Keeping the Faith

The simple tweaks of incorporating online fundraising best practices helped SMI see tremendous growth in its year-end fundraising in 2011 — to the tune of a 50 percent increase in revenue over 2010.

Now what?
After such a big increase in 2011, the challenge for 2012 was to take the program to the next level. So KerstenDirect and SMI got to work on segmenting the donor base upon engagement with the direct-mail program and sending different versions of online communications to those different segments. Then they began to marry the offline and online creative and messaging to provide a more consistent donor experience. For instance, both front-end and back-end premiums work well for SMI in the mail, so interactive displays and PDFs of similar premiums were incorporated online. At the same time, Kersten and SMI wanted to use the unique advantages of visual communications online, such as adding the first true direct-response video for the year-end 2012 campaign.