Missions to Movements
Missions to Movements is the nonprofit marketing and fundraising podcast that helps you grow recurring donors, scale monthly giving programs, and build digital campaigns that convert.
Hosted by Dana Snyder—speaker, strategist, and founder of Positive Equation—this show is packed with actionable nonprofit growth strategies, social media tips, and fundraising best practices.
Each week, you’ll hear how organizations are increasing donor retention, building thought leadership, and using digital fundraising to drive real impact. If you want to learn how to attract monthly donors, master nonprofit marketing, and transform your mission into a movement, this podcast is for you.
Missions to Movements
Improve Direct Mail Performance Using Behavioral Science & Personality Traits with Kevin Schulman
Fewer than five of charity: water’s donors wrote a check during a 75,000-piece direct mail test, yet direct mail STILL lifted revenue by 1.5-2%!
Behavioral science expert and DonorVoice founder Kevin Schulman is here to talk about why traditional direct mail metrics fall short, why your “non-check-writers” may be your biggest missed opportunity, and how personality-based messaging can transform donor engagement.
You’ll hear the inside story of a charity: water experiment that tested postcards vs. full letters, QR codes on the outer envelope, and personality trait targeting based on the Big Five framework.
Kevin and I also dig into measuring donor commitment, what predicts retention, and how some nonprofits are increasing their first-year monthly donor retention by 6-9 percentage points simply by adjusting their communication volume.
If you’re rethinking how direct mail fits into your world, this episode will reshape how you design, segment, and evaluate your campaigns.
Resources & Links
Connect with Kevin on LinkedIn and learn more about DonorVoice on their website.
Check out the book I’m currently reading, Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect, by Will Guidara.
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Register now for the FREE Monthly Giving Summit on February 25-26th, the only virtual event where nonprofits unite to master monthly giving, attract committed believers, and fund the future with confidence.
Let's Connect!
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So I have a confession. My mailbox has basically turned into a fundraising lab. A few months ago, I shared a kind of spicy LinkedIn post all about the direct mail I was getting from nonprofits and how I give as a digital donor. I was talking about kind of what was working, some ideas on what might not be, why some envelopes made me stop in my tracks while others were going to recycling. And since then, I've received 50 plus pieces of direct mail. Yes, I have counted and I have gone through them all. And it's really sparked this huge conversation online about is mail still worth it in this digital first world? Is it worth it for everyone? How do we measure that? All of these things, right? And today I went straight to the source of a really compelling kind of mini case study that came about in the comments of this LinkedIn post on behavioral science and donor experience. So I am joined in this episode by Kevin Schulman. He's the founder of Donor Voice, a donor experience company that uses behavioral science to really help nonprofits move beyond the one size fits all of direct mail and really build experiences around the human behind the donor. So this episode, we dig into a charity water experiment where they tested direct mail and digital using personality-based targeting. So we go into like if someone's agreeable versus open and these different personality traits I found fascinating and how they prefer completely different formats of direct mail. And they measured not just who mailed back a check, but the indirect lift across channels. So if you've been wondering whether your direct mail is quietly driving revenue or not, how can you personalize without making your campaigns crazy or what the next year to three years of direct mail could really look like, you're gonna love this one. Let's go meet Kevin.
SPEAKER_04:And it's that trait dominance that helps determine what you find interesting and assign value to. And so we tailor everything that we do in the fundraising world to trade. Image, copy, format, you name it. We know, and we have lots of evidence to support it, that it just increases the chance that you're gonna see it in a world, you're gonna give it attention, you're gonna agree with it, and then you're more likely to act on it. So it's messaging that speaks to you in person.
SPEAKER_01:Kevin, I am very excited to have you on the show after a few months ago. A LinkedIn post went viral in the conversation of direct mail. What's going on with it? What are best practices? How are maybe things shifting in the space? How should we be rethinking direct mail when it comes to messaging people? And for those of you that aren't familiar, I will link to said LinkedIn post in the show notes so you can see what happened. And I honestly love that it garnered so much attention because that means that there's a lot of conversation to be had around this topic. And Kevin, with your organization Donor Voice, you're sitting at this intersection, which I really love of behavioral science and fundraising. When you're working overall with your clientele and maybe even in the past or trends that you're seeing right now, where would you describe organizations of where they're at when it comes to personalizing donor experiences, maybe with direct mail and other aspects, versus the one size fits all kind of just like throw out everything and see what hits?
