Integrated Marketing: Are We Being Honest?
	Posted by Guest Blogger at Jun 13, 2013 07:02 AM CDT

This post was written by guest author Stephen Ferrando, Senior Director at CDR Fundraising Group. Stephen has a combined 15-years of expertise in both commercial and nonprofit multi-channel marketing, strategy, and analytics.  In his free time, Stephen is working on becoming a ninja, as well as focusing on his life-long dream of completing the last side on his Rubik’s Cube.

Integrated Marketing Communication is the coordination and integration of all marketing communication tools, avenues, functions and sources within a company into a seamless program that maximizes the impact on consumers. -- Wikipedia

Sounds great, right? Draws a lot of attention and pointed questions from the C-suite at your organization too, I bet. “What are we doing in social?,” “How many ‘likes’ does our Facebook page have, and how are we monetizing that?,” and my personal favorite, “What is our overarching social strategy?”

Caveat: In advance of the following paragraphs, let me state that I am very pro-integrated marketing.  In fact, we should all be reprogramming our brains to think in spider web cross-channel fashion, because the fractured media of today’s marketing world will only ever get more complex in the future.

With that now stated for the record as my shield, I feel I should get a little incendiary in this post. So, how many people (organization members or consultants) reading this would unflinchingly declare that they are running an integrated fundraising program? And if you do have the gravitas to say yes, would it hold up to an Ed Bradley “60 Minutes” interview, if the measure of success was the definition above?

The issues preventing more “yes” answers are far from unsolvable, and they fall into two relatively controllable categories, I believe.

The first:

1. Our Focus
We’re starting to focus on all the wrong things. What are we doing on Facebook?  What are we doing on Twitter?  What is our social strategy? These are the wrong questions, and they place a fundraising professional’s focus on things other than the priorities.

What’s your number one priority as a fundraising organization? In almost every case your answer should be, “Raising the most money possible to be deployed to support the benefactors or ideals of your mission statement.” If you didn’t answer that question with an answer like that, please sign up for the 12-step marketing strategy intervention I’ll apparently need to be hosting later this year.

Assuming you did answer it correctly, you must also know that online giving only equates to roughly 5%-12% of any organization’s total annual revenue (yours included), and social fits into that number as a weak subset of that 5%-12%.

So, if you are really interested in safeguarding and growing your organizational revenues, instead of being focused on the “Whats” (“What are we doing on ….”), you should be focused on the “Hows” (“How are we using the data from …”).  

(Yes, I know what you want to say here -- “but what about engagement,” “but what about how digital influences other channels,” “but what about being where the constituents are for brand awareness,” etc. -- all valid concerns, certainly. However, until the world of commerce begins exchanging a positive brand image for $10,000 donations and/or nonprofit organizations get a firm handle on multi-channel attribution methodology, I think we should stay focused on how to use the data these new media channels provide us to drive a meaningful revenue impact elsewhere.)

The second issue:

2. Our Structure
Most nonprofit organizations are universally structured in a way, both internally by business unit as well as within their CRM database, that is in opposition with the way the present multi-channel marketing world operates. 

Commercial companies by comparison are quick to “pivot” and do a re-org internally when necessary, and occasionally when it seems not so necessary, to align their internal business units with their strategic goals. Commercial companies willingly blur the lines. Most nonprofit organizations are still structured the same way they were in 1995, and rarely, if ever, go through the growing pains of trying to re-org the business units: “Here is our Events Team, here is our Development Team, here is our Major Donor Outreach team, here is our MARCOM/Branding team, here is our Digital Team (that’s a newish one), and then here’s the Executive Team.

Additionally, where most commercial marketers live on the cutting edge, if not bleeding edge, of CRM technology (marketing imperatives like the utilization of Big Data and advanced predictive digital analytics), those of us in nonprofit marketing realm tend to be riding in the technology caboose if we’re lucky, and if we’re honest, many are still standing by the CRM train tracks hoping someone will pick them up.

Blame the donors. They’ve gone and made the way most nonprofits organizations are structured, both internally as well as at an information structure level within their enterprise database, utterly ineffective, if not bordering on the land of Obsolete-ville.

Donors are, with an every growing frequency, crossing those nice neat boundary lines that historically existed within organizations to separate traditional media from new media, and MARCOM from major gifts. 

“So what?” you’re saying. “What’s the point? What should we do? Tell us.”

In my next post, I’ll answer this question, with a few thoughts on the path to integration.