Episode 271: Communication Fatigue in a Hyperconnected World - Better mass communication tactics
It's another great day right here on this edition of Around with Randall. I can only tell you what my inbox looks like, and my guess is. Is that yours looks much the same. It's overwhelming. How much communication do I get from not only friends and certainly for profit business, advertising, marketing, but also from non profits. And I'm not on Instagram or all the other type of X or anything else.
I am overwhelmed at times. And today we want to talk about this overwhelming of our donors that in a world in which we have hyper connectivity, are we overwhelming them to become or pushing them towards donor fatigue? And I would argue that in many cases we are. Today we're going to take this apart. Why this is happening.
And then what are some of the things that you should kind of think about as a global thought process in trying to figure out how to get it right? And then six tactical things that you can consider when you think about the way in which you communicate with prospects and donors on a mass perspective. So we'll start at the top, as we always do.
We are overwhelmed. I mean, between the texting, the social media, the direct marketing and that doesn't even speak to all the fraud and, you know, crazy people out there that are trying to send stuff that nonprofits get mixed up in this messaging blitz and that attention, I believe, is now a very scarce resource. How do we get the attention of people that are wanting to connect, but to stand out because that connects when we have their attention to the idea of financial viability, to their willingness to be maybe more philanthropic, fatigue is really not that uncommon when we think about generosity.
Somebody makes a gift if they give an email address or maybe an A, and I'm talking about things over the over the internet, we'll talk about things in the mail. So we add them together to even more. So is that we're really pushing into this idea of, well, we got to keep and we got to keep. We got to figure out how to take care of them.
It's a cognitive overload at times. I'm overwhelmed and I don't have all the stuff. Why is all this happening? Well, there's a couple factors that we need to, and I'm sure when you think about it, you'd come to the same. Number one is the growth of digital fundraising tools has lowered barriers to outreach. And this is about cost.
When we look at the effect of being able to email or text somebody, even if you have a third party vendor, it's pennies on the dollar compared to trying to mail something. And yet people are still receiving nonprofit mail. The second part of that is, is that as we become more sophisticated with technology, automation has become a big part of this.
So it can be loaded with lots of messaging into a system. So it just automatically goes out. The third thing is, is that there's an economic uncertainty, which I've talked about here on around with Randall. And as a result, we feel sometimes like we should communicate more to stand out, that we have to be unique, that our nonprofit needs it the most or a bunch, and that it really then number four is devolving trust that it's kind of like the boy who cries wolf.
Aesop's fables that if the boy keeps crying wolf at one point when he gets eaten and there's a real wolf, nobody listens. Well, how many times do you put up, let's say, an email or text into spam or into, do not contact or you unsubscribe because it's just overwhelming. Which means that the trust and relevance that you want to build with your donors is actually diminished by this idea of automation and growth in digital.
Most organizations aren't facing a generosity problem. Many are facing an attention and trust problem. And part of that is our own fault. In the nonprofit world, part of that is just the world that we live in. But we have to find ways of overcoming this if we're really going to be really what we want to be, which is respectful of our donors and prospects, give them the information that they need so they can be knowledgeable about what they give to, but not overwhelm them.
Or they walk away. So that's kind of the why. Now let's start pivoting towards or moving towards the tactical. But before doing that, we want to talk about kind of thinking about why this is really important when we right sized our communication in terms of volume, in terms of content, it reduces pressure and increases confidence. It also, if done correctly, will create a much clearer understanding of purpose and outcomes for our organization instead of scattershot a bunch of stuff, we actually can get into the conversation about what's really important and that it really aligns with the thought process, which we talk a lot about here.
My good friend Nathan Chapelle talks about it from the generosity crisis perspective is, is that it really is about more long term commitments. We're honoring the relationship. What we see in terms of outcomes when we do it, and the six tactical things I'm going to recommend is higher retention rates because people don't feel overwhelmed. We actually can increase lifetime value in terms of how we evaluate our best donor opportunities from a financial perspective, if we were able to do it in the right way, it will probably create a more predictive revenue stream as to our annual giving.
And that's what we're really talking about here. We're not talking about principal gifts, where, you know, certainly you're using email or texting or other things, but we're talking about mass numbers and that those revenue streams are hard to predict. And the last thing is, is if we remain more relevant with the right kind of communication, it improves our brand perception and advocacy.
