Are your comms "age appropriate"?
File under: Know your donors (or at least their visual limitations)
It seems like such a small thing. Until it kills the gift....
Why guesswork type at point of sale can flip a "likely" into a "no"
Today's burning question: Is your typography, digital or print, "age appropriate"?
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Setting the scene...
My Zoom host a few weeks back? A hospital foundation
Attendees? A proven team of winning communicators
The morning topic? "Everything {I Think} I Know About Successful Donor Communications, Crammed into 45-ish Minutes"
Followed by lots of interaction, with a bunch of pros who ALREADY do outstanding donor comms: newsletters, appeals, major gifts, monthly-giving promos, capital campaigns >>> the whole shebang!
Still: I had one itsy-bitsy nit to pick.
It had to do with the giving page on the foundation's website ... which is, technically speaking, what's called the "point of sale" in online fundraising. A point of sale is where the final transaction begins. It's where the customer hands over money.
The nit I wished to pick?
"When I went to your website's giving page for a first look, the type seemed really small. Small type won't work for 64-year-old eyes. Those are the eyes in the skulls of average donors."[Blackbaud data published 2022]
PS: By the way, dear reader: Another vital "point of sale" for fundraising is the reply device in your direct mail appeals. You see these cheap, peewee envelopes with all this tiny type squished in. A more lucrative trend, championed by John Lepp at Agents of Good (& others), is toward full-page reply devices. To study a recent full-page reply device (created by the Coopers of The Case Writers team), click here.
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Yes, yeah, I know ...
You can enlarge type on a computer screen with a couple of keystrokes.
I do it all the time.
But only when I'm motivated ... when I'm acting with purpose. Like when I'm writing for a client (I use a 200% enlargement with direct mail, so I can really FEEL -- as well as see -- the words). Like when I'm keeping up with the news (for some reason, political news is not quite as depressing if you enlarge the type). Like when I'm emailing dear friends.
Here's the metric to track: your conversion rate.
Online conversion -- the number of visitors to your website who actually DO something like MAKE a donation (rather than just window shop) -- is a horror show ... the kind of movie where almost everyone you care about dies.
Benchmark data summarized in 2016 by Nonprofit Pro found that just 1.1% of visitors to a nonprofit website made a donation. Bad news #1.
Bad news #2: of those visitors who DID click though to your giving page (i.e., to your point of sale), only 15% completed the transaction.
But that was 2016, right? Pre-pandemic? Everything's changed???
Here's the same benchmark data from M+R published in 2022. Still grim. M+R found that the donation completion rate on a giving page averaged across all charities was 17%. In other words: 83% of those who got to your charity's giving page did NOT in the end make a gift. They left instead without any financial commitment to your mission.
That's the vast majority.
Surely, there's something that can be done to improve those dismal stats? I mean: We have to, right?
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Online donors hang by a thread
They've made a step in your direction ... by clicking through.
But they are still considering. They're easily frustrated. And website visitors are antsy to begin with.
"Fifteen seconds," writes expert David Zheng, "that’s the average time spent on a website. That’s how long you have to capture someone’s attention...." [Mr. Zheng's lengthy, well-documented 2020 post titled The 15 Second Rule: 3 Reasons Why Users Leave a Website is eye-opening.]
Your website visitors will be, as Seth Godin has said of target audiences generally, "lazy people in a hurry." (He did not mean that as a criticism, by the way. He meant that successful communicators treat that reality as a worthy challenge.)
Your small type is an irritant.
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Let's turn this into a fun little test
What's the first thing you'd want a potential new donor to think when she/he clicked through to your giving page?
(1) "Oh, thank you! Look at THAT type. It's SO BIG!!! I can almost read it without my glasses! How thoughtful!!! I love YOU."
OR
(2) "The type's too small! I can't read that. Why do charities DO that?"
Obvious, right?
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As noted above, the average age of a donor in North America is now 64, according to Blackbaud's latest data. Most people at that age wear prescription glasses ... or are headed for cataract surgery (my hand's raised).
Able young professionals coming into fundraising don't always realize the pervasiveness of these visual handicaps for older supporters.
Still, forever: You build success in fundraising BACKWARDS from your most likely target audience(s).
SO: How well ARE your most likely target-audience eyes performing? How good ARE those eyes at absorbing your messages? Are your comms speaking with comfort to them, hoping to engage them, accommodating their predictable disabilities?
That's part of your job ... a BIG part of your job.
Communicating "efficiently" -- i.e., getting the best response to your offers -- is what separates the champs from the also-rans.
With so much love, dear reader....
PS: I first gazed upon my mother, bless her soul, 74 years ago. So I have old eyes. She was smiling, as I recall.
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Dear Reader: This is an excerpt from Tom Ahern’s e-newsletter. Did you miss crucial back issues of this how-to e-news? Immediately available! Just GO here. (And scroll down just a bit to sign up for Tom’s revenue-boosting tips and insights. In your inbox regularly. It’s free.)