Weekend Musings -14

Thoughts on how Indians give to charities, Salesforce State of Marketing, Facebook has new ways for generating leads, and NextAfter Year-End Multichannel Fundraising report

After two years of no show, the London Marathon 2021 returns today in full-stack. 

More than 40,000 runners will join some of the world's best on the usual course that starts in Blackheath and finishes 26.2 miles later in the shadow of Buckingham Palace on The Mall.

They will be joined by a similar number completing the distance 'virtually' via a tracking app on a course of their choosing.

This year 86 year old Eileen Noble will be running her 22nd marathon.

Last year braving the torrential rain Eileen became one of the oldest women to complete the London Marathon 2020.

And this young lady started running in her early 50s. It isn’t a typo. She runs because it gives her peace, few hours of break from her life and socialising.

Her secret to staying motivated on long runs?

“Accept the fact that you’re going to do it slowly, but just keep going.”

If you are looking for motivation then look no further. Eileen is the answer.

Talking about marathons - today I ran my first marathon in 4:30 minutes. Bangalore weather was kind. The timing is something that I want to work on. But a nice feeling and competed at my pace and ease. No injuries.

Moving on to my weekend musings for this week:

How does India give?

According to the recently released India Giving Report 2021 by Charities Aid Foundation: “Cash remains the most popular way for donors to give to charity but its use has declined in recent years (53% of donors in 2020 vs. 68% in 2018). Digital methods of giving have increased in popularity, particularly donating by digital wallet which has increased dramatically since 2019 (44% vs. 28% in 2019). The pandemic may have accelerated these trends – our research found that most of the public (72%) are avoiding using cash because of concerns around Covid-19.”

I have seen the report and I think digital is the preferred way and not cash. Not sure why but CAF isn’t considering “Online giving with a bank/credit card” as digital. Giving with digital wallets and via bank or credit card should be considered as digital and not separate entities.

Another interesting observation the report makes: “Generally, the public continue to be positive about the impact of charities.”

“Four in five (81%) believe that the impact on their local community has been positive with only a very few considering it negative (2%). More than three in four (77%) consider the impact on India as a whole to be positive whilst only one in 20 (5%) now consider charities to have a negative impact (up from 3% in 2019 and in line with 2018). Around seven in ten (68%) consider the impact of charities internationally to be positive. This is in line with previous years, though the very small proportion who consider charities to have had a negative impact internationally has increased (5% vs 3% in 2018).”

The State of Year-End Multichannel Fundraising

For this year-end multichannel study, Next After focused solely on how these same organizations communicated with both donor personas during the year-end season. As a result, the organisation successfully made donations to 103 organizations and analyzed 1,525 communications. 

One of the major findings was:

“65% of organizations did not communicate with their online and offline donors via multiple channels.”

Next After defines multichannel donors as those who make at least one online and one offline gift in a year.

“When analyzing the value of donors, we also look at online-only donors, offline-only donors, and offline-only donors with an email — folks who only give through offline methods, but the organization has an email for them.”

Multichannel donors aren’t just more valuable, but they’re more likely to give again and over time.

Wonder why most of them are behind retention(business reasons). Donor acquisition remains the biggest challenge for NGOs.

Donor retention should be the concern but no one speaks about - “How to acquire new donors or How to focus on Click to Donate(One-Off and Regular Giving).”

Next After should do a report on the same?

State of Marketing - Salesforce 7th Edition

According to Salesforce’s 7th State of Marketing, digital channels have solidified their central role in marketers’ toolkits; social media, digital ads, and video round out the three most common means of reaching customers.

“Even those digital channels that may have been classified as emerging in recent years are seeing mass adoption. Mobile messaging, for instance, is used by 69% of marketers, and nearly two-thirds of organizations use audio media like podcasts and streaming ads.”

In addition to this: “Eighty-three percent of marketers say their ability to meet customer expectations depends on their digital capabilities, and 83% say their work will be more technology-driven after the pandemic than before.”

Facebook has new ways of generating leads

Facebook plans to test paid and organic tools to help small businesses find and qualify leads directly within the Instagram app reports SEJ.

Facebook says that this will create another business case for using Instagram, and Facebook says this will be a more cost-effective way to generate leads compared to existing solutions.

Facebook quotes the success story of Seoul Spa:

“To give customers an easy and convenient way to get information about its offerings and book appointments, the Vietnamese beauty company used lead generation in Messenger, which increased qualified leads by 3.5X while also reducing costs.”

The ad campaign ran for 14 days. The ad took people to Messenger, which collected their treatment preferences, allowing the Seoul Spa customer support team to follow up with tailored messages, provide service recommendations and nudge them to book an appointment. 

Seoul Spa also partnered with Pancake, a customer support platform, which allowed its sales agents to respond to customer requests across different channels.

This is an exciting development and should be great to try out whenever this rolls out.

That’s all for this week I will see you soon.

Peace and happiness.