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, well, first of all, thanks for uh the invite. I'm thrilled to be a part of the podcast here and hope we can contribute to the overall value for the sector. The caveat will be, or the corollary to my comment will be that this is pertaining to mass market, which is where we operate. But in mass market fundraising, to your question, personalized experiences are the rare exception, not the norm. And so it is a one-size-fits-all world. To the extent there are personalized experiences, I think we've probably kind of dummied down the definition a bit. And so I know some pretty large charities that have significant event space, and they probably have 30 or 40 fully automated, quote unquote, tailored personalized journeys. Or maybe there's a mid-level program that is quote unquote tailored and personalized. But in all of those cases, the tailoring is defined, first of all, it tends to be pretty superficial, and it's defined based on the behavior that's tied to their CRM credentials in the case of mid-level, or it's tied to their event-specific behavior. So if I'm the team lead, I get a certain welcome series. If I have started my fundraising page, I'll get you know pushed to the next automated thing. If I haven't, I'll get a separate kind of flow chart-driven deal. So they're all based on my interaction with the brand versus who the people are kind of innately.
SPEAKER_01:Very interesting. Yeah. And I think part of that, and there's been a lot of conversation in the space about even how CRMs, how things are titled. When we say we don't want things to feel transactional, but that's just literally how these tools have been built for a really long time and how things are titled, which makes us innately think about things in that way. You came from the commercial sector, right?
SPEAKER_04:I did, although I've been in this one long enough that it it feels like a distant memory, but it was probably in the nonprofit world for about 15 years prior was commercial sector. And I'm old enough that that period of time far exceeds the 15 years, but it doesn't always feel like it.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Different learnings, though, that come into the work that you do now, I'm sure, that was focused on measuring customer relationship strength. How do those principles apply to the work that you're doing now?
SPEAKER_04:When I did first enter the space like 15-ish years ago, that weird set of circumstance, but as a part of my kind of observation of the sector, it seemed like a lot was missing from what happens in the commercial space. And yes, measuring the strength of that customer relationship was one of them. And so one of the first things that I did in this space was commission a study that was measuring the donor relationship strength. So the strength of connection between the human being and the brand. And all of this was work that was, like most of our work, is tied to academic theory. And so, in a lot of ways, we just kind of stand on the backs of these anonymous giants who toiled away in academia and cracked the code on lots of really cool stuff. And if we get any credit, it ought to be for just helping bring to some of that to practitioner land. So there were academics who have written reams and reams around relationship theory. And then when they were first looking at relationship, it was interpersonal the relationship that you have with a friend or a colleague or a family member. And you know, step one in that work, which all sorts of pertains and has perfect parallel in the donor brands or donor charity relationship, was all right, if this thing called relationship is real, we ought to be able to define it. And if we can define it, we ought to be able to measure it. And if you can measure it, you ought to be able to have those measures be indicative of outcomes that you care about. So that code has been cracked. I mean, relationship gets thrown around a lot in this sector, but I don't know that there's a lot of standardized understanding of what that means. But if folks, if listeners take nothing else from this, just know that relationship has been defined and the code has been cracked. Relationship has three parts. There's what we would call kind of functional connection. There will be different labels if you do a Google search or an AI search for this. But there's that step one in relationship building. And a relationship is a temporal thing. It happens over time. No one has a strong relationship after the first interaction. So step one is this do the whether it's person to person or you know, brand and human being, is there a sense of kind of reliability? Do I know what to expect when I interact with your brand? And there's some satisfaction elements in there. And if a charity can't deliver on that, the most basic sense of reliability and knowing what to expect, then the relationship's over. So step one is getting that functional connection. Step two, which you kind of only have permission to do once you've established the first part, is what we would done personal connection, which is kind of what it sounds like. There's this sense of reciprocity, this sense of give and take. And then once you've established that, the third part, and this all just sound familiar with any personal relationship that you have, there's commitment. And our measure for this is in fact called commitment, is sort of a shorthand. Commitment is that it's the coin of the realm, it's got some trust components in there, but the definition of commitment is what matters. If you're committed to something or someone, you've got motive or intent to maintain that relationship. And so when we measure the relationship between donors and brands and we see the functional connection and the personal connection and that degree of commitment, there's a very strong relationship between being high on those measures versus low and giving behavior or any behavior that you care about, advocacy, showing up very strong. Yes, it's rearward looking, and that I can look at past behavior and see that there's this strong relationship between higher commitment means better everything you care about, but it's also very forward looking. And so in that way, this measure of relationship strength does in fact hold. We've, I think at this point, collected, I think we've actually crossed the million threshold. We've collected commitment scores for millions of human beings. Wow.
