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A Hidden Gem in the World of Digital Fundraising

There is a hidden gem in the world of digital fundraising, and it's the online conference, Fundraising Online. For the fourth year in a row, this two-day conference brings together the best thinkers and practitioners of digital marketing in one place. The IMAB is a proud content partner this year for the first time.

And who said, “Good things in life aren't free.”? In this case, they are. The IMAB hopes you'll register for this FREE online conference.

Running across two days, this year's programme will feature 16 high quality workshops and two plenary sessions. The broad range of integrated and digital sessions will really challenge you by raising questions, which speakers will answer with their extensive knowledge and using real case studies from around the world.

You'll be inspired by Ryan Davis, Executive Director of Social Innovation at Blue State Digital, who will be delivering Wednesday’s plenary: Engaging digital natives around the world – what do Lady Gaga, Occupy Wall Street and Kony have to tell all of us? In this session, Ryan will give an exciting talk about strategies, tactics and content that truly target the first generation of digital natives around the world. His global story will take you through inspiring examples from The Born This Way Foundation to The NAACP, and culture movements like #Kony2012 and Occupy Wall Street.

Here are a few other sessions that you may also be interested in attending:

• What Do Your Best Friends Want? Understanding the 21st Century Supporter (presented by Katy Dubina)
• How to Plan, Execute, and Evaluate Integrated Fundraising (presented by Fred Fournier)
• Game on! How online and casual games can put the fun in fundraising (presented by Farrah Rooney)
• Demonstrating impact through digital storytelling (presented by Colin Habberton)
• Responsive web design (presented by Ida Aalen)

Register for Fundraising Online now to attend these sessions and many more.
                     
The IMAB has worked hard to create more learning, and collaboration, in the area of integrated marketing and fundraising for the charitable sector. Partnering with Fundraising Online is proof of our commitment to furthering knowledge and sharing in the sector.

We hope you'll join us for this free conference of the highest quality!

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Integrated Marketing Success in Western Canada

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.

Here at the IMAB, we’ve spent plenty of time profiling great campaigns and appeals that have demonstrated how integrated marketing has helped organisations achieve results that would otherwise have been impossible. This time, let’s step back and take a look at an entire annual giving program that always went to market with a multi-channel strategy and that used technology as the key enabler. The result? Success in all respects.

The Canadian Cancer Society in Saskatchewan saves lives. The Society has more impact against more cancers in more communities than any other organisation. To ensure they could be effective in their fundraising, communication and marketing activities, they began implementing the Convio CRM and Convio Luminate tools (Now Blackbaud Luminate) in 2010. By 2012, The Society had their new technology up and running in tandem with an integrated calendar as a roadmap and a directive to ensure all campaigns were multi-channel.

The impact on their fundraising program was immediate. Early indicators showed that the Society was on track for a banner year, and they proved correct by year-end. Here are just a few growth stats from 2012 over 2011:

• 40% growth in online revenue
• 84% growth in direct mail revenue
• 55% increase in non-primary-event revenues
• 35% email list growth

A single tool
None of this growth would have been possible without a pan-organization commitment to a single comprehensive tool that could enable multi-faceted integrated marketing. Prior to this overhaul, the Society had highly fragmented technology with no central database of record, and limited capabilities online. The transition was complicated and is still ongoing, but even in the first few months has proved well worth the time and investment.

Multiple channels and targeted communications
There is a lot that any charity, regardless of size or location, can learn from what the Society has accomplished. In the planning for 2012, it was determined that no campaign would be launched in one channel only. No event, advocacy campaign, newsletter or appeal launched without targeting, segmentation and promotion in place to ensure the best response possible.

Cross-promotions
Another important lesson to be learned is about the importance of list organization, and testing messaging. The Society successfully enticed direct response donors to events, while advocates and volunteers were looped into fundraising campaigns and donors into advocacy campaigns. The cross-list promotion created more loyal, active supporters that facilitated the remarkable growth the Society saw. The Society has been remarkably successful in creating cross-functional teams that work closely together to achieve mutually beneficial results.

