All Things Annual Giving

The Importance of Updating Email Addresses Regularly

The wonders of technology and its efficiency are not always what they seem. 

The tried and true process of direct mail fundraising is more difficult than ever, as the impetus has been placed on you, as the sender, to be sure your database is up-to-date.  This isn't the worst thing ever as it does force you to keep lists current, and this is a good practice regardless, but people have become less likely to respond to direct mail as they have gone to online giving, expected a higher level of personal contact, broadened their own giving options, and economic circumstances have hindered their ability to give.  

One development director recently related to me that her response rate on direct mail had declined from over 3% to less than 0.5% just in the last three years.  Yet, she was achieving growth in overall fundraising nonetheless, and even as the economy was in a doldrums.  

 How does this work?  For her, it meant increasing the attention she was paying to mid- and high-level donors, with personal visits, phone calls, saying thank you in new and different ways, etc.  But she runs a small shop, covering all aspects of development, from major gifts to annual fund. 

What if you are in a larger development operation and your piece is strictly limited to the annual fund through direct mail, phonathon, email and online promotions?  How do you keep up with donors' decreasing use of traditional postal services and responsiveness to phone solicitations?

Truly, you are left to pursue them directly through email solicitation.  Done correctly, this can be very efficient, unpretentious and focused.   But it also requires great attention to detail. 

Think about the logistics.  Some people live in one home, yet change email addresses often.  Others may have made multiple moves in recent years, but have maintained the sam email address.   Many people have more than one email address.  Mailboxes can be set up to screen anything they choose. 

"Opt in" services are quite valuable.  However, it is worthy of note that even people who are very welcoming of your attention early on, tire quickly of hearing from you in the maze of spam that hits their inbox every day.  You may have been moved to a folder you would have never thought of because a donor "opted in" to receive your newsletter.

Brian Lacy & Associates has many years experience helping nonprofits crack the donor code and get through the many and varied filters that exist.  Contact Brian Lacy & Associates today to find out how you can improve your results by enhancing your email potential.

Annual Giving and Email:

The Pros and Cons of Email Blasts

Blasting email to thousands of recipients has become very common in the marketplace today.  But here are some things to consider when deciding how much you want to pursue the strategy of reaching your constituency through email.

1. How up-to-date is your address list?  Do you have upwards of 25% of your past donors' email addresses?  If so, you have a good starting point.  If you're short on addresses in your database, you should consider an email append to bolster your records.  It's relatively inexpensive, and will provide with a significantly higher number of confirmed email addresses you can reach.
2. How large is your overall constituency?  Are you trying to reach a few thousand people or 100,000?  The larger the number, the more efficient it becomes to use email to reach them.
3. How effective are you at reaching your base through direct mail, by phone and in person?  Usually, these are only marginal considerations now that email has become the most commonplace method of keeping in touch, because it is rather non-invasive.  For the same reason, however, it is also becoming the easiest way to avoid more direct contact.  You can receive email any time, and never feel compelled to respond.  While other forms of communication may also be avoided, as a fundraiser you know where you stand when phone calls aren't returned, or visits can no longer be arranged.  The same is not so clear with email.

When you stop to think through these issues, the decisions about email communication change, but not entirely.  Email blasts are still helpful.  As a non-invasive communication vehicle, they function like news.  If the information is good, the reader will pay attention.  Granted, he has to open it first, but you have almost no control over that decision.  What you can offer is good quality content once the reader is drawn in.

In our next post, we'll discuss the components of a well conceived e-blast.  Until then, if we can be of greater assistance, please contact Brian Lacy & Associates today.

 

Data Cleansing

The Basics

Data management is primarily about three things: collecting it, maintaining it and protecting it.  Under these three categories all of the use of data available to you for raising money exist. 

Underlying all three areas and all of your success in fundraising is the matter of using the data effectively. But you must have effective organization in order for this to be possible.  This hub provides an overview of the organizational aspects of data management. Collecting Data

Think about this: there are more than 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of new data created on the internet in a year.  How much of this do you have in your database?  More importantly, how much of it can you use? 

Collecting Data

Frankly, what matters to you is the data that comes into your circle of influence.  You received a business card, met someone at a networking event, another made an internet inquiry, yet another called with a question about services.  Your board has friends, so do you.  There are political, cultural, marketing and other business people who have an interest in your mission. 

Have you captured the data from all of these sources.  This is a very important point.  No mailing list, distribution list, or other contact list that you can buy is at all important to you until you have touched and marketed your business to everyone you can touch personally. 

