Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Don't mention the economy...

You may recall some debate as to whether you should mention the economy in your appeal letters... I asked if anyone tests it to tell me the results.

Mark from bluefrog did - the idea was that maybe average donation would increase if they talked about the economic woes.

Mentioning the economy in a carefully controlled test they found that it harmed average gift considerably. I don't know the response rate but presum no significant difference or he would have said.

See the whole article here.

So, be careful about mentioning it!

Sean

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi Sean,

We've mentioned it in a number of campaigns but haven't done a proper test on it. But one particular campaign which went out right in the middle of last September's global crisis dealt with the economic situation in some detail and the results were fairly spectacular -it was the best non-Christmas mailing that client has ever had, with a very healthy response rate and average gift. I'll check the figures to see how the average compared with previous average gifts

Mark Phillips said...

Hi Sean

I do mention in the post on www.queerideas.co.uk, that response rates were virtually the same for both segments (they were also pretty healthy!). In fact there was a very small increase in response for the credit crunch pack. But this was dwarfed by the reduction in average gift.

I think it possible that the featured cause will have an impact on how talking about the credit crunch will impact on each appeal. We haven't tested it on them, but we've seen some amazing responses for appeals particularly for housing based charities.

Best

Mark

Unknown said...

yep, I think the cause matters, as does whether the recession is / could be relevant to the organisation, projects or issues in question.

In the campaign I mentioned above the recession and the budgetary situation did have a relevance. Response rate was way up for comparable segments and average gift was also significantly up.