Personalized Pathways: Using Psychology to Map Key Donor Journeys

Lori Skibjak  0:04  

Good afternoon, and welcome to Personalized Pathways using psychology to map key donor journeys. Our presenter today is Cherian Koshy, and before we get started, just a quick note that the Read More

Lori Skibjak  0:04  

Good afternoon, and welcome to Personalized Pathways using psychology to map key donor journeys. Our presenter today is Cherian Koshy, and before we get started, just a quick note that the webcast is being recorded, so it’ll be sent out later this week, that’s usually a question. And speaking of questions, if you have any, if you could please put those into the Q and A section. We do have a lot that goes through the chat, and if you want your question answered that way, we know to look there for it, and sharing will be able to answer. All right, so cheering you are ready to go. Awesome.

Speaker 1  0:40  

Well, it’s great to virtually see all of you here. Feel free to jump in the chat if you’re able, and let us know where you’re calling in from and how much snow is on the ground, if that’s relevant for you. If you’re in a place where it isn’t very snowy, that’s great. Fantastic for you, as mentioned. If you do have questions throughout, please put those in the Q and A section, because the chat gets a little messy after lots of people are in there. Good to see you. Donna from Wichita, a couple of inches good to see. Andrea, I’m also in Texas today, so there’s no snow on the ground, but I’m headed back to Des Moines, where there is at least six inches of the ground, at least from what I hear, so fascinating. Vancouver only has a dusting. Okay, good. Well, lots of you from all over and it is fantastic to see so many of you here. We’ve got almost 500 in the room right now. We’re going to jump it into things, and remember that you’re going to get a recording of this deck. So the content here, so in addition to being able to review the content that we talk about, you’ll also be able to share this with others. So I want to jump in really quickly. And if you’ve seen the DonorPerfect conference session that I did on donor journeys, I started out by talking about ancient map makers. And every session that we do around donor journeys, I love to come back to this concept that in ancient times when they didn’t know what was out there, when they had not charted the course, they labeled it with a dragon, and they said, Here Be Dragons. And this was sort of a reminder of what we didn’t know, what we were unsure of at the time. And a lot of the work that we do in the nonprofit sector is that unknown, particularly when it comes to donor behavior, donor psychology. And so throughout the course of the session, we’re going to talk about some of the psychology that you might be familiar with that. Frankly, I’ve presented on number a number of times. So if you’re familiar with my my body of work, you’ve heard about some elements of donor psychology. We’re going to take that to a whole new level today, a whole new level with a very specific framework around donor journeys. When we get there, I’ll remind you that you can, obviously, you can take screenshots, and you can also remember where it is so that you can go back to it, because this is quite a lot of deep content around the psychology as well. If you are not registered for our next session next month, that will go into kind of even a deeper dive, if you will, or haven’t downloaded the material that goes along with this, I’d recommend that you do that as well from the DonorPerfect website. What I want to remind you of as we go through this is just like those map makers of old in fundraising, our greatest opportunity is constant curiosity, being curious about who our donors are, what drives them, what makes their decision, not just in the first instance, not just in grabbing their attention, but actually in holding that attention for the long term. I’m reminded of the great philosopher Jerry Seinfeld. And if you remember this episode of the car rental place where Jerry goes up to the counter and says, Hey, I’m here to pick up my car, you have my reservation? Says, unfortunately we’re out of cars. Wait, what? Well, I made a reservation. Yes, you made a reservation, but we ran out of cars. And Jerry says, your job is not just the taking of the Reser reservation, it is the holding of the reservations, making sure there’s a car there. And so what I would want you to remember as we navigate this space is that we don’t just want to grab donors, we actually want to hold them, to connect them to the work that we’re doing. And the best donors that we have inside of our databases, inside of our organizations, are the ones that are there for the long haul. It’s sort of the the the unicorn of donors is the one. Are the ones that are connected for the right reason, and stay with us for the right reason. We’re going to complicate that a little bit. But I hear from a lot of organizations that they just want more donors. They want more donors, and they lose track of this, this curiosity about who their donors are, and the more actually lends itself to having to kind of force yourself into acquiring and acquiring more donors, and then. Losing them. You’ve seen the analogy of the leaky bucket and whatnot that leads us into this idea of the problem that probably all of us are facing, that we’re trying to grapple with, that we’re trying to figure out how to navigate. And this is the idea that we essentially may treat all donors the same. Now you all are taking the time here to kind of deepen your knowledge and invest in professional development. So I don’t expect that you are unaware of the problem. But how do you think about resolving this problem? And my guess is that you’re not, you’re not doing the worst problems that I’ve seen, meaning you’re not sending, well, the worst problem is when nobody sends out anything with regard to gratitude or stewardship or anything like that to donors or that we send out sort of repeated blanket appeals to everyone. Where this gets more complicated is the assumption that we really understand what donors want from us, from our organization, what they want in in their part of contributing to what we do, and ultimately that results in creating sort of a one size fits all journey. And what I mean by that is we assume that everyone follows a linear path of understanding who our organization is. Making a first time gift, making a second gift. Move on and on and on. Some donors leave. Some donors get recaptured or re, re engage with our mission, but we assume a lot around that that one size fits all approach, and even if you’re doing some levels of segmentation and personalization, is that, and here’s what I want you to think about, is that based upon the most convenient ways to understand the donor from your perspective, or is it really, really deeply curious about the donor and their journey with your organization? And so I throw out a lot of book references, a lot of movie references. The thing that this reminds me of is the final scene of the Breakfast Club where the the team, Brian in particular, is talking about how you see us in the most convenient kind of tropes and the convenient stereotypes. And the idea is that we we make these assumptions that not that our donors are jocks or brains or whatever, but that our donors fit a certain stereotype, and because of that, we treat them in a way that may not be appropriate. Thanks, Natalie. I You are my people. I love this, so that’s great. So what’s the opportunity that we need to unpack here today? First and foremost, it’s that each donor has their own unique motivations. Every single donor in your donor database, or every single potential donor that’s out there has a very unique set of motivations. We can’t just say every donor is like this, or groups of donors are like this. There’s an infinite number, well, 8 billion different versions of what those motivations are. And one of my professors used to say when we talk about donor messaging, donor motivating motivations and whatnot. Dr Moskowitz would say, you can think about it from this overwhelming, infinite possibility that every donor could be talked to in a very different way. But the reality is that’s not actually helpful for most of our organizations, unless you have only a handful of donors, it’s not really possible to write a specific appeal to every single donor and to cater every experience to every specific person. Instead, what we need to do is use the psychology, the science out there to guide us into a better understanding of donor types, so that we can use that understanding to create

