engagement

Don’t hesitate to (re)activate: Member and donor retention strategies for everyone

March 14, 2024 by Ted Fickes

Social platforms are limiting news, politics and social change content. The implications are stark for news and nonprofits (not to mention democracy).

It’s harder to find new subscribers and supporters when your organization’s social media posts aren’t seen or shared.

Advertising options are limited if a platform won’t let you post or won’t share those posts (even if you pay them). And advertisers aren’t keen on spending money to advertise on news sites with falling reach.

Of course, some organizations will feel more (or less) impact.

But everyone working with donors, members and subscribers should consider the stakes.

You can’t afford to lose supporters or see subscribers drift into the nether reaches of inaction.

Bringing in new members takes more resources and time. And if you can’t keep folks around long enough to break even then why bother?

Keeping people on your list, in you membership and (more importantly!) engaged in the work has never been more important.

Retention for the practical and adventurous

Last year I took a look at why people stay – in a job, a community, with their subscription or their ongoing donations. It’s a mix of inertia, habit, identity, trust, value and a sense of belonging.

People are inclined to stick around. We want to give something a try. And we don’t want (or are too lazy) to give up on things.

But we’re not looking to build a list of inactive followers. So use inertia to your advantage. Use the inclination to stick around to build a relationship.

Start by learning about your people.

Forms, questions and surveys are your friend. So is a survey tool that connects to your email and membership systems so that it can pre-populate fields like email address.

But most important, be curious, create a culture of conversation and recognize supporters. Denverite wishes happy birthday to subscribers in their daily email:

And if you click “update your preferences” they pre-fill your email address. Easy.

A little recognition goes a long way. You could also use this to send donors (or even non-paying subscribers) a more personal acknowledgment on their birthday – a note and sticker in the mail.

You can ask for other contact info. Mailing address is a great one. Zip code or city/town name is also a place to start.

Give folks a reason to share info. If you’re a news site you could give people local news (or, buzzword warning, hyperlocal news). A nonprofit that deals with environmental, political, educational or economic data could use a zip code or address search provide local or even neighborhood level info on pollution, schools, per capita income trends or more.

Idea alert: Address data isn’t just for subscribers.

Owen Berg, a recent graduate of New York University’s Studio 20 journalism masters program, wrote up a great case study on a local engagement project run New York’s The City, a nonprofit newsroom steeped in service journalism.

The team figured that readers (and potential readers!) were busy living their lives and not necessarily looking for more news sites to follow. And, like many New Yorkers, they might be dealing with high heating costs during the winter. Berg outlines the strategy:

Match a piece of service journalism to a location.
Directly deliver impactful information to that area.
Measure success, and repeat.

They looked at data on city rent and utility cost regulation and set up postcards that simply brought awareness to the issue and sent people to The City’s rent map tool.

A screenshot of The City's rent map tool postcard. It includes three small images. One shows rent stabilized apartments in a New York City neighborhood. The next image shows a building. The overlaying text says "No heat in your apartment? Here's what to do about it." The third image is a page of from the website that helps people find out more about the rent and heat and other livability data of their building.

Read more about the project in Berg’s Nieman Lab story. Berg acknowledges that this project brings together audience development and journalism. This sort of work is an opportunity for news orgs but also nonprofits that have data but struggle to get it into the hands of residents, community leaders and journalists.

As journalists speculate about whether news is entering a “post-social media” era, we raise a lot of questions about how to move forward with reaching new audiences. I believe local news is in an interesting position to innovate here because of its unique ability to establish a physical presence in the communities it covers.
– Owen Berg

Another way to get more info: just ask for it!

The conclusion of the Chicago Sun-Times’s welcome email to new subscribers uses humor to ask people to share a little more info about themselves:

It’s a great idea. This probably won’t get many clicks buried in the PS. It could also be more transparent about what the information asked for will be and how it will be used to support the reader’s experience. You could also include an offer – share info and receive a coupon for a free drink at Giordano’s (for example). But it sets an expectation and tone. And you know that someone who does click it is interested.

Only email is required (and they already have your email) and it doesn’t acknowledge that you’re getting this because you’re a newsletter subscriber. It’s probably a form used for many purposes (newsletter subscribers, new paid members, event attendees, etc.).

Instead of (or in addition) zip code you could test city name. Chicagoans love to talk about where they live…even if it’s Schaumburg.

Vary the form by newsletter and ask a question tied to that newsletter. Did someone subscribe to “Halas Intrigue”? Ask them who is their favorite Bears player of all time. Subscribe to “Someone in Chicago” (An advice column where Chicago can ask questions on how to navigate life transitions, relationships, family, finance and more.) Let them ask a question in the welcome message. Give them a favorite tip or idea from a recent column.