When we think about it, from the idea of the generosity crisis and deepening more transactional, excuse me, transformational gift opportunities rather than transactional. This is aligns with what I talk about in terms of elevations. How do we get more people to consider more engagement, more transformational conversations? Well, this aligns with our gift officers spending time talking with people who have given 5 or 10 times.
If we give them the right messaging to find out, are the interest in the state gift? Would they like to increase their gift? Are they interested in more information? It should align with our hopes of having more calls and visits as we elevate annual fund donors leadership, annual giving into major gifts or principal gifts or planned gifts into more opportunities of pipeline development.
All this to say is, is that it's an issue that if we address correctly, it's going to align with the things we really want. As a nonprofit, which is deeper relationships and better understanding of the value that we deliver to the community, to the people that we serve. So let's jump into the six tactical things that I think you can do.
And these are somewhat cost effective. We're not advocating at least we it's me. I'm not advocating that you go out and spend a ton of money to bring in a bunch of outside sources. I think a lot of this is just internal conversation and then segmenting in the right ways. So tactic number one is in some way, shape or form.
Being able to conduct some type of communication audit. What is the plan. Are you sending out emails because you think it's the right time? Or have you at the beginning of the year, fiscal year, calendar year, laid out a plan to what we're trying to accomplish? This is about mapping to start with all the outbound communication and that can be email, print, social events, phone, text, peer to peer campaigns.
Go back 6 to 12 months and find out what you've done before. You actually can plan what you're doing, because what I think you'll find is overlaps more isn't better. That these overlaps create the idea. And I've had an organization do this. They found out that a donor was receiving three messages per week. Now here's the crux. If you're in a complex organization health care, education, largest social service because other departments as well.
And so sometimes we have to fight the battle of trying to figure out what windows philanthropies, emails or texts or outreach go versus marketing versus some other part of the organization, like in health care. It could be dealing with press. Gagne is kind of the leading player in patient satisfaction. We need to audit these from an organizational wide perspective, just not the Philanthropy Foundation department.
And then we need to classify these messages. Are they and ask are they a report of the invite? Are the England Lodgment. What is it that we're doing. And what I think you'll find is there's maybe more messaging going out than you actually realize, probably from other departments. Again, based upon whether or not it's a large organization.
If you're sending out two emails per month out of your department, and there's two more coming out of marketing and two more out of some other place, it's no surprise that donors are saying, whoa, I can't keep up.
This is about cadence discipline. And it's not just a marketing decision. It's a governance decision. How is it we want to communicate with the people that are closest to us, and we need leadership to endorse this because we may not have control of marketing or finance or other areas of the organization, which may require someone from above all to say, how do we coordinate together?
So the first thing is tactic number one is do an audit. Figure out what the organization is sending out. The second tactic is to really think about motivation rather than wealth. That segmentation is a good thing, but it's not just by zip code or by wealth, or who gave the biggest gifts. It's about what they're most interested in.
And this begins to move into some more detailed, higher level thought process. If we can figure out what the motivation is for donors, what it's going to do is you're sending them information that they're interested in that lowers their fatigue. They're being overwhelmed by communication. So you could look at motivations in categories that are actually pretty simple. Maybe they're community based.
Maybe you know how the community is impacted by what the organization does in their donation did, or they are driven by education or recognition? If you're in the in a church or synagogue or a mosque, what type of faith driven giving things or options are out there? If they've given a lot, are they interested? Or maybe they're a certain age legacy in terms of a stake giving?
Or maybe they are thinking about innovation we always talk about. I am not sure I would recommend just having an I a fund, but innovation fund that can build the organization. Can you figure out some broad categories and then look and see where people have restricted gifts? Or if you've sent specific messaging that they've click through tracking? All of this is back to that auditing principle.
The second thing that you can do in terms of segmenting into motivation is to ask them, do surveys look at their past giving patterns. So this is where it becomes critically important to track how you ask and what you're asking for, or how are you communicating that can tie into people's interests. And this gets very nuanced. You may need a third party vendor for this, but there are some phenomenal ones that aren't that expensive that can tell you when we send out something on scholarship, these people click through.
