Conversation with Courtney Gaines

In a long conversation, Courtney shares her thoughts on the donor relationship, value proposition, donor-centric mindset, and why testing is the answer to enhance your digital fundraising

“Donor onboarding is no different than a dating relationship. I am not going to meet you and just tell you all about myself. I should get to know you and appreciate you before I open up. The bottom line it is a relationship,” says Courtney Gaines Vice President at NextAfter.

“In building a relationship you will understand the why and what they are looking from your organization. This helps you to understand what can you give to your donors and not just the other way.”

The final quarter of the year has been jammed with online nonprofit events. Thanks to the pandemic, almost all of them are free(kind of) and online. I have forced myself to attend a few of them. I find events boring and hardly find speakers who add value.

Courtney was a surprise. She was one of the speakers on day two at the recently concluded virtual conference NioSummit. Her simple and insightful talk focussed on the “New Donor Welcome Series” and why the secret to the second gift is not another crappy email. (Read more: New donor “Welcome Series”)

Donor relationship

But my concern is not the second email. As a donor, I am yet to receive the first email after I have donated.

In an hour-long delightful video call, Courtney was more concerned that her mother shouldn’t find out about the talk. “Growing up crap was a swear word,” she adds with a big laugh.

Courtney acknowledges the fact that most of the nonprofits haven’t solved the problem of the first email.

“Going back to my talk we have to have donor welcome series. This is why I also believe that nonprofits have to be more donor-centric than organization-centric. Because it is about people giving to people and not the organization”.

For most of us, an entire life passes by and we are still figuring what are we good at and what gives us happiness and peace.

For Courtney, it wasn’t the case. When she was in college as a Marketing and Mass Communications student she interned at a nonprofit. “I don’t know how and why the organization made me in charge of running the campaign. I had no clue about nonprofit or running a campaign but I ran it and it was very successful. I was able to use my marketing and communication skills for a purpose and it was a great feeling. Later on, I worked at for-profit organisations but I was miserable and very confused. I made a shift to a nonprofit organization. And I got back that feeling of doing good when I was 20 years old.”

Since then Courtney has been in the nonprofit sector. In her current role, she is the VP at NextAfter. Today her role is more strategic but it started from being tactical and specialist in optimisation.

“In the last five years optimisation hasn’t changed a lot. The testing technologies have slightly changed but the end goal is still consistent such as what motivates donors to give. The big question around value proposition which is why should I give to you rather than some other nonprofit organisation or not at all.

So a lot of our testing is trying to unlock it. And we test everything from name acquisition to donor acquisition and every part of the funnel. It could be a Facebook or a Google ad or understanding the website traffic and how to bring more conversions.”

Optimisation and its role in digital fundraising

To understand relatively more I ask her if she can elaborate on what she means by optimisation tactics haven’t changed a great deal.

“Over time after working with different testing tactics I have seen that there are consistent trends. We can have a very high-level understanding of a donor’s motivation.”

However, the things that have changed according to Courtney is the understanding of different audience segments. “Looking at what channels they are coming from and are they a donor or a non-donor or a recurring donor. Maybe they came from paid social vs organic vs direct. All of these factors have a significant impact on a person’s likelihood to convert or not convert. So someone coming from paid social will act very differently than someone coming to the website directly. Some of the basics of testing and optimisation have not changed. But we have obtained a detailed understanding of specific channels and devices as people come to the website.”

NextAfter is known in the industry for its open-source research. I am a regular visitor to their website and their research has always added value. For example, the latest experiment informs how a smaller recurring gift asks impacts overall revenue on article pages.

According to the research done by Courtney: “Focus on the Family gets significant traffic to their article pages on their website. During a special campaign they were running, they wanted to see if they could convert some of this traffic into donors. Instead of just placing a one-time donation ask, we wanted to see if that was the best option for giving on the page and for this campaign. To test into this, we developed a slide up feature that would appear on the page after a few seconds.”

Would a smaller recurring gift ask convert more donors and result in more overall revenue on articles pages?

I would say the research findings are interesting. “While we had less initial transactions with the recurring gift ask, the overall revenue impact was significantly more than the one-time gift ask.” (Read the research for a complete understanding.)

Value Proposition

Talking about one of the foundational principles Courtney gives a significant weightage to the value proposition.

However, she thinks that marketers can’t answer it.

“Why should I give to you is a question that should be posted to the donors or the non-donors. A great lesson in this is that we always think that we have the answers. The reason we test because we don’t have the answers and we continue to search for the answers. These answers tell us what is motivating people to give.”

She further informs that once you have developed a value proposition you should test it with all your different segments. “Test different claims of your value and your data will tell you what is motivating to your donors. From there you can apply your value proposition to different channels or across your organisation.”

A value proposition statement is very different from a mission statement. A mission statement is an organisation centric whereas a value proposition is donor-centric.

Donor centric vs organisation centric

Nonprofits that keep the donors in front of their organisational values are in sync with what the donor wants.

So should nonprofits be organisation centric or donor-centric?

Courtney thinks that nonprofits should think beyond themselves and it is also the hardest thing. “We become so organization-centric that we lose sight of our donors. We get wrapped so much in the brand and in our own identity that we lose sight of our why. The reality is that whatever nonprofits are achieving cannot be done without their donors or supporters.”

Maybe next time you are sending one more of the crappy email. Test one with donor-centric communication.

Pandemic and the shift to digital

There has been one more recent shift in the nonprofit space. Thanks to the pandemic almost every nonprofit is finding ways and means to go digital and understand the space of digital fundraising.

Courtney has seen a small shift in people valuing digital direct response programs more than they have in the past.

“I have seen a lot of organizations saying that we got to focus on digital but then nothing happens. Digital has been a space that people don’t know well. There is not a lot of data and so it is scary. The pandemic has made the shift and people are getting more serious about it. And also the demand for digital content and communications has shifted so dramatically.”

While Courtney believes that we have been pushed into the digital space by the pandemic but her belief is that this won’t fade away in a post-pandemic world.

However, she has no data to tell when the pandemic is going to end or whatever the post-pandemic world means.

Tips to small and medium nonprofits

With the time ticking fast I ask her what would be her advice for small nonprofits who are trying to solve the digital fundraising piece.

“Nonprofits should invest in building a relationship, getting outside the organization, and having a true donor-centric perspective. We need to keep the interests of our donors and supporters at the forefront rather than the organizational interests.”

From a tactical mindset, she further adds that nonprofit organizations need to be adding value and cultivating relationships with our donors equally if not more than we are asking for money.

“When we foster this relationship, the money will come. It is a direct result of the trust and the beliefs that we share with the nonprofit organization because they act on it.”

Before we wrapped up our conversation Courtney left with another piece of insight:

We need to keep asking ourselves why we are doing things we are doing. This is the only way we learn and understand our end-user.

And the answer to the why is achieved by testing.

In a world full of evangelists, transformers, and thought leaders, it is hard to find marketers applying basic principles of life.

Thank you, Courtney 🙏