Do things with and for your people

News organization using events as a revenue stream isn’t new. This 2014 American Press Institute story covers tactics for event revenue. It draws on lessons from the then 5-year old Texas Tribune.

In a 2017 report, Journalism Live: How News Events Foster Engagement and Expand Revenue (pdf), Josh Stearns at Democracy Fund gets into the weeds of tactics, planning, pulling off and paying for different kinds of events. There are even worksheets and templates – super useful for orgs of any kind that are new to planning in person events for their community.

In person events don’t need to be high cost but they are logistical hurdles and you don’t want to set yourself up to fail.

Webinars and smaller, more nimble, online events are great options. You could run regular new member, reader, subscriber events. Invite people to a bi-weekly or monthly live event. Maybe host it at a couple different times. Keep it short. Introduce new readers to people on your team. Maybe give folks a chance to meet each other (zoom rooms!). Give people a call to action – a next step like committing to attend an in-person event or become a paying member.

Basically: Help people feel part of something.

Pay attention to people who click (or even open) an invite email but don’t register or attend. Reach out to them with a special invite or ask them about obstacles to attending or better ways to host an event like this.

Transacting like you enjoy it

Don’t throw away your opportunities to have a conversation, share a bit of humor or ask for more info. Transactional emails – the receipt, thank you and other automated update messages – play a hidden role in retention.

Cory Brown of the 99 Newsletter Project (among other good works) had this to say about transactional messages:

One thing I’d love to see more of: Using transactional emails to reinforce the value proposition for readers, rather than just being another ignorable receipt to file away.

It doesn’t take much to stand out — a receipt email doesn’t need to be 9 paragraphs. But a little personality and thoughtfulness can go a long way.
– Cory Brown

At a minimum: don’t ignore or be casual about transactional emails. Be on point. Don’t be boring. And don’t ever confuse people. I’ve seen “thanks for giving” emails sent from the address and with the branding of the payment processor – a third party that the member/donor has never heard of before. It’s the sort of thing that creates doubts rather than trust.

Retention starts before a member joins or subscribes

Perhaps the moral of the story is retention starts before someone shows up.

First, have a deliberate retention strategy, including some basics:

A welcome series.
Events and engagements designed to make people welcome and comfortable early on. Don’t just let them subscribe and throw them into the unnavigable “we need your money now” waters.
Segmenting and reporting designed to give you a look at retention results at 3, 6, 9 months and so on.

Second, if you want people who stick around look for people like those who already stick around.

It’s easy(ish) to recruit people from an email acquisition service, Facebook lead gen or ad campaign. But good initial results don’t always mean much in the long run. If folks from a certain list or demographic recruited a year or two back didn’t show good retention, don’t go back to that source.

This may mean looking at smaller or more niche audiences and lists. You may want to partner with smaller organizations and/or online media outlets and influencers.

Third, don’t fake people out. Organizations may go looking for a new audiences and offer up a kind of content or focus that appeals to the audience but isn’t what the organization does. This sort of crossover content can backfire.

A recent report by Dr. Francie Ostrower at the LBJ School looked at the results of arts organizations who invested in audience recruitment programs funded by the Wallace Foundation.

The results of one-off programs for the sake of recruiting new audiences were disappoint. Don’t be something you aren’t just to please people (woah, verbatim mom-speak). It’s also a reminder that people don’t immediately attach to a brand or org.

Don’t wait for Elvis to leave the building

Raise your hand if you love planning and running a reactivation campaign to get inactive subscribers or lapsed supporters back in the fold?

Anyone? Yeah. I know a few folks (like me) who actually like this work. But it’s rough. And if reactivation is the extent of your retention strategy then you’re too late to do much good.

Want to keep people around – get to them early. Once someone hits an 18 or 24 month inactive list they’ve almost certainly moved on.

As Frank Page probably realized, people aren’t here for the Hayride. Give them a reason to stay.

Pretending to be your donor

January 2, 2013 by Ted Fickes

I found myself wondering the other day – as I struggled to make sense of the less-than-clear instructions on my business’ quarterly sales tax return – how often anyone from the Department of Revenue actually goes through the process of filling out their own paperwork as though they were a business owner like me.

If the folks who process returns, the people who manage the people who process returns, the department heads and the political appointees at the top of the org chart â€¦ if any of these folks had actually experienced the process of filling out a return, they might be inspired to improve the design of the system, or at the very least prepare clearer instructions.

I suspect, however, that most of these folks don’t actually use the system they run, so most have no idea just how complex, frustrating, and difficult it might be for the end users.

It’s easy to poke fun of large government agencies for not bothering to use their own services, but I’m willing to bet that most nonprofit folks don’t do it, either. When is the last time you walked through any of your user experiences, not with the eye of the program manager or executive director but as though you were the customer, user, visitor, or client? If it’s been more than a few months, it might be worth revisiting.

