Assigned Affinity – How and Why People to People Fundraising Works

I just joined Ted Hart’s People to People Fundraising group on Linked In.

It is a lively and growing place with discussions covering everything from explanations of God’s presence on Facebook to analyzing the success of Barak Obama’s presidential campaign. Poking through Ted’s profile I noticed a slide titled “How People to People Fundraising Works”

With an intriguing diagram, but no text, the slide egged me on: Can you describe what makes peer to peer (P2P) fundraising work? Can you come up with a model that suggests ways to tune your approach and maximize your results? After some reflection, I think “Assigned Affinity” could be an important part of such a theory for explaining why peer to peer fundraising is effective and how you can make it better. What I mean by ‘assigned affinity’ is this: If A likes B and B likes C it doesn’t follow that A likes C. (That would be great though! The resulting ‘transitive affinity’ would make peer to peer fundraising go like a brush-fire.) However, there does seem to be something almost as fortuitous at work in P2P fundraising: Some of A’s affinity for B can be ‘assigned’ to C … if B asks nicely?

Looking at P2P fundraising from this perspective: Assume we can give every event participant an organization-affinity score (1 being highest 0 being lowest) that captures the person’s affinity for the nonprofit organization and its cause. I imagine that the distribution would look something like this:

The donors, many of whom have low organization-affinity, give because P2P fundraising effectively leverages the high affinity they have for their respective Team Leaders and Superstar Fundraisers who asked them to, in essence, assign some of their personal affinity for them, to the organization.

Here’s another example of ‘Assignable Affinity’ that just came up in my personal life: Car shopping with my wife. The diagram below captures our relative affinities for one-another and each of our affinities for the two finalists in our car buying endeavor:

Based solely on my affinities, I would have purchased a truck (.85 > .70) However, my wife, assigned some of my absolute affinity for her (1.0) to the SUV. Modeling that process with “affinity-multiplication” we see that my assigned SUV affinity is .9 (=1x.9); greater than my direct affinity for purchasing a truck. Needless to say, there is an SUV sitting in my driveway right now.

As I see it, engaged P2P fundraisers intuitively include assignable affinity in their calculations as they decide which of the people in their personal network to solicit; only folks with high enough assigned affinity are expect to donate so the P2P fundraiser focused their efforts on them:

Undoubtedly, additional considerations matter as well. For example, P2P fundraisers probably consider the chances that a given prospect has a direct affinity for the cause and comingle that factor with their expected ability to assign affinity when allocating recruiting effort. Another topic touched off by this discussion is the temporary nature of assigned affinity and the challenge it creates for nonprofits: How do you convert the temporary good-fortune of “assigned affinity” into the lasting value of direct affinity?

But even without further development, the concept of assigned affinity alone yields some interesting suggestions for developing nonprofits’ approach to P2P fundraising:

Time to Share your Secrets: What methods have you used successfully or unsuccessfully to increase direct or assigned affinity within your fundraising events?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Frank Barry

Frank Barry, director of digital marketing at Blackbaud and blogger at npENGAGE, helps nonprofits use the Internet for digital communication, social media, and fundraising so they can focus changing the world. He’s worked with a diverse group of organizations including LIVESTRONG, United Methodist Church, American Heart Association, Big Brothers Big Sisters, ChildFund Int’l, InTouch Ministries, Heifer Int’l, University of Notre Dame and University of Richmond. Along with writing for industry publications like Mashable and Social Media Today, Frank facilitates discussions, presents solo sessions and organizes panels for industry conferences such as NTC, SXSW, BBCon and numerous others. When he’s out and about he enjoys talking to interesting people about how they are changing the world – check out his interviews. Say Hi on Twitter – @franswaa or Google+