Purchasing mailing lists is a short cut to good data capture.  Many organizations that could be very successful are struggling dreadfully because of poor data capture.  I know about this first hand.  

Data capture can be challenging and intricate.

One problem is that there are so many places to capture data.  Another is the time it takes to enter everything you have.  One of the most important  decisions you can make is with respect to where your data will be stored.  Smaller businesses often rely on Outlook because it is so pervasive and readily available. 

It's limits become obvious, however, as soon as you start trying to add large quantities of data.  But what is the next, better alternative?  This is the question of all questions.  ACT!, Gold MIne, and similar programs are very widely used sales tools for organizations that have many people selling, asking for support.  But they are limited in terms of their ability to meet the needs of large organizations and nonprofit organizations in general.

As a consultant, I have regularly advised organizations on database packages of many different companies.  The size, purpose, and needs for use of the information are all factors in deciding on the right platform to meet your needs. 

In the need, you will need to choose the right platform and execute its implementation wisely.  This is a challenging operation that requires careful attention to detail.  Likewise, it is vitally important to have a reliable staff person accountable for the accuracy of the information and overseeing its implementation.

Maintaining Data

Once you properly capture the data, you need to maintain it.  This is where the notion of "data cleansing" comes to life.  What is data cleansing?

It is the process of scrubbing data to eliminate errors, update for new and better information, and append existing data with new pieces of information.  In essence, this is what data maintenance is all about. 

Here are some basic examples of what you should think about in regard to data cleansing:

(1) Correcting Errors:  Let's say you hold a phonathon and call 5,000 donors.  You find that over 1,000 of those records are out of date or just, incorrect.  In calling the other 4,000 donors, you raised over $35,000.  By having invalid information, you may have lost another $10,000 or more by being unable to reach the other donors.  Is this acceptable?

(2) New and Better Information: During the course of that same phonathon, you learned that another 1,500 donors, who gave nearly $20,000 themselves, has new, better or different contact information - nearly all of whom prefer that you use the new rather than the old.  You spent an extra 25% time with each of these donors listening and collecting new information and explaining the "glitches" in your system. If your data had been up-to-date, you could spend this time calling at least 500 additional donors with the same resources involved.

(3) Data Appending: Let's say your overall database consists of 100,000 records.  You have 90,000 good mailing addresses, 75,000 phone numbers and 15,000 email addresses.  If these numbers were 95,000, over 100,000 (including alternate phone numbers), and 30,000, how much more money could you raise from the same database?  Past assessments suggest you can gain 20-25% within one year by properly upgrading your database with "data appends" for mailing addresses, phone numbers and email. 

Brian Lacy & Associates is a full service provider of data management services and specializes in cost effective data appending, updating and related services.

Protecting Data

Protecting your data can be every bit as important as collecting and maintaining data.  Because it so uniquely calls for its own solutions relative to the other issues, we will address this in separate, upcoming posts in our blog. 

Using Online Giving to Improve Annual Fund Efficiency

by Andrew Thompson

Earlier this week, we discussed how your expense budget affects the efficiency of your program.  For years now, directors of development and annual giving programs have been striving to increase the volume of gifts that come via online contributions. 

Hopefully, your institution long ago made sure that visitors to its site had a clear and easy path to making a gift online.  Likewise, any donor making an online contribution should be inputting enough data that you will have the opportunity to continually cultivate a relationship with that donor pro-actively in the future. 

By no means, however, is that the end of the story.  In future posts, we'll explore a variety of ways that you can make your online giving program more effective, i.e. specifically to produce more revenue, but here we'll only touch on that point as we stay focused on the efficiency of your program.  You need no daily reminder that these are tough times.  But, these ARE challenging times in the world of fundraising, and you have to come to work every day with both a sense of urgency and the need for greater efficiency.

In doing so, improving revenue numbers will certainly help.  Remember, we're looking at the ratio of the cost it takes to raise every dollar as the method of defining efficiency.  Thinking in those terms really helps to properly frame the problem.  Ask yourself, which methods of fundraising bring in the most at the least cost?  Phonathon?  Direct mail?  Online giving?  In person visits? 

As a former planned giving director, I was constantly reminded to tell our team how efficiently we raised money.  At the American Cancer Society, we liked to say it costs 22-23 cents to raise a dollar, but less than 7 cents to raise "major gifts" and even less to raise legacy and planned gifts. 

Over time, however, I came to understand that there were many different ways of calculating these numbers, and thus, many different results as well.  So the question is then, how does online giving truly compare to other methods of raising money, and even more to the point, how can it be done in a a way that helps to produce a more efficient annual giving program?

Here are two important points to consider.

