Sky's the limit

I missed the start of the new series of Mad Men.

Well, actually I caught up at the weekend, thanks to the magic of iPlayer. It was as well-written as ever, though I wasn't sure about Don Draper’s ad for London Fog raincoats (A woman flasher with the line ‘Limit your exposure’?)

But I had to watch it on a computer because my Sky+ box broke. I rang them to see if they could fix it, and had an... interesting customer experience.

Now, in fundraising we often think there’s a lot to learn about ‘Customer Relationship Management / Marketing’ from the commercial world.

Well, not from Sky.

In fundraising, CRM is called ‘stewardship’. And it just means that, once you’ve persuaded someone to support you in some way (whether that’s by making a gift, joining a campaign or giving their time), you look after them.

You listen to them. You respond to them. You turn a traditional model of a monologue into a conversation, by finding out what interests them, finding out how they want to be treated, and personalising your communications accordingly.

Sometimes it's just remembering that you don't have to ask them for money every single time you communicate with them.

By treating your audience as individuals, with a bit of respect and consideration, they reciprocate with greater loyalty, more donations and a legacy gift. In other words, you look after them and they look after you. And you maximise their lifetime value. 

And, while few charities would tell you they're completely satisfied with their stewardship programme, most are developing ways of giving their supporters a more authentic, personal experience. 

We're engaged in stewardship programmes with most of our charity clients, and there are some fantastic things you can do online and using dynamic content or digital print.

So, by contrast, Sky. 

Which has 10 million customers and so should have got the hang of how to ‘steward’ them.

My Sky+ box broke so I gave them a call. The guy on the other end said he would talk me through fixing it.

First, he told me to press the button marked ‘TV’ followed by the one marked ‘Sky’. In other words, he told me to turn on the TV and turn on the Sky box. I said ok, I’d done that.

He then asked me, without irony, apology or personality, if it was now working.

Brilliant. Clearly it’s impossible to underestimate the intelligence of your customers in the eyes of Sky.

We then spent a pained few minutes together, pressing buttons, waiting to see if anything happened, pressing more buttons, before he had to admit defeat.

Well, not quite. First he asked me if I wanted to upgrade to the sport and movie packages.

Amazing. Patronise me first. Fail to fix the problem second. Clearly the perfect environment to try and persuade me to spend more with you.

Then the final coup de grace. He told me the Sky box was out of warranty (I’d had it 18 months). So there’d be a charge of £65 to repair it.

£65 to repair a box I have to have in order to be able to use the service I’m paying them £25 a month for. Utter genius.

Unlike me. I’m a mad man.

Cos I paid up.

For goodness sake

About 10 years ago, the second agency* I nearly worked for was a small independent in Bristol.

They were founded by a copywriter and art director team. The interesting thing was, the copywriter was colour-blind and the art director was dyslexic.

So they really did rely on each other. The perfect complementary team. They offered me a job but I declined – the fact that the guy interviewing me smoked throughout put me off.

But I always wished I’d had chance to see the two of them in action – and nowhere since have I found a dyslexic art director / colour-blind copywriter team (though I’ve seen it the other way around – copywriters who can’t distinguish between “its” and “it’s” and art directors with all the colour sense of a footballer’s decorator).

Anyway. At the agency I chose over theirs, I worked with a talented, very funny art director whose motto was, “I like it... cos it’s done.”

I’m a big fan of maxims, slogans, aphorisms, mottos and motivational quotes.

You remember those Athena posters from the 80s? The ones with a picture of a mountaineer smiling with perfect American teeth and the line, “If your ship doesn’t come in, swim to it”. There’s one at my gym in fact. A poster of a woman doing a pole vault I think.

The line is, “You don’t ask for respect, you earn it”.

Awesome. I’d paper my whole house with such wise and pretty posters if I could.

And I use these great pearls of wisdom all the time. “It’s easier to destroy than create,” for example, is the one I use whenever someone wants to amend my concepts.

“If you feel in complete control, you’re not going fast enough,” is the line I use whenever people complain about my driving.

