San Diego Zoo

Reviewing the winners across all channels for the 2014 DMAW MAXI Awards, the shared themes were engagement, extraordinary storytelling and relationship building. The stats and snapshot images of the winning Direct Mail, Digital Media, Multichannel and Telemarketing campaigns provided high-level intel of the strategies and tactics.

Many of America’s biggest nonprofits have officially left the Great Recession behind, but the slow economic recovery continues to dampen results at even the most sophisticated fundraising organizations.

The 400 groups that raise the most from private sources achieved a median 7.5 percent gain last year, the third straight year of median gains for nonprofits in The Chronicle of Philanthropy's Philanthropy 400 rankings.

San Diego developer and philanthropist Conrad Prebys has given Scripps Health $45 million for its new cardiovascular institute in La Jolla, Calif., making the donation the largest in Scripps’ history and the biggest Prebys has given any organization.

Scripps officials plan to announce that the $456 million center being built at Scripps Memorial Hospital La Jolla will be named the Prebys Cardiovascular Institute.

San Diego philanthropist Conrad Prebys is giving the San Diego Zoo $15 million to launch a major redesign of its big cat and koala areas. This gift, announced Sunday afternoon, follows Prebys’ 2007 donation of $10.1 million to revamp the polar bear plunge and elephant care center.

Not only is this new pledge the largest single gift in the history of the Zoo, but CEO Doug Myers said Prebys is also the largest single donor to the Zoo at over $25 million. (In 2004 Joan Kroc bequeathed $10 million to the Zoo.)

In fall 2002, the Greater Los Angeles Zoo Association, which each year sees 1.4 million visitors pass through its gates and mails close to a million direct-mail appeals, felt the need for a direct-mail face lift.

The membership appeal the zoo had been mailing was a two-color effort, with a photo on the carrier of a little girl giggling as a chimpanzee looks back at her through a window.