Six Degrees of Disconnected Channels

Does your nonprofit’s or client’s direct response program operate with disconnected channels?

If so, well—your misery has company. Anecdotal evidence suggests that for most nonprofits, mail, phone, and email programs are not well integrated.

Of course, there are a lot of reasons why: it’s a strain on already-tapped staff to coordinate multi-channel functions and program calendars; concerns about cannibalized revenue between channels; misaligned goals across channels, etc.

Strides made with online integration between development and communications divisions aren’t much more apparent. Nonprofit communications or marketing staff are often focused on goals that differ from fundraiser goals. This misalignment is especially brutal on web initiatives—eg, an online marketing campaign loses the benefit of increased traffic that a supporting direct response strategy generates. Or an email fundraising campaign, not supported properly on the nonprofit’s website, suffers on credibility and performance.

In fact at a recent nonprofit conference, “Building, Retaining, and Mobilizing Constituents” was labeled as strictly part of the Communications track, and not the Fundraising track. These are core tenets of the donor fundraising development model. Bottom line is, fundraising and communications should be working together to share knowledge and blend their strength of skills to further the organizational mission and support. Isn’t that the ideal?

Here are examples of broad leaps by some nonprofits in recent years to “connect” better:

• ASPCA collapsed its Fundraising and Communications into one business division;
• Save the Children reported plans to assign shared goals among its direct response business units—ie, 10% of goal for each was required to be from integrated efforts;
• Easter Seals operates an Interactive Marketing division; housing both marketing and fundraising [online] under one business division.

These are large nonprofits. You might think “hey, those guys have more ‘bandwidth’, more resource to work with.” Maybe. Not always. And, a large nonprofit’s size can make it even more challenging to move forward or make broad changes.

Integrating can be a tough sell because it means some more work, contacts, meetings, scheduling and creative-sharing; for online fundraisers, online communicators, and vendors providing program strategy. And the sell might be your own! (“How am I gonna fit this on top of managing my program as it is?”)

• Get bold. Stay mindful, be affirmed by the mounting evidence that multi-channel donors are more valuable.
• Be persistent
• Eventually an increased ROI will be highly satisfying for your collaborative teams, your mission, and very importantly—for your supporters feeling more satisfied by the cohesive relationship with your nonprofit.

P.S. If you’re already “connected” or “connecting” with multi-channel fundraising at your nonprofit—Bravo! We’d love to hear your story. We’ll post it for the good of our inquiring-mind subscribers. Small and medium sized nonprofits are especially encouraged to respond, to give proper representation to our nonprofit success stories. Afterall, they are the majority of nonprofits out there!

April 2007

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