Speaker 1  8:47  

create engagement strategies that work for our donor groups. The most important thing to remember as we go through all of this, if you saw the conference presentation, if maybe you’ve downloaded some content already, and we’re going to go through this today. It can feel overwhelming. It can feel like there’s a lot to do, and I’m going to spend some time on that at the end here. But I want to start out by saying any small change that you affect later today, tomorrow, any small change that you affect in understanding and being more curious, in trying to figure out this puzzle, they’re going to lead to much bigger results, much more significant results for your organization, which is going to lend itself to even better fundraising, revenue, even longer engagement, and ultimately into donors perpetuating themselves. And that’s what I hope for all of you there is, there is not a group of fundraisers anywhere that I speak to that feels like they have enough money and they have enough staff. Everyone is working under a tight budget unlimited amount of time and resources that they can expend on things like this. So I absolutely. We appreciate you being here. I want you to to go away from the session saying, sort of just like a buffet, I can take one piece of this and apply this piece and know that it will have a positive impact on my organization. So if you were at the conference session, if you haven’t go reach re watch this. This is one of my favorite ways of talking about donor journeys. I amended it. If you went to Sunday school, you’ll sort of remember this, but it doesn’t. It doesn’t really matter what your faith background is. The idea is that we send out messages into the world, and some of those messages go to people that don’t care. And that’s sort of the first version that’s not included on this slide there. This is probably no secret, but there are some people who are just not into you. It’s okay. They they don’t care about animals, they don’t care about the arts, they don’t care about education. That’s just the reality. And our goal is not to move people to care about the thing that we care about, if they’re if they don’t care about it, that’s really, really hard work. I actually say the same thing about someone who’s never donated before. And this happens a lot when I talk to executive leadership or board members who just say, Hey, we’ve got, we need to talk to the richest people, or I know these people that are really wealthy, moving from zero generosity to one generosity, like $1 one $100 $1,000 it’s actually really, really hard, because that’s a huge mindset shift. So when you think about how to take this away, I want you to focus on the three types of donors that are listed on the screen. And these are the donors that I call rocky donors. They might have quick enthusiasm, they see a social media post, they come to an event or something like that, but then they immediately fall off. You know, historically, peer to peer fundraising is a really good example of where someone’s like, oh yeah, that’s compelling. They give some money, but then they don’t engage with your organization in any meaningful way. After that, they came for any number of other reasons. And then the second type of donor is what I call the donors. These are donors who actually take root. Maybe they give a couple of times, maybe they start a monthly giving program, or they attend a few events, but then they get distracted with life and their own personal journey, or with other causes that they care about. And so all these other things compete for their attention, and they lose interest in what you’re doing, in the work that you’re doing. And so that holy grail, I’m mixing metaphors here, but I love Indiana Jones. The The idea is there’s these, this group of donors that we want to we love, right? Like these are the ones that are really excited. They take deep root and they grow with your organization. They develop long term relationships with staff and program, you know, the whole thing. And because of that, their investment in your organization grows more significantly, and their relationship with the organization goes even further than just their own gift. And so those are the the unicorn donors, the ones that we’re super excited about. And here’s what, in brief, what I shared at the conference, quantity of donors may seem for a short time to be really cool, really valuable, and even revenue producing those quality donors, those donors that have deep roots and grow over time, over a long period of time with your organization, are actually invaluable. And here’s where I want to speak to any organization that’s listening right now that has a small team, you might say, Listen, we don’t have a lot of fundraisers on our staff. We don’t have a lot of staff. We don’t have a lot of money. What I want to what, what I want you to focus on, is that small group of donors can become the donors that advocate and are ambassadors for your organization, extending the reach of what you can do well beyond your existing staff and your existing resources, because they will do the work for you. So my, my recommendation, my my focus, for those of you that are in those small organizations, is, how can we now use some of these psychological principles to drive that level of engagement. So we’re going to jump into the psychology. And some of this may seem familiar to you. Some of this may seem like, oh, Sharon’s talked about this before. This is or this is something that I’ve heard before from other places, but there’s some nuance here that I want you to pay attention to. The first psychology principle is around social identity theory

