Case Study: Building a Donor Base Through E-mail, Part 2

Lessons learned
Kachuriak says there are two key takeaways that were unearthed from this partnership:

• Testing trumps marketing intuition. "One of the things I'm constantly surprised at … is that when we test things, we find out that best practices aren't best practices at all. That's what's exciting — to redefine those things by seeing how people interact with our communications," he says. "That's really what's so fun about the online side of things. WE have so much data, so many different attributes that we can test and we can learn not from focus groups or a survey but by watching how people interact directly with the conversion path that we've put before them."
• Humility is the key to marketing success. "If I think that I have all the answers, then that's usually when I find out that I'm dead wrong," Kachuriak says. "We try to empower clients to think like that as well. It's when we're partners and not a vendor and a nonprofit where we can both have the most success."