Talent Development

In the 2013–14 Season, a Professional Development budget didn’t exist for the California Symphony. Since then, the California Symphony has increased its Professional Development budget to more than $1,000 per staff member, and grown total revenue by more than $400,000 during that same time period. Investing in staff leads to results.

Orchestras have THE BEST talent on stage. Our players have been to the best music schools, studied with the best teachers, and must bring their absolute best — nothing short of perfection, really — to ever hope to win an audition in this intensely competitive field. And then they must perform their best again and again if they hope to gain tenure.

And on the admin side, we often don’t measure up to that.

In honor of conference season approaching, which is an opportunity for talent development that frequently gets the short straw, this post explores reasons for why this disparate juxtaposition between the artists and administrative talent often exists (there are actually some very compelling reasons), and why and how the California Symphony has chosen to tackle this issue.

This is definitely number one on the list and is probably the reason most often sited for not investing in talent development, and frequently a big reason for not attracting top admin talent to begin with. It’s true, we all have lean budgets — all of us — from the smallest mom-and-pop organizations to the biggest multi-million dollar institutions, and sadly, being lean and always trying to be leaner is among the most prolific traits of our industry. Money, or lack there of, is a symptom and not the problem though, and lack of money translates to lack of priority. So what is the priority, then? Well, the product on stage is the priority, which makes a lot of sense and is why this issue gets convoluted very quickly, and it brings the discussion to reason number two:

2. The Overhead Myth

The term “Overhead Myth” was coined by Dan Pallotta in a viral 2013 TED Talk and is the idea that nonprofits are wrongly rewarded for how little we spend instead of the impact we’re making. This myth was for a long time promulgated by nonprofit watchdogs like Charity Navigator, GuideStar, and others who evaluated charities on the sole metric of financial ratio (i.e. people expenses as a percentage of total expenses). For example, an organization with a budget of $1Million that spent $100,000 on staff would have a 10% overhead rate, and somewhere just above that percentage organizations would be docked — i.e. have a lower score from those watchdog groups — with not one ounce of attention given to if that organization was executing its mission, saving lives, serving more people, etc. So that’s a problem. The good news is that some of those groups have changed their rating system, including the two named above. The bad news is that this myth is still a widely held view among individual donors and particularly among foundations. To this day, every person reading this who writes grants will agree that foundations often ask questions about staff costs, and we have to tiptoe carefully around how we present our financials, or simply not include overhead costs in a project, which is a total joke because the project can’t get done without people to execute it in the first place. CalNonprofits has gone so far to say that low overhead hurts nonprofits, and they’re right. Why is it that the musician on stage gets to be categorized as an expense that matters and the person bringing those musicians to local schools to build a future audience for our art form has to be categorized as bad and wasteful? All of this is to say that this is a very real reason why our organizations don’t invest in talent or talent development.

3. Fear They’ll Leave

I have heard peers in this industry express this feeling: “I’ll spend the money, and then they’ll get poached by someone else.” Or, “We go through all that effort to train them, and then they’re qualified for a better job somewhere else.” Or, “…and then they’ll go get paid more somewhere else.” Opportunity for growth internally is not why people leave a job. That’s not a thing. No one has ever said, “My organization invested in me so much, I got fed up and went somewhere else.”

One study shows that the number one reason orchestra administrators change jobs is workplace (dis)satisfaction (source: Adaptistration). Harvard Business Review confirms this more broadly by stating that one of the top drivers for employee turnover is allowing workers to stagnate in their role. As managers, we have a real opportunity to keep our staff challenged, inspired, stimulated — and ultimately keep them as high and higher performers delivering more to our bottom line — when we invest in their professional development.

Hopefully the ‘why’ is becoming more obvious, and by drilling down deeper, the California Symphony has connected the reason to invest in talent development to its budget implications.

