There’s no such thing as best practices

There is no such thing as best practices.

Fundraisers hear the term Best Practices bandied about all the time. Every other conference session features them. They give us the false security of believing “someone has figured out the right things to do and all I need to do is follow their recipe.”

Nope.

As often as not, best practices are things we have been doing for a long time, that those who went before us were doing, and no one in decades has questioned the underlying validity.

Take renewals. Roger Craver has written a must-read mea culpa outlining the ways that renewal programs do not work and may actually be counterproductive. Turns out they are a holdover from the dawn of cause-based direct marketing when the only copyable model was old-timey magazine subscriptions worked. You subscribed and you’d get your 12 issues, and if you didn’t renew, you were out.

Roger concludes: “despite donor irritation, rising attrition, wasted budget, and mountains of data showing [the renewal model] simply doesn’t match donor behavior…In short, we are clinging to an aging unicorn and pretending it’s still a workhorse.”

Roger doesn’t stop there. He takes aim at the RFM (recency-frequency-money) model still common in many fundraising programs. And then he debunks a long-held “best practice” of quickly soliciting a second gift from new donors, because “that’s the best time to get new donors to give again.”

Digital marketers: Consider taking the ask email out of your email welcome series and see how that affects retention. It might surprise you.

All credit to Roger (full disclosure: He is one of my mentors) for coming clean: “If ever there was a sin of mailing more to make more, I was both the priest and the altar boy.”

Spend a half-hour on the Agitator site and you’ll start to think everything you thought you knew about nonprofit direct marketing is wrong. 

Recent findings include:

• Contrary to “best practices,” you should not put the ask in a direct mail piece in the first few paragraphs.
• QR codes in direct mail letters either help or have no effect on donor response rates.
• It’s helpful to put the words “Giving Tuesday” in your Giving Tuesday subject lines.
• It may be bad to mention a match in the subject line of a solicitation email (I wonder about that one).

There are no best practices. And if there are, they are hiding amongst a sea of impostors. And they won’t be best practices for long.

What to do?

First: Test. Test. Test. Test. Test. The DonorVoice data may be generally true, but not for your organization. Like all science, it can be upended by newer science. The DonorVoice findings are not your new best practices – they are worthwhile testable hypotheses.

Second: Give up on the idea of “best practices.” Personally, I find that liberating. Would you rather create something new and powerful, or would you rather plug in the “best practices” and turn a crank?

Third: Don’t make any abrupt changes without testing. You may be doing it “all wrong” according to the latest research, but you may have trained your donors to respond in a certain way. Sometimes, the research doesn’t translate into reality.

So the next time someone at a conference proclaims “best practices,” ask them how they know. Ask what they tested. Ask if it worked for organizations like yours. Because the best practice for your organization isn’t waiting to be discovered at a conference—it’s waiting to be tested in your next appeal.