Epsilon

When creating a holiday fundraising campaign, it’s important to make your message as specific and tangible as possible, says Tom Gaffny, executive vice president and managing director of the fundraising division of relationship-marketing firm Epsilon. In 2005, Epsilon won five awards for creative excellence in the nonprofit sector from the New England Direct Marketing Association (NEDMA), one of which was a Gold Award in the category of Best Art Direction for its work on a holiday campaign for Volunteers of America — an organization dedicated to helping at-risk youths, elderly, abused and neglected children, the disabled and the homeless. Gaffny says there are

Responding to our invitation in the February issue of FundRaising Success, Lacy Ward Jr., executive director of Court Appointed Special Advocates of Central Virginia, an organization that advocates for abused and neglected children in court, requested that her organization’s site be analyzed here.

Far from an expert on Web design and functionality, I enlisted the help of Domenic Spinosa, vice president of creative for Wakefield, Mass.-based relationship-marketing firm Epsilon.

If 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.

Premium Considerations Oct. 4, 2005 By Abny Santicola, associate editor, FundRaising Success Premiums in direct-mail campaigns can help pull better response than mailings without. But it's important to consider the added expense of mailing premiums in relation to the lifetime value of the donors those premiums bring in, according to Dennis McCarthy, vice president of relationship-marketing firm Epsilon. Generally speaking, he says, people who make gifts based on premiums tend to not have the same lifetime value as a traditional donor. "The long-term value of a traditional donor tends to be higher because they care about the message of the organization -- they care

“Is it the end of the line for fundraising by phone?” was what many nonprofit organizations were pondering last year when more than 48 million Americans signed up for the National Do-Not-Call Registry. While the law clearly stipulates that charitable and political calls are exempt, many members of the public still are unaware of the distinction.

A Harris Interactive poll of 1,011 people in August 2003 found that 37 percent thought that the federal do-not-call list also applied to charity calls.

The past few years have proven to be challenging for direct marketing fundraising. When you consider the 2001 terror attacks and the ensuing questions about dispersement of funds contributed as a result, Anthrax scares, the war on terrorism, corporate distrust, the recent Catholic Church opprobrium and the troubled economy, it’s no surprise that fundraisers have felt left out in the cold.