Fundraising Unleashed!

If there were to be crowned a Richard Simmons of nonprofit fundraising in the United States, ASPCA Senior Vice President of Development and Communications Jo Sullivan just might fill those sequined short-shorts.

She’s got the passion, that’s for sure. And the — ahem — dogged determination. And while organizations of this size have large development staffs and can’t attribute their success to one person, inspiration usually flows down from the top. Sullivan’s completely unbridled dedication to pets and the ASPCA’s mission to protect them and to speak for them in matters of health, adoption, training, care and legislation helps keep the organization at the cutting edge when it comes to both programming and fundraising.

And in an organization that, legend has it, began when Harry Bergh stopped on a New York City street to physically prevent a man from beating his horse, innovative operations have come to be the norm.

There’s the whole Internet thing, for example. According to Sullivan, the ASPCA was putting dedicated URLs on all of its direct mail as far back as 2001 — maybe not the first to do it, but darn close. Same in 2004 with DRTV, which she says her organization pioneered as a fundraising channel for animal-welfare agencies in the United States. Even its recent rebranding, which took the emphasis off of traditional animal-welfare imagery, was a step in a new direction.

“The ASPCA has been a place where technology and innovation have been welcomed, not shunned,” she explains. “Some charities shy away from it. But any opportunity to marry our ability to talk to people through whatever channel they want to talk to us, whether it’s phone, e-mail, television or whatever, we’re right there to maximize that channel.

“When Harry Bergh founded the ASPCA in 1866, it was the very first animal-welfare organization in this country. There just wasn’t anything for animals,” she adds. “So from the very beginning, we were there first. We have had some lulls where things just didn’t happen, but it’s kind of hard not to want to continue to lead the pack when you realize that your founder was the first person to raise a hand and say, ‘Animal abuse is not going to happen while I’m around.’”

It’s been a busy couple of years for the ASPCA, which in 2006 is celebrating its 140th anniversary. It started its rebranding effort in February 2005 and launched it last October, in the middle of a major restructuring of its development department — and both came in the throes of its massive Katrina-relief effort, when teams were putting in 18-hour days to raise funds to support shelters and rescue groups in flood-ravaged areas. In the end, the ASPCA brought close to 100,000 new names to file through Katrina messaging, Sullivan says, adding that the overlapping efforts made it difficult to accurately measure the impact of the rebranding. But with that many new names, it was a case of growing now and asking questions later.

The ASPCA has been moving along at a pretty good clip the past century and a half. But toward the end of 2004, it took a look at some numbers that, frankly, got on Sullivan’s nerves: Three-quarters of the households in the United States report having pets. That’s 66 million homes. The ASPCA has fewer than a million available names on its house file.

“Why? Why can I not get those other 65 million?” she asks emphatically. “It was becoming a little frustrating for us.”

So what’s the problem? Can’t be the organization’s direct-response numbers. It’s doing great with DRTV, and its direct-mail campaigns are consistently high yield. It didn’t want to divert its efforts away from its best lists — those of other animal-welfare groups such as the Humane Society of the United States, the North Shore Animal League and PETA, among others, which historically have produced the highest response rates, highest average gift and most economical cost per dollar.

A different light
If it ain’t broke, how do you fix it? You simply turn the whole thing around and look at it in a different light.

“We’d begun to realize that development isn’t the answer to opening to a new audience,” Sullivan says, almost sacrilegiously. “[Development] should be there, prepared through all their channels to take people who are driven to them and start developing fundraising relationships, but we have to find another way to get out there.

“So we took a really hard look at what we looked like, what our competitors looked like, where you saw us in the news, where you saw us in print, where you saw us on TV, and we realized that the ASPCA looked a lot like other animal-welfare groups,” she explains. “We were using the puppy paws and the kitty paws, and the hearts and the kitty tails. And those things are great, and they’re iconic, and they’re quick and easy to identify — but to identify with who? Certainly not us alone. Everybody.”

With a little help from a friend — the high-profile Saatchi & Saatchi group, which proffered pro bono work on the rebranding — and based on four years of donor research, the ASPCA ditched the tried and true and came up with trendy colors and a more tongue-in-cheek, though altogether serious, approach to DM messaging.

“I was like, ‘Saatchi & Saatchi … and free? I can do this. I can do this,’” says Sullivan, who also has a background in advertising on the consumer side.

The new logo is mainly gray, with the “P” in ASPCA called out in orange, emphasizing the organization’s main mission points of animal protection through the prevention of a roster of unfortunate circumstances.

“In looking at our logo, we realized that the ‘P’ was our active word,” Sullivan explains. “We’re there for prevention (prevention of cruelty, prevention of accidents), not just for abused and homeless animals, but for animals that you share your life with every day.

“We want to prevent you from having to make the decision to take that dog to a shelter because you can’t get him to stop biting the neighbor. We’re there with behavior tips to prevent that from happening,” she adds. “We called out the ‘P’ in orange so that everyone knew, whether it’s for strays, a purebred, a cat or dog, we don’t care. We’re here to prevent bad things from happening to animals.”

Prevention branches out to include everything from shelter and adoption services to health and nutrition information to training — both of pets for behavioral purposes and of humans, namely law-enforcement officials who must learn to recognize, address and properly adjudicate cases of animal abuse and neglect.

