A Conversation on Integrated Marketing and Fundraising, Part 1

FS: What do you see as the IMAB's role?
MJ: At the beginning, our role is really to be a spark. By bringing agencies together, it means we can bring resources to bear; we can assign these resources to collect information (case studies). Because there are a lot of agencies here, it means there's lots of clients and lots of comparative knowledge already at our fingertips. We really want to be the spark to a further conversation. In the beginning, it's only going to work if you have organizations who bring the comparative experience. They can move corporate resources to say we're going to assign people to collect this, analyze and then get it up for conversation and stimulate the sector. So it's really the beginning of the beginning.

Sara Spivey: At minimum, if we did nothing but just share what each one of those members is doing in some of these areas with practical applications of how people think about integrated marketing, we've already advanced the ball. To me, that's kind of the table stakes. There's so much more we can do, but just the fact that, if you think about a nonprofit that may work with one agency or vendor over time, we can only provide so much perspective based on what we see. Well, if you add 11 more agencies to the fray and potentially over time more vendors and potentially over time maybe even some nonprofit participants, you just open up the funnel of collective wisdom and collective experience to be shared. The first year here it's, "Let's all share what we know, because it's a lot, and then figure out how you build on it as a group."

MJ: If you just look at society itself, this phenomenon of, let's say, wiki science — for example, the University of Toronto is branding something called wiki science. There is a collaborative effort to identify and understand a bunch of different proteins. It's foundational science that's being done, and it's being funded by four absolutely cutthroat competitors in the pharmaceutical world. Competitors day to day are collaborating with researchers and the broader science community to tackle a problem that they can't fill in themselves. They have neither the resources nor the breadth of experience to tackle this. There could be proprietary things that roll out of the collaborative research. No one's naive enough to think that that won't happen. But I like to translate that to what we're doing over time, that it's kind of wiki-integrated fundraising.