Integrated Marketing Starts From Within
	Posted by Guest Blogger at Jul 05, 2012 07:01 AM CDT

Guest blogger Margaux Smith is a copywriter at the London fundraising agency, Bluefrog. After completing a post-graduate in Fundraising at Humber College in Toronto, Canada, she moved to the UK. She believes integrated marketing has become vital for the success of nonprofits, and looks forward to learning more as strategies evolve.

In today’s nonprofit sector, there are many organizations using various channels to communicate with their donors, whether that’s direct mail, telemarketing, door-to-door, online, print ads, etc. But as we start to integrate these channels, building campaigns that speak to our donors from multiple angles, it can become too easy to forget an important step -- to first look at your internal communication.

I recently asked SCA Direct’s Vice President of Client and Strategic Services, Jeanne Harris, how charities should best begin to build their integrated marketing strategy. She responded with some great advice that many of us have heard, but not enough have implemented -- start by looking within your own organization and break down your internal silos.

Instead of working within separate teams, build an organization-wide, master communication plan and hold regular internal meetings. That’s the best way to ensure everyone on your team can begin having the dialogue you need to properly reach the right donors with the right messaging. Too many charities still operate with internal divisions and without addressing this, the relationship with your donors will suffer.

For example, if you’ve got your online team working on a set of communications to send out, and the direct mail group is developing their own series of campaigns, supplemented with telemarketing initiatives or a special event, it’s vital that everybody knows what the others will be saying and when. That allows your whole organization to come together and deliver a consistent message to your donors -- and consistency is key to a strong integrated strategy.

Organizations that have the ability to work across their own departments, and who are able to prioritize what they want to accomplish the most, will be the most successful. It’s all about coordination.

Harris also advises putting together a thoughtful testing plan that will allow you to evaluate and attribute how an online activity may influence your offline channels, or vice versa. So many charities have their online world sitting separately from their other databases, but integrating your data will help you understand the true relationship. You have to know what people are doing, where and when, to remain relevant and demonstrate you’re listening and communicating about what truly interests your donors.

Good integration is about understanding the individual donor and how they want to be treated. Look at your communications through their eyes, and you’ll be on your way to a much more successful fundraising program.