For the first time in its history, the ASPCA also now has a tagline as part of its organizational logo, as opposed to the come-and-go tags that have made appearances over the years, emphasizing specific services it offers, such as adoption. The new, universal tag, “We Are Their Voice,” is all encompassing.

It also lent itself to cheeky new imagery that puts a bit of a funky spin on traditional pet pictures: The cat, dog, bird, turtle, fish, rabbit and horse models that now inhabit the ASPCA’s Web site and direct mail each hold a speech bubble in its mouth that elicits a giggle while at the same time driving home the “We Are Their Voice” point.

“It allows you to fill in the blank for your need for an animal,” Sullivan explains. “Does your animal need better veterinary care? We can help you get it. The dog down the street who doesn’t have a home — we allow you to be the voice for that animal. And then we work through our expertise to make sure all the animals are taken care of [by making sure you have the information and services you need].

“It might take a while to catch on, and we realize that, and we’re putting it on everything we can,” she adds.

Jump right in
Sullivan admits that not a whole lot of testing went into the rebranding. That probably will come later in the year, once the dust settles on the development department restructuring, the effort to produce an organization-wide style guide to regulate the use of the ASPCA brand and, oh, about a hundred other pots that have been set to simmer on her stove.

The main focus was less on bringing in new donors than bringing in new advocates, to help more people make a connection between themselves, their pets and the ASPCA. The one concern, however, was making sure the new look didn’t alienate existing donors.

“We don’t have a lot of money for research, so some of this was just a big gulp and a leap of faith,” she says. “And I wanted to be able to use the limited research dollars we had to make sure that this wasn’t going to alienate the current donor base, to at least make sure that they were engaged with it. When we found donors saying, ‘I love that, what a great concept,’ we kind of took a good-faith belief that the general consumer, pet-passionate audience would feel the same way.

“It all played out great. The rest is history. If I had had an unlimited budget, I would have had focus groups around the country, but …,” she trails off with a giggle so sly you can practically hear her eyes rolling over the phone.

Jumping into uncharted waters is nothing new for the ASPCA. As mentioned, it was among the first organizations to use dedicated URLs on all of its messaging. “At the very beginning with technology, when people were still doing charity malls, we skipped right past that and started putting dedicated URLs on every mailing that went out the door so that we could track whether people were getting mail and then actually going online to give,” Sullivan says.

“We didn’t test it; we didn’t wait around. We didn’t ask whether an e-mail ask on a reply depressed response rates. We didn’t test any of it,” she continues. “It became very evident early on that the Internet was a channel that was going to explode and if we spent time testing around the margins, we would miss the opportunity to engage these people in an integrated, multi-channel program.”

Sullivan predicts that the ASPCA soon will turn its efforts toward “everything from cell-phone technology to, I don’t know, blogging?”

“My objective is to figure out how to use fundraising technology and other communications tools to make the ASPCA relevant to every pet parent out there,” she says. “If it’s out there, and it’s a channel that people are using, we [want to] find a way to utilize it as well.”

But the devil-may-care attitude toward jumping in head first might be a little harder to maintain in the future. “The Internet was easy,” Sullivan admits, since so many people already had been booking travel and making transactions online. The new stuff will have to be tested more aggressively to make sure it’s an effective way to communicate with a pet-loving audience.

The big overhaul
The ASPCA is a direct-response behemoth, pulling 63 percent of its budget from that channel. But, as with many organizations, the overriding emphasis on DM took its toll on other channels — mainly planned giving and major gifts, which traditionally are harder to justify in the budget since results cost more to produce both in terms of time and money.

Before the restructuring — which Sullivan says was based on the examples of other hugely successful organizations — direct response, major gifts and special events were grouped together, with corporations and foundations in another camp. And everyone was reporting individually to Sullivan. Now, the channels have been divided into just two camps, each with its own vice president reporting to her. The direct-response side encompasses direct marketing, direct mail, telemarketing, e-mail and e-marketing, member communications and non-solicitation tools such as the magazine and Web site; the special-giving camp carries major gifts, planned giving, trust and estates, corporate and foundation giving, and special events.

“It was about Moves Management for the donor for us,” Sullivan explains. “We really wanted to be able to create a world in which the donor could come in as a $25 donor through whatever channel of direct marketing they came through — whether it was telephone, Web or mail — and have a solid cultivation experience, and then allow the special-giving side of the house free access to those donors that they needed for their cultivation purposes, whether it was inviting them to an event or major gifts.

“But with the two VPs in place,” she adds, “there’s constant communication to make sure that that donor never knows that they’re being passed around for other marketing opportunities.”

The ASPCA currently is working with a consultant to apply the same types of analytics to major gifts and planned giving as historically have been used to measure and justify direct-response efforts.

“So far so good,” Sullivan says. “We’re still working on building some bridges to consolidate our databases. Some of this is still learning, but we’re really excited about the analytics for this side of the world (major gifts and planned giving).

“Special giving has always been strong at the ASPCA. We certainly have done a good job with our major gifts,” she adds. “But now we can start really quantifying, in analytical terms, ‘If X bodies go into the major-gifts program, it should yield Y dollars.’ And those are things we did not do in the past, but it will allow us to better justify additional staff and more resources. We’re really adding some direct response kind of thought to who we’re looking at and why, and it’s been exciting to that team. Love having the benefit of a million-name database!”