Times have changed and so have the skills needed to excel in the area of marketing. If you are the head of a marketing team and/or fundraising team and you think through these five (or four primary) skillets, where is your team’s strength and where are the gaps?...
Motivating everyone to get involved is critical. Last week’s blog was about cause marketing. This week’s blog is somewhat similar, but is about a company (hint: the name is in the title of the blog) that is aligning their brand with the idea of community involvement...
Not every cause marketing campaign is successful—and there are reasons why. Trust me, after all these years in the nonprofit world, I’ve seen my share of amazing cause campaigns and ones that were total flops...
Just remember, as a nonprofit, your offline donors may be falling into that “senior” category, but your online donors are definitely more of a younger generation mix. Many of us have been saying this for a while—PayPal provides the greatest flexibility and even perceived security for those worried about providing a credit card online. It works with checking accounts and credit cards...
Most nonprofits work with agencies in the marketing and fundraising arena. But some of those relationships are not “healthy.” Is it about management style? Is this a “carrot versus stick” debate?...
Are you confused between opinions and facts when it comes to email marketing? Here’s a list of 104 answers for you…
Simply put, monthly giving is one way to help your retention metrics grow. It’s certainly not the only way you should be trying to retain more donors, but it certainly helps. And, as most organizations have realized by now, monthly giving is not just for the organizations that can tie their mission to a monthly cost or a service provided, etc...
As an industry, I think we have trouble innovating. Let’s be clear, I’m not talking about our desire and ability to test. We love testing. We love setting up objectives, stating hypotheses and looking at things from a statistically valid perspective. Most of those tests are tactical, and when it comes to really moving the marble, those won’t work. What I’m talking about is strategy innovation, audience innovation or even brand-wide offer innovation...
If you knew that 80 percent of your unsatisfied constituents would unsubscribe from your email, would that make you more concerned about satisfaction? What if unsatisfied constituents translated to your email list or Facebook community shrinking?...
The word “attribution” is feared by many in the marketing arena because it is so hard to tackle. But, at least look at Assisted Conversions in Google Analytics.
There is a viral campaign going around right now born from the discomfort people have with a certain online news site. This website seems to polarize many people in the U.S. and has been a big player in the recent political arena. The campaign is trying to use the very basic feedback elements of AdWords to hurt the website. That has some scary implications...
In the end, no matter how much you think you know (or someone else knows), it’s really easy to do some landing page testing these days. If you haven’t been testing aspects of your landing pages, then you need to get on it quickly...
You all know how much I love insight and data from studies. Recently, someone pointed me to the 2016 Donor Loyalty Study from Abila. There’s a lot in this document, and to really understand it you need to download the whole report. But here are some interesting elements about how donors view the content they receive from nonprofits...
Consumers today have similar expectations of all brands they engage with—commercial or nonprofit. And they expect brands to handle requests in close to real-time. Now, if you are saying, "Gosh, I don’t have this problem," think again...
The last few days have brought something unusual to the news: a battle of the data scientists. Yep, that’s right—data science people fighting about the validity of models for polling predictions. I find this very unusual. Data scientists compete all the time. But there is rarely an argument about what is empirically correct and valid...