SPEAKER_01:How is that configured? So, like for the listener, they'd be like, How in the world are they able to see where somebody is on that relationship journey?
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, so there's a whole bunch of things that if you want to know truth, the best source is going to the person. I think surveys get a bad rap. I mean, there's lots of really crappy surveys, don't get me wrong, but that's the author or the creator of said survey, not the vehicle. And so the only way to measure the strength of the relationship is it's an attitudinal construct. It's a loyalty is not a behavior. Loyalty is a sense you've got. That commitment is a something that exists inside you. And so you measure it with a survey through the whole product development effort. We've reduced it down to three items. So there are three statements. I get you to agree or disagree with these statements, and then you get a score zero to ten. It's very simple. Higher the score, the higher the commitment. And so we have clients who have these scores at the individual record level. You had mentioned CRMs in the fields. I need to create a custom field, which even the crappy CRMs can do, that's called commitment score. And it's a numeric value at zero to ten. And you know, one simple illustration or application of that is a lot of charities, big or small, are going to get wealth scores. And so they have this sense of your capacity. Well, we have clients who will, in simple ways or sophisticated ways, be able to compare wealth scores with commitment scores. And your best prospect is not someone who's rich. Your best prospect is someone who's rich and who loves you. And so I can see you've got a commitment score of a nine out of 10, which is high, and you've got a lot of money. I want to put disproportionate time and effort on reaching out and connecting with you.
SPEAKER_01:I love this. I wonder how often, listener, I'd love to hear from you on this that we're actually sending out surveys. And I love your point. It's three questions, three statements, not 12, not 20, because those are not going to be completable. They're just not. Is the vehicle traditionally where you're doing the surveys through email communication, or do you have an approach where it's through text message too? You're just really trying to get out there. And do you send out a direct mailpiece to get people to do the survey? What's been the best success rate in generating the most amount of responses?
SPEAKER_04:It's definitely all of the above. Okay. The organizations that that have really high coverage, meaning a percentage of the file, they've got a commitment score, they've got a change in mindset. And it doesn't matter if you're tiny or medium-sized or large. The mindset is what matters. You have to assign value to this sort of data. And I don't think the sector generally does. The sector assigns enormous value to the RFM data that sits there. They probably assign enormous value to the wealth scores that might get appended. But the data that helps you understand who the person is, and in this case, their connection to the brand, that's a mindset thing. But once it becomes a business imperative and you tell yourself that having this commitment score is as important as having their home address or their email address, then you get kind of business permission to make it a system-wide data collection exercise. And so it's going to be online after the online donation or baked into the form. We would put it on a reply form for direct mail. We definitely have sent out SMS to collect this. It gets thrown onto the end of the e-newsletter. So existing vehicles just adding it on there. And standalone things whose sole purpose is getting this particular kind of data.
SPEAKER_01:I mean, I think it's invaluable because it would lead how you're going to communicate with those people, or like who's just not interested anymore? And that's okay too. Like maybe they had our season with us and now it's not existing. So does this loop into is this the personality trait, which I'm going to lead into for the tests with charity water? But does this all encompass the personality traits or is that a separate exercise?
SPEAKER_04:Separate.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. Okay. So part of matching donor comms, you would say, starts with this commitment piece. And then how does the personality trait exercise come into play?
