Mine Your Own Business

It took a good year for my husband and me to learn how to cook for two after our two sons left the nest. Spaghetti is the worst. I swear we were making enough pasta for two families and not two people. But at some point we realized that we were wasting our resources. We were throwing away money by buying too much. We were spending too much time preparing large meals for people that weren’t even there to eat it. And we were wasting food because we couldn’t possibly eat it all—you can only eat the same thing so many days in a row.

But, as they say, practice makes perfect. So, we eventually figured out exactly how much pasta to make to have a lovely dinner with enough leftovers for lunch the next day. And we discovered that just because our kids didn’t like alfredo sauce doesn’t mean that we couldn’t ‘recycle’ that spaghetti for a completely new meal. I guess it was sort of a 'reduce, reuse, recycle' moment in our life.

Oddly enough, many of you have been creating your marketing for the masses as well and you don’t know how to do less better. You're engaged in Spaghetti Marketing! 🍝 You may be realizing that the materials you’re buying to mass mail aren’t producing the results you’re looking for. You’d even love to reuse some of your creations to go a bit further, but don’t know how. Wouldn’t it be great if you could recycle some ideas that would save time, but make money, too? This is a nonprofit marketing 'reduce, reuse, and recycle' moment! You can do better—and I’ve got a few ideas below of how to begin.

This week’s menu…

Left Brain Marketing Methods:  I’ve already told you that I’m a data nerd. So, it shouldn’t surprise you that I use Excel and my left brain to track results. But we also track the budget we expend to make a campaign happen and the money we bring in on that campaign, too. Today I’ll show you left brain tricks hidden behind the curtain.

Right Brain Marketing Moxie:  Clearly, I love me some right brain moxie. But that doesn’t mean you have to have thousands of ideas to pull off successful communications with your donors. In fact, you can mine your own (marketing) business. Think about it...When you mine the earth, you dig in deep for the purpose of extracting the elements you find that might be valuable or useful. And, yes, you can do that with your donor communications as well. I’ll provide some examples that we've used to demonstrate how you can mine your own (marketing) business.

Are you ready? LET’S GET COOKIN’!

Left Brain Marketing Methods:  I think sometimes people ooh and ahh so much over the right brain marketing moxie and the cleverness of the ideas that they don’t realize that none—and I mean none—of those ideas should be executed without a firm foundation of left brain marketing methods.  Keep this in mind…

A weak plan (left brain),
implemented beautifully (right brain),
is a waste of time for your donor.

Let’s unpack that for a minute.

A weak plan—ignoring left brain strategy, data, and results-based ROI.
Implemented beautifully—executing a creative idea that many people love.
Is a waste of time for your donor—looking nice on the outside but lacking purpose and missional substance. You just mailed out fluff and wasted your donor's time and attention.

That’s why we make sure that our left brain plan is as strong as our right brain execution. Here are a few left brain marketing methods that you can implement to strengthen your purpose and your substance. 

1. Strategy: We always know why we are mailing something. After all, if we don’t know why we’re mailing something, how on earth will our donors know. While we find that every piece we give tends to EDUCATE our donors in some way, they are also used to strategically REPORT progress to our donors, ASK our donors for something, or THANK them for their generosity. Everything we do hinges on one of those VITAL VERBS—yours should, too.
   
   
   
2. Data: Your database is filled with knowledge, but you won’t know that unless you begin pulling reports. We review our donor data every single year. We know who is giving and who isn’t. We know what kind of donor they are--first time, loyal, bequest, past volunteer, etc., and we steward them appropriate. We’re not throwing a piece of spaghetti against the wall to see if it will stick. We’re marketing to produce the best results. We do not market to everyone—we’re not Crest or Coke. As nonprofit marketers we are more about conversion marketing than brand marketing. That means not everyone needs to know us! The donors that have both an affinity toward us and the capacity to give represents the sweet spot of donors that we can convert to giving in bigger, deeper, more meaningful ways each year. And those who don’t respond, likely aren’t stampworthy.
   
