Keeping supporters sweet

In a fascinating research report from The REaD Group plc, which was published in April, more than half of UK adults said they would stop donating to a charity if it contacted them too frequently. Asked to select from a list of options of things that would make them stop donating, 53% of respondents chose this as the prime cause. The second most popular cause was badly targeted mailings, chosen by 47% of respondents, followed by money being spent on marketing by charities, chosen by 43%.

I know from personal experience how badly targeted communications make donors feel – I recently received a blanket ‘Dear Friend’ letter from a charity that I had supported for the best part of 20 years (and to the tune of several thousand pounds over that time). The incompetence of the approach made me question my whole relationship with the charity, and I have since switched my allegiances elsewhere. Of course the mailing was not the only reason, but it was certainly a catalyst.

Keep it clean
This raises the whole question of data accuracy, as well as how best to build relationships with audiences and donors. Even in these dark days of a double dip recession, people are still moving house, getting married, having children and dying. The result is that your database will almost certainly be out of date – one estimate is that around 20% of data changes on an annual basis.

Luckily there are plenty of services available to help you clean your data, and most of these will carry out a free audit so that you can see the return on investment before committing. If you are still sending out anything by snail mail, chances are you will cover the cost of the data cleaning in savings against your first mailing.

Attention to detail
So what other steps can you take to ensure that your donors or audience do not become frustrated? First of all you should ask them the question: how often do you want to be contacted? Store this information in your CRM system – effective CRM solutions will then ensure that they are only communicated with at appropriate intervals. You should also make sure that every communication contains clear opt-out advice or an unsubscribe link.

As my own experience has shown, the other key to keeping supporters happy is to ensure that communications are personalised, both with the right form of address and targeted content. Make sure that you have a space on your website where your constituents can update their details – and this should be able to extend not just to address but also general preferences and interests.

The ultimate aim is that each person feels they have a genuine one to one relationship with you and that you value them as an individual. It’s the key, of course, to success in any relationship.