And 95% have never – and will never – see your TV ad? Is it still a campaign? Should those three different communications still be ‘integrated’?

Personally, I don’t think so. At least, not automatically, which seems to be the assumption nowadays.

I think charities sometimes fall into the trap of thinking what they’re doing is a campaign, when actually it’s just a bunch of media that happen to be running at the same time. If you haven’t got the spend of NSPCC launching ‘Full Stop’ then the chances are most of your audience won’t see a campaign. Most will just see one medium.

And if they’re just seeing your communication in one medium, then I think that medium should play to its strengths. Some of which you might have had to forego if you were making everything integrated – which I’ve seen happen lots of times. You have a great idea that works for direct mail, but because it only works in that medium, you can’t use it, because “It wouldn’t be integrated with the poster campaign”. The poster campaign that approximately 0.001% of your mailing audience will see. 

So I’d never automatically assume integration is good.

If the figures suggest most of your audience won’t see more than one or two ‘impressions’ then it may not be worth bothering with. Because you’ll do something which looks integrated to you, when you’ve got the work spread out on the board room table, but which won’t be seen like that by the audience. 

Yet because your ‘integrated campaign’ has forced all the different media to look and sound alike, ignoring their individual strengths, each will perform individually worse than they would have done if they’d been able to go their own way (within the confines of the overall proposition and your brand).

Which leaves a nasty taste in the mouth. Unlike, say, my wine choices.

Right, I’ve got a large glass of Babycham with my name on it.

Sunday's child

I’m surprised to learn that Myleene Klass doesn’t follow my blog.

Or – more likely – she’s an avid fan, but just disagreed with my notion that ‘Hero’ would be a good name to give a boy, but not a girl.

Because that’s what she’s gone and done.

Our beautiful little girl (the much more sensibly named Daisy Boo) was born at 5 to midnight, Sunday 27th. Just in time for the census, as people keep telling me.

Both sets of grandparents are of course delighted.

My mum: ‘I told your auntie Floss in Australia that you’ve called her Daisy Boo, because making up names is all the rage over there. But even she hadn’t heard that one before.’

Caroline’s mum, visiting and giving us a lovely bouquet of flowers: ‘You can keep the vase too.’

Caroline’s dad: ‘It’s an old Branston Pickle jar.’

Anyway, on the Friday night before, Caroline was three days overdue. So I went to get a curry. Ok, it may be an old wives’ tale that a curry can help bring on labour, but hey, any excuse not to cook.

The man behind the counter asked me if I’d ever been there before.

‘You ask me that every single time’, I replied, a bit peeved. ‘Most recently, two weeks ago’.

Clearly I don’t make much of an impression.

Anyway, he asked me what I did for a living. I said I do a lot of work for charity but I don’t like to talk about it.

And he told me about his own charity work. After the Pakistan floods, he and his staff worked extra shifts for nothing, and donated the profits to the appeal. He also asked every customer if he could add £1 to their bill and donate that to the appeal too.

He was thinking about doing the same for people affected by the Japanese tsunami (look at me, I’ve worked in fundraising so long I know better than to use the word ‘victim’).

Anyway, I was very impressed. I work for some amazing charities who do fantastic work. But the stuff I do is really time-consuming. Involves dozens of people. Gazillions of ‘sign-offs’. And takes months to complete.

But my local curry shop owner hadn’t bothered with any of that.

He didn’t need a PowerPoint presentation. Or a social media strategy. Or 17 rounds of amends.

He just got on with it. A spoonful of compassion. A bucketful of action.

He reminded me how simple it can be.

And how easy it can be too – to get good people to support a good cause, if you don’t let your own briefings and bureaucracy and bullshit get in the way.

Or maybe not. Maybe I’m just tired and emotional at the birth of my first child.

I mean, look at little Daisy Boo. She’s gorgeous!

What's in a name?

I’ve been blogging neglectful recently.

Partly because I’m frantically trying get two books finished and ready for publishing before I become a dad in about eight weeks. (Getting permission from some clients to reproduce copy I BLOODY WROTE FOR THEM is proving particularly troublesome.)

But mainly because all my brainpower (what there is of it) has been going into the gargantuan task of Finding The Perfect Baby Name.

My first choice, if we have a boy, was Thor.

But that suggestion was less welcome than Richard Hammond at a Mexican restaurant.

In fact, according to my girlfriend, all my preferred choices sound like ‘something you’d call a dog’.

