Compelling Message through Multiple Channels Yields Impressive Results for Nonprofit
This article was written by guest blogger Brock Warner. Brock is a fundraiser for War Child Canada & US, as well as a TEDx speaker on philanthropy, a blogger, and volunteer with the AFP Greater Toronto Area chapter.
Few charities can articulate their mission as simply and powerfully as The Children's Center (TCC) can with their powerful statement that “children should be seen, and not hurt.” The tagline was the core message of their 2012 reactivation campaign and is a marketer’s dream, but more importantly it was the vehicle for a highly effective fundraising campaign for lapsed donors that grabbed attention across channels.
Since 1929, TCC has served children and families in the City of Detroit with an integrated approach to community mental health that treats the whole child and the whole family. TCC puts children and their families at the center of all that they do – while providing the most expert and compassionate care needed – so children and families can heal, grow and thrive.
Like many charities, the value of the work being done by front-line staff was for some reason not being communicated to donors in a compelling enough manner that they were giving loyally year after year. In early 2012, the leadership at TCC faced the fact that their number of active donors was dwindling with proof in the results of their annual winter campaigns: in 2010 the appeal had only broken even, and in 2011 had fewer donations and lost money. Online revenue was an insignificant 2% of total revenue, and only 27% of their database had an email on record. So, they hired a senior marketing executive to rebrand, retool and press the “reset” button. Enter the new message, tailored specifically to reactivate their lapsed donors: “children should be seen, and not hurt.”
This custom reactivation campaign marked a complete turnaround from past years. It encompassed the entire multi-staged communications cycle from the very first donor touch to the final acknowledgement letter.
The list of communication channels employed was impressive:
- Executed two-stage direct mail targeting volunteers and lapsed donors, segmented into three groups by previous giving levels.
- Created responsive landing page to engage mobile traffic; convert online donations.
- Sent 3 emails with links back to landing page.
- Recruited internal/external influencers to help spread the word online.
- Pre-written on-message Facebook posts/tweets.
- Customized Facebook Cover photos for supporters.
- Customized acknowledgement letters to personalize and include campaign-relevant messaging.
- Continued traditional face-to-face, telephone channels, when appropriate.
The campaign was a resounding success! The key was the deployment of a seamlessly integrated, multi-channel campaign, with a compelling message, designed to accommodate donors at anytime, from any device.
At the time of publishing this blog, the annual appeal raised over $72,100. Lapsed donors renewed by 15%, and online donations represented 21% of total revenue. Mobile web traffic increased by 78%, and TCC’s donor email list increased by 15%. There was also a significant increase in social media activity.
The strategy was so successful that TCC will be refreshing the assets and rolling it out to active donors, as well as designing an acquisition component. Congratulations to The Children’s Center from everyone here at the IMAB!
Share, Like and Post | | Article Link | CommentGiving the Gift of... Cupcakes!
This article was written by guest blogger Brock Warner. Brock is a fundraiser for War Child Canada & US, as well as a TEDx speaker on philanthropy, a blogger, and volunteer with the AFP Greater Toronto Area chapter.
The sweet story of Cupcake Day actually starts in Australia, where their national SPCA had a dash of success with a mouth-watering idea. The recipe for Cupcake Day is simple – SPCA supporters sign up to host a Cupcake Party, then invite their friends. The guests can donate and/or attend the Party, and the host is encouraged to sell cupcakes and raise even more money when National Cupcake Day comes around. The Ontario SPCA and BC SPCA both picked up on that scent of success wafting from down under and independently reached out to their Aussie counterparts to bring this delectable event to Canada rather than develop a new campaign from scratch.
The Ontario SPCA and the British Columbia SPCA are both leading animal welfare organizations in their respective provinces. They provide shelter, animal rescue, adoption and other services in their respective provinces.
Rather than keeping their Cupcake Day plans a family secret, the OSPCA and BC SPCA decided the best possible way forward would be to each combine their own ingredients to the mix so they could get a rise on a national scale. This teamwork allowed them to fold together management responsibilities, expenses, marketing and general dirty work of getting an event packaged and ready. Local SPCA’s and humane societies all over Canada were asked to join in as well. This was the first time SPCA’s and humane societies worked together on a national scale event in recent animal welfare memory. The deal was that if they sprinkled the Cupcake Day messaging into their ongoing communications, the funds raised would be collected by the BCSPCA in the west and the OSPCA in the east and then whisked away to return to the province of origin. By January 2013, the campaign’s mise en place was ready, and it was time to go live.
