The Path to Integration
	Posted by Guest Blogger at Jun 20, 2013 07:04 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.

In my recent post, I offered up issues that I believe prevent many of us from running truly integrated fundraising and marketing programs.

Now, humbly, I will offer up some potential solutions: 

1. Admit we’re not really doing integrated marketing
The first thing we must do, even the most advanced of us, is admit that what we are doing is not yet truly “integrated marketing”, but rather “coordinated marketing.” We are coordinating a DM campaign with an email campaign, or an SEM effort with a DRTV spot, or an event with our social presence, and that’s fine. Coordination is progress. In fact, for the more advanced fundraisers who have successfully coordinated two, three, or four channels or efforts, you’re ahead of the curve. Keep pulling the rest of us along with you!

2. Ask the tough questions
The next thing we must do is begin asking tough questions about our organizational structure and how we are capturing and using data in our CRM platform. So, be the catalyst for change. Start asking “Why?” a lot more often and not accepting boilerplate answers like, “That’s the way we have always done it.”  Challenge why the artificial silos exist between teams, challenge team structure, challenge what data is or is not being captured and how that data is catalogued, and ultimately challenge yourself to place the data above all else as the priority.  

3. Study (and use) the data
That’s right, I said it.  Data.  Copious, eye blurrying, buckets of data. Good data. A new social engagement platform, or mobile app, or “I just gave a gift!” share functionality with some snazzy creative may feel like the epic win of an integrated digital marketing program, but it isn’t. The data that those solutions throw off that can be combined with other existing data assets to inform and influence other channels — that’s where the epic win will be found. Because in the data is where the answer to the most important C-suite questions — “Where is our next best dollar spent?” and “How do we go from fundraising $X to $X+1, two years from now?” — live.

Until we start to do these things, far away are the days when an email goes out and lands in my inbox, and then based on my actions (or inaction) to that communication the copy topic, offer, imagery, ask string or format within the next scheduled DM piece I’m to receive gets dynamically altered, while simultaneously, the database has just captured that I “Liked” for the 25th time a status update on the organization’s Facebook page, and that data point was combined and cross-referenced with a data enhancement variable for wealth, and now I have bubbled up to the top of the “personal call list” for some Major Gift Officer real-time and receive a friendly call that same day.  

Sexy right?  We all want to get there.  And I believe we will.