Forget the cost of training — think of the cost of hiring. People always say it’s expensive to train someone new, but think of the costs you incur before you even get to that point: One job posting on LinkedIn is $500; that pays for the conference fee had that person stayed at your organization. Add in the costs to post that position to a few other job sites, and you’ve also broken even on the cost for conference transportation and lodging for that person.
Acknowledge not everyone in the whole org can go to a zillion (or even two) conferences a year. But there are other ways to foster a talent development environment. About a million webinars are available, and for many of them, if people would stop “multi-tasking” while watching and actually focus on the content presented, there is a wealth of good training being presented in this free or low cost format. We have tried to create a culture at the California Symphony that allows time for this so the multi-tasking isn’t a temptation and the time carved out is a priority. Besides conferences and webinars, there are also continuing education classes, daylong workshops and seminars, and industry boot camps. There are a lot of opportunities of varying time and monetary commitments we can foster.
Take advantage of discounts. Many professional development opportunities offer first timer rates and scholarships (last year we paid almost $0 for three staff members to go to a conference they wanted to attend because of funding for new attendees and emerging leaders). And since you’re only a first-timer once, make sure to go for the early bird rates in successive years. This seems like a no-brainer, but so often our orgs are structured such that sometimes people don’t know if they’ll be able to attend the conference/workshop/seminar until closer to the actual date, and the organization misses out on savings as a result. Plus, hotels and flights are cheaper in advance, too, so when you are budgeting and planning for this expense on a proper timeline, those costs are made as low as possible.
Staff have some skin in the game. The deal we make at the California Symphony is that if you want to attend a conference, you need to become an individual member of that service organization; for most of us that’s ACSO (Association of California Symphony Orchestras), for some it’s the League of American Orchestras, and for others, it’s something else. For example, our Music Librarian recently applied (and was accepted!) to become a member of MOLA (Major Orchestras’ Librarian Association), and she just went to their conference (with all the first timer discounts and scholarships she could rack up, of course), and came back a fireball of energy and ideas of how to make her work better and serve the organization in new and innovative ways. (Side note: I had no idea the librarians’ conference resulted in this kind of enthusiasm and idea generation…those folks are on to something). It was worth every penny (of which there really weren’t that many pennies spent compared to how much more awesome Marcella will be at her job now), and each staff member who invests a little themself tends to maximize the opportunity.
Report back after conference. What’s not acceptable at the California Symphony is to attend a conference/seminar/workshop and feel inspired and warm and fuzzy for about a week. I want action from the investment, so employees are required to report back at a future staff meeting what they learned, their key takeaways, and what they plan to implement in their work here based on all that. This internal show-and-tell is practiced all the way up to the Executive Director. We do this for a few reasons:

This holds everyone accountable, so their performance can be evaluated against the goals and ideas they set for themselves.

2. They’ve just passed on the inspiration, ideas, and takeaways from conference in a personal way to the rest of the staff. #win

Over the last four years, the California Symphony has gone from not even having a professional development line in the budget to investing more and more in talent and their development. And the growth in revenue we’ve seen far outpaces the expense. In other words, it’s an investment that’s paying off.

The California Symphony has increased its Professional Development budget to more than $1,000 per staff member per year, and grown total revenue by more than $400,000 during that same time period. Investing in staff leads to results.

Stealing a few more cues from Silicon Valley and the greater business community, here are some other ideas we are looking to implement:

New hire boot camp. Some firms practice a multi-day or even multi-week orientation curriculum that covers all facets of company culture, cross-departmental and large-scale initiatives throughout the company, and a marketing/brand overview. We do a mini version of this at the California Symphony: every new employee, regardless of department, seniority, or job function is presented our audience development plan (more on that here and here, and you can view the actual plan here) in addition to our SMaC plan (here). We’d like to expand this to include a basic marketing/messaging overview (i.e. brand personality, how we talk about ourselves, key words or messages to use in our public communications…because every single role is public-facing to some degree, not just the marketing personnel).