SPEAKER_04:Yeah. And just to sort of finish up the commitment score thought, or the ways in which we the main way we'd apply it is at some level it's a selection exercise, but it's a more refined way of knowing who really is a good prospect because wealth alone is a pretty lousy indicator. And oftentimes even their own RFM behavior on your file is a lousy indicator. So in combination, you can get much more efficient with selection. The other way that we've used commitment scores is kind of broadbush mass market to, in the year one for a new supporter, dictate the number of communications we send out. And in this way, it kind of runs counter to what you might expect. We have done year-long tests where based on commitment score alone, high versus low for new donors, sent more versus less, just total number of kind of touch points. In fact, this was for a monthly giving file. So everyone was coming on as a monthly supporter. And then all of these communications were kind of in the stewardship category, meaning they weren't asking for additional dollars. And we had, I think the test was 12 communications versus 18. So they got one a month, and then the test group got the extra six sprinkled in throughout the course of that year. And overall, it was just a wash. If you just looked in in aggregate, kind of test versus control, you didn't get any improvement in the outcomes we care about, which would be the retention rate typically for 18 versus 12. So why bother, right? It's extra time and effort on the 18. Except that the real test wasn't that. The real test was splitting out by commitment. And our hypothesis was that the low commitment people actually need more, they benefit from more. And when you break it out by low commitment versus high, you had a massive difference in year one retention. The low commitment people is about a six-point percentage point, 9% increase in first year retention. And it was a nine point loss for high commitment people. So we were in essence kind of making the sale that was already made. And so those extra communications served as irritant, and irritant just results in people quietly quitting.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Yeah. I totally see that. I think that makes sense, but it's fascinating to be able to have the numbers back to it. Fascinating. I mean, I think this is huge. I mean, I think it's an invaluable metric. What would be your recommendation for an organization that maybe is smaller just to put together a Google form work on there? Like, would you say less than five? Is there a was there a magic because of the reason of three of the statements?
SPEAKER_04:It's definitely the three statements. But we this was a like multi-year thing that started pre-donor voice, where we had hundreds of items because we were trying to measure these component parts of relationship, and our product development effort was standard fair. You do all this sort of statistical exercise, and you're really trying to figure out what's the what's the fewest number of items I can have to measure this underlying thing. And we would evaluate how few items we could have based on how well it predicted behaviors. And so the three magic questions are in fact the three. And if you go to two, it gets worse, and we don't actually improve it much if we add four or five.
SPEAKER_01:Got it, got it. Love the testing analysis. Okay, wait. So I want to switch gears into the personality traits because it's going to listener go into what was kind of the discussion on this LinkedIn post was about a charity water test that they did around direct email. So, Kevin, will you explain what is this personality trait strategy?
SPEAKER_04:Yes. One of the things that we think is missing from fundraising messaging is messaging that speaks to the person. There's messaging that speaks to program A, B, or C or issue X, Y, or Z, there's messaging that speaks to the organization and its mission and its brand. And those things matter, but there's rarely anything that speaks to the person, independent of the brand and independent of issue A, B, or C. And in our work, we know that if something is going to get seen and agreed to and acted on, that we're better off having messaging that can break through the clutter and speak to who they are as a person. One of the things that does that is tailoring message and as we'll probably talk about image and format to one's personality. In the field of psychology, there's a personality theory called the Big Five, which probably needs a new PR agent because it's probably lesser known than Myers Briggs, which is any personality researcher will tell you is mostly garbage, but again, it has really good PR because everyone's heard of Myers Briggs. That's right. By comparison, few have heard of the Big Five. But the Big Five is very psychometrically sound, it's been around for decades, and the Big Five has been shown through lots of work, academic and our own, and other practitioners, to be very predictive of people's choices. Big and small. So musical preference, do you have a pet? Do you have if you have a pet, is it a dog or a cat? If you have a dog, is it a big dog or a little dog? Occupation, if you marry, who you marry, big and small choices are influenced by our personality. So I would encourage listeners to Google the Big Five, and you can find a big five assessment to take. There's 15 question versions and 200 question. Pick a you know one in the middle, like a 40 question version. And you'll get scores on each of the big five. There's a lovely little mnemonic device that spells out ocean. So the O stands for openness. And again, everyone has some score on openness. There's no such thing as a zero, but there is a high and a low. Open people are going to be assigned value to abstraction and aesthetics and beauty. It's the only trait that's actually correlated with formal measures of IQ, and therefore it's got correlates with income and certain occupations. But these are people who are not only capable of processing at an abstract level, they kind of prefer it. These are the people who, if you're thinking about imagery, they don't benefit from just a close-up visual of a child or a puppy. They want to see a fuller panoramic landscape. They want to be able to sort of process the situation. The sea and ocean, if we're just following out, the mnemonic here stands for conscientiousness. If your LinkedIn profile lists your GPA and your various accomplishments and your rewards, and you've got a sort of formal picture, you're high in conscientiousness. These are people who assign work to effort and achievements. They're very goal-oriented. These are the sorts of people that in fundraising communications, I want to have a very structured, sort of boring appeal that's got some bullet points, that's kind of cut into the chase, and talking about how the beneficiary has put in effort to improve their situation, as of for instance. E is extroversion, which is probably the one we're kind of most familiar with as kind of a late term, and it is exactly how we understand it. There's people who are high on that trait, they're very extroverted and low being introverted. A is agreeableness. People really high in agreeableness, these are the yes people. They they enjoy and derive value from helping others in all sorts of situations, but you can see how that's just a natural kind of charitable fit.
