Integration can be tough, but it often has the right results.

By Geoff Peters

Clearly there have been significant efforts by a wide variety of nonprofit organizations to integrate their fundraising messages. Some of these clearly also have paid off handsomely for those organizations.

Impediments to integration
Probably the most significant impediment to this approach is attempting to integrate the databases supporting each medium. Maintaining a transaction history of e-marketing efforts is simple, but it is rare that that database is also integrated with the direct mail database, which requires “list hygiene” such as NCOA and periodic de-duplication. Frequently the tools used for database maintenance for e-mail are quite different from the tools used for telemarketing and direct mail. Even more noticeable is the problem of trying to integrate major-donor and special-event databases with direct mail.