Speaker 1  14:42  

people give to match their self image, what they say about themselves. One way of thinking about this, I do a lot of work around storytelling, and we have stories that we tell ourselves, stories that allow us to whether it’s open doors or I. In our own lives or try things that are new. We might say to ourselves that we care about X, Y and Z, that this is important to us, and that self image, those self stories, drive our decision making. In this case for us, it drives our decision about whether to be a donor, whether to be a volunteer, whether to get engaged in some other way. There are other ways that we sell our social identity is formed, and that’s with other people, group identification, who are our people. And there’s fascinating work that on this part of it is, of course, like we expect that people like us do things like this, and we have a sense of who we are as people and the groups that we associated with. But there are also people. I remember doing this as a keynote once, and someone is like, I actually am. I know people. I’m someone who considers myself a rebel and not part of an in group, out group dynamic. And what I mentioned to them is the science actually suggests that by being a specific out group, you are actually creating your own in group, which is really a fascinating way of thinking about so when you think about social categorization, group norms and giving behaviors, this is the whole basis around peer to peer. Giving around, event giving around, how people do you know, kind of volunteer ass and things like that. So I want you to start thinking about identity based giving motivations inside of your organization. This is a level of curiosity that starts to expand how we think about not just their their giving behavior, which is what we’ll talk about the next webinar next month. Are they a past donor? Are they current donor? Are they a future donor? Those types of things here. What we’re talking about is, what are their underlying identities that we can get a sense of, and feel free, if you’re willing, in the chat, to say what are the identities that your donors hold, not just they were, you know, a past donor or a current donor, but what are the identities that your donors hold? Now, you know, sometimes people say, you know, I don’t know, or I, you know, I’m not sure, but they might actually have some really straightforward identities. I see some examples in the chat. So Natalie says they care about the local community. Dee says they’re Catholics. David says they love the arts. So they care about wildlife. These are great so they care about the things that your organization focuses on. They may have multiple identities, and one of the things you’ve got lots of great examples here, which, by the way, pay attention to the chat, because this will be helpful for you as you go through this exercise that we’re going to do in a moment here, they may have an identity that you have very clear in your mind. I want you to understand two things, two things that are very important. One is that people have multiple identities that intersect, that coincide. So they might be there’s a lot of examples here about people being Catholic or some faith tradition, right? So actually, Jay’s example here of parents is a really good one. So I’m a parent. I have three kids under the age of 14, and that is part of my identity. It’s a strong part of my identity, but it’s not the only part of my identity. I’m a fundraiser, I’m a board member, I’m a you know, whatever else it might be. So these types of identities are different, and of how I act in those different capacities will look and feel different. So that’s why an A person might give to different causes because they adapt to those different identities. The second thing to remember is that some identities are malleable. Some identities are changeable. So someone who is to who cares about a certain thing or who identifies within a certain group may change over time in terms of how they interact with the world. So with that in mind, I want to give you a framework for thinking, and this is the one that I would take a picture of. Screenshot whatever you want. But here’s how I think about identities. When I talk about multiple different ways in which the psychology plays part in our donor journeys. And I’ll show you how to apply this in a moment. A lot of people will will think about donor the donor identity, based upon a specific observable behavior. And that’s great, don’t get me wrong. That’s very useful, especially for segmentation, are they an alumni? Are they a faith based donor? Are they someone who’s a previous recipient of our services, like someone who went to an arts performance, and then they’re they’re potentially donating? I worked in an arts organization, so we looked at that as as one example of segmentation, someone who is. A community member and cares about community we’ll talk about that in a moment. But those are all different, very objective, observable things. When we step back a little further, though, these five different types of identities might be helpful to you in thinking about, what is this person asking? What is this person thinking? What’s driving their behavior. So I gave you a little bit of time to take a picture of this, but I’m going to go through each one of these just momentarily, because I want you to understand how, if they’re one identity, appealing to them or thanking them, using a different identity actually does not help build engagement, does not propel them on the donor journey. So if you’re building a map to get someone from point A to point B, or, let’s say, point A to point D, but B and C don’t match, then it can stall out that engagement. It can stall out that map. So let’s talk about purpose driven identities. These are people who are saying in their heads, show me the numbers. I had a donor in my last organization. I worked for a workforce development organization, a very great organizations doing fascinating work. And I’m going to use this as an example of how throughout these different models, because you’ll see how it applies. We had one donor, a very significant donor, who did his own research on our theory of change and wanted both internal and external data to demonstrate that our model was actually successful before he invested a significant amount of money. So the core belief for this donor was, change should be measurable. I should be able to see if I put this input in, it will get that output as a result of of my, my, my gift. And so the moment that you can make memorable, and this is very key for me, the moment that you can make memorable is that what they’re looking for in measurement actually gets done. So when you’re thinking about the what the Ask will be and what the gratitude will be, this is Ask frame just because of space. But when you’re thinking about that at the both the ask and the gratitude, your gift delivers proven results. We can show you, we can demonstrate that we have these results. So in workforce development, we were able to say, here are the wage gains on the average cohort level. We can say it resulted in a wage gain of $24,000 that was very clear. And we can prove that through the testing that we had done. The second identity is affiliation, and these are folks who look for who else is involved. I mentioned peer to peer donors. But also think about like your board giving or giving that is in any way public to the community. These are all the question they’re asking is, who else is involved. A lot of times when I would do capital campaigns, the question that a prospective donor would ask is, who else is involved, who else is already given. And the core belief is not necessarily bad. None of these are bad. I want to be very clear. These are not like bad identities. These are all real, true identities that people have, and our goal is to understand which one is which. So the one of the core beliefs of the affiliation identity is we rise by lifting each other up, and we want to work together. These are folks that in particular want other people to come around the donation behavior. They’re folks that would say, we can do more together. And this is the memorable moment together. We’re stronger. We can do more together than we can do alone. So the Ask frame and the gratitude frame is either join other leaders like you, or you are part of other leaders that are doing this work. So even now, you can see how like social proof is something that people talk about who else is doing that. That’s the affiliation identity. But if you use social proof for a proof for a purpose driven affinity or identity, they don’t care. That doesn’t land, that doesn’t answer the question. So based upon these internal questions, are we delivering what they’re the answer to the question that they’re asking? So for the investment donor, what’s the return? So this can often be

