Merchandise

Year-end online fundraising doesn't just happen in December. Here are nine practical steps fundraisers can take now to raise more money online in December.

During their presentation, “30 Ideas in 60 Minutes: Your Hour of Creative Power," at the Association of Fundraising Professionals Fund Raising Day in New York held last Friday, Jeff Brooks, creative director at TrueSense Marketing; Moira Kavanagh Crosby, president of MKDM; and Dennis Lonergan, president of Eidolon Communications, provided direct-response and online fundraising strategies to make your fundraising solicitations stand out from the crowd. Here, Crosby outlines her 10 strategies from the session.

April 27, 2010, Press Release — Retail thrift pioneer Savers Inc. today announced the launch of a new "Nonprofit Locator Tool" on its websites, making it easier than ever to donate gently used items that benefit the company's more than 128 nonprofit partners.

There are more than 240 Savers, Value Village, and Village des Valeurs stores across the U.S., Canada and Australia, and every location has a unique nonprofit partner in its community, such as Big Brothers Big Sisters, The Arc, The Epilepsy Foundation, HOPE Services or the Canadian Diabetes Association.  Each store pays its nonprofit partner for every used item donated, which include clothing, housewares, furniture and more. Partners are paid for donations collected directly by the nonprofit or at the Community Donation Center, located on-site at the Savers, Inc. stores. These partnerships turn otherwise unused goods into sustainable funding that supports the nonprofits' programs and services right in the local community.

The new Nonprofit Locator Tool will help match potential donors with nearby nonprofit partners and Community Donation Centers, thus encouraging increased donations for nonprofit partners. Last year, Savers paid $127 million to its partners for donations, and it has paid more than one billion dollars since 1954.

In a recent study, M+R Strategic Services studied results of year-end fundraising e-appeals from Easter Seals, Human Rights Campaign, Save Darfur Coalition and The Wilderness Society that were launched in December 2008. Each organization sent an e-appeal with a premium ask and one without the premium. Premiums varied across organizations and included scarves, calendars, T-shirts and blankets.

September 15, 2009, DMNews — Online purchases grew again in 2008, but retail sales were flat and call center sales declined, according to Epsilon Targeting, a recently formed data division of Epsilon. These were among the findings in its Annual Multichannel Trend Report, which is based on aggregated merchandise purchase data from the Abacus Cooperative database.

September 4, 2009, The Wall Street Journal — Most people see the Tate Modern and the British Museum as bastions of fine art. Peter Tullin, however, thinks of them as powerful brands.

Sugarcoat it all you want, but offering premiums in an acquisition campaign is, essentially, bribery. And pretty unsubtle bribery at that.
You’re saying to a prospect, “Look, I’m afraid you don’t care enough about my organization’s work to support it out of 
passion or principle, so I’ll offer you this trinket to try and buy your loyalty.”
The dilemma is obvious. You’re going to have much greater loyalty from people who support you because they believe in your cause. But those premiums sure can bring in more donors. At least in the short run.
To a development director, the promise of the premium can be very alluring. For a relatively small investment in mailing labels or tote bags or whatever, you can reasonably predict that significantly more people will respond to your mailing.

“The large print giveth and the small print taketh away.” — Tom Waits There’s this economics professor, a pretty cynical guy, who sometimes starts his classes by inviting a student up to the front of the room. He holds out a dollar bill and says, “Here, take this.” The student reaches out and the professor immediately snatches the dollar back. Then he holds it out again, the student reaches again, and again he snatches the dollar back. After repeating this three or four times, the student gives up, annoyed and somewhat embarrassed. The professor turns to the class and says, “That,

One of the most frequent questions I hear as a fundraising consultant is, “Do you believe in using premiums to recruit donors?” It disturbs me, because it almost always is positioned as a “yes” or “no” question. But it’s really not that simple.

On one hand, premiums can be viewed as a wonderful cure to the problem of low response rates. The offer of a low-cost/high-value item as a reward for a contribution often will generate much higher response rates than offers that provide nothing.

Best Friends Animal Society, located in the heart of southern Utah’s golden circle of National Parks, is home to as many as 1,500 dogs, cats, horses, rabbits and other animals. For the past 10 years, the organization had been using the same acquisition package. Although it had done a great job, response rates were dropping, causing the donor file to remain flat.

The situation was dire: If a new package wasn’t created, the file actually would have started to decrease, which could have led to cuts in service.