Before We Learned to Scroll: What Experiential Fundraising Can Teach Us
— Written by Jasmine Coronado, Strategic Advisor at Marlin Communications.
Watching my one-year-old play with a pack of cards the other day got me thinking about fundraising.
He wasn’t really interested in the cards. He wanted to pick them up, put them in the box, take them out again, shuffle them around and generally work out what he could do with them.
It made me think about the child-like curiosity we have when we’re little. We experience the world through our senses. We touch things. We listen to sounds. We look closely. We pick things up, turn them over, open them, pull them apart and work out how they work.
Somewhere along the way, we get very good at just consuming information.
And that got me thinking about how we design fundraising communications.
We talk a lot about digital, and for good reason. Digital gives us incredible opportunities to create personalised, interactive and immediate experiences.
But I wonder if sometimes we think too much about the channel and not enough about the experience.
What does it actually feel like to receive this communication?
What are we asking someone to do beyond read, scroll or click?
Could they explore something? Make a choice? Reveal something? Hear from someone? See the impact of their support? Feel like they’re part of something?
And that doesn’t have to mean creating some elaborate digital experience.
It could be a really simple interaction. A story that unfolds. A personalised message. A short video that makes you feel like you’re there, right there in the thick of the action, right there in the moment of rescue. An email that invites you to make a choice rather than just read another update.
And sometimes that experience might be physical too.
There’s a reason direct mail still plays a huge role in fundraising. Not because print is better than digital, but because physical things give us a different way to experience a story or a proposition.
A letter you can hold. A photograph you can keep. There’s something unexpected inside the envelope.
I don’t think the answer is ever just about digital vs direct mail. But it does raise what is probably a more useful question: how do we make our fundraising communications feel like something people experience, rather than something they simply receive?
Because ultimately, we’re designing experiences for humans.
And humans are curious, sensory beings. We like to explore, discover and experience things for ourselves.
What’s something you’ve received in the mail, in your inbox on your phone that you still remember?
