Whisper those three little letters…R.F.M.

Last month, I was fortunate enough to visit Melbourne, Australia, and meet with a number of JCA’s clients there. I spent one afternoon with some of the staff of the Australian Ballet, perhaps Australia’s most renowned dance company. One of the meeting participants was Judy Turner, an accomplished fundraiser who is relatively new to the organization. Given her organization’s great popularity, Judy immediately recognized that her fundraising opportunity was a huge base of prospects in the form of ticket buyers. She also saw her challenge was finding a manageable number of well-qualified donors out of this sea of possibilities. If you only have time to call 500 donors out of a pool of 30,000, don’t you want to spend your time on the best 500?

Judy’s immediate, no-nonsense idea for zeroing in on her top prospects was encapsulated in those three letters she said to me: R.F.M. RFM stands for Recency, Frequency, Monetary, and refers to a segmentation concept that has been around the direct marketing world for years. The idea is to take a pool of prospects and categorize them based on those three attributes. How recently have they interacted with your organization? How often do they interact? How much do they spend/donate when they interact?

Look at Your Accidents Before You Erase Them

I don’t believe in accidents – so Pablo Picasso is purported to have said.  I’ve wondered if this was his suggestion that sometimes your subconscious mind bubbles to the surface in the guise of accidental brush strokes and perhaps you should see what that part of your brain is up to before it withdraws.

I often think the same thing when looking at a client’s analytics that seem, well, wrong.  Those numbers can’t be right!  Sometimes there is a rational explanation, perhaps a major donor is skewing the average gift metric, or an influx of corporate sponsorships is making the gala line look odd.  But at other times, you might just be looking at a trend you didn’t expect.  And isn’t this why you have business intelligence tools to begin with?

Take the Seattle Repertory Theatre, a JCA business intelligence client.  They are a big fan of the geographic mapping tool included as part of JCA Answers.  When they looked at their ticket sales numbers on the Answers “heat maps”, they saw a mistake.  As expected, there were high concentrations of ticket buyers in a ring around their theatre.  The “accident” was that there was a sizable cluster of ticket buyers living more than 200 miles away from their theater. 

CAN-SPAM Act – What Do I Need To Know?

New to e-marketing?  You need to understand and abide by the CAN-SPAM act.  First of all, it’s CAN-SPAM as in “stop spam” rather than “canned spam,” the lunchmeat Monty Python couldn’t live without.  The CAN-SPAM Act is a law that affects every organization that uses email in its operations.  It covers not only bulk email campaigns, but every commercial email message.  A violation is worth $16,000, so you’ll want to understand and abide by the rules.

Think about the email you’re sending.  Messages fall into one of several categories:  commercial, transactional, or other.  Commercial messages sell or advertise something, transactional or relational messages confirm or facilitate an ongoing or past transaction, and messages that fall into the “other” bucket are not commercial, transactional, or relational.  Messages that are primarily commercial are covered by the act. Messages that are primarily relational are exempt from most of the act although they cannot contain misleading or false information.  How does this work for a non-profit organization?