← RKD Group: Thinkers
RKD Group: Thinkers
Balancing data and creativity: Lori Collins on finding the “why” behind the numbers
00:31:44
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Foreign.
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Welcome to the RKD Group Thinkers Podcast. I'm your host, Justin McCord, and on the the high wire with me today, as always, is Ronnie Richard. That is the first of many circusy acrobatic gymnastic references that, that you'll hear as a part of this episode. Ronnie, tell us about our guest.
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C
Our guest today is none other than Lori Collins. I kind of feel like I should give her like the big circus intro, but, but we'll just go. This is Lori Collins. She's executive vice president at RKD Group. She's head of RKD's marketing science team and she is driving all of our data analysis, our market research, and everything we're doing there. So very much the, the left brain analytical side. And the thing I discovered today that I didn't know prior to our conversation was, was the right side that Laurie does yoga. Laurie has a background in aerial arts, which I didn't even know what that was and now I have learned about that. So this more artistic side of her and it's just the perfect blend as you hear her talk about it.
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B
Yeah, we, we get into the idea of applied math. And so, you know, I think that so often I have heard non profit leaders talk about we did this research. And then I'll, and then, you know, I'll ask, well, tell me, tell me about the research. And then it's a binder on the shelf and, and it used to be a literal binder. Now it's a PDF on a, you know, on a server somewhere. But it, it sits. And so Lori's passion and her expertise at bringing to life the insights and the findings from research and analysis are, are really unmatched. And so we get into that as a part of the episode. We get into some current day stats and, and the reality around those stats of making sense of what's happening in philanthropy. And yeah, we spend a fair amount of time talking about the aerial arts. So a few great reasons to stick around and enjoy the rest of this conversation. Featuring Lori Collins of RKD Group on the Thinkers podcast. Okay, Lori, when did your passion for yoga start?
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Oh, that's a switcheroo. 1990. Is that dating myself too much? That was yes and no.
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If you want me to watching this.
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Were not born.
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1990. 1990.
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In 1990. Yeah. What was the catalyst here?
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That was my first semester of college and so the, the college actually offered a yoga class which was kind of cool and innovative. So I started taking it and it, what's not to love about it? Great way to stretch. There's a lot a great community there. Love it.
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B
And it's been a considerable part of your life ever since.
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A
Yeah, on and off. It ebbs and flows and it, of course it's the first thing to go when you're busy. Don't you guys find that, that you know that working out is going to help everything in your life. Your sleep, your health. And yet it's the first thing that we deprioritize when things get hairy and the to do list gets too long.
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So true.
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Is it your primary way of navigating stress?
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No, it's not. It's more of a outlet that has kind of led to other areas that I prefer more the aerial arts, if you will. And that's something that has truly left the path just because of time. But that's like the ultimate stress reliever. Plus like something that really helps you develop other sides and aspects of yourself. Because you can only do so much left brain things. You really. I think it's important to have balance and in the left brain, right brain spheres. And that's something that I think lends itself more to more of that artsy side, which is not something that I do a lot.
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C
What are aerial arts? I just have to ask. I don't know what that is.
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The Cirque du Soleil. So back in the day I took up aerial silks, which is a phenomenal way to get in shape. Lots of times people take their first class Ronnie, and they say, oh, you know what, I'm going to come back to this when I'm in better shape. But it's actually the opposite. You get in better shape by doing it. And the first time you maybe can take two steps up, climbing two steps on the aerial fabric and you get really defeated. And then the next week you're like, I came to the top of a 20 foot ceiling and it felt so good. And so you do it again and before you know it, you're in great shape and you're learning all these new artistic ways of movement, which again is not something that's not a muscle that I flex. Literally and figuratively.
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B
Where does one go to find this fabric? Like, are there, is it a studio? Is it just like a warehouse? Are you going to Montreal?
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It's Michael's. They go to Michael's.
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In your garage you've got a 20 foot ceiling and you've been like, where, where does one go?
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All of the above. Literally all of the above. There's official aerial studios. A lot of them tend to be in warehouses because you need really, really tall ceilings, right? And I've been to New York City and checked out their aerial studios, which have terrifyingly high, I think it was like a 40 foot ceiling. And it's just, you know, you've got this mat that, let's be real, it's not going to do a thing if you were to have an accident. And so, and then there's, it's a whole underground community as well. So once you're in it, you kind of like, oh, hey, so. And so has an aerial rig. And at my last place, I actually had the architect put in an aerial rig in my loft. And so it wasn't overly high, but you could practice the strength moves and the conditioning and all of that. So four years ago I lost that when I moved and haven't been back, which is a bummer.
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B
Okay, so that is the right brain side, right? Like the yoga, the aerial arts, the creativity coming out there. Your career has been on paper, largely left brain around statistics and analysis and research. And not that there's not a balance in all of those things. But take us back to what led you to working at DirecTV and a LinkedIn. You use aerial arts to install dishes or.
