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Appeal Packages

Jennifer Boettger

We are one year in and still wrestling with how our college will use packages. We were trying to make it work for flexibility in packaging by using categories; allowing us to package by format (email, text, phone, mail, etc), Message (segmented groups with different messages), and Audience (segmented groups but same message). Seemed like a good idea in theory and our implementation team didn't disagree, but we are now seeing hiccups with this plan. Among oher things, what to do if we want to track both format and, say, segment.

I highly suspect we've over-thought and over-orchestrated this. I'm curious to know what others do to report on the effectiveness of an appeal's format AND the appeal performance by segment or message.

Side question: What do you all use Marketing Source for?

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Comments

Dariel Dixon

I've used appeals to track segments. I think the question becomes at what point does a package become it's own appeal? The mailing might be it's own appeal, then the segments become the package. Perhaps the email becomes it's own appeal, and not a package? When reporting, you can just combine the similar appeals together to determine the overall impact. With regards to messaging, those things are still just packages if they are a part of the same overall format. For instance, you can use an appeal code of something like ALUMXX for alumni or FRIEXX for friends. Regardless of what you decide, the key is consistency.

Also, the other question becomes if the package can be quantified accurately. It is difficult to determine appeal and package with regards to online gifts. I know that NetCommunity has the capacity to ask for that information, but it only pulls from appeals, and can't separate into package (As far as I remember, it's been a while).

This can seem a little daunting at first, but it helps to have someone else to give their input. If you think you are probably are overthinking it, chances are you are, but you need to create a plan with a clear picture of how you want to report on it.

Faith Murray

At our org, we view each communication as its own package. So, a direct mail piece would get one package, and a follow-up email would be sending the donor a second package of the same appeal. This way when you run your analytics, you can account for crossover in communications media (response rates for those who received the email AND direct mail vs. just one).

For segment and message, we use a single package coding system, using acronyms to pack a lot of info into one code. For example, in a single mailing, we might have packages:

AMLPR = Alumni, Major Level, Lapsed, Planned Giver, Regular Text
FRPMT = Friend, Regular Level, Previous year giver, Monthly donor, Test text

To analyze, I usually pull a giving summary into Excel, convert the package acronym into separate columns, and then sort and analyze based on the various factors. (For example, sort by Alumni/Friends and Text to ascertain whether alumni were more likely to upgrade with the test messaging; then re-sort by Major and Regular levels, and Previous/Lapsed to determine which donor levels had a higher reactivation rate per the test text, etc.)

If you don't prefer to go quite as deep into analyzing your appeal results, you could potentially accomplish the same functions directly in Raiser's Edge. The Package field has a short character limit, but the Appeal Comments field has more room. You could include a longer “Comment” such as “Alumni-Major-Lapsed-Planned-Control" and then pull by that in your Queries attached to your various Reports. (Query criteria being Appeal = 2022 Appeal AND Comments include Alumni).

Faith Murray

@Dariel Dixon we get around the limitation of package tracing on online gifts by entering the package on donors' records the moment the package is sent (vs. gift received). All recipients of an appeal get the appeal code. We get donors who send checks and other gifts through the mail absent their package info also, so it really helps having their package already recorded in the record.

Dariel Dixon

Faith Murray:
@Dariel Dixon we get around the limitation of package tracing on online gifts by entering the package on donors' records the moment the package is sent (vs. received). All recipients of an appeal get the appeal code. We get donors who send checks and other gifts through the mail absent their package info also, so it really helps having their package already recorded in the record.

Yes @Faith Murray, my last organization did that as well, however having to look that information up during online gift processing became very tedious on the staff, and especially since I haven't been able to add that information to the constituent window in batch. It can be done, but it takes a considerable bit of time from the rest of the gift entry, which is fine as long as someone is accounting for that.

Angela Tuttle

We have not used packages as much as we used to but when we did we did it the same way that @Faith Murray describes.

Karen Diener

I would advise NOT overdoing it to start. Think about what is most important - what do you want to learn - and refine from there. But you also need some patience.

When in a high school, we ran a program for a full year and then reassessed for the next year. I think we may have dropped a segment early on because the performance was abysmal and it was obvious that we were wasting money by sending to that group. But we held back and assessed the program as a whole, and didn't adjust every single mailing.

At the school, we broke down into four groups:

Alumni
Alumni who were in a reunion year
Current Parents (parents of current students)
Grad Parents (parents of alumni)

Every one of those groups was then segmented by Renewal, Lapsed, Long Lapsed, and Never Givers. I forget the specific date ranges we applied to Lapsed and Long-Lapsed. Our approach was to think about their relationship to the school and how we would communicate with them about the school's fundraising needs.

We did not get hung up on how they were giving. We did not mail to people with active recurring gifts since those were largely going to the Annual Fund already. We did mail to people with open pledges because they were supporting capital projects or specific programs and not Annual Fund.

We did four mailings a year. As soon as someone gave, they were excluded from subsequent mailings. I think we sometimes included everyone at the fiscal year end mailing, but I cannot say for sure.

We used QuickLetters to do the segmentation, and I added (via import) the Appeal and Package to all constituent records. Also via import, I updated the Appeal record to indicate how many people received each package, and I added expenses for each per package.

All of the reply cards had the appeal and package code printed on them, and we also used barcode scanning. So the gift entry person could scan the barcode in batch, which would pull up the constituent record and pre-populate the Appeal and Package.

In the end, my Annual Fund director could do her own reporting by running the Appeal Summary on the Appeal record. With all of the data on that record, she could easily see the cost per dollar, cost per solicitation, and performance for each package. That helped us make better decisions over the years to which groups were performing well (which was contrary to what everyone had said up to that point!) and which we should not bother mailing to because they performed poorly.

This was a high school of about 2000 students, and I was the only RE person. Once everything was set up, it would take me a few hours to run everything, but a good deal of that was waiting for segmentations or imports to process and I could do other work in between.

Karen