SPEAKER_01:Yep.
SPEAKER_04:And then the N stands for neuroticism, which is a kind of a scientific term. People high in neuroticism are gonna have more anxiety and stress and be a bit more apprehensive and nervous about certain situations. And so if you took an assessment, you'd have a score on all five. It's equally true that you would tend to be trait dominant on a trait or two. And it's that trait dominance that helps determine what you find interesting and assign value to. And so we tailor everything that we do in the fundraising world to trait image, copy, format, you name it. We know, and we have lots of evidence to support it, that it just increases the chance that you're gonna see it in a added world, you're gonna give it attention, you're gonna agree with it, and then you're more likely to act on it. So it's messaging that speaks to you in person.
SPEAKER_01:I mean, I 1000% agree with this because I think my point about the LinkedIn post and how we met was, and I want to hear like how this is tactically, like how you get this information and then make the changes to the formats. But what I explained in the post was that I've received literally nearly all the same communication. They are all trifolds, they're all long letters, they all have the envelope with a check to give. Like half of them gave me the return address labels, probably another like third gave me notepads, another group. There at least 10 of them had the penny or the nickel gadget gimmick, whatever, on the front to get me to try and open something. All of them, for the most part, you could tell, were ask-based. None of them were really stewardship. They were all heavy on the ask. And none of them, to your point, definitely didn't know, or for taking out my personality as to a how many of these are just unfortunately going in the trash. And for me, like format-wise, a postcard with a beautiful image, a quick note to me to get me online to read a story would have done magic and would have been perfect. How does somebody know that about Dana? How do they find out my personality traits in order to do this? And maybe this is where we kind of segue into how Charity Water applied this strategy with the test.
SPEAKER_04:So we set out, it's been maybe four years ago now, to figure out how we could get personality scores on any donor file. I don't care if it's one record or a million records, without having to administer a 40 question personality assessment, which yes, as you can imagine, is a pretty big barrier to achieving scale. And we have a personality researcher on staff. And before he was a part of our team, I would have thought the big five was referenced to the, you know, the Michigan Fad Five or something. I had never heard of the Big Five. But we all became sort of our own little pseudo-experts in the big five. And we had reason to believe that the third-party data universe of all this publicly available, messy, noisy, but very high-scale data could be used to reverse engineer our way to personality scores. Because the third-party data, if you think about it, it's nothing more than it's a mirror. It's a reflection of your choices and mine. Because the third-party data has shopping, it's got demographic, it has lifestyle, it has choices that you have made. So the product development effort was a multi-year deal. We collected in with the gold standard way, meaning vis-a-vis survey, thousands of personality assessments from humans, from donors. I think we had around 10,000 total, and it took a while.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_04:And then we went to one of the third-party data providers. It was Epsilon in this case, because they were sort of willing to play in the sandbox. And we said, look, as a research project, we want all of your third-party data, which is around four or five hundred different attributes, appended to this data set. And we want to see if we can build a model that will use the third-party data to predict trade. And so, fast forward to today, that is exactly what we've done. So we can take any file and it's all automated now. It's about 50-ish or 50 or 60 attributes per trait. So I think about the third-party data as raw ingredients to give kind of a cooking analogy. So with raw ingredients, I need a recipe. That's kind of the magic sauce that we have, which is a recipe that tells me here are the 50 raw ingredients that go with openness. And then I will see how you, Dana, match up on those 50 ingredients. Do you have 10 of the ingredients or 40 of the ingredients? And based on that, you get a score. Same thing for agreeableness and the other traits. And if you were to just look at a profile of the 50 or 60 for open versus the 50 or 60 for conscientious, knowing nothing about kind of the origin of that, you would say, well, I don't know why you have these two lists, but I can tell you those two people are very different, and I would be better friends with that one than that one. I have more in common, right? So it is that third-party data that serves as proxy. So we can create these scores. And then we simplify the world. And I'm going to put you and me into our highest scoring trait, which is what we did with charity water. They wanted to test the value of direct mail. They had never used mail ever. So a hundred percent of their donors came to them through online methods. And for a variety of reasons, all good, they were wondering about the value of direct mail and might it add to various behavior metrics that they care about. So we had a test and it was a 75,000 piece mailing or something. And we had a test and control, and the control group just got kind of digital touch points, which was mostly email and probably maybe some exposure to digital ads.