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So my back in the day, my career path looked like this. It was a bulletin board in the college in the, the department of statistics and someone had posted a internship for a research intern. And this was at a company called Request Television. They were a pay per view provider and they were offering the high, high price. This was, you know, back in the 90s. So this is, this is good money. Back then it was $7 an hour for this research intern, which, you know, sometimes research internships back then were unpaid, so this one was paid. I absolutely loved the people. In fact made some lifelong friends there and I'm actually married to one now. So that was the best part of that, that I met Steve there. Even though we ironically had gone to the same high school at the same time, our paths never crossed because I was older than he was and I never would have cavorted with a little freshman as a senior. So we became really good friends there at Request Television. And that kind of led to being in the cable and satellite space until I went to my first agency, a database marketing agency. And then they, they had a acquisition of. It was Merkle and Merkle Domain. And so they acquired a fundraising agency. And then that led me onto this path. I, Chip Grizzard reached out to me and he was like, hey, we're looking for this lead of analytics might you know of anyone in the Atlanta area and not, not willing to move to Atlanta, but it kind of started this trajectory of this path that I've been on to use your powers for good. Right? You can apply statistics to frogs, pharmaceuticals or sports marketing or actually social impact and social good arenas. So why not do the latter? And so that's what I've been doing for the last 15 or so years.
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C
Laurie, I want to go back a little bit before DirecTV and ask about when you sort of realized that statistics and research was. Was a passion of yours. It seems like it was very early on. And I'm always impressed, I've said before on the show, I'm always impressed with people who see their path and follow their path early. And it seems like, I mean, you graduated a degree in psychology with an emphasis on statistics and research design, and you knew what you wanted to do where other people, they kind of takes them a little bit to find their path. When did you, were you taking notes of stats as a kid and when did you first discover that?
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Yeah, great question, Ronnie. In freshman year of college, I took a lot of statistics classes and I took them through the math department as well as psychology. And something that I was rather shocked about was that stats classes through the social sciences, such as psych, are much, much more stringent. So my professor for stats in psychology was, you need to not only memorize the formulas, speak to the formulas, use your calculator for this, like the old fashioned calculator, not even on a computer, and tell me why these formulas work and what they're doing to the data transformations. And so as a part of those Statistics 101 classes, the textbook would always have these case studies. So here's the test design of treating 100 people with migraines. And this test, group A took this behavioral therapy plus this pill test, group B had a placebo only test and set up the statistics in support of understanding whether or not there was a statistically significant difference. And sometimes it would stop right there and my curiosity was piqued, like, what happened? What happened to those folks in the placebo only control group? Like, what happened? And so that kind of put me on a path of the why behind the numbers and the application of them. And that's the beauty of statistics, right? It's applied math. Truth be told, I hate theoretical math. I'm not good at theoretical math. But put it in the realm of statistics and applied math and then that's a game changer because it has so many Applications to the modern world, understanding the modern world, impacting the modern world, and then measuring what happened as a result of that.
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Love that idea of applied math and it's importance of things all around us. I had one statistics course in grad school. I think I may have had two math courses in, in both my undergrad and graduate.
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Did you call it statistics?
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Oh, absolutely. But it was more of just. I'm going to lean in with the Mark Twain quote of, you know, their lies, damned lies, and then their statistics. Right.
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Do you know that was actually former British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli that said that, not Mark Twain.
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No.
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Yeah, yeah.
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Don't you take away my twin quotes.
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Just, just properly source it and you're all good because.
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Okay, good.
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There can be, you know, three kinds of lies. If you massage the data long enough, you can get it to say anything you want. Right. And that's what, through transparency and the right statistics at the right time. It's almost like the marketing message. We want to give the right message to the right person at the right time. You want to do the same thing with statistics.
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Yeah. And, and, and with research in, in general. Right. Understanding the context around it.
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Yeah.
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So you, you go down this road of like you, you happen into social impact.
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Yeah.
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Right through, through your time at agencies. And then it kind of snowballs and you go deeper and deeper and deeper. At what point in that snowball did you decide this? This is where, as you, as you have said, this is where I want to use my superpowers. Was there a, was there a moment? Was there a season? Was there a project? What was it that. At what point did you find yourself realizing this is the lean in that, that I want in life?
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Yeah. So when Chip Grizzard recruited me and I was interviewing with the legendary Perry Moore, Chip Grizzard and all of those folks, it just quickly became a familial environment. Right. It's just, there's something about it. And maybe it was the juxtaposition. One of the last verticals I supported at, in my database marketing days for the commercial side was big Pharma. And I got a taste of it and I was just like, ick. You know, they do a lot, it's without controversy that they do so much good in the world, but just the environment of working with the pharmaculture, it can be very cutthroat, very demoralizing. And here in this space, we're making an impact in our own little ways of making the world a better place. Like why Wouldn't you want to do that?
