When Integrated Marketing Doesn't Work for Nonprofits
	Posted by Katy Jordan at Aug 16, 2013 07:04 AM CDT

Is multi-channel marketing always the answer? Are there times when it just doesn’t make sense or flat out doesn’t work? Let’s talk through a few scenarios in which it may make sense to stick with traditional approaches to ensure campaign success.

Disaster Relief
Unfortunately, national disasters and tragedies do happen — much too often. If you have the collateral, budget and inventory to swiftly respond with a direct-mail appeal and telemarketing campaign, go for it! However, more often than not, nonprofits aren’t able to react that quickly through postal mail — so in times of disaster, it may be best to rely on digital channels. Keep an emergency email template on hand, so you can promptly send an urgent message to your supporters. The good news is, you can integrate your appeal among your digital channels, using social media, your website and search engine marketing to help reinforce your disaster relief efforts!

If you do have an active telemarketing campaign in progress, reach out to your telemarketing team and see if you can revise the script to include a disaster-related ask. Some nonprofits also keep urgent appeal letterhead and envelopes on hand, so if you can quickly turn around the copy and creative, you may be able to get that appeal in the mail before the relevance of the disaster wears off.

Season-Specific Campaigns
How much does the time of year or season impact your direct-response schedule? We work with a human services nonprofit that always does a winter survival campaign. The challenge is the direct-mail appeal is sent in September, well before many of us are thinking about the cold months ahead. This disconnect proved evident in the email response, or lack thereof. After testing a pre- and post-email touch point with the September direct-mail campaign versus a standalone winter survival appeal in January, the results showed the email audience was much more responsive to the email when the content was more relevant to the time of year.

Big, Newsworthy Events
Similar to disaster relief, responding swiftly to big, newsworthy events through traditional media channels may prove difficult. Especially during election time, if your supporters become motivated by certain events (debates, town halls, polls), relying on digital media to inform your base may pay off best in actions and donations.

Quantity Concerns
Many of the cross-channel tactics generating buzz today include cookie matching and custom audience targeting. These efforts require a “match” process — i.e., matching a postal address with an email address, or matching an email address with a Facebook ID. Keep an eye on your input quantity and make sure you’ll have enough quantity post match (match rates can vary wildly) to warrant the time, budget and potential impact that campaign may have.

For example, say you’re looking to experiment with Facebook’s custom audience targeting and have a direct-mail campaign going to 30,000 targets. First, you’ll need to find how many of those 30,000 recipients have an email address. Let’s assume that 60% do. That brings your input quantity to 18,000. Now you’ll want to upload those email addresses into Facebook to match an audience. This match rate can range from 30-70%. If you get a 50% match rate, you’ll end up with 9,000 records to input. That number may not produce any statistically significant results on this campaign.

Lack of Data Integration
The whole point of multi-channel marketing is to communicate with your supporters in a consistent manner. Especially in fundraising campaigns, it is very difficult to do this successfully without an integrated data set. Many fundraisers tend to craft ask amounts to their donors based on giving history. If you’re only looking at a portion of your donors’ history (for example online only), you could be leaving significant revenue on the table or asking for too little. On the contrary, asking too much from your donor could push the donor outside their comfort zone and you may miss out on a gift.

What about you?
Have you tried integration in the past and had a miserable failure? Have you found a solution to any of the challenges or campaigns above and made them work? Please share your thoughts in the comment section! How do you decide to integrate or not to integrate — that is the question!