And I’m always humming, “A mars a day helps you work, rest and play” at 11:30 when the sandwich lady arrives, dishing out chocolate bars with more relish than the Child Catcher. 

But as I say, the art director I worked with, his favourite line was, “I like it cos it’s done.”

In other words, if something we’d done was good enough... then it was good enough. We could stop and move on to the next thing.

The next thing usually being a game of table football.

I mention it because it seems like he must be doing half the charity communications out there right now. So many of them seem to have been created with a “I like it cos it’s done” attitude.

I got a mailing from UNICEF the other day that was a prime example: extremely bland, utterly formulaic. My shopping lists are better written. My timesheets are more creative. And if an agency can’t create compelling work for a cause as powerful as UNICEF’s then they should be delivering the mail rather than creating it.

That art director’s favourite saying must have really stuck with me. Because the contrary line I sometimes use when looking at a piece of creative we’re doing at the agency is, “Good is a good start.”

And yes, of course people roll their eyes and shake their heads like I’m a cliche-spouting cheese-ball. They’re absolutely right, of course. I am. But I don’t mind at all, as long as it means better work.

Talking of which, I should get back to polishing these pitches.

After all, as Henry Ford (may have) said of his success, “Yes, I am lucky. And I find the harder I work, the luckier I get.”




*You’re right, I don’t look old enough.

Well heeled

I mentioned last week that I’m walking everywhere, since my girlfriend’s icecapades ended with her crashing my car into a police car.

At the weekend, I was walking around town with her. And she was complaining about it.

Complaining about walking. Even though it’s her fault (or the policewoman’s fault – the insurers are yet to decide) we had no car.

Trying to give her a sense of perspective, I recanted the Oxfam case study I read last week about a woman who has to walk 22 miles every day, just to collect water.

“Yes,” replied my girlfriend, “but I bet she doesn’t have to do it in high heels.”

Anyway, as I also said last time, we’re in the middle of two pitches at the moment. So I’m working on them every waking moment. Rather than writing a longer, more interesting blog.

Maybe next time I should recount the experience of working on a pitch in an agency.

At the moment, I can describe it for you in two words.

Exciting.

Knackering.

Snow joke

I’m not very good at analogies.

Or metaphors. Or similes. Or, as I discovered over Christmas, yo-yos (I haven’t yet mastered ‘the sleeping dog’, which is the core move behind most tricks, according to a You Tube yo-yo master).

Anyway: analogies. I can’t do them. Unlike Jeremy Clarkson, whose writing is usually more laden with analogies than a... a... well, there you go.

But the incredible blanket of snow that stretches out before me at the moment feels, for all the world, like a metaphor for this fresh, new, unblemished year that’s stretching out before us. 

I really think it’s going to be an exciting year for anyone in fundraising – there’s just so much clever stuff going on right now, to reach audiences that are simultaneously growing both larger and more sophisticated.

And at Tangible, we’re in the middle of two big pitches, which is definitely very exciting.

There’s nothing like the adrenalin rush of a big pitch to keep you warm on a cold winter’s day. And working on not one but two... well, that’ll keep you warmer than the too-tight Christmas jumper your nan knitted you (sorry, another poor analogy).

Especially as, in this case, both pitches are for very switched-on clients who really know their stuff and have ambitious goals for 2010. So, fingers crossed.  

However. My fondness for snow came to an abrupt end this weekend.

 

When my girlfriend skidded on ice and crashed into an oncoming police car. You can probably find it on You Tube – lots of people with camera phones found the idea of smashing into a police car pretty entertaining.

I should say, no-one was hurt – just my no-claims discount. While the car is now languishing in the intensive care wing of the nearest auto repair garage.

But it does mean I’ve gone from walking through the snow as a novelty to walking through at as a necessity.

In theory, the footsteps are the same. Yet now, it doesn’t feel like I’m crunching through powdery white fairy dust in Narnia. It feels like I’m pulling my snow-laden boots through a scene from ‘Alive’. That film where they crash in the Andes and eat each other.

Anyway. Here’s to a happy new year in fundraising, with charities coming through the recession like the first snowdrops pushing through this long-lasting snow.

Oh look. Another poor analogy.

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.

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.