But when we send something on innovation, these other people click through. Well, that drives the content that you may want to push out that won't overwhelm people. We want to align mission tone and examples based upon their motivation rather than just in general. And this then begs the question, well, how do we produce that much material? We're talking about a change of a paragraph.
So if you have as a terrible example, a four paragraph with two pictures, some type of communication, paragraph one and four, maybe the same for all segments, but two and three might adjust with a change of pictures. The idea is, is that we want to use the same general messaging for the entire organization, but in the middle, create specific ties to what they're interested in, examples of what they connect to.
So don't rewrite everything. Just rewrite small portions of it. Segmentation doesn't require, if done correctly, an immense amount of expensive software. Now, if you're a really large organization, you've got lots of different purposes. Maybe that requires a third party or a larger staff, but a really well managed spreadsheet and a discipline note taking process, or really marking your CRM correctly, can really material improve your relevance into the areas that people have interest.
And so segmentation by motivation, not by wealth. Number three tactic number three is to rebalance the ratio of asking to the idea of reporting or stewardship. I am not opposed to giving Tuesday, giving Thursday giving November whatever used to be like one day. Now it seems like everybody's coming up with their own giving day that has negative consequences.
Because then when you look every time in your inbox of your email or your X account or your whatever, you're overwhelmed by people there. So I'm asking again, where you want to differentiate yourself is the ability to say, we are going to change our ratio so that we communicate more about impact, about value, about the appreciation for people's engagement, rather than solicitation.
And the ratio that I'm recommending is 3 to 1, that your target ratio should be three impact communications. You can classify them however you want for every direct solicitation. So if every month you're asking for money, then at the end of the day, what you end up with is a lot of people who will just tune you out that you need stories.
And this is where storytelling did a podcast about this year, recently, about the value of story keeping or storytelling. Excuse me about the benefit about the beneficiaries of the work that you do and your nonprofit does about progress of the metrics, not about fundraising, but what the organization's trying to accomplish. Is it meeting the benchmarks of our strategic plan?
What have we learned? What are what is our future? What are we trying to accomplish in the grand scope of things? Also, I think the length of these and the depth of these is pretty important that conciseness is really, really a positive. I love one page reports, maybe one page front and back, two minute videos with a lot of, commentary and then lots of visuals around the value, the impact that the organization makes.
And if you're doing what we talked about before in terms of segmentation, you might have four videos going into different areas, but a bunch of them have the same information with very specific things that are added to different levels of intent, or the different areas of intent or interests that the donors have. The other thing that we should be doing, and this is based upon basic principles of stewardship, but when we do it from a mass perspective, it's harder is to really reinforce the donors role in what we've accomplished, that we could have done this without them, that their previous gifts are active and engaging and producing results.
If we shorten the messages, make them more impactful, and really talk about the stories of the benefits of the people affected. And we do it in a 3 to 1 ratio, what we get is a lot more people going, oh, I have a lot of interest in an organization. Are they doing the things that I think they're doing?
A short, impactful note with metrics and one story can outperform a 12 page annual report in terms of retention, effect. Think about value rather than size. Think about relationship building rather than asking. Think about telling stories rather than soliciting. Doing that in the right ratios will develop more long term standing, a larger opportunity support through the annual giving process with outreach.
Number four introduce intentional quiet periods. And this is so under realized and used that sometimes silence can be appropriate. It can be confidence, it can be respectful. And when you do outreach then when you do that with a quiet period, it stands out more when you send something because they haven't heard from you recently. And I'm not saying take a year off, but if you're sending something every week, at a certain point I'm like, I don't want to read all of this.
So look at a calendar and designate some times where you may not have that much communication digitally mass wise, that maybe it's late summer when a lot of people are on vacations or around the holidays after they've made a gift. Maybe, you are going to let some time go in January to kind of say, hey, we'll let everyone calm down after your end.
This does not eliminate the need for gift officers. Major gift leadership. Annual giving principle gift a state giving. This is not your individual relationship recommendation. There should be continual, appropriate internal relationship building with handwritten notes and small acknowledgments. But what I'm thinking about is in terms of a kind of a break, is mass appeals. You can communicate internally, you can communicate individually, but sometimes just giving a little break might elevate the next communication to a higher level.
