Creative Direct Response

Is your organization “pushing the envelope” with direct mail? Tell us about your most daring DM efforts.

Everyone likes a premium. But as it turns out, if it doesn’t tie into an organization’s mission, donors won’t respond as well as if it did.

At least that’s how it turned out for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, which works to preserve the legacy of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington, D.C., and educate the public about the impact of the Vietnam War.

What a grand time. FundRaising Success ventured into the tricky awards arena for the first time this year. And even though it was all new to us, it was a terrific experience from start to finish. We had a better-than-expected showing — 33 packages in all, submitted by 10 agencies and two organizations — a small but enthusiastic group of judges and a lot of fun.

You know all about testing, right? Will blue text get more donors to renew than red text? Will you get more new acquisitions with a picture of a cute little kitten or a half-starved dog? Can you do it better, faster, cheaper than you’re already doing it? All good questions. And all test-able, along with about a million other nuances of your direct-response program. So test away. But after the test, you’ll find yourself lousy with statistics. And if you are, indeed, lousy with statistics, all your valuable testing might be for naught. Geoff Peters, president of the Crofton, MD-based Creative Direct Response, knows

President John F. Kennedy gave NASA a decade to get to the moon. My kids give Santa a year to come through with presents. But I wonder if the rocket scientists and St. Nick have the same “under-the-gun” feeling that many direct mail fundraisers have when preparing the next big campaign.

Both experienced and newbie fundraisers alike know that successful campaigns require an investment of financial resources and time. We’ve dealt with the financial issues, now let’s deal with time — the one resource of which we all have the same amount to spend.

Multi-channel fundraising is simply the idea that an organization uses more than one medium simultaneously (mail and telephone, for example) to conduct fundraising campaigns. Integrated fundraising is merely the process of making sure these campaigns are designed to work synergistically with one another.

Here’s a shocker: Fundraising is tough. Joan Specter, who’s part of the development team at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, spent quite a bit of time driving that point home to me during a conversation I had with her recently.

She was talking about her work with the center, where she focuses on securing major gifts, and explaining how much patience, tact and tenacity it takes to get someone to part with, oh, say, a million bucks.

Many organizations, such as the American Red Cross and CARE, provide relief services to communities in severe situations. But when it comes time to address the possibility of being victims themselves, many nonprofits become proverbial ostriches with their heads in the sand, writes Michael K. Robinson, IT director at full-service fundraising firm Creative Direct Response, in his new book, “Disaster Recovery Planning for Nonprofits.”