It’s tricky, Finding The Perfect Baby Name. You don’t want anything too esoteric (apparently). Because you don’t want your child being stared at by disbelieving faces all their life. “Your name’s… Crankshaft?”

Nor do you want a name that they have to spell out all the time. R Fiennes must have had a fine old time growing up. “Err, yeah, it’s it’s pronounced ‘Rafe’. But it’s spelled… Ralph.”

If it’s a girl, we did like ‘Sydney’. But if you hear ‘Sydney Atkinson’ is on their way, are you expecting a boy or a girl to show up?

And you don’t want to go the other way and pick something too humdrum. In fact, my girlfriend made it very clear we didn’t want a name as unremittingly-dull as ‘Ian’, for instance. When she was talking to my parents.

Plus there are all the perfectly-decent names you might like, before someone says “Oh no, you can’t call it Charlotte. I knew a Charlotte. She was a bitch.”

We’ve even had conversations along the lines of “Yes, but what if our child isn’t cool enough to be an ‘Ethan’?”

I wonder if charities have the same trouble finding the right name.

The Red Cross is a good name; has been since 1870. But it can’t be ideal that they have to be known as The Red Crescent in some countries. Especially as, despite them not being political or religious in any way, I once saw a BBC newsreader refer to “The Red Crescent, the Muslim arm of The Red Cross”. Which would have horrified them.

And what if you’re a new charity? Have all the good names gone?

After all, when John Grooms and The Shaftesbury Society merged a few years ago, they decided to call themselves Livability. It’s not even a word. Sounds more like a bad tag-line for a vitamin ad campaign. ‘Now with added Livability’.

But then again, Help for Heroes is a fairly new kid on the charity block – and they’ve got a fabulous name. Simple, clear and with a bit of emotion to it. And ‘Heroes’ is a great word to own.

Hey, Hero, there’s a possible name for a child. Not for a girl obviously.

That would be silly.

The Future's Bright. The Future's Black And White.

My girlfriend got me a Kindle for Christmas. Although I’m not sure she knows what it’s for, since she also bought me a stack of paperbacks.

But the Kindle is great – as everyone everywhere has already pointed out, it’s not like reading on a traditional, backlit screen. But it’s not like reading a book either. In some ways, it’s nicer.

You don’t have to hold it open against a protesting, perfect-bound spine. You don’t need to remember your page number or fold over a corner (in fact I believe they recommend not folding the corner of your Kindle over). And you can increase the typesize at the touch of a button.

But the reasons I wanted a Kindle were benefits they don’t even advertise.

After all, the TV ad for the Kindle is of a girl reading hers on some exotic, sun-kissed beach. I’m about to become a dad for the first time – it’ll be years before I see another exotic beach.

No, I wanted a Kindle because of an utterly self-centred benefit that occurred to me:

I’ll never have to lend anyone a book ever again!

Actually I don’t mind lending people books. I’d just like them back. Which often doesn’t happen.

I must have lost dozens of books that way. And you can either go through the social embarrassment of every so often wimpily saying, “So… how are you getting on with that book I lent you… eight years ago?” Or you can just not mention it at all, and just think of that person as A GODDAMN THIEF WHO STOLE YOUR PROPERTY.

Anyway. There was a second, related benefit I wanted a Kindle for. Not to read novels on (again, as they do in the ads). But instead, to store all of my reference books on. All my non-fiction books on fundraising, advertising, marketing, creativity, writing, design etc etc. It struck me that having all that reference material brought together on something weighing less than a paperback would be A Good Thing.

While I’m doing Amazon’s job for them, there are three more handy benefits they don’t shout about.

1. You can lend books with it. You can send your electronic copy from your Kindle to someone else’s, for 14 days. Then it comes back to you, without you ever having to drop unsubtle hints about getting it back.

2. You can email documents to your Kindle to read them. Really handy when you don’t want to be fighting with six different confidential printouts on a train.

3. You can surf the internet on it. Ok, it’s not in colour, but it’s still handy – yet it doesn’t feature in Amazon’s ads, and it’s accessed from a folder called ‘Experimental’. But I lay in bed on Boxing Day following the Guardian Online’s coverage of the fourth Ashes test from my Kindle and it was great. (It helped that we marmalised them, obviously.)

So. As I’ve clearly proved: modern advertising is rubbish. If charities conveyed the need and solution of their cause as weakly as those ads promote the Kindle, they’d never raise a penny.

And no wonder that when I log onto Amazon the homepage says, “Thank you for making Kindle number one.” They should be thanking me. I had to discover half the benefits for myself.

Less is more

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.