Speaker 1  24:23  

overlapping with the purpose driven group, but there I their philanthropy is very strategic. Their generosity is about creating. Sometimes I hear this as systems change or lasting impact, and this is very much sort of thinking about how to optimize their giving, how to leverage certain gifts to be able to create long term or sustainable change. Those are ways of of doing, of that approach. And a lot of times I hear this from donors who are specifically saying, Here are the ways in which we want we want to see Max. Month impact. How can I see maximum impact for my investment? And so that’s the memorable moment we don’t want to and sometimes this goes off the deep end in some ways, like we don’t want to fund overhead, or we don’t want to do some of those pieces, so we want to make sure that we are careful about how we talk about that. But one way to think about the ask, and certainly the engagement or the increase in the ask, is how to optimize and expand their giving portfolio. They think about it very much like a stock investment. I’m going to invest in Apple, and my expectation is that Apple is going to increase, but then the for for other people, you know that might be we want to see something adjacent to that, IBM or Nvidia or whatever, you know, get the idea. Those types of things create an overall investment in the approach that they want to see in the world. The third one, which is where a lot of fundraisers and a lot of consultants and a lot of thought leaders focus on is, tell me the story. Now, I want to be very, very clear about this identity and this model. I am not suggesting that data is the only way to go for these other ones, or that social proof is the only way to go. I feel like I shouldn’t say. I feel I am certain that data is a storytelling activity, that when you present data, you are actually telling a story. I saw a consultant once at a conference. I was sitting in the back before I was speaking, and she was saying, data is the diplomat, data is the diplomat. And I was like, Why are you lying? Data tells a very specific story. It tells a story of of how you are thinking about these numbers. And so I want to remind you that even though on a relationship identity, we’re more story focused, everything else is also story focused as well. And this core belief is around the idea of personal connections. They want to know the person they want to think about. They want to they want to know, like, the backstory of that. And I feel that way a lot about television shows, for example, like I want to know the back story of what happened with this person, so that I can feel more connected to the the, you know, night agent is, I just finished that on Netflix. That’s what I care about. There are times where that backstory will propel future action. Would anybody tune in to Cobra Kai today if they didn’t have a background of of karate kid before? No, they really wouldn’t, right, like, this is not a great story. Today, I see folks that are on board with these, these shows. So I love that. That’s great. Um, so the the memorable moment is that every gift has a story, and this donor is part of that story. That is especially true of the relationship identity. But it’s not as though it’s you would ignore that in the other identities. You would just tell that story in a different way. So one way of talking about that is being part of a family, being part of a group of relationships. You can use family language if that’s appropriate to your organization. It might not be, but either way, point being that that family connection is what drives that kind of relationship, is what drives that approach. The last one is a service approach, or a service identity. And these are folks who would say, put me to work. I want to do some work. And interesting enough. There are times where this is positioned by our organization in good ways and in bad ways. Sometimes we’ll have people who are in a governance role, like in a board role, who want to volunteer to do the work the business of the organization. Now, depending on your board model, that may be entirely appropriate or entirely inappropriate, but their view is, I want to work. And you may have donors who aren’t necessarily saying this out loud, but they give because they want to be part of the work. They want to get their hands dirty in some way. There are certainly people who volunteer based upon that, who can also then be engaged in philanthropic work. So ultimately, the idea, the core belief of this folk, of this group, of this identity is actions speak louder than words, and their memorable moment is that hands on piece, the the the hands that serve, have those stories to tell. So how can I be part of that story in a meaningful way? And then you may not be able to see this, but the Ask frame is, it’s your time and your treasure. Both of those things combined that make change happen. So can you, hopefully, you can see now that there are these different identities, and I see there’s questions about