Newsletter: What Works Best at Checkout? Round-Up vs Specific Ask 🤔 ; How to Raise More Money from Matching Gifts 🎁 🎁 ; How Web 3.0 Can Be Used for Social Change 😇
Did you know that people all over the world read my Selfish Giving newsletter??? 🌎🌍🌏
It's true!
While most of my readers are right here in the United States, I boast readers from the United Kingdom, Japan, Brazil, Russia, India, South Africa and just about every other country in the world!
Cool, right? 🕶🧊
But one of my favorite readers abroad truly lives on the other side of the world. That person is Tasman Cassim, Senior Manager of Partnerships at the Black Dog Institute in Randwick, New South Wales, Australia!
Not long ago Tasman (or 'Tas' as his friends call him!) - who's an accomplished corporate partnership professional and fundraiser in his own right - wrote asking me if their retail partner should ask shoppers to round up to a specific amount as opposed to the nearest dollar.
I gave Tas some advice and I wanted to share what he wrote back. I think partnership pros could all - regardless of where you live in the world - learn something from his experience!
⭐️First, what Tas wrote:
G’day, Joe
You might remember last year you gave some great advice on what’s the $ amount to ask for at the till when rounding up. Our partner went with a $1 an $5 donation and I wanted to share the results below with you. They said it was the mix that helped and the flex to talk to the customer. Thanks, this was invaluable advice and turned into the most successful retail round up campaign we’ve done, over 100k raised! Thanks as always mate.
Tas
⭐️Second, a few key learnings from Tas' round-up campaign that included a specific dollar ask.
$1 donation drove 52% mix of total $ donations & 87% mix of total unit donations
$5 donation drove 34% mix of total $ donations & 11% mix of total unit donations
Together the two denominations drove 86% of the total funds raised
Average raised per store was $537
Top store raised $3,240 and the bottom store raised just $33
⭐Third, the key takeaways from this campaign include:
Give it a try. If you're currently doing a traditional round-up program that asks shoppers to round-up to the nearest dollar, do a test in several stores of giving shoppers the option to round-up an additional dollar or five dollars.
Shoppers like options. The best point-of-sale fundraising strategy may be to give shoppers lots of options. They can round-up to the nearest dollar, round-up for a specific amount or just make a flat donation of any amount.
We need more data. The only thing we don't know is how many shoppers were turned-off by the specific ask pitch and didn't donate anything (Not even rounding-up to the nearest dollar). I would still like to see some A/B testing on campaigns that round-up to the nearest dollar compared to campaigns that ask for a round-up to a specific amount.
Further Reading: Why are round-up fundraisers so popular and effective?
✍️ Partnership Notes
1. Bike sales have been booming during the pandemic! Are bike makers on your prospect list? Here's a great partnership between bike maker Trek and World Bicycle Relief that could serve as a model for other partnerships. If you hit a paywall on the Adweek article, read this one instead.
2. Car maker Land Rover insists its Defender Fender Above & Beyond Service Awards Winners is “not a marketing idea or what can we do to sell more cars” but an effort to give back to groups that have given so much of themselves during the pandemic and before. Whatever their goal is I think it's great!
3. The Hockey Diversity Alliance (HDA), Budweiser Canada, and Canadian Tire have teamed up to sell a cause product - #TapeOutHate hockey tape - in tire stores across Canada.
4. A good article to share with your corporate partners. Five ways to turn your purpose into a competitive advantage.
5. A 5-minute guide on how to raise more money from matching gifts. A great segment from Curt Weeden's Nonprofit Fundraising Channel. [Video]
🤑 Marketing Your Cause
1. A choice of words is a choice of worlds. ACLU reframes abortion bans as ‘forced pregnancy’. How can you better reframe what your organization does?
2. Again, words matter...One piece of direct mail landed this volunteer-run nonprofit $100,000. Nonprofit copywriting guru Tom Ahern explains how they did it.
3. Visuals are important too! I love this new tool that removes in seconds any unwanted object, defect, people or text from your pictures.
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P.S. The Purpose People™ community is brought to you by our friends at Accelerist. Many of you know Brittany Hill and her team well!
😎 Cool Jobs in Cause
1. Senior Mgr., Development, Special Olympics Southern CA, Long Beach ($62k - $68k)
2. Director, Sales Sponsorship & Strategic Partnerships, Sesame Workshop, NYC
3. National Director, Corporate Alliances, American Diabetes Association, Remote ($110k - $125k)
🧠🍌 Brain Food
1. Explain Web 3.0 to me like I'm five.
2. Ok, now that you've read 👆learn how Web 3.0 can be used for social change.
3. Phew. That was a lot. 👆👆Now for some entertainment.
