How should we define success?

Ah...July. A new year. A fresh start. The holiday weekend is a good time for a little R&R so that you come back to the office re-energized. But while you're sipping on that cold beverage poolside, take a few minutes and reflect on the year - which appeals stand out in your mind as the most successful and which did not perform as well. Was it an issue of timing, integration, target audience or the tool itself? And for that matter, how should we define success? Is it based solely on dollars raised or can we also consider non-donors converted, lapsed donor participation and other non-giving related engagement with the appeal? Do things like providing updated contact information, sending back a comment, and asking for more information also add up to a successful appeal? To use Scott's acronym IMHO (which means "in my humble opinion" if any of you, like me, had to look that up) I'd say yes because this type of engagement is the first step to securing a gift. If we're talking about online appeals, we should also be considering metrics like the email bounce rate, emails opened versus buttons clicked (the number of folks viewing the appeal versus the number persuaded to click) and clicks to the giving form versus gifts actually submitted.

Everyone asks what the benchmarks should be – what constitutes a good response? If you do a quick search online you’ll find a wide-variety of answers by industry. The frustrating part for fundraisers is that all non-profits are lumped together. And “good” for a religious charity is very different than “good” for higher education fundraiser. Depending on the type of campaign, audience, mailing frequency, and content, “good” is also different for each institution. For a college that has never emailed their constituents, the bounce rate may be as high as 25 – 50% depending on how old the data is, an email open rate of 10 – 15% is good, and a click through rate to the giving page anywhere up to 0.5% would be good. As the institution emails more frequently and more strategically, we’d expect those numbers to go up (in the case of the bounce rate, down of course). Let’s go back to the MainSpring University example that I mentioned in my last post. Their email open rate has steadily grown since they have sent more frequent email appeals. So while I may have said that an open rate of 15 – 20% was good for them at one time, now I’d say high 20% range is good for them. Similarly, the click through rate of 0.5% was good at one time, and now 1.1% and higher is more average for their appeals. So when asked, what’s good – the best response really is “it depends.” It’s very hard to resist wanting to compare your results with other institutions, but in order to gauge your success a better comparison would be to compare your results to those of your previous campaigns that were sent to the same or very similar segments.

Asking yourself questions like this will help you not only gauge the success of your appeal but may also give you some hints as to the next steps to successfully converting those constituents into donors. Now go on, refill that drink and enjoy the long weekend!