If you’re going to give away your best content, be generous, but be smart.

After doing the same donor report for almost six years, it was time to sharpen the product, boost the content, and get deeper into the charitable giving segment.

Charities face enormous challenges and are surprisingly competitive for donor dollars. How do you get them in a room together?

The Problem

Shortly after its start-up in 2012, Insights West began diving into the research needs of BC’s charitable sector with a biannual report on how BCers view various charities. But, after a few years the report’s purpose started to wander and they started spamming it out to the wrong audiences. How do you make a truly valuable and important report resonate with the right audience?

The Solution

The truth is, less is more and targeted is better. So, let’s break this up, target, and segment. In fact, that’s what we did for both the report and the audiences.

The regular report was produced and sent to the most of the usual suspects, but much more focused on the right audience. Then a second, more segmented, detailed, and in-depth report on donor motivations and intentions was promised to those that opened and downloaded the first report.

Those that followed suit, got that report: a deep dive into the donor habits of key audiences across British Columbia with insights into how to market to them and how to get them to give.

Finally, recipients of the report were invited to an in-person luncheon where the research team would present the results, telling them what it meant, what they needed to do, and how they could improve their fundraising efforts.

The Result

We thought we might get a dozen people, or worse, half that. Charities have many competing interests and many are small. And if the response was low, the Research Director was willing to just do a personal presentation at their office.

Well, within days of sending the invitation to the event, the best hoped for scenario was doubled: there were 24 interested. But of course, on the day of the event, you get about 25% drop-off, right? Well, we had the number right. There were 25 attendees.

And best of all, they all got a third and final report summarizing the notes from the event, sent to their in-boxes the second the last of them left the room.

The lessons are simple: create great content, direct it to the right audience, make it valuable and give it value, set a cadence of follow-ups that are relevant but not annoying, and then deliver a pleasant and delightful surprise.