Long-Term Engagement

For an organization that was founded 35 years ago — specifically to build one memorial — the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund (VVMF) certainly has become a master of reinvention.

Well, if not exactly reinvention, then at least refocus. And its fundraising strategies have morphed with it, quite successfully.

First, there was The Wall itself. That was completed in 1982, after a somewhat ramshackle grassroots campaign begun in 1979 grew to a national furor. The plan was to build The Wall, turn it over to the National Park Service and basically dismantle the organization after its 10th anniversary.

But The Wall wasn’t going to maintain itself. Nor would the grounds around it. And the founders of VVMF just couldn’t see leaving all that work to the park service.

“As it was a gift from Vietnam veterans and its supporters, raised with all private funds, we wanted our memorial to be the jewel of the National Mall,” says Adam Arbogast, senior director of communications and marketing for VVMF. “In the eyes of our organization and our supporters, it is the most important spot on the National Mall, and we are committed to ensuring that it has every resource it needs for the benefit of our visitors.

“This powerful place of remembrance and healing was a gift to the nation,” he adds. “We were responsible for its creation, and we intend to stay responsible for its aging. It isn’t something we wanted to simply wash our hands of when we were done.”

Then there was the issue of education about the war. The memorial was stunning and powerful, of course, but just visiting it didn’t provide any real history or insights. So, an education center was born, and events around history and healing were planned. And it became clear that fundraising, which had all but shut down once The Wall was built, would have to be reactivated and re-energized — this time with the focus on creating and supporting all of the new and ongoing initiatives.

Once again, magic happened. Original donors were happy to jump back in with support — despite having not been contacted by VVMF for nearly a decade — and new donors were anxious to come on board.

FundRaising Success covered the VVMF saga in our October 2011 cover story. But not long after that, the organization realized it once again faced new fundraising challenges, and once again, it regrouped.

Re-energizing the program
According to Arbogast, it was time to shift the focus from appeals for support for immediate action to more of a preservation mode.

“We’re still encouraging engagement,” he says, “but we want to engage with them to take part in the preservation of the memorial, and the legacies of the names on the wall, the items left at the wall and the historical piece of the Vietnam War.”

To do that, he says, the organization embarked on a multipronged approach. Hope Brolsma, account supervisor for RobbinsKersten Direct (formerly LW Robbins), explains that the goal was to “re-energize a mature program through analytics and modeling, steadfast attention to strategy, evolutionary and revolutionary testing, and innovative creative.”

Apparently it worked. Brolsma reports a 24 percent increase in overall revenue from 2011 to 2013; a 12 percent increase in donors from 2011 to 2013; and 2014 revenue, net revenue and number of gifts up in Q1 and Q2 compared to the first two quarters of last year.

“The numbers are kind of astounding to me,” Arbogast says.

In 2011, he explains, VVMF was engaging annually with about 200,000 donors, mainly through direct mail. Problem was, it had about 1.4 million names in its database. (That number has since grown to 1.75 million.) The very first thing the organization did was switch agencies and then funnel some resources into a new lapsed-donor reactivation strategy.

“Previously, we had been trying to reactivate lapsed donors using acquisition methods,” he says. “Lapsed donors were seeing mailings similar to what they may have seen when we acquired them. There was nothing that said, ‘We remember you.’ It was just the same messaging as someone who was new to the organization.

“We thought, ‘We can do this. We can spend less money to go back after lapsed donors to get them re-engaged by trying to figure out why they stopped giving in the first place,’” he says. “We invested to really bring them back into the fold and try to get them engaged in a meaningful way. It wasn’t abrupt messaging like, ‘This is who we are,’ all over again. It was more like we just picked up old conversations with old friends we hadn’t talked to in a while. We saw a huge cost savings because, unlike with standard acquisition, we weren’t guessing. We could be really focused with these people.”

RKD worked with VVMF to create two lapsed-reactivation models within the organization’s million-plus-sized lapsed audience — one for recently lapsed donors and another for long-lapsed donors. They also started a lapsed-reactivation creative track using the acquisition control as the lapsed control to start, and then aggressively tested against the acquisition control and identified two new packages focused specifically on lapsed donors that rolled out in September 2013. Now VVMF has three lapsed-donor packages in rotation.

According to Brolsma, the results of this strategy in year one were a 91 percent increase in the number of reactivated donors vs. the previous year; a 77 percent increase in revenue from reactivated two-year lapsed donors; a 68 percent increase in two-year lapsed reactivated donors from 2011 to 2013; and average gift from this audience segment up 20.7 percent, with 7 percent increase in giving frequency.

