Keep It Simple: How to Take Advantage of Donor Behavior

It’s fun to see how business articles can (at times) apply perfectly to charitable organizations like The Salvation Army.  In the current issue of the Harvard Business Review, I read a great piece called “Customer Loyalty Is Overrated.”  You can read it here.

The point: Consumers (your donors, in this case) make decisions somewhat “automatically” a large part of the time, once trust in a brand and experience with that brand have been established.  So why not focus on making those decisions even more simple for people, rather than focusing too much on rebranding and reinvention? 

I love this part of the article:

“The brain, it turns out, is not so much an analytical machine as a gap-filling machine: It takes noisy, incomplete information from the world and quickly fills in the missing pieces on the basis of past experience.  Intuition — thoughts, opinions, and preferences that come to mind quickly and without reflection but are strong enough to act on — is the product of this process.  It’s not just what gets filled in that determines our intuitive judgments, however.  They are heavily influenced by the speed and ease of the filling-in process itself, a phenomenon psychologists call processing fluency.  When we describe making a decision because it ‘just feels right,’ the processing leading to the decision has been fluent.” 

Our focus on acquiring sustaining donors makes great sense against this behavioral research.  After all, we want your contributers to become more and more accustomed to giving.  But at the same time, we must not forget the relationship element that The Salvation Army has with its supporters.  Because that giving “habit” will quickly erode if trust is broken. With this in mind, the article offers four rules to follow:

1. Become popular early.  It’s important to convert casual supporters into sustaining donors very early on.  Take advantage of their interest in The Salvation Army right away by providing specific and attractive giving opportunities.  Strike while the iron is hot.  Be undeniable.  The sooner donors get into a giving pattern, the better.
   
   
2. Design for habit.  When it comes to reaching donors, choose the path of least resistance.  That means making yourself easily accessible through various mediums (including digital).
   
   
3. Innovate inside your brand.  The Salvation Army shield is iconic.  You’d never want to lose an image so powerful and recognizable.  That’s why adding “Doing the Most Good” alongside the shield (for instance) works so well.  Even as you tread new ground (which is important), you don’t want to lose the history, tradition, and foundation of your organization. 
   
   
4. Keep communication simple.  Quick, impactful, yet personal messages go a long way to reinforcing the importance of your donors.  For example, share a bit of insider information so your donors feel more involved.  You want to create such compelling conversations that they will never want to leave.

Think about where you shopped and what you bought this past weekend.  Or what you ordered the last time you went to a restaurant.  Did you take a chance on, say, Squid Ink Pasta with Rock Shrimp and Bottarga, or did you get the salmon again?

We love what we love, and there is both comfort and ease in that.  What’s amazing is realizing we can use these same feelings and tendencies — when employed in the right way — to reach your donors and help The Salvation Army become even better!