Never stop thinking about how you can get the most out of your data, how your charity can use technology to the best effect, and how you can work with all the teams at your organization to provide the best possible programs for your supporters. In the end, it pays off.

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IMAB Shakes Things Up at the Multichannel Mixer at 2013 NTC

Last weekend, the IMAB leadership team, Mike Johnston, Chris McKinley, and Katy Dubina led a successful workshop, The Multichannel Mixer, at the 2013 Nonprofit Technology Conference in Minneapolis, MN. Audience members represented a cross section of small and large nonprofits as well as some agencies working in the U.S. and international markets. The session quickly segued into a real world conversations of the true challenges nonprofits of all sizes are facing in the industry. Overwhelmingly, nonprofit representatives agreed that internal silos and organizational culture is the number one road block challenging charities.

The group discussed specifically some incremental steps toward improvement and justifying investment in multichannel marketing activities. The audience was then divided into two groups to work on true life scenarios facing some nonprofits today. The groups were tasked with crafting integrated solutions to appeal to donors of multiple generations, spread investment across multiple channels to diversify revenue sources, and combat attrition in specific channels such as major gift donors and telemarketing.

Participants rolled up there sleeves and worked together with new friends to arrive at some forward thinking solutions incorporating integrated marketing. Stay tuned for other IMAB presence in the industry. IMAB members will be presenting at the upcoming  Fundraising Online Conference May 15-16.

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Announcing the 2013 IMAB Integrated Marketing Award Winners

On Saturday, April 13 at the NTC awards luncheon, the Integrated Marketing Advisory Board (IMAB) announced the winners of its second annual Integrated Marketing Awards. The Integrated Marketing Awards recognize nonprofit organizations showing exemplary leadership in the area of integrated marketing.
We congratulate this year’s winners, who exemplify the sector’s use of integrated, multi-channel marketing campaigns or programs.

Winners by Category:

The Donor
Canadian Cancer Society in Saskatchewan won in the category of The Donor for demonstrating how an integrated marketing campaign or program had an impact on donor satisfaction and the donor experience. The organization committed to integrate every campaign in 2012 so that no event or campaign was conducted through a single channel only. Donors were encouraged to participate as volunteers and advocates, and advocates and volunteers were encouraged to donate.

The Organization
The Ontario SPCA and British Columbia SPCA, both leading animal welfare organizations in their respective provinces, won in the category of The Organization, demonstrating how an effort across the organization aligned strategy, structure, culture, or skills to impact the organization’s ability to integrate its marketing efforts. The organizations worked together to share management, expenses, marketing and work in bringing a successful fundraising event from Australia to Canada.

The Practice
The American Diabetes Association, an organization leading the fight against the deadly consequences of diabetes and fighting for those affected by diabetes, won in the category of The Practice for sharing its real world case study highlighting best practices in the field of integrated marketing. The organization quickly spun up a highly integrated “Giving Tuesday” campaign around their Step Out: Walk to Stop Diabetes walk.

The IMAB is privileged to honor these organizations that are demonstrating best practices in the field of integrated marketing. We’ll feature case studies from these organizations in future posts, so stay tuned for more details!

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Measuring Your ROI in Multichannel Fundraising Campaigns

This article was written by guest author Peter Schoewe, Director of Analytics at Mal Warwick/Donordigital. The article was originally printed in Philanthropy Journal.

In our newly evolving multichannel nonprofit fundraising environment, the old methods of measuring return on investment have clearly begun to fall apart. Today’s nonprofit fundraiser can choose from a multitude of channels to invest in -- and each channel can have different cost structures and produce different types of donors and returns.
 
This complexity makes it even more critical to be able to understand -- and measure -- the return on your fundraising investments (ROI), so that you can make data-driven investment decisions across channels or across a combination of channels. The following four steps, detailed in Donordigital’s Measuring Your Return on Investment in Multichannel Fundraising Campaigns, will help you measure return on investment across multiple fundraising channels.
 
STEP 1: ESTABLISH THE GOAL
Fundraising efforts can have benefits far beyond dollars for a nonprofit organization.  In spite of the capabilities for multichannel fundraising efforts to engage individuals to become advocates, activists or volunteers, it is recommended that -- for the purpose of calculating return on investment for fundraising efforts -- the following standard should be used: The goal of fundraising investment is to produce revenue in the form of donations that have cash value.
 
