Response Management

Persuading people to respond how you want them to – be it returning a feedback or booking form, or to participate actively in your services – is the subject of many academic texts. If you think about commercial activity where budgets are generous you will notice that many campaigns employ an incentive. It is worth thinking about using an incentive yourself to maximise the response.

For our sector the incentive is equally as likely to work if it is a social or environmental incentive as much as if its financial – for example a typical incentive is to enter in a prize draw to win vouchers. Another example is to offer to share resources: plant a tree for instance, or sponsoring young people in a project. You will probably be able to brain storm a lot of related ideas specific to your services that would be a good link in a campaign and that provide incentives to encourage people to respond.

A lot of marketers use a response mechanism in their mailings to track who is responding to what message. So if you want people to book on an event and have advertised and used direct mail then a response code on the advert will tell you how many have responded to the advert and how many responded to the direct mailing. You will need to ask people as they book if they have a code with their booking or put it on the booking form.

Another way to manage response is to have a cut off date respond by xx date. This makes people reply promptly.

Information from the Building Resilience Resource Pack produced for the West Yorkshire Local Development Agency by: Bradford CVS, fit4funding, Voluntary Action Leeds, Social Enterprise Support Unit, Leeds Community Foundation, West Yorkshire Community Accounting Service and the Holistic Partnership Limited.