Let me explain the analogy upfront rather than making you wade through this piece to get at the meat of it (pun intended). What we eat for dinner is highly dependent on context. Whether someone will donate to an appeal is highly dependent on context. That’s my set, I’ll be here all week!
Now, hopefully your interest is piqued enough to read on and get a more fulsome explanation.
Sushi isn’t among my top dinner choices. I’ve never been a big seafood fan. If I’m by myself, I’ll usually order pasta, paneer tikka masala, or cheese enchiladas. If it’s got cheese and carbs, you’ll find it on my plate.
But a lot more goes into my dinner plans than my own tastes! Am I having dinner with my partner Amy who loves sushi but is lactose-intolerant? Will my toddler Marlow, who has a severe egg allergy, be there, too?
Am I eating dinner at home in Brooklyn, where I can get the best version of most cuisines in the world? Or are we ordering delivery where I grew up in rural Pennsylvania, where a fancy night out was at Olive Garden?
There are so many variables that influence whether I am eating sushi for dinner that go far beyond my preferences. To make a good guess, you’d need to know my taste but you’d also need to know the context.
Chorus is finding the same thing is true when we send a fundraising appeal to a supporter. In study after study, we’re seeing that audience members have distinct and durable topic preferences. In one study for a health and human services nonprofit with over 5M people on the list, aligning an email appeal to a donor’s topic preference boosted the donation rate by over 2.25x. For a nonprofit working in the LGBTQ+ space with over 2 million supporters, an appeal on a supporter’s favorite topic raised 1.8 times as much per email as an appeal on another topic.
The temptation is to do things the old way and assign those supporters to topic buckets or tags. When you’re writing an appeal on clean water, you send it to the clean water people. Clean air goes to the clean air people. This is how we’ve all done it for years (if at all).
But just like my dinner plans, a lot more goes into whether a supporter gives. So when Chorus looks at whether to route a single appeal to an individual supporter, we also study the timing (what else have they seen lately and how have they responded to it), the volume and frequency of appeals in the last several months, and the news environment. These variables are the equivalent of who else is coming to dinner and what city are we eating in. With all of this information, we can predict whether an individual supporter will donate or take action on this specific appeal at this specific time through this specific channel.
The result is higher engagement and fundraising rates and less churn, because Chorus can route content to the people highly likely to respond and strategically suppress the people who are highly unlikely to respond, thus preventing unneeded churn.
So, am I eating sushi for dinner? If Amy’s picking and we’re home in Brooklyn, there’s a decent chance. My order history alone would say never. A supporter’s giving history is the same kind of clue: it tells you a lot, and it still can’t tell you what they’ll do with the appeal you’re sending tonight.
Thanks,
Sam
P.S. Want to learn more about Chorus or read the results of our research in detail? Reply to this email or book a walkthrough.