Future Fundraising Now

Brand standards vs. what works in online fundraising

Great story in the Innovative Email blog: Change your calls to action & see your click-through rates soar.

Through testing, they discovered that green call-to-action buttons got more clicks than other colors. (Interestingly, they've also found that the effective call-to-action color varies from one industry to the next.) Unfortunately, the company's website color-scheme demanded that the buttons should be red. Green buttons violated brand standards.

(The happy end of the story is that they were allowed to test the effective color against the brand-compliant color, and the difference was dramatic enough to persuade them to make an exception.)

The learnings:

If you find brand & consistency obstacles in your path when testing calls to action, remember that your job is to try and interrupt someone that is reading through their inbox. Your job is more difficult than that of the website because of this, so try to positively challenge any resistance, ask for a small-scale test segment that will still give you a significant result and let the results speak for themselves.

People exploring your website and thinking about giving didn't read your brand guidelines. They don't care about your tasteful color palette. In fact, they are more likely to notice a clashing color than a matching one! So even if your color scheme is full of good "response" colors, you might do better with something that stands out from them.

These issues exist not only online but in all media.

I realize this information would make brand cops gnash their teeth (if they read this blog, which they don't). But you need to make a high-level decision: What's more important, effective fundraising, or a well-guarded brand? The two frequently are in conflict. And if your decision is brand over effectiveness -- why?

Thanks to BeRelevant for the tip.

Irrelevant images kill fundraising

Compare these two web ads for Haiti relief:

The first one, for World Vision makes a clear connection between the words and the image.

The second one, for United States Fund for UNICEF is startlingly incongruous. We see a mother and child. We assume they're Haitian, but they could be Canadian, for all we know. There's no hint that these two need help, are in danger, hungry, sick, or anything in particular.

Kind of odd, given that a major city lies in ruins, something like 250,000 people are crushed, more than a million are homeless, and many more are struggling with hunger and disease.

Now why would UNICEF choose to use an irrelevant image?

I have no inside knowledge of the situation, so I could be completely wrong about this, but I'll venture a guess: It's branding -- that old nemesis of effective fundraising. Branding just tends to do that. I can almost see it in my mind: The guidelines for UNICEF stress the dignity and self-sufficiency of those they serve. It would be exploitative to show them in their need.

It feels better -- a lot better -- to be able to say we protect the dignity of the people we serve. And images of people in pain, in need, surrounded by destruction or squalor -- those just make us uncomfortable.

But what if the cost of our feeling better about our messaging is significantly less revenue to serve?

To me, choosing feel-good fundraising over effective fundraising is immoral. The trade-off is way too steep; lives are at stake.

The only reason people respond to the UNICEF ad is because they're seeing the real pictures elsewhere.

If your organization is trapped by brand standards that force you to be irrelevant and ineffective, you should put a lot of energy toward changing that. It simply isn't tenable in a hurting world to let a discredited marketing theory keep you from raising the funds you need.

Half-way branding does more harm than good

The other day I got an newsletter from a local nonprofit (which I won't name). The lead story on page one starts out like this:

We are pleased to share [Charity]'s new brand with you! After much research, serious analysis and consideration, we made a decision on a new "look and feel" for our organization. You will see this new brand reflected in future newsletters, mailings and our website. While our outward appearance is new, our commitment to [the organization's cause] remains the same.

It goes on and on in that vein: Proud but boring navel-gazing about their new "brand."

Big warning sign: If it seems you need to say Our look has changed, but we still do what we've always done just as well, you probably are digging yourself into a hole.

Unfortunately in this case, the "brand" they're so proud of consists of sans-serif fonts (significantly harder to read than serif fonts in print) lots copy in ALL CAPS (hard to read) and a lot of reverse-out type and type over color (also hard to read). The central pillar of the brand, it seems, is hiding what they do from people by making it hard to read.

But unreadability is only part of the problem: This organization has bought the damaging myth that a look is a brand. That's like thinking your clergyperson's haircut is the content of your faith. Your "look" is not your brand: What you do and who you are is your brand. The look is a small part of the real package.

There's nothing at all wrong with creating a distinct look -- assuming it's not unreadable. If the "look" is readable, nice, and appropriate, it will do no harm and probably do some real good.

The problem is the belief that look equals brand. It lets everyone off the hook. The newsletter article is a perfect example of the distortion that myth causes: They used prime donor-attention real estate not to promote the cause, not to motivate donors to care, not to reward donors who gave -- but to yammer on about the "brand." Cause-wise, they would have been better off leaving the page blank. (That would get people wondering what's up. Maybe they'd poke around in the newsletter and discover some cool things about the cause.)

If someone in your organization, or some outside branding expert proposes a branding project, make sure they are expert in your cause -- not just graphic design, marketing, and the latest fad color palettes and fonts. Because if all you get out of the project is a "look," you will have lost ground in your quest for a better brand.

You can't hide your bad attitude any more

Customers and donors seem to be developing psychic powers. It's as if they know what we're thinking. You can't put anything past them.

That's what we see in a recent post at Tom Peters' blog, Your Brand Can Only Be As Good As...

It's impossible to fake out your customers. Our world has become very transparent, and your customers can see, clearly, right into the soul of your company. If you want your customers to have clear, compelling, motivating beliefs about who you are and what you do for customers, you must ensure that your company's employees have those beliefs. Otherwise, your marketing and sales promises will not resonate with the reality of being your customer.

This matters for nonprofits too.

If your organization is full of people who think your donors are clueless dolts who are barely worthy of supporting you, it's going to show. Even if those people aren't involved in fundraising or marketing.

I bring up that example because I've seen that specific issue many times at nonprofits: While the fundraisers earnestly struggle to motivate donors to join the cause, a culture of anti-donor, we're-too-cool-for-those-ignorant-fogies disdain constantly undermines them.

It's the kind of stuff we used to get away with, because personality didn't really matter. But in a deeply connected world where people are suspicious of the messages they receive, you're going to get caught: It won't be dramatic or embarrassing; just a slow death by low response rates and tumbling retention.

If your organization has this cultural problem, your pain has probably already begun.

The beauty of an ugly website

How much effort are you putting into making your website beautiful? It might be too much.

Gerry McGovern's blog takes a look at The Ugliest Website in the World -- craigslist.

Yes, craigslist is ugly. And 47 million people visit it every month. That's more than eBay or Amazon. Ugliness has little to do with anything:

Craigslist is willing to do the basic, boring stuff again and again and again. It thinks long-term. It puts people first. It trusts them. And millions of people trust it and use it every day to find love and cars and stuff. Craigslist, the anti-brand, is one of the biggest brands of the 21st Century.

That's not to say that an attractive craigslist would be less successful. (Well, you never know…)

But beauty is overrated. I know too many organizations that get stuck on beauty and end up delaying for months, even years, because they aren't happy with the way their website looks.

It's far more important that your website do what it does well. That's where most of your energy should go.