SPEAKER_01:Well, who is it going to? Was it existing donors or just over?
SPEAKER_04:Yes, existing supporters. In this case, it was focused mostly on their one-time givers who kind of flowed over the transom. They have a lot of people who flow over the transom through various digital outreach that sign up as monthly. These are the people that had signed up as one times.
SPEAKER_01:Okay.
SPEAKER_04:Who in their in a relative basis got lesser retention from charity water. And so they wanted to kind of change that and they wanted at the same time do this test to see if direct mail might add something to the mix in getting these folks to give again and/or sign up to be monthly. And so it was a two by three design where the we took these names and we applied the personality tags. And for a variety of reasons, just to simplify the world, we were focused on people high in agreeableness or high in openness. We put everybody into one of those two categories. That was the two, if you're thinking about a just two rows and three columns. The columns included a postcard mailing. To some of them. A full kind of letter package mailing was the second treatment. And then the third was a variation on that letter package treatment where we had QR code on the outside and the inside versus just the inside, I believe.
SPEAKER_02:Okay.
SPEAKER_04:We set up ahead of time because we fully anticipated that the we needed to be able to capture the indirect response. Meaning we were anticipating very few checks for a whole host of reasons, not least of which, and and that would be really obvious, is that we knew that the average age of these people was such that the likelihood of them writing checks was really, really low.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_04:So I think out of the 75,000 pieces, the number of checks that we got, you could count on one hand and have fingers left over. So even though we anticipated hardly any, I was still sort of stunned by that. But we shouldn't be stunned by that because if you're married people who are 50 or 55 on average, they're not ready to checks, full stop. Nothing will get them to change that behavior. That's right. So we had a fairly extensive tracking mechanism and a 45 or 60 day window to look at online behavior.
SPEAKER_01:Which actually, I want to like just pause there really quick. So, listener, if you're thinking about your own database of supporters and think about there is a generation that is still going to write you checks. However, baby boom or older that generation, there is a new wave that is coming up, for instance, my generation, the millennials. And I don't even remember the last time I wrote a check. I don't even know if I have a checkbook for business, yes. But again, still I don't even the last time I've used my business checkbook. So you need this is a great thing to be talking about and looking at what's the next wave of supporters and the right format that is going to work for them and what you can expect to receive. Also, I wanted to mention you said uh measure indirect lift, which I also agree upon. When you see something in the mail, it might not spark you to give in that moment, but what does it spark you 30 days from now when they send you an email and it's like, oh yeah, they sent me this mailer. How did you try and gauge that lift?
SPEAKER_04:I'll speak to the first part of if I may, and this is not specific to charity water. We suppress direct mail response when we put make checks payable and we send that to someone who doesn't write a check. And even though that same mailing might these days have a QR code or URL, you've put the reply envelope there. You have signaled to these folks that that's your preference. And while I could do the mental kind of cognitive exercise to see the QR code and get past that, nobody gives us that much attention because they got really busy days. And so you've got to make it frictionless. So we in acquisition and house file mailings now are tagging people in a similar way that we tag them with personality trait with check writer versus not check writer. Third-party data is a great signal there. Age, not surprisingly, is a huge, huge correlate and predictor for check writing behavior. There's a few other variables that you need in the mix, so it's a simpler formula than the trait one. But for people who are not gonna write a check, direct mail has a can work much smarter. It is a great way to reach people full stop. It is a lousy way to get people to transact if you're gonna ask me to do something that I haven't done in decades or that I don't want to do. So for the people who are non-check writers, which by the way is a much bigger universe than the check writers. And no, I don't need to get to 20 or 30 year olds. I need the percentage of people who are 50 who write a check is really small. And it's only going in one direction. I think 4% of transactions in the US are check. It was 10% not that long ago. And for wide swaths of America, it's zero and has been for a long time. And it's even more extreme outside of the US, where they haven't written checks, they're much further along in their banking systems.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, definitely.
