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Activity anchoring

And why list building without a clear intentional content strategy kinda like setting your money on fire.

Activity anchoring

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Two sessions at next year's Nonprofit Technology Conference

Do me a favor and check out two sessions I proposed for next year's NTC (Nonprofit Technology Conference) in Detroit. Give them a thumbs up if you like. Thanks!

  1. The Politics of AI would be a space to directly discuss the politics of AI, its advocates and critics, and how its use, particularly by nonprofits, influences the politics that influence nonprofit missions and impact. If we're going to have 317 sessions on AI at a nonprofit conference it seems sensible to have one that gets into the tech's underlying messy political theory.
  2. Newsletters (under the hood) is a quick tour of around 10 well known (or at least well done!) newsletters, mostly from outside the nonprofit space. We'll cover a range of the what, how, and why of winning newsletters so you can bring some of that to your email and newsletter work.

A general theory of Activity Anchoring

I made up a term called activity anchoring to help describe what happens when we do list building and recruitment. It's inspired, no surprise, by the idea of price anchoring.

The other day, Suchit Patel had a piece for the Audiencers that describes the relationship between price anchoring and the discounting of news subscriptions. We've all seen this with magazines and news subscriptions, right? Half off for the first year or even $1 a month for six months.

Price high and you might get fewer customers. Price low and you get more customers but you might just break even or lose money. But you can get market share. But you set a price expectation that can be hard to shake. People don't see the real value (or want to pay the true price) when it's time to buy again or renew a subscription.

We're doing something similar in nonprofit list building.

List building and recruitment is often centered around what's essentially a low-value / low-return ask. We put up a "take action" petition or message to Congress. Or we use an ad or newsletter referral to entice someone in a similar audience.

We're using actions and engagement. But engagement is free. And pretty easy to secure from people. That ease is an anchor. It sets the value of your organization, and participation in it, in the mind of the new subscriber.

We tap into an emotion, make it easy to join, and then pray we can persuade folks to open another email or, who knows, make a donation someday.

It's a digital direct mail. We accept the cost and know that 90% or more of these folks will never give a donation.

But we really really want (and need!) to bring in people who will pay off. Not to be crass about it but it's a complete waste if someone subscribes to an email list and never gives money, takes an action, or even opens and clicks an email.

So why are we anchoring our activities at such a low "cost" to the subscriber? Why? Why?!

Maybe because we've always done it this way. And we can always write off the cost to awareness building and unmeasurable hopes that someone will someday do something.

Here's a good thing: We talk a lot about welcome messages and good onboarding. That matters. You should have clear goals and intentions for your welcomes and onboarding. You should create events, spaces, messages that create room for people to get involved. You should practically harass people into becoming habituated to paying attention to you.

But welcoming and onboarding are part of a bigger action and content ecosystem.

What if you produced content - writing, audio, video, in person events - that corner the market on your topic?

What if you had a newsletter (or multiple newsletters) that were relied upon by your target audience as a key source of insights and actionable information? What if that newsletter content was produced in chunks and formats that could be distributed into social media videos, Slack or WhatsApp groups, Reddit threads? What if your website, newsletter(s), and other emails complemented each other such that someone reading an email could always go to your site and easily see that, yes, you are working on that issue and know what you're doing.

An email subscription is just a wee tiny piece of a content strategy. And small part of one's possible full experience with you and your work.

If we're anchoring our target audience's activity on a single recruitment action like signing a petition we're going to bring in people with a low expectations and, most likely a low lifetime value.

Bright Ideas

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