Professional development stipend. Now that we’ve grown our talent development budget, we’re exploring the idea of including it in our benefits package (e.g. every employee has up to $X to spend on their own growth each year). Then, there’s not a pool of money to which people have to request access, but rather, an assumption that you as an employee are worth the investment — an equal investment to others — and you have the freedom and autonomy to determine how to use that investment to best benefit you. And, for those employees that want to invest in a bigger way, such as a continuing education class or attending many conferences, or traveling to one big, far away conference, they can make that decision and supplement as needed (see “skin in the game” comments above).

Mentorship. Structured mentoring is something our industry needs. Not the wimpy kind of mentoring where someone eager asks in a Dr. Seussian way, “Will you be my mentor?” and the person on the receiving end feels awkward and directionless from the way the too-open-ended-and-goalless question was asked; that doesn’t serve either party well. We need a systematic approach to coaching and development of others: mentorships that have a defined beginning and end, and goal(s) for the mentee, so that the period of mentoring has a clear direction for both parties. Plus, the mentorship needs to be mostly driven by the mentee, which can only happen with some basic training/orientation/expectation setting…again, some structure. While this type of project might seemingly lend itself to a big organization with a large staff, we are in the early stages of developing a plan working across organizations with which we’re connected. More to come on this in a future post. In the meantime, at minimum, finding ways to give direct feedback to your employees is critical in moving your staff and organization forward, and is often overlooked as a non-essential at nonprofits of all sizes. There’s too much at stake to not give straight and actionable feedback to your team.

Compared to other industries that have cultures of professional development, mentorship, accountability, and clearly defined growth tracks, we are behind. Being in service to the art means being in service to the people that produce the art (raise money for the art, market the art, educate others about the art, etc.), and there are a lot of people who never play an instrument on stage who help produce the art.

At the end of the day, people execute the mission — on stage and off — so we need to work on getting, keeping, and growing the best people. Conference season, here we go.

Aubrey Bergauer, Executive Director, California Symphony
Aubrey Bergauer defies trends, and then makes her own. In a time when most arts organizations are scaling back programs, tightening budgets, and seeing declines in tickets and subscriptions, Bergauer has dramatically increased earned and contributed revenue at organizations ranging from Seattle Opera to the Bumbershoot Music & Arts Festival to the California Symphony. Her focus on not just engaging — but retaining — new audiences grew Seattle Opera’s BRAVO! Club (young patrons group for audience members in their 20’s and 30’s) to the largest group of its kind nationwide, led the Bumbershoot Festival to achieve an unprecedented 43% increase in revenue, and propelled the California Symphony to quadruple the size of its donor base. From growing audiences, increasing concerts, and expanding programs to instilling and achieving common goals across what are usually siloed marketing, development, and artistic departments, Bergauer is someone you want to follow — on the nationally-recognized blog she created to discuss what actually works in a changing arts landscape, and in real life, too.

A graduate of Rice University with degrees in Music Performance and Business, for the last 15 years Bergauer has used music to make the world around her better, through programs that champion social justice and equality, through ground-breaking marketing and audience development tactics on the forefront of technology, and through taking strategically calculated risks in a risk-averse field. If ideas are a dime a dozen, what separates Bergauer is her experience and record of impact and execution at institutions of all sizes. Praised for her leadership which “points the way to a new style of audience outreach,” (Wall Street Journal) and which drove the California Symphony to become “the most forward-looking music organization around.” (Mercury News) Bergauer’s ability to strategically and holistically examine and advance every facet of the organization’s mission and vision is creating a transformational change in the office, on the stage, in the audience, in the community, and going well beyond the industry of classical music.

Originally published Aubrey Bergauer / California Symphony at medium.com on May 18, 2017.

Patron Courtship: Just In Time for Valentine’s Day

Over the last three seasons, the California Symphony has nearly quadrupled its number of donor households, increased the total dollars raised from individuals by 51%, increased subscriber households by 21%, and increased single ticket buyers by 33%. This love affair isn’t a one-night stand.

We love our patrons. Seriously. Patrons are the lifeblood of any arts organization. Without them, our art has no audience, and yet so often arts organizations don’t keep the patron at the center. Or we focus on always getting new patrons at the expense of developing deep, meaningful, long-lasting relationships with the ones we have. And that might be because relationships are a lot of work. That’s true in romance, and it’s true for orchestras. We already wrote a post about why chasing new audiences is not the right answer where we shared why we don’t focus on new patrons despite that being the war cry of virtually all arts organizations, and there we shared why and how we focus on wooing first time attendees to come back again and again. On the audience development spectrum, that post covered first-time buyers, multi-buyers (i.e. repeat attendees over the course of a year), and getting those repeat buyers to become season subscribers — and how we’ve made thousands of dollars of incremental revenue through a very targeted retention plan. Now, in time for the month of love, the patron courtship continues here, where we share our approach to loving forever and ever our first time subscribers, renewing subscribers, and first time donors.

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: no matter who you are, from a first timer just checking us out, to a season ticket holder, to a long time donor, the California Symphony has a thoughtful and strategic plan for you. In an industry that often compares patron cultivation with romance/dating/courtship, some of these tactics are things other orchestras are doing. Some are not, and even at the nation’s largest performing arts institutions, rarely are the marketing and development departments working together and taking all of these steps.

Definition: People who bought season tickets for the first time, no matter what size package.

Some research shows that new subscribers make the decision on whether or not to renew next season within something like the first 30 minutes of their time with you. This means they’ve been fighting traffic to get to the venue, searching for parking, trying to find their seat, and maybe waiting in line at the bar — all before a single note is ever played. We try to mitigate these factors that we have very little control over by greeting our new subscribers with a welcome gift: in our case a CD recording of the orchestra that’s not commercially available. It’s an exclusive gift only available to donors at a certain level and these brand new season ticket holders. “I want to thank you,” wrote one new subscriber this year, “for an enriching concert and for the CD you prepared which I was not expecting and was thoroughly pleased by your gracious gift.” Another said, “OH! By the way, I was SO SURPRISED by the CD that was on my seat at my first concert — that was my first real orchestra concert ever!”

Welcome gift for first-time subscribers one their seats at the first concert in their package. First year renewal rates jumped by 10% last year.

Next year, we’re going to take this one step further and also include an insert of all the subscriber benefits (such as free ticket exchanges, discounts off extra tickets, first right of refusal to keep their seat next year for full season subscribers, etc.). In theory, these patrons have seen all those benefits before and hopefully they were part of the reason they chose to subscribe in the first place, but it’s an opportunity for us to remind that subscribing is awesome, and that we try very hard to make it worth their while. Also, it’s worth mentioning that we’re lucky that a CD format is still preferred by most of our subscribers in a world that’s increasingly moving to digital downloads and streaming, but that’s not going to last much longer, so we are also looking into ways we can include a note with instructions to “Download or stream this recording at…” There are certain orchestra union rules around this, so we have a few things to work out here.

Lastly, just as important as what we do for new season ticket holders is what we don’t do. Arts administrators, get ready for this: we do not solicit first year subscribers for a donation. Ever. The only next step we want this group to take is to renew their subscription as that is so critical to the lifetime value of those patrons, and data upon data shows that this group is the most difficult to renew. So why muddy the waters? Why try to move too fast? Well, the reason for most of us is that we’re desperate suitors — we all have big fundraising goals that only get bigger every year — so we ask what seems like a great prospect, a subscriber. And then it works, kind of, because some first year subscribers do donate in response to those solicitations, but we’ve gained that short-term revenue at the cost of the long-term game. It doesn’t help the subscription renewal rates for this very important segment, so stop doing it. We will agree that the first time you pull a mailing list and specifically suppress/exclude this group, it feels unintuitive, wrong even, because we’d done it the other way for so long, but it worked, and our first year renewal rates skyrocketed because of it.

The final thing we don’t do for our first year season ticket holders is try to renew them info a full season package, even if they came in as a full season package. We definitely offer plenty of incentives to renew into the larger package, but we don’t make it the only option. Renewing into any number of concerts > not renewing at all.

Definition: People who have subscribed for two consecutive years or more.

Once our dearly beloveds are a renewing season ticket holder, the romance is heating up, and it’s time for a DTR. This group has a lot of sub-segments: full season subscribers, small package subscribers, subscribers who also donate, and subscribers who have not yet donated. Everything we do with this group is targeted to each of those sub-segments just described, with the one exception being Subscriber Appreciation Day mid-season, which is for all season ticket holders. On that concert series, every subscriber (including the first years) gets a thank you love note signed by members of the orchestra on their seat waiting for them when they arrive. We make a big deal of Subscriber Appreciation on stage in our pre-concert curtain remarks, there’s a full page dedicated to it in the program book, and patrons love it. This definitely falls into the category of “a lot of orchestras already do this,” but here’s a fun tip if you are not already doing this: make sure you have the musicians sign their name AND instrument on the cards; we had so many super zealous subscribers approaching staff the first year we tried this, excitedly proclaiming, “WHO IS ALAN?!” among other musician names, “I LOVE ALAN BECAUSE HE SIGNED MY CARD, AND I NEED TO KNOW WHERE TO LOOK FOR HIM IN THE ORCHESTRA!!” We had to tell a lot of people that first time that Alan plays timpani. We love that patrons cared about these notes and the players that signed them that much; we’d say that’s the home run equivalent of a dozen roses from tú amor on Valentine’s Day. Finally, it is no coincidence that Subscriber Appreciation Day takes place right before we announce next season and start the renewal campaign. Also not a coincidence that we program that concert to be a blockbuster.

Example of subscriber appreciation cards, signed by members of the orchestra and placed on every season ticket holder’s seat. The message is always, “You are our favorite. You get special treatment, the best seats, the best price, the whole enchilada because you are our bread and butter.”

Back to the DTR. This renewing subscriber group is now in various fundraising appeals throughout the year with tailored asks based on their individual donor history, and their subscription renewal forms are just as customized. At this point in the relationship, we want to tell this group that we know them; we’ve been taking the time and care to know what to offer them. No one-size-fits-all promise ring here (and yes, that’s definitely where we want the relationship to be headed). In every case, we want to renew the subscription with an upgrade offer, whether that’s upgrading to a larger package or upgrading their donation. Here’s a little chart we follow for who gets what offer:

Yes, this is a lot of work. Yes, this means marketing and development staff spend a lot of time together to make every patron’s renewal form specifically customized to them. Yes, it’s working. Last year our subscription renewal rate was 80%, and we increased our subscription donation campaign revenue by an outstanding 50% over the year prior.

Definition: People who are brand new donors.

Once a week, we prepare gift acknowledgements, the thank you letter and tax receipt each donor receives for making a contribution, for all donations received during the last seven days. Simultaneously, we run a report for who in this group of donors is a first-time donor, and we specifically call this out in their acknowledgement, saying how we noticed they are new to the family and we are so happy to welcome them.

Example of new donor thank you letter, sent along with a new donor welcome brochure detailing all the ways in which their gift supports the Symphony. The message is that we noticed they are new, are incredibly grateful, and that we’ve wasted no time putting their gift to work.

Then, a musician in the orchestra writes a personal thank you note to the new donor (we also do this for renewing donors at a certain level, and we decided it was worth including the new donor love birds in with this benefit/stewardship activity). As an aside on how this musician note process works, at the beginning of each season we put the call out to musicians who would be willing to help us with this task throughout the year. We tell them up front we’d love their help thanking donors and that we’ll provide everything they need: California Symphony stationery, a few donor names and addresses, talking points and examples of what they can say, and stamps. We try to make this as easy as possible for the musicians to help with this activity, and they are incredible — each year we have several players offering to help out, and they are generally more than happy to do so because they know much of those donations are going to support the work they’re doing. Before each concert set, we give the orchestra members who have volunteered to help with the thank you love notes a packet of all the materials and names and addresses assigned to them. It usually amounts to about 3–4 notes per musician. On the receiving end, donors go crazy for this. Almost every time a round of notes gets mailed, we get calls a few days later from donors thanking us for the wonderful notes they received from the musicians. Donors calling to thank us for thanking them…what a big love fest we’ve developed, or should we say, requited love!

First time donors also receive a New Donor Welcome Brochure that contains information about the organization, our programs, maestro, and upcoming events. We explicitly say we want them to know what their gift is supporting. This group also gets invited to donor events throughout the year according to their giving level. If they’ve given $1,000 or more, they also get a thank you call from a board member (all donors who give this amount or more receive the call, regardless of if they are new or not), because a study showed that a board member thank you call to a donor within 24 hours of making the gift resulted in a 39% increase in giving the next time they were solicited compared to a control group that did not receive a call, and another study showed that a thank you call from a board member led to 25% increase in donor retention versus 10% when the call came from a staff person (Source: Penelope Burk, Cygnus Applied Research). If any board members at any arts organizations are reading this, please make those thank you calls!

If you’re thinking all of this is a lot of work, it is. Few organizations coordinate marketing and development efforts in this way, and we get why. There are easier, less thorough/customized/high-touch ways to manage our subscribers and donors. For almost all of us, we take the easier routes not because we don’t care, but because we are overworked and underpaid and have a million other things to do, AND because it used to work to a certain degree. That is, when every subscriber gets a generic renewal invoice, or every direct mail appeal looks the same for each patron, or there’s no welcome gift or appreciation days or love notes or phone calls, we still make money. But the days of low hanging fruit, or loyal subscribers and donors who care about the arts because its intrinsic value, or people who renew and give and increase those gifts every year because of a sense of civic duty are over. We know all this as administrators, and if we want to be good at our jobs, we need to accept that the work is harder than ever. Just like every successful relationship, right? And like those successful relationships, so worth it:

In the last 18 months, the California Symphony grew active accounts (i.e. accounts with any ticket purchase or donation activity) by 35%.
Over the last year alone, we increased new subscriber households by 29% and increased first year renewal rates by 10%, all in addition to an overall renewal rate of 80%.
Our number of donor households has nearly quadrupled in the last two seasons; individual giving revenue has increased by 51%.
Concert hall paid capacity now averages 90% this season, up from 78% three seasons ago. Plus, this increase is while adding more concerts (i.e. more sales inventory).
In the first year of implementing these patron loyalty steps, we have increased first time attendee retention to 22%, meaning that 22% of new attendees who came in the 2014–15 season returned within 12 months of their first purchase. More on this here.
The subscription donation campaign (i.e. for all those segments that do receive a donation ask during the season ticket renewal period) resulted in a 50% increase in total money raised this season over last season.

We repeat: the work is worth it. So use this Valentine’s Day month to start thinking about the ways you can love, court, woo, and wow your patrons. We hope this post helps you do just that.

Later this year we’ll conclude our audience development series with a post on the less fun segments of lapsed donors, unrenewed subscribers, and lapsed ticket buyers. In other words, what’s plan B when plan A doesn’t work.

A graduate of Rice University with degrees in Music Performance and Business, for the last 15 years Bergauer has used music to make the world around her better, through programs that champion social justice and equality, through ground-breaking marketing and audience development tactics on the forefront of technology, and through taking strategically calculated risks in a risk-adverse field. If ideas are a dime a dozen, what separates Bergauer is her experience and record of impact and execution at institutions of all sizes. Praised for her leadership which “points the way to a new style of audience outreach,” (Wall Street Journal) and which drove the California Symphony to become “the most forward-looking music organization around.” (Mercury News) Bergauer’s ability to strategically and holistically examine and advance every facet of the organization’s mission and vision is creating a transformational change in the office, on the stage, in the audience, in the community, and going well beyond the industry of classical music.

Originally published by Aubrey Bergauer / California Symphony at medium.com on January 31, 2017.

Once and Done

Pictured: a mock-up of the envelope used in the California Symphony’s July 2016 fundraising solicitation.

Just about every arts organization runs a donation campaign as they approach the end of their fiscal year. The California Symphony is no exception as it’s the last chance we have to raise the funds necessary to end our season in the black. The problem is that this mid-summer deadline where we close the financial books on one year and begin another is important for us as an organization, but not in any way relevant — even arbitrary, perhaps — in the eyes of the donor. In other words, this is among the worst times and reasons to raise money.

Despite all that, not running a fiscal year-end fundraising campaign this year was not an option. We needed the money. An added parameter was that we needed to continue broadening our donor base, because our database of potential donors looked like this:

So this summer, we decided to run an experiment to answer the question: how can we tap the largest segment of our database — the people who have had no interaction with us in the last three or more years? No concert attendance, no donations, no special events, no free tours of our education programs, nothing. Zero interaction. Think about that. The largest group of untapped potential in our database is the people who care about us the least. Ouch. To make this even more painful, this absent group is not MIA for lack of us trying: they receive mailings with information for every concert, invitations to special events, and of course other donation appeals about three times a year. And if they’re on our email list (which a little more than a third of them are), they’re hearing from us even more. That’s a lot of effort we spend to invite people to engage with us, and for whatever reason it has all fallen flat for this group. In fact it has fallen flat for three years (and longer for some!).

So what do you do to get this group’s attention? Offer them a chance to have us leave them alone.

Usually, giving someone a chance to opt-out of communications is marketing suicide. That’s why unsubscribe links at the bottom of emails are so tiny and buried…no one wants to actively direct your attention to the place where you can escape all their wonderful marketing and fundraising messages. However, we rationalized that when everything else we’ve done for the last 3+ years has had no effect on this group whatsoever, something — anything — needed to change.

At about the time we were coming to this conclusion, Executive Director Aubrey Bergauer came across the work of University of Chicago Economics Professor and Department Chair John List. He and his team had published a handful of case studies where they partnered with a few large non-profits who purchased mailing lists for their fundraising solicitations. They frequently refer to these purchased lists as “cold lists,” as opposed to “warm lists” which contain people who have made a donation in the last three years. John List and his team experimented with these large non-profits, and in a mailing to 800,000 names (that’s a huge solicitation by the way — nearly a million people!), they offered a test group an option along the lines of “give now and we’ll never bother you again if you check this box.” They also mailed to a control group without the “once and done” option, as they aptly called it (give once and you can be done with us forever). The results were fascinating to us:

They raised 3 times more money from the “once and done” group than the control group
Only about 30% of the respondents actually checked the box
It did not reduce future mailing results

We decided we would try this with our own cold list. Not a purchased list of strangers, but with our own database of people who had gone cold, that large segment of people who had no interaction with us in three or more years. Risky? Perhaps. But what was the worst-case scenario, we figured? Worst case #1: someone who had no desire to interact with us anymore mails us back without a donation and checks the box. In that case, we agreed, we’d remove them from our mailing list per their request and we’d stop wasting money on someone who not only doesn’t want to hear from us, they’ve not produced any revenue for us in at least three years. Worth it, we decided. Worst case #2: people give, but a lot of them ask to be removed from the mailing list. Let’s just stop at the first phrase there — when has “people giving” ever been a problem? Especially in this scenario when these people were otherwise basically dead to the organization. Worth it, we decided. Worst case #3: People just don’t get it, don’t care, or it’s not an effective piece. That would be no different than everything else we’ve tried for the last 3+ years with this group. Worth it. Best case: some people who were cold as ice suddenly jump back in with a donation. Not even a ticket sale, but a cash-is-king donation. WORTH IT.

Over the next three months, we got to work executing the campaign. We developed special campaign materials for this group with “Once & Done” branding. We even added a line to the envelope that said “Make one gift now and we’ll never ask you again,” just to help ensure the open rates were as high as possible, because the first hurdle with a cold group like this is to get them to even look at your envelope for more than two seconds before tossing it into the recycle bin, let alone get them to actually open it and — gasp — read it.

Sample of the appeal letter and actual return slip from one of the “cold” prospects who made a donation after having no account history with us for several years. The red check on the return slip was made by a staff member when they processed the gift.

The mailing hit homes right after Independence Day with a deadline of July 31 (i.e. the end of our fiscal year, which was the impetus for this whole campaign), and the letter talked about the successes of the past year and how we were 94% towards our income goal for the season. (Side note: this idea of listing the highest percentage toward goal possible also came from John List’s research; his data showed that the closer you are to your goal, the more people are likely to give and the higher the average gift received. This is contrary to most nonprofit “best practices,” whereas usually, the industry standard is to publicize when you are at 60–70% towards a campaign goal. So we included that stat as a secondary test — it was true, we were very close (94%) to balancing our budget for the year — in every version of our appeal letter, not just to this Once & Done group.) Here’s how it all played out:

The Once & Done group resulted in 24% of all campaign donors. Of our other segments solicited (i.e. other appeals to people who did not get the “once and done” message such as ticket buyers, subscribers, recently lapsed donors, etc.), only our current, existing donors came in with a higher percentage of campaign gifts.
The Once & Done group made 17 times more gifts compared to the year prior, and generated nearly 15 times more revenue.
The side experiment of listing our very high progress towards goal in every prospect group’s letter resulted in exceeding last year’s totals in every category.
[Updated 9/19] Seven different households of the Once & Done group purchased tickets to attend our season opener concert. Extra fascinating given that they had gone at least three years without attending.
How many people checked the box to have us never contact them again? Only 5.

Just for fun (and full disclosure): we did have one donor mail us back an envelope containing only a dime and two pennies. But they didn’t check the box…

A few more clarifying notes that hopefully are helpful to those who have read this far:

For this experiment, we mailed to a lot of people. Normally, we don’t mail to every person in the database (too costly to always do that!) and generally target people who have interacted with us in the last 4–5 years. We wanted to make a special exception for the purpose of this experiment and mail to accounts that were older and colder, just to see how it would pan out.

This fall we are taking a deeper look at which “cold” people are better prospects to come back into the fold than others. For example, is a person who purchased season tickets three years ago but not since more likely to donate with this type of solicitation than a person who donated five years ago (but not since)? And how do these people compare to someone who came to a special event fundraiser dinner three years ago but hasn’t interacted with us since? Is there any difference in likelihood to donate between a donor who gave four years ago versus five years ago? All of these questions are being explored as we head into our next big fundraising campaign this fall.

And speaking of our next big campaign…shameless plug: through November 4, we’re running what has proven to be our largest fundraising campaign of the year for the last three seasons, a matching challenge where every donation up to $200,000 will be matched dollar for dollar. If you’ve enjoyed reading about the work the California Symphony is doing in this or other posts, please consider supporting these efforts by joining the campaign at any amount and having your donation doubled by the match.

Lastly, we have another plan for this inactive/cold group that we’ll be implementing before this year is over with the specific goal to get them back into the concert hall. We’ll tell you all about it in a future post.

Originally published by Aubrey Bergauer / California Symphony at medium.com on September 13, 2016.