While chatting with one of SPN’s readers last week, we noodled on leasing Email and SMS lists to attract new donors. Since many Orgs I know rely on lists, either as a substantial part of their digital fundraising mix or as a supporting affiliate-like channel during moments of peak donor interest, I thought I’d share some thoughts.
For starters the Cost per Donor Acquisition for these channels – or data sources – often look attractive. But be warned – they’re a beast that can very quickly destroy your Donor Experience.
Fundraisers can use lists in 2 ways:
- Turn-key, spray and pray OR…
- Just ask for the raw data sans blast
Let’s break it down.
More common is a turn-key package organized by an outside vendor for blind prospecting to a large list of people who have never heard of your Org based on their black box, modeled fundraising interest. This use case requires almost no involvement by you – and drives net-negative results.
The most obvious reason to not buy these lists is because text and email prospecting is annoying. It sucks for the recipient. Yesterday morning, I received probably my 101st email asking me to support a 2024 political campaign. I bought a baseball cap back in 2020 and left my actual phone number on the check out page for delivery purposes. Since then, anyone running for election seemingly anywhere now texts asking me to pitch in.
That’s probably the most common example of text-blasting – and it likely works well for political fundraising. Awareness and top-of-mindedness are the only metrics that matter for electoral advertising – most people are voters. We aren’t going to forgo our right to vote or change our fundamental beliefs based on irritating advertising, and we only have two – or several – choices on the ballot.
But for most apolitical nonprofits, that isn’t true – blasting potential donors with flashy-red-button “donate now” emails or text-YES-to-donate texts will most likely result in them blocking the number, marking an email as spam, and finding other Orgs to support with their wallet.
Respect is a crucial aspect of donor experience – and any sustainable fundraising program.
Buying lists makes Orgs lazy.
Like affiliate programs, SMS and Email list buys require very little management, seeming to be a holy grail of reaping the rewards and acquiring new donors at acceptable CPA. There’s very little need to invest in understanding who the donors are, investing in good creative, or testing the donation experience on the website. Which often means Orgs lose these muscles really quickly. It wouldn’t be an issue if SMS and Email affiliate programs lived up to the promise – but their performance tends to deteriorate over time, leaving Orgs with significant dips in performance.
Buying or leasing lists is unsustainable with privacy changes.
Digital 3rd party audiences are already becoming unusable in most states due to the CPA laws and will be destroyed by Google’s declared fight on 3rd party cookies. Email and phone number lists are no different in their mechanics – the data is collected from public sources, most frequently without explicit user consent or consent acquired by fine print text at the bottom of terms and conditions – making the data vulnerable to further privacy changes.
(Lack of) Data recency, low engagement, and associated waste.
Most interest-based email and phone number lists, similarly to 3rd party cookie-based audiences, are comprised of cheap, outdated information. Programs based on these lists, despite having acceptable – and sometimes comparatively great – CPAs, have meager click-through rates, conversion rates, and, most usually, low donor lifetime value. These are arbitrage programs – at a prospective donor level, their mechanics can be explained as “driving low value at an even lower price.”
As I explained in SPN 82 using the CPM example, obsession with “the lowest price” leads to a very inefficient spend-to-being-seen, or the “spend conversion” ratio. Orgs deploying these tactics go through 10x the potential donors needed to raise the same amount of money compared to higher-quality programs – further adding to damaging reputation and becoming “that spammy organization.”
There’s Another Way
Email or phone number lists can be acquired from those same prospecting vendors without opting for the text-blast part. Ask them to share the raw data – most will be happy to (while meeting the necessary PII processing regulations).
This is a worse deal at face value – your Org will pay for the data itself, with no performance guarantee, instead of using a fixed pay-per-new-donor model for the full package. But those lists have actual value, incomparable to damaging prospecting efforts.
Use public email information to enrich your existing donor file. Most of your donors have multiple email addresses. It makes total sense to use list providers to “enrich” your existing donor file with other email addresses before using that data for further analytics, such as uploading those addresses to Liveramp or a competing tool for further psychographic analytics.
Use public lists to reach out to donors who lapsed a while ago. Prospecting with public lists isn’t a good idea, but using purchased or leased lists to cross-validate them against your donor file from 5-7-10 years ago is a different story. This is probably the cheapest way to get the most up-to-date information that can be further used in reactivation campaigns – remembering the donor experience and not outsourcing the entire workflow to traditional affiliate-like vendors. For this use case to work, in an ideal world Orgs should own the execution, enabling them to control the creative, frequency, and analytics data.
Wrapping Up
In SPN, I frequently talk about Donor Experience and how Orgs’ need to play the long game, create a culture of learning faster, and build the muscles and courage to experiment. Owning the donor data is paramount. Employing list-leasing or affiliate marketing isn’t a strategy that will help any Org win in the long run.