When somebody says, I haven't heard from them recently. Think about quiet periods in your planning. Reactive pauses that occur after donors done something, or been engaged, or been maybe communicated with to give it a little breathing room. Number five is to really clarify the messaging. All too often I see, and I've got a university that I attended who does this really poorly.
They're breaking what I'm recommending here. When you communicate out your priorities, make it a single priority. Don't try to do everything at once. So divine. Define one central, a kind of objective, one program, one fund, one outcome. If there's a long list, people get overwhelmed. And so it's then it's hard to align subject lines. It's hard to align visuals.
It's hard to align follow up calls or actions because there's just too much in one thing. And people don't read all of that. So remove those secondary requests. Concentrate on communication in one specific area. I think about a university. I mean, the law school where I'm very honest, I'm very passionate about does this very well because I get the law school.
I'm interested almost in everything they say in one way, shape or form. But when I'm overwhelmed by the university's whole, and my wife and I have four degrees from one school, like, I'm like, I don't have time for all of this. And so you're going to have to create segmentation and a sense of priorities, kind of a sequencing that allows you to know exactly what you're communicating out.
A campaign that asks for the annual fund event tickets, volunteer sign up are typically not going to be read as in detail because it's too much then asking for one. So if you add the segmentation, which was recommendation number two, I believe, and then number three, you shorten it to meaningful communication. If you do those two things, then this becomes really easy because then you're segmenting into the messaging that they want to hear the things that they value.
So recommendation number five is clarify. Recommendation number six is a little bit more sophisticated and may not fit everybody. And maybe it's even optional. But can you allow donors to self-identify the communication that they want. Creating control that it allows donors to select frequency monthly quarterly, major updates, whatever offer the different areas that they're interested in, how they get it email, print, text.
How would they like to be asked? What we're finding is, is that when you allow donors to control a little bit of the content flow, they become more engaged. And as a result, what ends up happening is, is that you deepen the relationship and by respecting their views or their wishes, organizations that actively promote kind of a preference center or preference opportunity often see unsubscribe rates declined dramatically because people get what they want.
And that's really the emphasis that we have to speak to. If all we do is send out a lot of material and our and our, you know, people are emailing or clicking or whatever it is, unsubscribe. We've lost them. And that's why this is so important, because once you get them, why would we want to give them away?
So six things that you can do that don't require a massive amount of money or, you know, for third party vendors to do to really focus on what they want, to make it shorter, to create some gaps or some quiet periods, some silence and a ratio. It correctly and if possible, even allow them to choose, but ratio it correctly.
So you're communicating at the right levels, with solicitations being the minority. Each of these tactics is less about creativity and more about discipline, organizational discipline that's going to build trust. That fatigue is reduced when communication becomes more intentional, more relevant, more respectful. Fatigue is not going to be solved by doing things more creatively. You're just doing more of them.
It's actually going to be solved by doing less intentionally, meeting donors where they are in terms of what they want. More is not better more, just more. Figure out how to do better by doing less and concentrating in the right things.
Don't forget to check out the blogs at HallettPhilanthropy.com. Two per week 90-second reads. You get an RSS feed right into your inbox, and if you'd like to reach out to me, talk to me if you have a recommendation or question. I've been doing a lot more of those here recently. It's podcast. It helps become philanthropy, nonprofits, charity work, the work that we do every day, no matter what role you play, is more important now than it ever has been that the needs of our communities is growing.
There are more people falling into gaps between, as I always talk about free enterprise, the idea that businesses don't want to do certain things is not profitable, and government, which isn't that efficient. People fall into that gap. And that's where we live at our finest, that we help the community. Those that are the under represented, the not heard and that means what you do every day has value to individuals, important things in your community.
Don't forget my favorite saying some people make things happen. Some people watch things happen. Then there are those who wonder what happened. We're in the business of being people who make things happen reasonably not overwhelming kind of pairing with what we talked about today. For those who are wondering what happened and when we do that in the right way, it brings great meaning to our jobs every day, really makes it purposeful for who we are and what we do.
And man, that's a great way to spend a career. So, find that why that impetus to be someone who makes things happen so you can feel great about helping those who are wondering what happened. I'll look forward to seeing you the next time. Right back here on the next edition of Around with Randall.
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