SPEAKER_04:The non-check writer, gone is the BRE. Gone is the reply form. No one's gonna mail anything back. Let's have a bigger piece of paper. We dub it an activation form that is focused on that last mile friction where I'm trying to get you to transact now and I'm gonna offer up a variety of ways that you, as the non-check writer, might take. Yes, there's a QR code, but there's also a text or a short code. We want to visually show that on the other side of that QR code is mobile wallet payment options so they can visually see on this form that you've got Google Pay or Apple Pay. I think it's a very big missed opportunity here to have mail work smarter and recognize that we're undermining that with this obsession around evaluating success of direct mail based on check writing. I grant that people who want to write a check, that's great. Let's have them keep doing that. But the actual tables are pretty clear on where that population is going.
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely, 100% agree.
SPEAKER_04:With Charity Water, it was all standard matchback logic. So we were able to track at the ID level on behavior that was occurring 30, 45, 60 days down the road.
SPEAKER_01:Got it. Okay.
SPEAKER_04:So the net net of all of that is that we got an extra like one and a half or two percentage points of response for the test group that got this direct mailing, even though basically zero people wrote checks. So it was influential in prompting behavior, which is the whole purpose of any sort of marketing. Of course. You know, some of the sub-findings, and I think this actually may have been part of what we were exchanging or roofing on on LinkedIn, is the full letter package did better than the postcard.
SPEAKER_01:Interesting.
SPEAKER_04:Our hypothesis going in, and we obviously thought both had a chance, but we the postcard we put in the mix because these were existing supporters, so they knew the brand. We knew they weren't going to write a check, and so there were some cost savings to be had. In their case, they've got a very clear and compelling visual to kind of convey the mission as a reminder for what the business they're in. We had clean water versus dirty water, these two glasses. And then, you know, on a postcard, you can include all of those activation type triggering mechanisms, the QR code and the rest.
SPEAKER_01:Without anybody having to open a physical envelope.
SPEAKER_04:Right, right. And so the full letter, we did, as I noted, kind of the one variation there was including QR code on the outer versus not. In both instances, it was on the letter or the reply form or something. And the QR code that was on the outer beat the one that didn't have it on the outer. So it did get more people, that very few people scanned those things, but it did get more scans. And it also, we think, got more people just to open it up. I think the takeaway on the letter package overall beating the postcard is that we had we had a bigger job to do with those people. It wasn't just a brand reminder, which is about what the postcard could do. Signal that you're still there and that this is the basic business that you're in around water, and that's sort of the proposition being clean versus dirty. But the letter package told a story and it was tailored to trait. So there was this woman whose story we told, and we would emphasize different parts of that based on trait. So agreeableness got different quotes from her. These were all real, it was just choices that we made and sort of sort of the editorial level almost. But we were guided by what we thought the reader might assign value to. Openness, uh, we talked more about the village and the circumstance than we did for the agreeable people who really are agreeable. People are their moral frame is they want to provide care and prevent harm. And so, in that way, it doesn't take a lot to sort of signal that to them that this is helping is a way to provide care for people and prevent bad outcomes. And so the the image and the close-up of her was what you might more typically see as what works in charity land. And yes, for agreeable people, that's true. For open people, we did have the broader sort of panoramic view of the village so that you could kind of process that along with copy that spoke to it. We just gave more details in a story form for the open description.
SPEAKER_01:Fascinating. Yeah. It's really fascinating. This has been so eye-opening. And I think it just hopefully what I want listeners to take away is like there's more thoughtfulness that we can do in approaches to reaching our individuals to have that true relationship and speak to them for an organization that doesn't have 75,000 people to send out a mailer to or resources like uh a charity water of the world. What is something that like we are in the midst of giving season? What is the first step that you think they could take towards thinking like this, starting to test like this? What would be your advice?
SPEAKER_04:Well, I'll offer up the the non-sales sales pitch because I think it is an important point to note is that you any organization can have these trait scores that I described for 15 cents a record. So in that way, it is not a barrier. If you've got a hundred records, you can get the your hundred records tagged.
SPEAKER_01:If you've got a million records, where can they go to do that?
SPEAKER_04:Well, they probably find me on LinkedIn or just go to the donorvoice.com website and there's a contact form there. Perfect.
