Talking to Your Board About Direct Response
It's often counterintuitive — so business instincts might actually be counterproductive.
- Map out the long-term value of your donors, and explain how you calculated what you can afford to spend to acquire and cultivate them. Get your board used to evaluating everything over the long term — not simply campaign by campaign.
- Show them the money. You’ll be amazed at what happens once businesspeople understand that for every dollar you invest in direct-response fundraising, you net $3 to $4 for your cause.
- Quantify natural attrition and the steps you’re taking to build your largest asset — your active-donor file.
- Map out projections to demonstrate the long-term impact of cutting acquisition — as well as the impact of investing more in successful online and offline acquisition programs.
- Study industry frequency testing, and if necessary, conduct your own cultivation frequency tests to determine the optimum number of appeals based on the response (net revenue) of your donors, not someone’s opinion.
- Run head-to-head tests of your channels (digital, mail, DRTV, phone, events), and calculate the long-term donor value and net revenue over time of donors acquired via each channel to determine the right media mix. And show how the value increases dramatically as you engage with donors through multiple channels.
- Do in-market testing, not simply focus groups, on your best offers (Success/need? Monthly sustainer? Advocacy? Generic/specific? Founder/celebrity/CEO/recipient?), so you can meet the donor where she is, rather than where you (or your board) wish she were.
- Do the analytics to demonstrate the impact of integration not just across channels, but up the entire donor pyramid to show your board how direct-response donors (the bottom of the pyramid) can be migrated to produce monthly contributions, major gifts, capital-campaign support and planned-giving revenues.
- Finally, consider inoculating your board in advance against the stereotypical objections. I once told a conservative, development-shy board of a $20 million nonprofit that we had a way to raise an additional $1.5 million net a year. After explaining the strategy, I warned these board members that they’d probably hear complaints about the fundraising from friends, neighbors and even family, but, “If generating an additional $1.5 million isn’t worth the hassle of complaints, tell me now and we won’t do it. But if we go forward with it, let’s agree that we’re in it together and not going to be discouraged or deterred by complaints.”
Tom Harrison is the former chair of Russ Reid and Omnicom's Nonprofit Group of Agencies. He served as chair of the NonProfit PRO Editorial Advisory Board.
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