First, you probably already know that online giving can appear much more efficient than it actually is.  The blessing of having someone you did not solicit make a gift nonetheless, carries with it the burden of not knowing what s/he responded to.  It also means there is no group or category from which s/he emerged and can necessarily easily be placed.  

Thus, if you want to replicate the result, you have to spend time and energy figuring out what it was that got his attention and use it to target others who would do the same.  But because s/he was unique in this way, you will find yourself targeting more or less unique behaviors which can be very time consuming and inefficient. 

Achieving greater efficiency online demands an understanding that these attracted but unsolicited donors respond in much the same way as any other online customers.  Hence, the process of search engine marketing has been your ally and you can make it work even more to your benefit with proper optimization techniques. You will gain efficiency in online giving when you match the reasons these donors are looking to the messages they can find and will see when they are attracted to your site.

The second point to help you in this process is to always keep in mind that the efficiency is largely gained after the donor has made an online contribution rather than before.  You now have a tremendous source of new information and an opportunity to cultivate a long term and growing relationship with him or her because you made that first gift possible online.

Right at the outset, you have a unique chance to capture some additional funding with reminders that their gifts may be eligible for a match from an employer.  Immediately after a gift is committed, you can redirect the donor to another page where they can determine the eligibility and sign up instantly for the match.  I've worked with Brian Lacy and Associates on this in the past, and it is a tremendously effective way to improve giving results before you've even had contact with the donor himself.

Online giving opens a diverse array of giving options to pursue.  Carefully crafting your program to enable and improve your overall efficiency can solve many of the difficult problems you may face in a challenging economic environment. 

USPS New Postal Service National Change of Address Link Rule

Direct mail marketing remains one of the most powerful and economic ways to reach a target audience— delivering your message directly to your prospects through the U.S. mail for pennies. The beauty of direct mail marketing is that it’s a medium that works regardless of budget—big or small.

Effective November 23, 2008 the United States Postal Service now requires address lists for standard mail to be cleared of incorrect addresses every 95 days, rather than every 185 days as previously required.

The new ruling, announced earlier this year, is meant to decrease the number of undeliverable mail pieces processed by the post office. The rule has been expanded to Standard (nonprofit discount rate) mailings. It originally only applied to First Class mail.

In order to meet the new “Move Update” standards, a mailer must update its addresses using methods approved by the Postal Service. The method recommended by most is the National Change of Address (NCOA) update method.

To comply, mailers must update their mailing lists to account for recipients who have moved every 95 days at minimum. For example, a mailing entered on Nov. 23 must bear names and addresses that were updated no earlier than August 20.

Nonprofit organizations that do not update addresses they mail within 95 days, verified by submission of a Certificate of Move Update Compliance (PS Form 6014), may be charged First Class postage on their entire mailing.

Contact Brian Lacy (or by phone at 860-478-9291) for assistance with inexpensive NCOA Screening and other data cleansing services.

Reaching Donors Through Email

Using Email in a Weak Economy

Compared to other forms of communication, email is extraordinarily efficient. No doubt, you are making the most of the use of email already, but think about increasing your email usage, particularly in a bad economy, as you avoid postage, telecommunications and labor costs.

Below are a few specific ideas:

1. Employ an Effective Email Service Provider to make sure you cover all the bases you need in running email campaigns. One way of expanding your reach through is with a Network for Good account.  Network for Good ties in multiple nonprofit organizations with its mailing programs to reach more potential donors in a short period.

Fundraising During the Economic Crisis Years

By Gerry Reeder

Fundraising during an economic crisis is never easy. The problem is that the services provided by non-profits and charities are often more needed than ever during an economic downturn. This means that your budgets and revenues will be increasingly taxed at the time when your expenses are growing and growing.

Don't fret. Don't cry. Don't give up.

Here are some simple things to remember about fundraising during an economic downturn:

Annual Fund Basics

by Brian Lacy

The best of annual fund development begins with the fundamentals. Database management, direct mail and online giving, phonathons, matching gift campaigns, effective donor segmentation - these are components for successful, year-to-year fundraising for any nonprofit organization, no matter how large or small. 

It is a process that parallels good blocking and tackling on a football team.  You know the fundamentals, you design the plays, and then you go out and execute.  Our goal is to teach, coach and help you through the execution of good annual fund development.

On the pages and posts contained within this blog, we're striving to provide the best set of information available on annual fund development found anywhere on the web.  But our services go much further than the basics you can find here.  For assistance with any of you annual fund needs, please email me today.  Or  go to my website: brianlacy.com to get familiar with all we have to offer.