SPEAKER_01:I will link for it to you all in the show notes.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah. And with that, they get a cheat sheet, one per trait that talks about how to tailor to the trait, what words to use, tone, there's format suggestions, image suggestions. They also get, whether they're big or small, a 45-minute workshop with our personnel, our behavioral scientist team, including our heads. I don't care if they're a small cherry or a large, that's part of the mix, and there's no minimum price around all of that. So you will get curated high-level attention around that. My larger kind of response on this is that that I think we need to raise the floor on what is kind of minimally viable, if I'm going to use that product development term. This should not be thought of as sort of next level, you know, graduate level stuff. Our whole job in life is to connect with these human beings. And if we can agree that they're different, then we need to start treating them differently. And I get that that can create its own sort of paradox.
unknown:Right.
SPEAKER_04:And we aren't different, yeah. So there can be some analysis paralysis, like where do I start? How do I start to treat them differently? Well, this is one very validated, proven path to do it. And you don't have to come up with five versions out of the jump. The charity water kind of analog here, which I do I think is important for all the listeners, is that so they had these tags, they owned these tags, the people who were high in agreeableness and high in openness. And yes, we did the letter copy and put all the time and effort in as the kind of experts on that. Unbeknownst to me, they didn't even tell me they were doing this, which is great. They sent out an email test separate from all of this. And they wrote the copy themselves based on what they had learned through the process, which you would absolutely get in this sort of 45-minute session that I described. And it beat their they had a control that was just a one size fits all. And they got left. They actually were able to do, and I thought that was great.
SPEAKER_01:So smart.
SPEAKER_04:They had sort of inferred enough through osmosis and just being a part of the process that they were able to go off and do their own tailored version.
SPEAKER_01:Well, I think it would literally affect everything. It would affect what's the communication we're sending in a text versus an email. I would create a whole bunch of different segments in my email base, not just direct them all. In an event setting, we could know who's going to be in the room. How do we switch things at their seat or at this table? Do we have like there's this could be integrated, should be integrated into everything that's done? And then what if we are truly saying that we are focused on transformational relationships over transactional? But to your point, it shouldn't be the most innovative thing. It should just be how it is done. I feel like it's been like this hidden, I don't want to say secret, but kind of. Why? Why do you think that is? And are you seeing a jump and a growth in this taking flight?
SPEAKER_04:Just on your earlier observation, yes, this has application across any channel or circumstance. Why? Because it travels with the person. So in every situation, there is opportunity to tailor and expect that it can do a greater job of fostering connection. It's anecdotal and we we have our own sort of blinders on, but yes, I I think the sector writ large is moving closer to us, which certainly helps with our marketing outreach. And look, I mean, people change because they see the light or they feel the heat, and there's an awful lot of heat where groups are not growing and you know they're at best flat, often shrinking. And I think there's a quiet desperation that's growing, and I think it needs to for different answers to the same old questions.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_04:Best practice, even our version of best practice, our job as a business is to put these best practices, you know, out to pasture. Not, and it's not an indictment on past, it's just it's an evolution. And I don't think that the sector has evolved fast enough. I think that too much of the sector is satisfied with the best practice of 50 years ago.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_04:I think there's an appetite. There's an appetite for growth because aren't growing.
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely. One of my favorite, and I'll kind of like have us wrap with this, is I've been reading the book Unreasonable Hospitality. And it's, I don't know if you've read it before, but Will was the co-owner and general manager of 11 Madison Park, at one time the world's number one restaurant, and basically states does the statement that this is what we've always done. Is that the beginning of the conversation or is it the end? And it should always be the beginning of the conversation and not a period at the end. And so I have really found this conversation so fascinating. And I hope it creates a whole trickle effect of people flooding to be able to find out this information and to really shift how we're thinking about things. Kevin, where, again, if you can just say, where should people go to be able to learn more about their personality traits and to connect with you?
SPEAKER_04:LinkedIn might be the easiest place to find me. And then otherwise, the website is thed donorvoice.com.
SPEAKER_00:Perfect.
SPEAKER_01:Kevin, thank you so much. I appreciate your time. I'm sure this is a very busy season for you and the team. So I hope you guys are having fun in the midst of everything and seeing some really, really, really cool results. Thank you.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you so much for tuning into today's episode of Missions to Movement. If you enjoyed our conversation and found it helpful, I would love for you to take a moment to leave a review wherever you're listening. Your feedback helps us reach more change makers like you and continue bringing impactful stories and strategies to the show. Don't forget to hit that subscribe button too so you'll never miss an episode. And until next time, keep turning your mission into a movement.
