Advice from people who still run the programs.
Most people who consult on face-to-face work stopped doing it years ago, or never did it. We run crews this week. What we tell you is what we are currently finding out, not what was true the last time we operated.
- Both sides of the businessNonprofit development functions and commercial field sales operations. The diagnostic is the same; the vocabulary isn't.
- Decades, in more than one marketPrograms built and run in the United States and internationally, which is how you learn that a method is a method and not a local habit.
- We can test the recommendationWhere the answer is genuinely uncertain, we can put a live crew behind each option and let the numbers settle it.
Two kinds of organization, one kind of problem.
Something that used to work is returning less, and nobody inside the building can say exactly why.
Nonprofits
- A read on your development function as it actually runs, not as the org chart describes it
- Where your donor file is going: the age curve, the attrition curve, and what the next five years look like if nothing changes
- Channel mix across direct mail, digital, telephone and face to face — and what each one is really costing you per retained donor
- Monthly giving: whether to start a sustainer program, and at what size it stops being an experiment
- Why donors are leaving, which is usually a stewardship answer rather than an acquisition one
Companies
- A read on your field sales or customer acquisition operation, including what your reps are actually saying at the door
- Cost per acquisition set against how long those customers stay, rather than against the signing target
- Channel fit: whether your product belongs door to door, in retail, in front of businesses, or nowhere near a field team
- Rep turnover, which sits upstream of customer retention and is usually the cheaper of the two to fix
- Your exposure through subcontracted or 1099 dealer networks — licensing, conduct and what it costs you when it goes wrong
A document you can act on, in priority order.
The review
How the function runs today, written plainly. We talk to the people doing the work, read the numbers you already have, and say what we found rather than what is comfortable.
Recommendations, ranked
In the order we would do them, with what each one costs and what it should return. An unranked list of twenty improvements is a way of not making a decision.
What to stop doing
Usually the most valuable page. Most organizations we look at are running two or three things out of habit, and the budget for the thing that would work is already sitting inside them.
We can run the test.
A recommendation is an argument until someone tries it. When two approaches both look defensible on paper — two channels, two asks, two gift levels, two scripts — we can put a live crew behind each one and come back with what actually happened.
That is the difference between telling you which option we believe in and telling you which option worked. It takes longer and it costs more than an opinion, and for a decision you are going to live with for five years it is usually the cheaper route.
- A real crew, a real marketNot a focus group and not a survey. People having the conversation with the public you are trying to reach.
- Measured past the sign-upBoth options followed to the retention checkpoint, because the one that signs more is not always the one that keeps more.
- You keep whatever it producesThe donors or customers acquired during a test are yours. A test that throws away its own results is an expensive survey.
Two things we won't sell you.
We don't do vendor selection
We run face-to-face programs for a living, which makes us one of the vendors. Scoring our own competitors for you would be worth nothing, however carefully we did it. If you need someone to run a procurement process, you need someone who isn't us.
We'll tell you not to hire us
Sometimes the honest answer is that a face-to-face program is wrong for your cause, your product or your budget this year. We would rather say that in a consulting engagement than discover it together eighteen months into a campaign.
Engagements are scoped and priced per organization, in writing, before anything starts. If a review turns into a program later, that is a separate conversation with its own contract.
Start with the diagnosis.
Tell us what's returning less than it used to. We'll tell you what we'd look at first, and whether we're the right people to look at it.