the you know, how do we get there? Like, how do we understand this? So let me unpack that as well for a moment, and I’ll get there in just second. And. Want to simplify this. When you’re thinking about who are your donors, realize that there are probably all of these folks in the that you probably have an entire you know, it probably is not 2020, 20% applies, but you probably have purpose. The analyst donors identity, who’s saying, prove it to me, you probably have connectors, saying include me, strategists who say grow it part, folks who say move me, and doers that say use me. And so as you are thinking about that piece of of what I’m going to do, the simple, and I know this sounds like overly simplistic and a non answer, but at least for now, what I want to say is in terms of understanding and identifying who they are. Remember where we started? It’s about being constantly curious the simple, and I know this sounds like too simple, but part of it is just asking your donors why they gave, what prompted you to give in the first place and to see how they would like. What are their answers? And then, does this fit this model? Maybe, you know this is a model that I find helpful, because I’ve used it before in fundraising, and I found it to be helpful in understanding the psychology of why people do what they do. And then, how can we put A, B and C together in a sequence, for the analyst, for the connector, for the strategist, for the heart driven donor, for the doer, and then to say, so, this is the specific example that I’ll give you. Sometimes a first time donor doesn’t want to be asked for a gift. The second time this, the second time that second opportunity to do something is that servant for the service oriented part is, would you be interested in volunteering? And what I saw in my work is when we understood the service oriented donors, the doers, and we moved from you made a gift. Would you be interested in volunteering? Would you consider volunteering their next gift was so much higher, and their continue, their lifetime value as a donor went way through the roof? So that’s that’s one key, one short answer. And then I want to talk about some other donor psychology principles, and we’ll come back to how do we map this out a little bit further? So the second piece is to understand there’s two processes going on in giving first is system. One thinking, this is automatic. It’s emotional. A lot of this is when we do a call to action on social media. We have an image, we have a story, we have a real I’m not good at social media, but those are the words that people use their emotional giving response. It could be direct mail, anything like that, but we could unpack that differently. My point is they’re responding sort of automatically. And this is a quick decision. The second one is a deliberate, reasoned giving decision. And if you’ve seen my work before, one of the things I talk about is sometimes people are hooked by the emotional giving, but they need a deliberate reason, a logic, to support the decision that they made in order to have longevity. So if you think back to the taking versus the holding, a lot of people create a lot of emotional energy to get a donation, and then they believe that the next thing has to be a heightened state of emotion, and they keep kind of pushing themselves higher to get emotional response after emotional response. In reality, what we need is to cut, is to create a combination of emotion and logic in order to be able to build the engagement that attracts both systems, because we’re all built in both ways. So think about combining an emotional story hook with with whether it’s impact data or a logic, you know, logical proof of con of some kind. But then, as you are mapping that journey for your existing donors, what are the different pieces at play that, hopefully the donor has indicated to you. So now we’re going to get into how do we how do we know? How do we tell and again, there are simple answers, and there’s one universal truth, which is we don’t always know. And I know that’s not a lovely answer, but we’re talking about people don’t forget. People’s identities change. Some of their identities change, and especially when it comes to donor behavior, the things that they care about, some of those things can be malleable, can be changed, and because of that, what we think at one point in time might be different to another point in time. So what I want to remind you of is there’s no easy fix. There’s no silver bullet. I’m not one of those people that would ever tell you that in any walk of life, however, we can take a best guess. And this comes back to the idea of anything that we do is going to be better than what we’ve done before. So how can we take some of our best guesses? And sort of, I’ve said this a lot with a lot of things, but. Fire and then aim right. How can we make a donor journey and then see where the fallout is, as opposed to saying we don’t have any ability to make a donor journey, because we don’t know.