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Yeah, right. And it was also like that switch came about in like 2010, 2011. And so you would have been also as people are getting a little back on their feet from the impact of the Great Recession and just before you had some transformative work in email in particular that like came about like a new sort of digital surge came about in 2012. And so there's this kind of window where you came into, into that space full time that is a great moment to look back and say yes, it was like right in this, this threshold.
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So yeah, yeah.
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You've also then taken in those 15 years in the last 15 years and you've taken that a step further in that you have some regular pulses on giving that you have maintained.
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Yeah, exactly. And brought over the marketing science RKD barometer, which we do quarterly. And I really like the terminology of barometer just because I think it's a little egotistical to think that we could project what charitable giving is going to do in a year or two. To me that's where the crystal ball territory comes in. And it's probably just as accurate as a crystal ball when we try and project out simply because we have so many unknowns, not only volatility within the economy, we've got things that are beyond our control. Pandemics, disasters. And we know that all of them incent provide incentives for giving and charitable giving and they impact it in very different ways. So 2020, 2021 were record years for charitable giving. And you wouldn't have thought that they would have been because look at how many people were impacted employment wise during the pandemic. So those that could give did and gave it very high levels. And that's sometimes a little hard to predict, especially without any precedent on it.
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As we're recording this today, our mid year benchmark reports are being sent out to clients and to across the industry. Talk us through a little bit about what are you seeing right now? What do the benchmarks tell us and combined with the barometer, what's sort of the state of giving? Because we're coming up on Q4 and year end. Yeah, people want to know.
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Exactly. I love it. So there's a lot of continuation of the theme, of course, of fewer donors giving more. I recall pre pandemic talking about this broaching the topic that it's not about donor replacement, it's about revenue replacement and replenishment. Right. So we kind of had this shift pre pandemic and then we pushed pause on the fewer donors giving more. And all of a sudden acquisition was actually making money in its first year REM and it was like what a change. And slowly the pendulum is coming back. We are certainly looking at fewer donors giving more. However, I think that those opportunities still exist to lean into those higher roi, higher LTV or long term value channels so that we can really ensure that the long term viability and sustainability of programs are driven by of course, major relational, mid level, sustaining digital, et cetera. These are all tactics that have higher ltv, higher roi. And I think that we have to lean into the trends. We can fight them all we want, but at the end of the day there is a growing wealth disparity in the US it actually started back in the 80s and it is continued. And I think that it's got a 2 speed of growth. I've heard it said in terms of the wealthiest demographics are getting wealthier and to a lesser extent some of the poorer households are losing some of the ground that they had received in the last few years post pandemic. So you've certainly got this return to the fewer donors giving more. But what is the why behind it? When we look at donor sentiment research and donor check ins, I know that the biggest barrier to charitable giving is actually the affordability bit. Those that don't give and about half of us adults don't give charitably. And that's because they believe that they or they truly cannot afford it. And that makes a lot of sense because when you look at that 50%, 50 percentile, you we know that about 95, I think it's 97.5% of the wealth is in the top 50%. So where does that leave the bottom 50%? It's only at about 2.5% which of course they're struggling with being able to give charitably. So when we look at the why behind that, it kind of gives more context to this adage that we throw around a lot, which is fewer donors giving more. Let's lean into where we can and where the money is and fish where the fish are basically.
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I golly, there's so many different places to go with this conversation. So one I Ronnie, do you know what a barometer does?
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Measures pressure, right?
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Look at you.
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It does study weather a little bit.
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It's imminent. The reason I like it is because a barometer, it tells us what's around the corner, it doesn't tell us what's beyond the next hill. Right?
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And so I appreciate that as an analogy because I do Think that even as you talk about growing wealth disparity, et cetera, like, that is a. There's a version of like understanding the pressure within philanthropy. Not pressure as in the pressure that individual fundraisers and CDOs feel, et cetera, but the pressure in and around giving and in and around wealth and in and around societal trends that are reflected in charitable contributions. So I have that kind of cloud that's rolling in for me mentally. And then I also have this. I don't know if it's altruistic, aspirational side Lori, that makes me think about the, you know, the parable of the two coins of like, how good it is to give no matter what the amount is. And for us as fundraisers and like the tension that we have in fundraising around focusing on those with the higher wealth. But then we know there's the psychological benefit of giving anything. And so how are we also creating avenues to normalize, you know, a dollar a month or $2 a month or whatever it is rounding up at the register.
