Target

[Stephen Pidgeon is chairman of Target Direct, a direct-mail fundraising agency in Gloucestershire, England. At the 27th International Fundraising Congress, which was held in the Netherlands last week, he presented a session titled New Challenges Facing Direct-marketing Fundraisers. Here, he offers a synopsis of the session.] It’s not getting any easier, but there’s still a pile of things you can do that will radically improve your direct-marketing fundraising. However, fundraisers of the future will have to put in considerably more effort to achieve the same and better results — and that means improving the supporter experience in much the same way that commercial companies

In a recent edition of the TM Tipline, the e-newsletter from FundRaising Success sister publication Target Marketing, Beth Vendice, president of Advanced Results Marketing (www.armdr.com), offered the following suggestions for questions that any company/organization needs to explore before hiring an agency to help it embark on a DRTV campaign: 1. Does the agency have a history of success on TV? 2. What is the agency’s experience in my category/vertical (or mission)? 3. Does the agency have the buying power to negotiate the cost savings I need, and can it subsequently deliver improved ROI or reduced acquisition cost? 4. How hands-on is the agency’s account

Ah … it was a great run. But a tricky one. For the past few years, I’ve been wrestling with the challenge of letting FundRaising Success Senior Editor Abny Santicola do her thing without the rest of the Target Marketing Group catching on to how fabulous she is.

Wow! Who ever thought the Gold Awards could be so exciting? The sun was setting on judgement day, and we had a tie for Package of the Year. A first! So, I polled our four judges — Steve Froehlich, director of development analytics at the ASPCA; Tim O’Leary, vice president of McPherson Associates; Paul Bobnak, director of North American Publishing Co.’s Who’s Mailing What! Archive; and FS Senior Editor Abny Santicola. After some soul searching and spirited debate, they weighed in: two for one package and the other two for the other package.

A sampling of lists available to reach sports fans as potential donors.

El Museo del Barrio was founded in 1969 by a group of Puerto Rican educators, artists, parents and community activists in East Harlem’s Spanish-speaking El Barrio. Today, it’s a leading Latino cultural institution dedicated to representing the diversity of art and culture from the Caribbean and Latin America.

Cutting through the communications clutter that donors and constituents are exposed to regularly is no easy task and can require a one-to-one, customized communications strategy. This is the topic of the white paper “One-to-One: Five Smart Ideas to Improve Communication with Members, Donors and other Customers” by Edward Wendling, director of marketing for Advanced Solutions International, which offers the following five tips for organizations looking to improve constituent communications: 1. Capture data — namely contact, demographic and transaction information — from every customer interaction. Collecting this information will help your organization create donor profiles, which will enable you to target and personalize communications.

When I interviewed for my job here four years ago, I came in kind of blindly. I knew the parent company — North American Publishing Co. — produced trade publications, but I didn’t know what sort of magazine, specifically, NAPCO was launching. When I found out it was about fundraising, I was thrilled. And I went on to tell the president of the Target Marketing Group, who was doing the interview, how intimately involved I had been in fundraising for much of my adult life. And I further went on to talk about car washes and bake sales and — oh, boy! — a Krispy

Following is a sampling of lists available to reach parents as potential donors.

When I interviewed for my job here four years ago, I came in kind of blindly. I knew the parent company — North American Publishing Co. — produced trade publications, but I didn’t know what sort of magazine, specifically, NAPCO was launching.