What Integrated Marketing Means to Me -- Jeanne Harris
	Posted by at Mar 07, 2012 07:04 AM CST

The opportunity to join with others to enter into discussions on what integrated marketing is, how we can improve the donor experience, understand how organizations can align all of their resources in support of an actionable, cost effective, measurable integrated approach to delivering marketing messages and to share learnings is an exciting one. 

As marketers, we understand the need to go where our donors and constituents are and to engage them in a way that promotes excitement, opportunities for engagement and deeper relationships. We understand and deploy industry best practices within specific channels, and now with the ever changing landscape and the communication mediums available -- we are faced with the question on how to best orchestrate and deliver our marketing messages to the right people, at the right time -- in a consistent manner that allows our donors the option of responding in whatever way makes most sense to them and through the channel(s) they choose -- to raise money and to build partnerships.  

I believe that integrated marketing is not just having multiple channels at our fingertips, but the more challenging goal of creating “a seemingly simple messaging symphony” to show our constituents that we know who they are and that we are smart in coordinating and defining what it is we want to say to them and where.  The end game is to understand and act on our data to help build a long term relationship with our donors that acknowledges that they are in charge (not us), to build trust equity and to be forward thinking enough that we can increase cross-generational giving which will ensure our organizations remain relevant and dynamic moving forward -- (while raising money all the way.)   

There are many examples of organizations that have successfully integrated campaigns.  It will be exciting to see how organizations build upon their marketing strategies aligning channels, budgets and resources.

So all this is fine and dandy -- probably not too many would disagree with the basic concepts noted above, but our discussions will be important in working together to navigate the intricacies of:

• Collecting,  analyzing and applying our data across organizational departments;
• Optimizing our analytics tools to measure results on key metrics across all channels;
• Understanding where to allocate our resources in the delivery of our fundraising messages for the best return;
• Embracing (and yes maybe better understanding) donor expectations and assumptions in  our ‘real time’ world;
• Establishing the organizational communication roadmap that will allow us to establish our top priorities and devise the best plan for our organizations to truly move the needle from a results perspective , and
• Retaining the need for innovation and our ability to be fluid and nimble to the marketplace.