While pretending you are a first time prospective donor to your organization, visit the website and see how easy it is to find the information you think you might want to know.
Go through the process of making a donation while pretending you are a supporter of the organization but unfamiliar with the donation process â€¦ visit the website, find the donation page, and actually make a donation. Any annoyances? Any steps where you might be tempted to give up and do something else?
Try signing up for your newsletter. Was there any friction in the experience? Now unsubscribe to your newsletter. Was that as easy as it should be?
If you sell products online, are there any annoyances in the shopping or purchasing experience, or it is smooth and delightful?
Try playing the part of a long-time supporter experimenting with a new service or tool for the first time. Did you easily figure out each step? Did the process make you feel valuable?
If your nonprofit provides a facility or a service, this list gets a lot longer: imagine being a first-time visitor to the museum, or a first-time customer of the service.

Walk through every step of the process thinking about how that user will experience it. Every user touch point sends a sharp signal to your supporters and potential supporters. It tells them how much you care about them and their contribution. And beyond the symbolism and messages, the more friction and the less pleasant your user experience, the fewer who will actually complete the transaction.

When we run programs, websites, and organizations, we often think about their design in terms of what’s easiest for us. We pick the donation tool that most easily integrates with our database and our bank. We design the navigation on our website in terms of how our staff uses the website. We design the sign-up forms for our membership programs, field trips, and services based on what’s convenient for managing those offerings.

We often don’t think about the experience of our supporters, visitors, customers, and clients. The result: the user experience is often neglected, filled with unnecessary points of friction, and can even be simply unpleasant.

And, unlike the Department of Revenue, we can’t compel people to use our services.

(Photo by Flickr user Sybren A. StÃ¼vel).

Jacob Smith is the co-author of The Nimble Nonprofit: An Unconventional Guide to Sustaining and Growing Your Nonprofit, the former mayor of Golden, Colorado, and a nonprofit consultant.

A friend of a friend: How Obama used Facebook to turn out voters

December 6, 2012 by Ted Fickes

We all know that social networks can be a crucial arena for engaging your supporters and developing new relationships, but for a sense of scale look no further than the 2012 presidential campaigns. Both campaigns made extensive use of social networks like Spotify, Pinterest, Instagram, Tumblr, and, of course, the giants Facebook and Twitter.

One major problem for the campaigns in the closing weeks of the race: 18-29 year-old voters are very difficult to reach by phone, and making sure that very specific audience actually voted was a critical campaign element, especially for the Obama campaign. Their solution: aggressively, intelligently, and strategically using Facebook to identify supporters, keep them engaged, and then – during the GOTV (“get out the vote”) efforts in the final weeks – reminding them to actually vote.

Because of their early and sustained efforts identifying supporters through Facebook, 85% of the campaign’s GOTV 18-29 year-old targets were friends of friends of Barack Obama on Facebook. Obama for American Digital Director Teddy Goff explains, “We had about seven million instances of people contacting about five million people, all of their friends who they knew … these were people we had to reach, and couldn’t reach otherwise.”

And note the importance of very clearly identifying the audience. Even though Facebook users span a wide range of demographics, different demographics use the network differently. This was a strategy targeted for a very specific demographic. This not-so-little detail highlights a common problem in exhortations for nonprofits to use social networks more aggressively. The first step should always be defining the goal, and the second step – always – understanding the mechanisms of change enough to clearly and specifically define the audiences you need to influence. Then you can figure out if and how social networks matter, and how to use them effectively if they do.

But there is clearly a growing chance that social networks will matter, and if your target audience for a given campaign includes 18-29 year-olds in the United States, then social networks may well be critical part of your strategy.

Jacob Smith is the co-author of The Nimble Nonprofit: An Unconventional Guide to Sustaining and Growing Your Nonprofit, the former mayor of Golden, Colorado, and a nonprofit consultant.

Feeling the Love

May 24, 2012 by Ted Fickes

I’ve been subscriber to a local cultural organization for twenty years now, and for the first time since I first joined I didn’t renew my subscription.

From the “Missed Opportunities” folder: in all those years, nearly every time the organization has ever reached out to me has been a solicitation â€¦ contribute to the organization, buy tickets for a special event, donations to special funds. No notes just thanking me for being a supporter. No acknowledgment of my long tenure as a subscriber. No invitation to offer my thoughts for the next year’s performance schedule or ideas for other events and programs. No phone calls from board members asking what I think of the organization or if I enjoyed the performance last week. No gestures of appreciation at all.

What’s so striking is how little it takes to make supporters feel appreciated. It doesn’t require fancy parties, expensive gifts, or elaborate theatrics.

