A new strategy helps Mothers Against Drunk Driving revive its stagnant fundraising, recommit to its missin and invigorate its staff and volunteers.

By Margaret Battistelli Gardner

WORDS TO LIVE BY

Additional observations from Bobby Heard, national director of programs and development, MADD:

“Complacency is what got us here; as long as the checks [are] coming in from direct marketing, who cared? One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is that you can’t be complacent. You have to constantly be looking at your strategy and approach, and thinking about how you’re going to raise the next dollar.”

“The trends are changing, the environment is changing, and you have to constantly be challenging your thinking. What really are the best practices and how do you apply those to your organization? You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Sure, you need creative ideas and processes, but there still are a lot of people who have been there before us.”

“The competition in communities for dollars is so unbelievably tremendous. I’ve seen it especially with our walks. The amount of good causes out there asking for donations makes it tough. You have to work that much harder and sure, you’re asking that much more to get the support you need to be able to support your mission.”

Sitting squarely in the upper echelon of effective and highly respected nonprofit organizations, the Texas-based Mothers Against Drunk Driving celebrates its 25th anniversary this year. For the past decade, the nationally acclaimed drunken-driving education organization has held steady as a $47 million charity fueled in large part by direct-mail fundraising.

An impressive number, by anyone’s standards. But MADD’s top dogs read “steady” to mean “static” and decided a few years ago that the organization needed a major kick in the fundraising pants. Enter Bobby Heard, who took over as national director of programs and development in 2002.

Heard, along with MADD’s CFO, analyzed the organization’s fundraising performance.

“The first thing we did was an analysis of our historical performance, and what we found concerned me. When we did the analysis of all of our 990s from the last decade, we realized that we had been basically flat. We had been hovering around a $47 million charity year in and year out for the past 10 years,” he explains.

“Well, you know the analogy of a flat line. We needed to think about fundraising in a different way,” he adds.

The problem, it seems, is that MADD historically has relied heavily on direct marketing — telemarketing in the early 1990s, then direct mail later in the decade. And while direct marketing is doubtless the workhorse of nonprofit fundraising, it’s expensive in terms of both time and investment and, as MADD discovered, can hide a multitude of shortcomings within an organization’s collective psyche.

In MADD’s case, Heard discovered that 1) far too many people at the organization were simply afraid to ask for money, and 2) much of its early momentum had been replaced by complacency, fueled in part (and rather ironically) by the success of its direct-marketing efforts.

Most of MADD’s money is raised nationally and then distributed regularly to its 600 affiliates around the country and in Guam, a cushy gig for the local affiliates who fell into some dangerously lackadaisical routines.

MOTHERS AGAINST DRUNK DRIVING

Mailing Address: 511 E. John Carpenter Freeway, #700, Irving, Texas 75062

Phone: 800.GET.MADD (800.438.6233)

Fax: 972.869.2206

On the Web: www.madd.org

THE FIGURES
Employees: 315 full-time
Annual Operating Budget: $53,280,000
Annual Contributed Income: $33,238,000

Financial Snapshot: MADD’s marketing and development department is responsible for raising funds to support its mission work and operations. In FY 2004, 62 percent of MADD’s funding was raised nationally and 38 percent by 600 affiliates across the country and in Guam. Of the national revenue, 52 percent came in through direct mail; 20 percent through telemarketing; 6 percent through corporate marketing; 6 percent through grants; and 16 percent through other sources.

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