A Test That Captured the Changing Times
For nearly a decade, Freedom from Hunger’s acquisitions control has been the steadfast “Loan Approved” package. The modest #10 mailing communicates the organization’s focus on providing small loans to help women establish businesses to feed their families and change their lives. And for years, the organization has been frequently testing against this package with little success.
That is until late 2008, when the nonprofit decided to adapt a renewal package for its acquisitions audience-a package it fondly refers to as “Edgy Choice”-particularly in light of the economic hard times that so many prospects were experiencing, but also making it clear that the women the organization represented were suffering far more. To its great delight, the package performed strongly.
“We have been trying for years to beat ‘Loan Approved,'” explains Cathy Carley, account executive at Sanky Communications, the New York-based agency that works with Freedom from Hunger to develop its direct mail. She says the “Edgy Choice” package was a renewal that Freedom from Hunger had used over last summer, which it then converted into an acquisition package and is right now showing some considerable strength in beating “Loan Approved.”
Similar to its predecessor, this new package is also a simple, #10 package with a four-page letter-a length the organization repeatedly has found to work well in acquisitions-along with a reply device and a BRE. The creative and format also resemble that of the control, and just as other packages do, it tells the personal stories of several women who have benefited from the organization’s initiatives. “We like to tell a story of a woman that was given a chance,” says Carley. “Everything that we do is about women, and we want to make sure that people know who these women are” (Archive code #605-172500-0902).
What sets this new package apart-and lends itself to the name “Edgy Choice”-is the emphasis it places on the harsh choices women in developing countries face daily. The letter opens with a checklist that calls on the prospective donor to consider which choice she would make: “Feed my children healthy food? OR Buy medicine for the one who is sick? Watch my children waste away from poor nutrition? OR Give them my own small portion of food-praying that we all survive the hungry season?”
According to Carley, the organization decided to present prospective donors with potential choices at a time when they themselves may be faced with tough choices. “The idea was to make the prospective donors aware that they were making hard choices, too, and women all over the world are making even harder choices about their families,” notes Carley. “Everyone was talking about how bad it is out there for us, but imagine how bad it is when you live on a dollar a day. We take for granted so many things, but what if you really had to make a choice between feeding your kids or getting medicine? How do you make that choice? And so many women do make that choice.”
The “choices” theme pervades the entire letter, and the copy reflects the organization’s focus on providing these women with “The Power to Choose …”-whether it’s “Hope over Hunger,” “Education over Despair,” “Health over Disease,” “Self-Sufficiency over Helplessness” or “Compassion.” “The idea behind the edgy woman letters that we have done is empowering women where you think there’s so much despair,” explains Carley. “The idea of Freedom from Hunger is that they are empowering these women to really fulfill their promise.”
In August, the organization performed a simple A/B test, mailing 50 percent of its audience the control and 50 percent the new “Edgy Choice” package. Then in September, the organization performed the second in its series of three two-way tests, mailing “Edgy Choice” to half of its audience and another package that previously had shown strength to the other half. The final test in the series mailed in November, and that was the control package versus the other package.
“‘Edgy Choice’ outperformed both packages significantly, which was surprising because nothing ever beat ‘Loan Approved,'” says Carley. “They’ve come close, but nothing ever can get over that hump. And ‘Edgy Choice’ had a larger percent return, a slightly better average gift than ‘Loan Approved,’ and it was a much better percent return and average gift than our second package.”
With six acquisition mailings slated for 2009 totaling 550,000 pieces, Carley is looking toward the spring 2009 test between “Loan Approved” and “Edgy Choice” to determine the future course in acquisitions. “We’re going to be testing it again in the spring against ‘Loan Approved,’ and then we will see what we decide to do in the fall,” concludes Carley. “We’re very pleased about that, and we’re going to keep testing it to see if this could become our new control.”
Test for Postal Savings
Economic woes have everyone thinking of creative ways to trim excess expenses. And for some, an obvious place to look may be postal expenses. But consider how your testing strategies may be impacting your overall postal expenses and what you might do to optimize your testing approach. According to Cathy Carley, account executive at Sanky Communications, Freedom from Hunger decided to perform three two-way tests, rather than three-way tests, in order to gauge how each of its three packages were performing without incurring the postal expenses of a three-way test. “We do a 50/50 split-we generally only test two packages at a time for postage saving reasons,” explains Carley. “We don’t mail large enough quantities to test more than two packages at a time-the postage just becomes astronomical. Each mailing is split in half, and it’s a simple A/B test.”
