Beyond Multichannel
MacIntyre points to two major factors, the first being that increasing numbers of aging Americans and their families feel they should be in control of their own end-of-life decisions.
"A substantial majority believe they should be able to acquire a prescription for a life-ending medication from their doctor," MacIntyre says. (A Harris Poll released in January 2011 indicted that 70 percent of adults nationwide agree that terminally ill patients should be able to choose aid in dying.)
Multichannel and beyond
The other factor is C&C's use of an "omnichannel" marketing model that incorporates fundraising into all operational aspects of the organization.
"The genesis of our approach involved a reorganization, from 2007 to 2009, of the way we think about donors," MacIntyre says. "It became clear that our donors, volunteers, activists, and clients and their families are all the same people. They're all supporters. We realized it was important that we coordinate our messaging into one set of messages to all of them."
For example, C&C has the e-mail addresses of 20,000 of its 38,000 24-month donors. The organization can go directly to those 20,000 donors when it asks people to send e-mail to their representatives in Congress regarding an end-of-life initiative.
"You have to think of activists and donors as the same group of people," MacIntyre says. "You can't separate those two actions from one another. You have to coordinate. This is difficult for some folks to understand, because the entrenchment between programming and development and communications in most fundraising organizations is deep.
"The program work in most organizations is considered the work of the organization, with development and communications supporting the program work," he adds.
Not so at C&C. Integrated, omnichannel marketing is the cornerstone of an organizational philosophy that addresses more than communications and development functions.