   
3. Results-based ROI: You need to know how much things costs. For example, at my office, I know that a black and white copy costs 1¢ and a color copy costs 6¢. My CFO was happy to look at our copy invoice to determine what those bottom-line costs were—and that’s helpful. We all know a stamp costs 53¢. And that knowledge is power. Now I know that a mailing with 2 color copies and one stamp will cost:
   
   12￠= two copies
   53￠= one stamp
   65￠= total cost for one donor 
   
   Multiply that times the Top 50 Donor segment that we sent it to and our total cost was: $32.50.

Then on the flip side, we can pull reports from our database to show us how much our Top 50 Donors gave to us, say in the 30 days after that mailing. Obviously, the goal is to make more than $32.50. I’d say 95% of the time we greatly exceed that very low-bar goal. However, if we don’t that’s telling too! If a mailing doesn’t produce any results, then it was ineffective. It didn’t speak to the donors, we didn’t make an attractive appeal, or it simply wasn’t well received. Either way, that's good data that shows us what not to do. Luckily, it only wasted $32.50—and that is only wasted it you didn’t learn something.
 

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Right Brain Marketing Moxie: I’ve done nonprofit marketing/communications/stewardship presentations for thousands of people. And repeatedly, people always ask these two questions:

1. How do you come up with some many ideas?
2. How will I ever be able to come up with so many ideas?

Well, there is a method to that madness, too. Keep this in mind…

 A strategic plan (left brain),
implemented poorly (right brain),
is a waste of time for you.

Let’s unpack that for a minute.

A strategic plan—prioritizing left brain strategy, data, and results-based ROI.
Implemented poorly—sending out boring content, a wall of words, or something that looks like it was put together with little care or attention to detail.
Is a waste of time for you—looking bad and reading like a snoozefest, even though on point with purpose and substance, will get neglected--and possibly immediately recycled by donors—failing to bring in the results you were looking to get. You just wasted your time. You know you get these in your own mailbox and you also know you’ve been guilty of inaction or reactive recycling. 

Once you know your left brain marketing methods are strong, your right brain has the freedom to get creative. It’s science. Although we can multitask, our brains are natural mono-taskers. That means once you’ve made your left brain marketing decisions, then your right brain has the freedom to get creative. Just giving your brain the opportunity to use the right side by itself, will help you to find, discover, and create more clever ideas. Here is some right brain marketing moxie that will help you discover that you’re closer than you think to getting people to open your mail.

I think sometimes one reason we end up sending boring content, walls of words, and poorly executed mailings is basic idea generation. Just because you’re doing marketing at your nonprofit doesn’t mean you’re a marketing major! It means you love the mission, you have a small budget, and/or you have a small staff, and the marketing part was in the fine print under ‘other duties as assigned’.

That’s why I started this blog. It’s all about knowledge generosity and sharing ideas that produce results with you, so you can steal them, use them, and reap the rewards all on your own.

That’s why I wanted to share the concept of mining your own (marketing) business. Ideas can be reduced, reused, and recycled. We do this all the time and you can, too.

Take these ideas we mined with a Wheel of Fortune theme.

Use #1 (top left): Using a basic graphic as the clipart for our card that educated our donors on how to give now and later—Give Where You Live. You can do this too, with any phrase, at this website.  Go wild!

Use #2 (bottom left): The same Wheel of Fortune Concept, but this one uses a brad to make an actual ‘spinning wheel’ that the donors can manipulate to see how much their endowed scholarship fund will award based on the size of their fund.

Use #3 (right top and bottom): Same WOF theme, but now we're educating donors about leaving the Foundation as a percentage beneficiary. We reused the brad idea so they could manipulate the wheel but for a different audience and different purpose.

When you segment donors into smaller, manageable groups, you can do more custom work like this. And, yes, an idea sent to one donor segment can easily be recycled into a similar idea for a different donor segment.

Mine your own (marketing) business by reducing the number of donors you market to, reusing ideas by making small tweaks that will resonate with the recipients, and recycling ideas that were used for one donor segment, but are new to a different donor segment.  These left brain marketing methods combined with the right brain marketing moxie of idea mining really will make a difference. Try it and let me know how it worked for you.

All My Best,

dawn
[email protected]