Speaker 1  35:12  

One specific takeaway is that when what you lead with determines what you seed in the donor psychology, and this is probably the thing that I’ve tried to work out in my career as much as possible. I should students just say career, both in fundraising work, but also in my personal life. When you say certain words, certain phrases, when you make certain appeals, those words have purpose and meaning and presumed intentionality. And so you probably are familiar with the fact that transactional giving leads to transactional results. That’s it’s a reality. Some people will say it’s really bad. I’m not necessarily sure that it’s bad, as much as it’s just something that we have to understand when we do transactional giving. When we say public media is very is very well known for doing this like buy a CD, buy a tote bag, and part of your membership goes to that when you’re trying to transition someone for from transactional to transformational giving, it becomes very difficult, because we lead it. We lead with this idea. So in the donor’s mind, their perception is this. It’s also true of I don’t, I didn’t see if there were any membership organizations, but I’m on the board of AFP, and so one of the things that we look at is, if you are a member of AFP, you are a member, and you pay member dues. And so then to transition to philanthropic giving to the Foundation, which I’m a donor of, and I hope that you would be a donor of, would be it’s a difficult jump, right? It’s a difficult jump to make that transition, because people say I pay my dues in higher ed. It’s the same thing. I paid my tuition. Why should I give to the organization, to the college or university or to the school. It doesn’t really matter if it’s higher ed at all. So as you think about, how do I understand this donor identity, one of the things to think about is putting out different versions of your appeal and seeing what people give to as a result of the different versions you can have a purpose led mailing. You can have and you can do this with the same group of donors and do tests of different types, maybe pick two, see what performs. Or you could do this with different groups of donors. You don’t get a straight like statistically valid test. But that’s not necessarily important right here. What’s important is understanding, how do we start to group these folks? And you might say, of the pairs model we we start to think that there are two or three or whatever, not all five. In my experience, I’ve seen with bigger and bigger donor volumes. You You know that there are five like I find in my experience that there’s, I see all five of them. But if you have an opportunity to just take one or two of those and put those together and say, oh, let’s test each one of these and see what people actually write the check for, or actually click the donate button for, now, you can tag the appeal to that and say, okay, they gave to a purpose driven approach, or purpose driven social media posts. And that’s what the activity proves to us is, is we have some bit of data that tells us this is how we should respond now, as part of that donor journey, if we have a purpose driven person, I’m just starting at p if we have a purpose driven person, then we’d want to respond to them in a purpose driven way, and we want to get their feedback on that. My communications teacher from eons ago was like, remember, communication is not just sender and receiver. It’s the feedback loop. So when you point something in the chat, you’re you’re telling me, oh, this is helpful. This is good. I don’t understand that piece, which I’ll get to, I promise. So as you think about these different pieces, how can you constantly find out not just who’s in your donor database, but how those donors are changing? And again, this can be overwhelming, but don’t feel like it needs to be. It’s an opportunity to just start pulling together these pieces. I want to jump on. Christine has a question about recommend parsing out donor listserv to target the messaging for different types of groups, as opposed to generalized donor newsletters. Now my coach, who you’ll see in a moment, Rory Vaden, says, Don’t be a should head in these conversations, and I have to be very clear and careful about enunciating so I don’t run afoul of anyone. I’m not saying you should do and what I’m suggesting to you is that, because I don’t know your organization, you know Christine, or anyone else I don’t, there’s hundreds of you. So what I would say is, how do we navigate the work that we need to do as an organization with what will best serve our community? There are two pieces to this puzzle, and so I can say, from experience, that in the arts organization that I worked in, we knew we had people who cared about arts for art’s sake. They’re Broadway lovers. They wanted to go to the show, and they wanted to make sure that that was available in our city. There are other people who said, I love arts education and making sure the next generation gets to see a performing art performance, or gets to go to classes and whatnot. Very different motivations of people. And so we sent out two different newsletters, two different segments that may have some of the same content but written different ways, and now we can see how does that respond to different folks? And so whether it’s a one on one conversation with a donor to find out their motivations, that’s not really scalable, but seeing how they respond to your appeals, to your you know, do they open your thank you notes? Do they, you know, do those types of things, but someone’s already mentioned in here as well. Donor surveys are a great way of doing that. My recommendation to you is two things on donor surveys. One, understand that short surveys are going to be much more effective because people don’t have time to give you a lot of feedback with their busy lives, so a one question, a three question survey, is probably where I would end on that I wouldn’t go much further than that, and don’t feel like you need to get all the information all at one time, but you can never ask for someone for feedback or advice on a regular basis, So don’t try and inundate them with all kinds of stuff right away. Try to figure out how you can get the most useful piece of information that you need at that time. The other piece is, know that surveys are essentially a pulse check, right? You’re not trying to devise a grand unified theory of the grand unified theory of donors as part of this, but you can start to then get a sense of who they are. So with that in mind, I want to finish with what you are probably familiar with in terms of donor psychology. And these are what’s called cognitive biases. These are frameworks that all of us, not just your donors, all of us, use to make decisions. Our brains consume the most amount of calories in our daily life, and they are inundated with decision making all the time. I have to decide whether to all the things. So these principles are things that can help you nudge people along a journey that they already want to be on. I want to be clear that we’re not going to convince someone from an organism, and I always give examples, and they’re never good, but you’re never going to convince someone who loves X type of cause to abandon their love for that cause and give to something completely opposite that’s not going to happen, so not without a whole ton of work and whatnot. So how can we take someone who already loves the work that you’re doing and encourage them to do some things that would that would resonate with their identity, that would expand on their work and their what they ultimately want to do, but they don’t know. They don’t know what to do. So the example of anchoring is a really good example. The first number that someone sees gives them a frame of reference for what they should give. Let me give you a non donor example so you can see this if I said, Here is a $50 bottle of wine. I have anchored what you believe the $50 anchored what you believe you should spend on wine. So the next thing that I say is compared to that first thing here is $100 bottle of wine. So the $50 bottle of wine now is a is perceived differently because of the second thing. If I had said instead of $100 bottle of wine, and here’s a $10 bottle of wine,