After that, Arbogast says, VVMF made a serious effort to meld online and offline engagement efforts — keeping messaging consistent across channels but using each to its best advantage. For example, the organization uses email “to send them fast updates and remind them to give and help support us,” he says, “so we don’t have to worry about cramming too much into a direct-mail package.”

That prime real estate, he explains, is saved for “beautiful imagery and to tell better stories in our printed media.”

Biggest challenges
Most organizations struggle with new-donor acquisition, but it’s even more challenging for VVMF because its core demographic — Vietnam vets and their immediate families — is dying off.

Most of the organization’s new donors come from organic efforts. “Engagement is our outreach,” Arbogast says, explaining that “The Wall that Heals” — a mini, mobile version of the memorial — is a great ambassador for VVMF. Wherever it shows up, people experience it and then choose to sign up for VVMF’s mailing list.

Unlike the actual memorial, The Wall That Heals isn’t made of stone, so it’s nearly impossible to get a name rubbing. Instead, visitors put in name-rubbing requests and provide contact information. They also can opt in to the mailing list.

Tourism websites are also a key source of new names for VVMF. Once a person is directed to the organization’s website from a tourism site, engagement begins immediately. VVMF helps visitors plan their visits to D.C., checks in with them directly prior to their trips and then follows up afterward — all as a way of encouraging interaction to guide them to opting in to VVMF’s list.

While VVMF can’t put up signage at the memorial, brochures and on-site volunteers point visitors to its website. The organization also:

• encourages school research and other community projects as a way of introducing younger generations to its resources;
• puts out calls for photographs for inclusion in its annual calendar and tests engagement devices on social media, encouraging participants to share throughout their social networks; and
• engages its Facebook followers to nudge them toward becoming email subscribers or mail donors.

Arbogast is adamant that a physical opt-in to any mailing list is crucial for building strong relationships.

“You have to tell me, yes, you want to receive mail or email from me. I’ll be open and honest with you and will not be sending you things you don’t want,” he says. “You have to ask people to make the choice to receive information from you. When you’re like that with people, they are far more inclined to want to take that next step.”

Another challenge, of course, is converting those who sign up for the list to actual donors. While VVMF isn’t a membership organization, per se, it strives to convey a sense of membership among its donors, Arbogast says. Once a person makes a donation, he or she receives a membership card. It doesn’t have to be renewed.

“We want you to take some kind of action — we hope it includes a donation. But even if not, we want to remind you that we want you to stay involved in some way,” he says. “Keep the card with you, as a reminder of who you are and that you have donated or helped in some way, shape or form. People like it because it’s a tangible reminder of something that is important to them. It’s definitely a point of pride — and it should be.”

Brolsma says VVMF’s “Membership Package” to convert new donors resulted in a 113 percent increase of new donors giving their second gifts in April 2013 over April 2012; new-donor gross revenue increasing 148 percent in 2013 vs. 2012; and new-donor net revenue increasing 351 percent in 2013 vs. 2012 — with a marked decrease in cost per dollar raised.

Arbogast says that with VVMF’s heavy reliance on organic sign-ups, the organization is very careful about recognizing where donors come in from and tailoring their welcome/conversion series to that initial contact.

“The devil is in the details,” he says. “You have to keep track. You can’t just throw them into the stream of communication. You have to have that specific welcome series, even if it’s just a thank-you. The next step might not have specific details, like if they came in through The Wall That Heals, but the first step at least acknowledged where they came from.”

By his own admission, Arbogast “loves testing and data-driven things.” So his advice to anyone trying to inject some new life into his or her fundraising program is, of course, to test. And test. And test.

Not only that — but pay attention to your results and adjust your efforts accordingly, without compromising your core messaging.

“You have to test,” he says. “It’s essentially free in social media. Most people don’t ‘unlike’ you as long as you keep content relevant to your core audience. Email has a cost, but you can still target segments.

“Once you get in there and look at the data, you can see what different demographics respond to. You can take those lessons and start to explore other formats. It might be as subtle as adding another bullet to your direct-mail appeal that is aimed at something this younger demographic likes. Or in email, talk about what you do. You’re not changing the message to your core audience, but you’re trying to be inclusive.”

What you can learn
Following are a few additional quick tips that Arbogast offers to fundraisers looking to breathe new life into their fundraising:

• In social media, share content from another organization like yours that is putting up content that’s drawing a different demographic you might like.
• Social media has a short memory, so if something doesn’t perform well, move on to the next thing.
• Test your housefile. If you do an acquisition test, let your list broker know you’re trying to test some content to different demographics. Keep everyone fully aware of what you’re trying to do. They might have great suggestions about where you can attract your next donors based on the new information you have.
• And in case you missed it … testing is key.