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Right. There's tension in that giving. Yeah, yeah. And the charitable behaviors such as volunteering, social advocacy, those are. You're absolutely right. And I'm so glad you brought that up, Justin, because this is a difference between my research over the last 15 years doing tracking studies of charitable giving. It was kind of interesting. I just recently found out the reason why my research wasn't matching some other very venerable, well sourced research out there, such as the Lilly School of Philanthropy, because their research excludes the. The lower end giving. Right. I've always included that. I don't care if you give a dollar to charity, if it's. That to me is a reflection of your heart, not your finances. Right. How, how generous are you? So for a long time, I saw for about the period of 12 years, up until the last three years, that the proportion of US adults giving charitably was incredibly consistent. It was 54% plus or minus 2 percentage points over this 12 year period. That's incredible. And meanwhile, we saw the Lilly School of Philanthropy was like, no charitable giving is going down. Well, the at issue, there were two differences there. They're tracking charitable giving $25 and up, which is a low but sizable statistic. When you look at the proportion how Americans give and what they give, a good portion of them do give $25 or lower in an average year because that's what they can afford. However, there was also this implication of religious giving. So I exclude giving to churches, houses of worship and political campaigns. So I'm better isolating that research that can help our climate change client partners with how to grow and what it looks like for giving. So that's the reason why my barometer was more steady up until the last couple years, in which case we have seen a decreasing proportion of those giving charitably. And it's because it's a difference of looking at the giving holistically at all levels and kind of also isolating that non church giving.
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Orey, as you look back at your career path and some of the things we've talked about today, who would you say are some people who influenced you along the way or people you learned from that got you to where you are today?
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It's a great question. So my favorite co pilot that has taught me so much of what I know is actually the amazing Alexa Langford. And she and I work together together for a dozen years. And when I came to Grizzard back in the day, my first leadership experience in the fundraising agency realm, I knew very little. I had worked on some charitable accounts on the domain side at Merkle, but I really didn't know the details and the nuances of analytics for fundraising. And it's distinctly different. There's kind of, I like to say there's some metrics that are false positives. If you just look at revenue per active donor and if you get double digit increases there, you can say yay, those fewer donors are giving a lot more, not just more. But that's a false. Indicator. Anytime I get double digit increases in revenue per active donor, that's a red flag for me. That means that you are whittling your base down so much that you are really reflecting those loyal multi year donors. Right. So Alexa really helped me understand the nuances of analytics applied to charitable giving. She's one of the smartest analysts in the space and I was lucky enough to partner with her for about a dozen years and she's now doing fantastically on her own, leading strategy and analytics in her own Right. So it's kind of a. I look at it as a growth success story for both of us.
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B
Say a bit of a. Like a trapeze partner, Right? Like you.
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Exactly. There's a place in la, Justin that does the partners trapeze for beginners. And I'm so tempted to do it, but it's also like terrifying, right? You've got a net, but we all know that you know you can hurt yourself.
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Yes, I will happily come watch, not participate.
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I thought you were about to volunteer.
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Yeah, exactly. I think it would kind of be the ultimate trust building exercise, because social psychologists say that the higher up you are, the more you've got that high energy that really cements emotion and feeling. And so back in college, I remember reading a story of social psychologists actually making pairings on a high suspension bridge. So it was a first meet and greet with potential suitors, and they actually paired at higher rates because this elevation really heightened everything and you felt everything at a higher level. So all I'm suggesting here is not love matches in the agency. However, maybe we do some trust building exercises with trapeze.
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C
Trapeze team building.
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Yes.
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Listen, I, I, I am decently quick on my feet. I'm definitely more quick witted. But, you know, there is. Yeah, there is. I have a love for, I have a love for gravity and being, you know, on the earth and.
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So you don't like heights at all?
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No. No.
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Ronnie, how about you?
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I've, I've gone skydiving and bungee jumping, so I'm, I'm okay. It scares me, but, but it's fun.
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So here's how this can work is y' all do the trapeze thing and I'll, I will be your promoter and sell the tickets to watch.
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A
No tickets, please.
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C
And you'll do the high flying puns cert.
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Do rkd.
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A
Oh, I like it. Yeah, I like it. And I prefer being the introvert I am. I prefer Ariel with no audience. Like, everyone is like, oh, you want to perform? I'm like, no, look over there. Okay, I'm gonna do this thing, but I don't want any eyes on me. And.
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Yeah, well, Lori, we appreciate you hanging out with us today. Hanging out with us today. Swinging by.
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And climbing to greater heights.
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Climbing.
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Elevating our conversation.
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C
Conversation without a net, too.
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B
Conversation with no net.
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A
I didn't know what you guys were going to talk about.
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B
Yeah, you thought it was just a couple of clowns.
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A
Thank you for confirming that.
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B
All right, friend, we, we will, we'll catch you again soon.
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A
Sounds great. Great catching up with you guys. Group Thinkers is a production of RKD Group. For more information, including how you can partner with RKD to accelerate growth for your fundraising and nonprofit marketing needs, visit rkdgroup.com.