Of course, this doesn’t mean you should never invest in efforts that can’t be measured, or that you must produce equivalent revenue in all channels. But it does mean you should make those investment decisions after you have prioritized and optimized investments you know will have a measurable return.
 
STEP 2: START WITH THE “I” IN ROI -- DEFINE YOUR INVESTMENT
To be completely accurate in measuring fundraising investment, you would need to count and distribute the costs of a thousand different items -- the cost to turn the lights on every morning, the salaries of everyone on your staff, the money you paid for the sandwiches at your last brainstorming retreat.
 
However, calculating expenses to that level of detail is not feasible given the limited time and resources available to most fundraising programs. Therefore, consider the following two standards in determining levels of fundraising investment across channels:

1. Count the direct costs of initial and subsequent efforts.
   Direct costs should include all expenses incurred specifically to make the effort possible. Examples of direct costs include:
    
• The cost per contact for a phone campaign
• The cost of paper, printing, list rental and postage for mail efforts
• Online advertising and list rental costs
2. Count only those indirect expenses that are outside your usual cost of business.
   A robust fundraising program incurs many costs that are not directly attributable to any one effort. But most of these expenses can be considered a cost of doing business, independent of any single fundraising effort. You will not take down your organization’s website, throw away your database or stop thanking individuals for gifts if you decide not to perform a new donor acquisition effort this fall.  Therefore, taking the extra effort to assign these expenses across different fundraising efforts is most likely not worth the effort -- and will not help you make strategic decisions about which channel to invest in.

STEP 3: UNDERSTAND THE “R” IN ROI -- CALCULATE YOUR RETURNS
Based on step one above, the calculation of returns becomes a whole lot easier. Because your goal is to raise dollars, the return on your investment is simply the dollars you raise. As with tracking costs above, this can be done most easily at the donor or prospect level through the following steps: 

1. Assign an origin effort to every donor or prospect you acquire.
   This should be the effort that first identified the individual as a likely donor to your organization. It could be an online action based on a click through from a banner ad or a piece of return mail from a direct mail acquisition effort.
2. Measure all initial and subsequent revenue from that donor or prospect.
   This would include all direct gifts made by the individual, including the initial gift to your organization.

STEP 4: MEASURE THE MULTICHANNEL RETURN ON FUNDRAISING INVESTMENT
Once you have measured your investment and determined your return, measuring ROI is easy. Simply divide total revenue returned by the total of the initial and subsequent costs. You can measure this ROI as a percentage -- with 100 percent ROI meaning you have gained a dollar for every dollar you spent. Or it can be phrased in terms of dollars -- for every $100 you spent, your return in donations is $100. 

Here is an example:

• You spend $10,000 on an online campaign that acquires 5,000 new prospects.  Over the next 12 months, you send these prospects 25 emails at $0 expense, two phone campaigns that cost $4.50 per contact for 500 contacts, and three direct mail campaigns at $0.50 each. That means your total expense is $10,000 + $0 + ($4.50 x 500) + (3 x 5,000 x $0.50) = $19,750.
• Over the same 12 months, 250 of the 5,000 prospects convert to donors, giving a total of $21,250.
• The ROI for the online campaign = $21,250/$19,750, or 108%.  In other words, for every dollar you spent, you raised $1.08.
   

Measuring ROI in this way means rigorously tracking all of your campaigns and donors, and being able to assign costs and revenue to the proper effort. However, to determine how much money to invest across competing channels, it is impossible to make the right decision without doing this legwork. And, in today’s environment, it is imperative to measure return on investment in an equal way across all fundraising channels in order to ensure the long-term health of your organization.

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© 2014 Integrated Marketing Advisory Board. All Rights Reserved
The individuals who post here are members of the Integrated Marketing Advisory Board. The opinions expressed here are their own, are not necessarily reviewed in advance by anyone but the individual authors, and neither Convio nor any other member of the Integrated Marketing Advisory Board necessarily agrees with them.