Five Components of DRTV Fundraising Success

4. Fulfillment. If you place a phone number in your DRTV commercial, your call center will be another critical partner. You've paid for a small window of TV time in front of your potential donors, and it is essential to capture their immediate responses to your ad. Your call-center partner should be at the phones, ready to answer, 24/7, and should be staffed to handle peak advertising times. It must demonstrate the technical competence to route calls appropriately; report on calls presented, wait times, abandonment and call disposition; and close the sale. A good call-center partner also will help you craft the best wording for your scripts and then make recommendations for testing changes.

If you're driving viewers to the Web, make sure your site has the technical capacity to track response. You can create customized landing pages or micro sites that continue the logical progression from the TV ad and the offer. Optimize the shopping cart so that the donor has a fast and easy buying experience.

Your fulfillment kit in the mail should tie back to the TV creative to reinforce the emotional response that the responder felt at the time. Make sure the kit meets the expectation you created in the commercial.

5. Evaluation and control. Capture the metrics that will lead you to invest in the best stations and times. Early indicators are cost per response by station. Later analysis will include cost per donor. And once you have a station history of conversion rate from lead to paying donor, you can set an "allowable" cost per lead for each station you advertise on. This "allowable" can become a negotiating tool for your agency to use to buy marginally performing stations.

Measure your cost per lead, conversion and cost per donor by creative execution and time of day. This analysis will give you and your media agency the best information for placing ad time and also will make your next tests apparent.