For their five-year anniversary, the local cafe in a town I used to call home gave coffee mugs to all of their customers. A decade later that mug is still a cherished part of my morning coffee routine, and I eat there every time I pass thru town. Every now and again, I’ll get a call from a nonprofit staff member or board member just to thank me for supporting the organization. I’ve enjoyed the occasional “member appreciation event” over the years. After getting stuck in the dreaded “purple line” at President Obama’s inauguration and missing the event, my Congressional Representative sent me a photo of the swearing-in. It didn’t make up for missing the event, but it was a very cool gesture and required very little effort or expense.

Even more disappointing: if they couldn’t figure out how to reach out to me in some non-solicitous fashion during the many years of my support, at the very least this local cultural organization might have done so when I didn’t re-subscribe by the deadline, since retaining me as a subscriber has to be much less expensive than re-acquiring me later. Doing so would have offered them an opportunity to learn why I didn’t renew (too expensive this year), earn my gratitude if it had been because I forgot and missed the deadline, perhaps offer me a special deal because of my tenure, or suggest an alternative (“did you consider renewing with tickets in a less expensive section?”).

I’m a huge fan of this organization, but I’m not feeling the love coming back my way, which can’t help but weaken my enthusiasm for them. Even for those organizations that are the most resource constrained, you can find ways to make sure your supporters know how much you appreciate them, and that, in turn, can’t help but deepen their relationship with you.

(Photo by Flickr user candiceecidnac).

What Nonprofits Can Learn From the YouTube Laugh Factory

January 30, 2012 by Ted Fickes

Screen shot 2012-01-28 at 12.28.16 PM — Wired Magazine shares lessons from Maker Studios.

Last month’s Wired magazine had a feature on Maker Studios and the rise of commercially viable independent web-based videos. Their takeaways on effectively using video online:

Rule 1: Make a lot of video content. A lot.
And if the video releases are regularly scheduled, all the better.

Rule 2: Target a niche.
Be really clear on what audience you are targeting and make sure you understand that audience really well.

Rule 3: Connect with your fans.
Olga Kay is sending a personal note to each of the 450,000 people subscribed to her YouTube channel. Nuff said.

Rule 4: Collaborate.
Collaborations can make for great content and introduce all of the folks to each other’s audiences.

Rule 5: Optimize for the algorithms.
One example: tagging, title, explain, and annotate your videos with as many specific and general descriptors as possible.

The goal for most nonprofits might focus more on engagement than ad revenue, but the lessons apply just as well.

Want to Fundraise Like Charity:Water? Develop Engaged Advocates, not Donors

August 23, 2011 by Ted Fickes

I’ve always been struck by the different ways old and new organizations approach online communications, fundraising and organizing. The two groups could learn a lot by studying each other.

Charity:Water poster - 4,5000 children will die today from water-related diseases — Charity:Water poster with a focused and powerful idea.

Newer groups aren’t beholden to a certain way of doing things, entrenched hierarchies and well-established silos. They’re likely led and staffed by bootstrapping generalists that are truly passionate about an idea or mission and not much deterred by failures. Their enthusiasm rubs off on those around them and can stir up a hornet’s nest of much-needed action.

Organizations that have been around a while (and let’s say 15-20 years or more) have staying power. They have figured out how to get things done and sustain the business of running an organization. Relationship-building takes time and they have stuck to it – likely carving out strong relationships with the powerful in communities and government.

Most that work in and around nonprofit organizations these days would probably say that adapting to digital networks and online fundraising has been a challenge for older groups. A well-established way of doing things is challenged by the speed and apparent loss of control over message and action wrought by online networks.

Learning from Younger Groups

There is room in the nonprofit tent for both old and new organizations. But technical change is happening fast and the fabric of communities, environment, institutions is fraying before our eyes. Groups need to be at the top of their game. [Read more…] about Want to Fundraise Like Charity:Water? Develop Engaged Advocates, not Donors

Storytelling a Start to Engaging Action, not the End

July 12, 2011 by Ted Fickes

Is storytelling enough? Is storytelling the peak engagement activity? If your organization is engaging supporters with good stories are you doing all you can for your people and issues? Storytelling is essential but it must tie tellers and readers together into a network that takes meaningful action.

That seems one possible conclusion that could be drawn from a recent post by Katya Andresen in which she discusses the “humanization highway” concept in Jay Baer and Amber Naslund’s book The Now Revolution. Baer and Naslund are describing responsive businesses with great customer service models. In their view (quite rightly, it seems) the more “human” an organization becomes the better service it provides. This leads to better, more loyal customers. A similar case could be made for nonprofits: interact with members and supporters on a personal, human level and you’ll have more active and engaged participants.

Baer and Nasulund lay out a five point continuum of “humanness” that places storytelling at the top. The full list is: