The Last Landline in a Mobile Future: Making TM Work

1. The Last Landline in a Mobile Future: Making TM Work Olivia Gauvin, Oxfam America Paul Vogel, Planned Parenthood Federation of America Eva Bowie, O’Brien Garrett

2. Planned Parenthood’s Applications • Monthly Giving • Conversion • Retention • Special Appeals and Renewal Campaigns • Acquisition & Lapsed Reactivation • Activist Conversion • Stewardship • Inbound Support

3. Oxfam America’s Applications • Activist Conversion • Monthly Giving • Conversion • Retention • Upgrade • Renewal Campaigns • Lapsed Reactivation

4. The increasing preference of mobile phones over landlines, coupled with FCC regulations, makes it more difficult and expensive to raise funds via the phone. • 65.8% of US households can only be reached via mobile 1 • Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) requires nonprofits to gain consent (written or oral) from donors to call or text cell phones • The definition of oral consent is subject to interpretation • TCPA prohibits the use of automatic dialers to cell phones, regardless of consent, which increases the cost per call to mobile numbers 1 Source: CDC National Health Interview Survey, April, 2017

5. So, What Do We Do About That? • Make the extra effort to capture mobile numbers • Invest a little more to append mobile numbers • Offset lower contact rates by lifting fulfillment rates • Target more effectively • Craft the message to be as meaningful as possible • Make the call one part of a multi-channel strategy • Text, Baby, text

6. Learning Outcomes You’ll get ideas you can put to use in your own program right away, including: • Techniques to expand your monthly giving prospect universe • Ways to leverage SMS to enhance your TM efforts • Tips on strategically deploying the channel within specific donor groups • Integrating TM with other channels

7. Multi-Channel is the Secret Sauce Case Studies

8. Oxfam America’s Activist Conversion Phase 1: Generate Leads on Facebook • Goal: Generate 90,000 leads with an investment of $180,000 (avg. cost of $2.00/lead) • Strategy: Serve ads to Facebook members who look like OA’s activists/donors • Tested a variety of ads on topics such as Women’s March Pledge, Refugee Ban Pledge, Climate Change and World Economic Inequality (Davos)

9. Oxfam America’s Activist Conversion Creative & Copy Matters

10. Oxfam America’s Activist Conversion • The leads generated from the Facebook ad were called the following day • Scripts were customized according to the message in the ad that generated the response • First and second asks were for monthly pledges • Third and final was for one-time gift

11. Oxfam America’s Activist Conversion • Campaign Results: • Generated 25,000 leads with phone numbers at an average cost of $2.50 each • Contacted 34% of leads via phone (heavy concentration of mobile) • Converted 1.25% of those contacted to monthly giving with a nice average pledge of $19.07 • Converted 2.1% to one-time gifts at an average of $28.86 • Overall cost per sustainer = $698 • Three year payback

12. Oxfam America’s Activist Conversion • Ads that generated the most leads: • Post-Women’s March Pledge • Refugee Ban • Post-Election Pledge • Ads with the highest sustainer conversion rates: • Davos Income Inequality report • Post-Women’s March Pledge • Post-Election Pledge

13. PPFA’s Donor Acquisition New donors are acquired via TM through four different list sources • TM firm owns prospect list and mine it on our behalf • Coop: we pool our lapsed donors with those from other organizations, the firm selects best prospects (similar to any other mail coop) • Activist conversion • Multi-channel effort: Phone/Mail for Acquisition – we rent names with phone numbers and contact via mail and phone

14. PPFA’s Donor Acquisition • Some of the coops already in the plan as continuations offer the option of phone numbers for an additional cost of $25.00/M. • In January, 2016 we launched a test to measure the value of adding a TM contact to the existing mail contact. • Half of the names were only mailed, as usual. The other half were also eligible for a phone call. • The calling began about 2 weeks after the mail date, as close as possible to the in-home date. • The script was based on the mail piece.

15. PPFA’s Donor Acquisition • By adding the phone call, we were able to acquire 163% more donors at a cost per donor that was just $0.90 more than the control group. • Those additional 802 donors are already identified as TM-responsive, making them prime prospects for additional TM efforts including conversion to monthly giving.

16. PPFA’s Donor Acquisition • So far, we’ve: • Expanded the program to the Action Fund (c4) • Acquired over 6,000 multi-channel donors (~9% of total donors acquired via TM and Mail) • Typical campaign metrics: • Contact ~30% of the file • Pledge rate is normally ~5% • ~22% on credit card • ~60% total fulfillment rate

17. PPFA’s Donor Acquisition • Lessons Learned: • As we expanded the program, we found we were renting some of the same names month after month. While acceptable in the mail, it’s more intrusive to call as often. So we refined the monthly list orders to exclude donors previously ordered in the last three months from the phone lists. • Timing is less important than we thought. We originally tried to coordinate the call with the mail in-home date. But that became impossible as we expanded, and we saw no impact on performance.

18. PPFA’s Donor Acquisition • What’s next? • Launching a test next month to measure the value of more frequent TM appeals to the donors acquired via TM. Test group will be eligible for a TM appeal every six weeks. This is compared to the three or four contacts/year for the control group. • This month, we expanded the strategy to the long-time lapsed donors. For sometime, this pool of 1.3MM donors has been a valuable list source; optimized based on their giving activity in coops. We mail ~ 1.7MM per year. We expect to add another 100,000 TM contacts in tandem with the mail this year.

19. Calling Cell Phone Numbers • Handled differently by some vendors due to varying interpretations of TCPA • Some vendors require an additional scrub • Some require contractual indemnification to make certain contacts • Manual dialing • Manual dialing is slower, more expensive but increases results • Some firms run mobile numbers through the automated dialer one time before going to manual dialing

20. Future of SMS in Fundraising • Planned Parenthood has successfully used both broadcast and one-to-one SMS to drive advocacy campaigns • Established the Defenders program post-election • Also used to deliver health care information one-to-one • Working to overcome technical and compliance hurdles to replicate in fundraising

21. Future of SMS in Fundraising • Fundraising applications on the horizon include: • Sustainer recapture • Second gift from canvass-acquired donors who don’t commit to a monthly pledge • TM pledge fulfillment • Activist conversion • Cultivation • Must be one-to-one; some TM firms are now offering support

22. Thank You! Paul Vogel paul.vogel@ppfa.org Olivia Gauvin olivia.gauvin@Oxfam.org Eva Bowie ebowie@obriengarrett.com Don’t forget to visit the Solutions Showcase! Many of the ideas discussed today are on display at the Solutions Showcase!