Cupcake Day was celebrated across Canada on February 25, 2013, and Canadians ate it up!
The marketing for Cupcake Day was innovative, cutting in content from a variety of channels and mediums including Facebook, Twitter, print materials, email promotions, and an online media buy as well as a PR campaign in Ontario. Even postcards to promote the event were piped to local SPCA chapters to give their ground promotions a consistency that complemented the online properties.
And, because sharing with friends is just plain good manners, “Cupcake Hosts” could sign up online to receive a host package by mail that included posters, pledge forms, balloons and stickers. On Facebook, all participants were invited to share their cupcake designs for a chance of winning a prize package, which resulted in 10,000 new Likes.
The campaign raised significantly more than the $150,000 goal. Once the total online and offline revenue for both BCSPCA and OSPCA were processed, just under $360,000 was raised to date. Plans are already in the works to expand CupCake Day in 2014 and has attracted many National Corporate sponsors who want in!
NOTE: The Ontario SPCA and British Columbia SPCA won a 2013 IMAB Integrated Marketing Award for this campaign.
Share, Like and Post | | Article Link | CommentThe Path to Integration
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.
Integrated Marketing: Are We Being Honest?
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.
Share, Like and Post | | Article Link | CommentAmerican Diabetes Association Builds a Movement
This article was written by guest blogger Brock Warner. Brock is a fundraiser for War Child Canada & US, as well as a TEDx speaker on philanthropy, a blogger, and volunteer with the AFP Greater Toronto Area chapter.
Every fundraiser wants to believe their campaign is a true "movement," but the reality is that our appeals often fall short. Last year, when the national staff for the American Diabetes Association’s (ADA) Step Out: Walk to Stop Diabetes event were looking to increase post-event fundraising for their peer-to-peer fundraising event -- they needed to ignite the passion amongst their most loyal supporter base, and give them the extra push they needed to raise much needed funds.
ADA leads the fight against the deadly consequences of diabetes and fights for those affected by diabetes. This is done by funding research to prevent, cure and manage diabetes, deliver services to hundreds of communities, provide objective and credible information and to give voice to those denied their rights because of diabetes.
Step Out’s Pay it Forward movement is born:
For those of you not in the know, Giving Tuesday is a national movement encouraging generous people all over the world to commit some sort of charitable act on the Tuesday following American Thanksgiving. The Step Out team wanted to give their participants and donors a chance to get involved in the movement. They also wanted to turn the usual concept of event fundraising incentives on its head.
Through the Pay it Forward campaign, participants and donors were asked to make an unexpected gift to a walker and for every gift of $26 or more -- representing the 26,000,000 Americans with diabetes -- the person receiving the gift would qualify for a (donated) Hawaiian vacation. Cool idea, right?
Many Step Out participants had historically been less engaged online and this could have been the first time they've heard of Giving Tuesday. It was also the fundraising off-season, so engagement was not at high levels.
This integrated campaign was conceived and executed in approximately three weeks time, which is an incredible feat for a national organization of ADA’s size and scope. The four-day campaign was promoted via:
- Daily FB and Twitter posts targeted nationally and locally
- Creation of FB event and a custom cover photo
- Campaign promotion added to the site carousel
- Custom landing page
- Donation form update, with post-gift social sharing ask
- Donation notification email encouraged the participant to Pay It Forward
- Emails on first/last day of campaign, segmented with specific content for donors, team captains and walkers, with ideas of who they could give to and why
- Materials sent to local offices, including personal emails, phone scripts, social media posts for their internal use
- Promoted posts on Facebook
- Creation of a deliberately campy YouTube video.
A Red Strider (participant with diabetes) from Los Angeles, CA won the trip and said, "When I got an email that my mother-in-law donated a second time I called to remind her that she already donated! She told me she did again because she cares about the cause and wanted to give me a chance to win the trip!"
By the end, the campaign raised $21,000 through 333 online gifts. Last year during the same time, $5,500 was raised through 87 gifts.
Great job!
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