A new strategy helps Mothers Against Drunk Driving revive its stagnant fundraising, recommit to its missin and invigorate its staff and volunteers.

By Margaret Battistelli Gardner

“Well, you know the analogy of a flat line. We needed to think about fundraising in a different way,” he adds.

The problem, it seems, is that MADD historically has relied heavily on direct marketing — telemarketing in the early 1990s, then direct mail later in the decade. And while direct marketing is doubtless the workhorse of nonprofit fundraising, it’s expensive in terms of both time and investment and, as MADD discovered, can hide a multitude of shortcomings within an organization’s collective psyche.