Integrated Fundraising Communications More Effective Than Email Alone
If you’re one of those folks who believes that you should slash your budget for print marketing and direct mail fundraising, think again. One of the takeaways from the CASE Online Strategies conference was that campaigns that use multiple media channels are more successful than those that don’t.
I posted about Vinay Bhagat’s keynote during the conference and I wanted to come back and focus a bit on several slides from his presentation because they are so compelling.
During the conference, several people, including Ken Kipps, made similar points, but only Vinay provided some data to back them up the value of integrated, multi-channel marketing.
Part of the “why” to do multi-channel marketing is generational. Many boomers will respond to direct mail and telemarketing, while those channels leave Gen X cold. For them, it’s email, the web, and some social networks. For younger Xers and millennials, the channels to pay attention to are IM, text messaging, and social media.
During his presentation, Vinay showed the online and direct mail appeals for a World Wildlife Fund Tiger Emergency fundraiser. The integrated appeal-when offline and online appeals were coordinated-showed a 40 percent better response rate. And Convio’s research shows that online engagement helps to grow annual donor value.
What does an integrated, multi-channel campaign look like? Vinay showed in his presentation that included web appeals, emails, direct (paper) mail, videos, text messages, and web content all delivered over a three-month campaign cycle.
And for more ideas of online multi-channel strategies, here’s a report of a presentation by Ken Kipps from UVA; while this is from the recent AMA conference in Chicago, it’s similar to the one he did in Seattle at the CASE conference.
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