Speaker 1  44:13  

your brain now says $50 was either that you made the opposite decision in those two instances 30 seconds, you made an opposite decision about the $50 bottle of wine. Oh, $50 bottle of wine is great compared to $100 bottle of wine, or $50 bottle of wine is not great compared to the $10 bottle of wine. Lots of different factors go into why. I don’t know anything about wine, but you get the idea right, that when people get a sense of where they’re starting from. It affects how your brand is perceived, how they think about everything that comes after that. So we want you to very simply think about on your donor page, what is the first thing that they see? What is the best gift? What is the thing that makes the biggest impact? What is that thing that they see? And here’s what I will say for a lot of organizations that I work with, there’s no number. I was working like some someone called me a week ago and they said, Hey, can you do a like review of our donor page? And I was like, Sure. I looked at it, and I said, You don’t tell me how much will help you. Don’t you don’t give me a number at all. How do I know what to give you? Does $10 help? 50, 100 1000 a million, like I don’t know, because there’s no number whatsoever, until I got to the gift page, and then it was just a bunch of numbers, but no information on what that does for the mission. I don’t know. What does $1,000 do? What does $100 do? I have no idea. So that’s a simple, easy fix for you to say. I wouldn’t word it this way, but did you know that it cost $7 to send a kid to a live performance that gives me an anchor, and I’ve used that in particular for anchoring on monthly giving. So we would take first time donors at performing arts center who made a roundup gift. They bought a ticket to Hamilton, they rounded up from $93 to $100 and we would go back and say, did you know that it cost $7 to to give kids access to arts education? Would you consider a $7 a month gift, and that allowed people to have a frame of reference. The next one is availability of recent examples of giving decisions. Do you have testimonials, for lack of a better term, of people who have made this gift? This is especially important, planned and legacy giving. If that’s on your radar. It’s super, super. The work, the psychology work that Dr Russell James has done, really identifies that living donor testimonials drives land or legacy giving decisions. I don’t think Dr James would be offended if I would to say that my small modification to that research is that it’s probably true of everybody else. Do we know what? Who else is giving to that as part of our approach that there are other people giving that’s a simple way of doing it. And then people want confirmation. This is true again, in consumer behavior, if you’ve ever bought and bought an Apple product, you know that immediately after you buy a product, they send you an email congratulating you on the purchase that you’ve done a good job. These are this is true across the consumer spectrum. They reinforce the decision that you have made, because they want you to immediately feel good about it. The second after someone presses donate on your website is the moment of uncertainty. The second after they click that button is the moment of uncertainty. So when people say things about speed and thank you and gratitude and whatnot, there’s some truth to that, of course, right? Like there’s some data around. Here’s what I want you to understand about the psychology of that up until they receive some notification from your organization, they don’t know if you’ve got it, they don’t know if you’ve used it, they don’t know what’s happened. And so you are contributing to uncertainty in that moment. There’s a reason why delivery times have been sped up, and why they give you these notifications. The Domino’s Pizza tracker is how domino solves this problem. Your pizza is in the oven, it is coming to your house like that’s the way of demonstrating you made a great decision, and you’ll know when you get it there. And then status quo, the default options will shape giving patterns, so just like an anchoring where the first number influences the giving. Now I want to clarify that in some cases, if your goal is a higher gift, then potentially a higher gift, a higher number would help. My friend Bernard Ross did this, like, literal study in New York City. He went to, like, Third Avenue. Hey to people on the street, we’re on Third Avenue. Would you be interested in making a gift? And then he went to Harlem and said, Hey, we’re on 98th Street. Would you be interested in making a gift? There was a statistical significance just based upon what amounts they in the street number and you can check out burn stuff. Bernard Ross is the name he he’s more than willing to share that with you. So then, as you think about default options around the work that you’re doing, what are what do you default to? For monthly giving, for an annual gift, for one time gift. How does that frame? How they think about so both in anchoring and the status quo. Want to remind you that it’s not necessarily the highest amount that you want. In the case of the monthly gift that that we were talking about, we actually went lower than the average roundup gift, the average one time gift. We went low. Lower because we wanted to anchor a monthly gift rather than a one time gift, which is typically lower. So in the previous session, we talked about mapping the journey around these kind of five A’s awareness, their first information of your organization, analysis, how they’re evaluating that don’t forget that a lot of your donors are doing research and understanding of your organization prior to getting engaged with you as a fundraiser or learning more directly from you. So be mindful of that and then how that plays out. The action could be giving, could be volunteering, it could be something else, but then acknowledgement as recognition and advocacy being champion. So I gave you, in the last session, an example of Harriet, the retired school teacher arts and obviously, really close to work that I’ve done before. You can copy this, but you can also see, like, is this something that’s helpful to you as you’re mapping these different stages? And then the avatar is built around the identity. So want to clarify what we talked about before in terms of the psychology, is that avatar and expectations and then these stages, their awareness, their analysis, the action, the acknowledgement and the advocacy are all how you inform your work based upon the decisions that play out. So those are, those are ways in which you can apply some of that work into a map, if you choose to do so. Now, some people look at this and are like, Ooh, this is really fancy, to be clear. It’s not. It’s not actually very fancy. But I just kind of jam this out, I think, on Canva. But if you feel like this is more than you can do, or you feel comfortable doing. You could just do a spreadsheet and just say, Here’s my donor avatar. Here are five columns around awareness, analysis, all the things. And then once you better understand the the identities, you can start brainstorming what that looks like, and also recommend if you’re comfortable without sharing any of your your organization information, anything that’s proprietary, brainstorming the donor journey, based upon the identities and all of these steps is a really great task for AI. So a chat GPT or a clog, or whatever you might use, might be a great way of just saying, Hey, I’ve got this donor, these donor identities. You could even take the recording of this session and put it into AI and then start to craft it for your organization. Just start very broadly around the like, I’m a higher ed organization, or I’m a healthcare organization, whatever that might be. So as you kind of close up here, what I want you to think about is when you are taking one of these segments that donor dreams, and that’s where I would start, one segment, one journey, identify the psychological principles at each stage. The psychological principles in each stage. Might be the the things that we talked about, and then what are the behaviors that we want that donor to do? What are the things that we want the donor to accomplish in this stage? And then what is the barrier to them doing that thing, and what is the benefit that they will receive when they do that? So when you think about the behavior, sometimes we do the shortcut, but like the behavior is giving, we want them to give. I want you to realize that that’s very much oversimplifying a whole lot of behaviors. If you send a direct mail piece, your behavior is not giving your behavior is opening the mail. You want them to open that piece of mail, and there are all kinds of barriers for why they would do that, unpack it. But then think about if you send an email, it’s opening the email. If it’s on social media, the behavior is stop the scroll before doing the donation. So think about what is the smallest behavior that you can

