No effective charity or business wants to waste time and money or deliberately upset customers or supporters. That’s why targeting has long been a mainstay of the marketer’s and the fundraiser’s toolkit. In my simple world, it helps us to achieve two things:
- Communicate only with the people most likely to act upon our messages in the way we want them to (assuming we match the target group’s wants and needs to our messages)
- Save time and money by not communicating with audiences who are least likely to act in the way we want them to.
I appreciate that there are further subtleties here, like recognising that our organisations will have different messages which will appeal to different or the same audiences at different times, so one general rule of targeting simply won’t fit all situations. But in the last week alone I’ve observed three examples of the consequences of all this targeting being done independently by multiple, well-meaning organisations:
Targeting postcodes for charity bag collection Several contributors to the LinkedIn Group, Charity UK, have been sharing their experiences of receiving multiple collection bags – from several every week to 3 every day!
