Getting Your Wires Crossed

f your idea of multi-channel fundraising involves sitting at a desk with a telephone receiver balanced between your ear and shoulder with your finger poised to hit “send” for an e-mail appeal as you drop a direct-mail package in the outbox, cease the blitz campaign for a minute and read on.

Multi-channel fundraising, which professionals across the board acknowledge is a strategy whose time has come, sounds easy when you break it down: You’ve got channels — multiples of them. Integrate them and raise funds. Simple, right? But while an all-out assault on potential donors from every which way might get your organization noticed, it probably won’t be the kind of attention you’re seeking.

Properly executed multi-channel fundraising involves timing, and an understanding of donors and prospects, tracking, and response-rate metrics, among other things, designed to result in a seamless amalgam of unified, branded messages that support each other and your
organization.

According to Tom Gaffny, executive vice president of fundraising for Wakefield, Mass.-based Epsilon, which specializes in customer relationships, it’s a relationship builder that demonstrates “the charity’s interest in the person, the commitment to the person, the idea of good stewardship and the fact that [the nonprofit] wants to have a relationship.”

It also allows you to offer donors a variety of communications, not all of which have to contain asks. If your direct mail is ask-heavy, for example, your e-mails could focus more on activism while your newsletter promotes news and advocacy. Testing to figure out the best combination of channels almost goes without saying.

But the key, Gaffny maintains, is ensuring that new channels supplement existing ones, rather than replace them. Moving a donor out of one channel and into another simply defeats the purpose. Your goal, he says, is to forge a well-rounded communication strategy that helps “support, cultivate, nurture and educate” a loyal and knowledgeable donor base.

As simple — and simplistic — as it sounds, multi-channel is just now coming into its own as a structured fundraising strategy. According to Roger Craver, founder and chief executive of Arlington, Va.-based nonprofit direct-response firm Craver, Mathews, Smith and Co., nonprofits are “waking up” to the power of integrated, multi-channel fundraising programs. But it doesn’t happen overnight. Craver says most nonprofits go through three distinct stages before finally embracing it:

Stage One: Denial (“Integration won’t work for my organization.”)

Stage Two: Anger (“Others are doing so well, so why can’t we?”)

Stage Three: Acceptance (“Maybe this isn’t a fad after all …”)

This is for those of you who finally have come to Stage Three, are shaking off your shroud of denial and squinting in the bright light of fundraising’s future. And from what we hear, you’re in the majority.

Brave new Brady
One organization that surmounted the challenge of how and how frequently to communicate with donors is the Washington, D.C.-based Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, which launched a multi-channel fundraising campaign about two years ago.

The organization wanted to increase its e-constituent list and then integrate those new names into its direct-mail efforts.

With 38,000 member and non-donor activist e-mail addresses, the organization launched a microsite supported by a print ad campaign called
the “NRAblacklist.com” in fall 2003. The page rails against an NRA-issued list of individuals, organizations and businesses that oppose “immunizing gun sellers against civil liability” and invites visitors to join that list by signing an online petition.

The strategy quickly captured more than 60,000 new e-constituents. Spurred by this success and gun-related federal legislative battles in 2004, the Brady Campaign began a new online campaign called "stoptheNRA.com,” which mixed e-mail appeals for funds with action alerts such as petitions.

In September 2004, the organization mailed an acquisition package to 33,000 non-donor e-constituents. The result: 1.26 percent response,
a $24.22 average gift and a net per acquired of -$6.22. The Brady Campaign then took the concept a step further and contacted by phone 20,000 non-donor e-constituents who had followed through with an online action, such as signing a petition. The results: a 21 percent pledge rate and average pledge of $27.38.

The organization continues to find success with this multi-channel approach, having mailed 12,000 acquisition pieces to online non-donors in March 2005, resulting in a 1.07 percent response rate, a $23.40 average gift and a net per acquired of -$12.13.

Mary Ester, director of development for the Brady Campaign, says the organization is well aware that the e-constituents contacted via direct mail might still end up making most of their donations online. But that doesn’t mean the campaign is a loss, says Gaffny, who adds that whether donors end up giving through other channels or not, reaching them through multiple channels enhances the relationship and can result in increased giving down the road.

It’s something the Brady Campaign is analyzing, Ester says, adding that the organization already considers its multi-channel efforts successful.

New net for nature lovers
At The Nature Conservancy, multi-channel fundraising is in its early stages and more basic. There it’s as simple as soliciting an online donor for a second gift via both e-mail and direct mail.

Director of Membership and Annual Giving Amy Golden admits that The Nature Conservancy was initially somewhat resistant to investing in fundraising channels other than direct mail. But it recognized that its direct-mail constituency, while an affluent audience, is older and aging, and either retired or on the verge of it. To attract a younger audience, Golden and the development staff recognized a need to improve the organization’s Web presence and tap into the younger, Web-savvy field of potential donors.

To that end, The Nature Conservancy launched its Great Places Network, a free membership program that serves as an online community where visitors can sign up to receive a free monthly newsletter that can be tailored to report on issues germane to the state they live in and the specific issues they’re interested in. It’s a way to get people interested in the organization’s mission in the door and open to e-mail appeals. When someone makes a donation through an e-mail appeal, he or she then is
flowed into The Nature Conservancy’s regular donor file and will begin to receive direct-mail appeals.

“People may get the [appeal] through snail mail, and then they may respond through e-mail,” Golden says. “We find that if we can continue to use both channels, we have stronger results overall.”

Don’t forget the data
However you enact multi-channel fundraising, Gaffny says, your goal should be investing in the overall relationship — thereby creating donor value — through “a series of multi-touches within a
number of differentiating channels.”

But all that means nothing if you don’t collect the data from those interactions.

“If an organization wants to take the time to create a multi-channel program where they either are proactively pushing out communications along different channels or just offering different channels for the donor to find at his or her own discretion, unless the organization also is capturing what’s happening via all those channels, then they’re not really getting the full breadth of the relationship,” Gaffny says.

It’s what Craver calls “the database problem” that results from a silo
mentality, which still exists in a lot of organizations where the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand’s doing. As a result, organizations fail to connect or integrate their databases.

“Matters of the Web and Internet, mistakenly thought to be ‘technical’ in nature, are set off in silos guarded by Webmasters, IT personnel and sometimes communications departments who have little or no understanding of metrics — investment, performance, return on investment — and all the other tools needed to implement and measure an effective multi-channel campaign,” Craver adds.

To run a multi-channel campaign effectively, an organization must make data gathered from each channel available across the board so it can get a full picture of a constituent’s activity and be accurate in subsequent solicitations, regardless of channel.

Moving past the denial and anger stages to an acceptance of multi-channel fundraising is one thing. Embracing it and making it an organizational mindset is another.

If that’s where you’re at, fear not. You aren’t alone.

“I think all nonprofits are struggling with this,” says the Brady Campaign’s Ester. “You hear other nonprofits making their way through, and you know that if they did it, we can do it.”