Speaker 1  54:11  

design an experience that moves them from behavior to behavior, understanding the different barriers and benefits that are that would happen for each one of those pieces. So then, when you are thinking about personalizing the journey, when you’re thinking about personalizing this journey for so you have, like, a big identity, and you’re thinking about what is the next step you were taking a big group, taking a big group, right purpose driven donors, for example, now we need to take that and extract it and make it personal. So within that, we’re not saying everyone is exactly the same. We’re now saying we’ve got some data that we can use to make that even more relevant to the individual. So things like giving history you. Event attendance, their communication preferences, their channels, that they’re involved in, their programmatic interests. And now we can take that psychological principle and make the to your chariot, dear Sally, dear, whatever might be better than just saying everyone’s a purpose driven person. So as you think about how to take what we’ve learned today, if you grab one identity, you grab one identity, and then you look at how do we personalize that you already have the data that you need, and how you can take that information and make it even more relevant. So I want to end by talking about some of the common pitfalls that we see all the time when people do this. One is sort of over automating the process, over overdoing the technology piece and eliminating the human piece. And what I mean by that is the there are ways in which you can send out like automated triggered emails and things like that. And in those cases, what we find is that we lose the personalization that is really important, and any variation that occurs in that segmentation, any versioning that happens when identities change or behavior changes, and because the automation becomes super predictable and super like impersonal, it’s really difficult to kind of navigate without to really get resonance out of that. The second piece is lack of testing. So we sort of assume remember constant curiosity is key. So we sort of assume that when we take when we figure out from donor surveys or curious questions that we ask our donors and whatnot, we assume like these are our identities. This is a fixed understanding of what who our donors are and what their journeys are. And we don’t iterate, we don’t test. So within a week, a month a year, this becomes, I mean, short term, you’re probably good, but in a longer term, what you’ll find is that these aren’t hitting the same way, and that’s because people grow and they change and they can’t, they they don’t react in the same way. So that has everything to do with just assuming. And you could do this right, like you can go into AI and say, Who are my donors, and what is their journey? And it’ll fill out some stuff for you that’s making a lot of assumptions. The best answer for you is asking the people that are involved. And that leads me really nicely into this last one around forgetting the human touch is probably a lot of you know, I’ve been involved in AI for quite some time. I’ve done the the research on how donor behavior, or donor perceptions of AI plays out in donor behavior, and without getting into all of that, what I would suggest to you is that donors say that they don’t want to lose the human touch in fundraising. So they don’t want to lose the human touch and interaction with your cause, that is one of their number one concerns. So we have to be really careful about how we engage with this, with the tools, with the technology, but also with these processes, because it can very easily turn off our donors if we do things that are very automated or assuming or whatever. So how do you take this information and move it very quickly into something that you can use do personalized outreach, where and when? You can think about creating targeted impact stories, impact stories that are relevant to those particular identities. Be mindful of the choices and communications if someone’s responding or engaging through email or through a social media DM, be mindful of those choices, and then be careful about recognition that’s aligned with what they are actually looking for. So I mentioned to you that this can all seem overwhelming, so I want you to be thinking about when you get into this process, you might be saying, This isn’t working. I gotta do something else. I don’t. I’m not going to do this at all. I want you to start thinking about why this isn’t and how will I know that this isn’t working. It means running through a donor journey several times to see if and when it will work and how it will work. So moving as you think about this from both your perspective, but also from the donor’s perspective, think about moving from a question of, should I to how will I, and the emotional energy that’s necessary to move to that last piece. So it mentioned Rory, my coach. He talks about increasing the commitment of by creating consequences of failing, and then setting our focus on how to do this work. So rather than saying, after this webinar, I don’t have time for that, I want you to remember that you don’t have time to waste. You’ve got to do more with less. And so I talk about this as the law of diminishing. Intent that right after this, right now, you have an opportunity to do something, and I would encourage you to do some thing, some piece of this, because next week is it, you’re going to forget about this. Next month after the webinar, you’re going to say, I don’t know if this is, well, this is a this is for me anymore, because you’ll forget about it. So for next steps, audit your communications through what I call these neuro fundraising principles, the psychology map one or another donor journey, identify those key personalization techniques and then continue to test and refine. We’ll be here next month talking about some of these same principles, but even deeper dive on donor behavior, and we’re really excited to see you for that, there’s additional materials from donor, perfect. If I could be a resource to you, please don’t hesitate to reach out. Let me know. I know there’s a lot of questions here, and we’re a little over time, so would love to a bit of see if there’s any questions that I can answer, but while typing and we’ll do some of this other close up stuff as well.

Lori Skibjak  1:01:06  

Okay, we did have a lot of questions. Yeah, I think you got to some of them, but there are,

Speaker 1  1:01:13  

there’s quite a bit. I’m going to say them, and I’ll send them out as well that

Lori Skibjak  1:01:17  

that would be great. I’m sure there were some people waiting, but I’d like to thank everybody for joining us today, and we hope that you found the session valuable and gain some insights that you can put into action. Special. Thank you to terian for sharing his expertise with us. We’ll be sending out a follow up email with the recording in the next few days, so you will all get that. I know some people were looking for the chat, and that’s not necessarily something that we do send out, but there will be a transcript with the recording, and as Jerry mentioned, be sure to check out part two, where we continue exploring donor journeys. So on March 12, Cherian will be joined by DonorPerfects Learning and Development Manager Kelly Ramage for a session titled New current and lapsed. Why you need different donor journeys? So we hope that some of you who have registered through our web page register for both sessions, and we hope to see you there again. We appreciate your time and participation. Today, there was quite a bit of participation. It was great, and we look forward to seeing you at the next session. So I hope you all have a great morning afternoon, wherever you’re logging in from and thank you so much for hanging out with us today. This was this was great.

Unknown Speaker  1:02:31  

Thanks everybody.

Lori Skibjak  1:02:35  

All right. Have a great afternoon. Thank you. You.