A Three-Step Conversion Strategy

A Three-Step Conversion Strategy

FS Advisor: March 21, 2006

By Abny Santicola, editor, FundRaising Success Advisor

In a presentation at the DMANF 2006 Washington Nonprofit Conference last month, representatives from the American Red Cross and Habitat for Humanity shared the multi-channel fundraising strategies that helped them raise massive amounts of money to respond to 2005’s various natural disasters.

For both organizations, the multi-channel effort began with contacting donors via the method with which they seemed most comfortable. According to Tim Daugherty, Habitat’s senior director of direct marketing, the organization’s “Integrated Agency Campaign” was comprised of three parts:

Step One: Reach out to donors via their most responsive vehicle. Mail was sent to mail donors, e-mail to e-mail donors, and phone calls were made to phone-responsive and lapsed donors.

Step Two: Ready the agency to be able to collect donations, donors and volunteers from paid media such as their Web sites, direct mail, etc., and unpaid media, such as links from news sites such as CNN. One aspect of this involved redesigning the homepage to, among other things, enable it to be a better collection device for income, donors and volunteers.

Step Three: Convert donors from one vehicle to a second or third vehicle of giving. Part of this involved converting designated donors to undesignated donors using secondary vehicles. Online, mail and inbound phone donors were converted to monthly donors via telemarketing. And second gifts were obtained from mail, phone and Web donors through mail and the phone.

Habitat’s strategy to convert donors to other modes of giving yielded designated income 1,947 percent greater than year-to-date projections and undesignated income 133 percent greater than predicted for the year.

Tim Daugherty can be reached at tdaugherty@habitat.org.