Oceana Dives Into Multichannel Marketing

By Karin Kirchoff and Jeff Regen

Want proof that multichannel integration yields better results? Check out this recent Oceana campaign. It not only used Web, e-mail, mail and telemarketing, but it also had good  message flow, contact cadence and a campaign theme that resonated with the organization's constituents.

Anniversaries are not typically good fundraising hooks — they tend to mean more to the organization than they do to the potential donor. But Oceana and its partner agency thought outside the box and came up with a compelling theme — the anniversary of the devastating BP oil spill combined with an appealing organizational ambassador, the imperiled sea turtle. The combination was so powerful that this campaign was the second most successful in Oceana's history in dollars raised and grew its sustainer program by a whopping 60 percent.

Topic

First anniversary of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the plight of imperiled sea turtles. (In the interest of full disclosure, Oceana works with M+R Strategic Services, the employer of one of the authors.)

Data and segmentation

Although this critical piece is sometimes overlooked (to the fundraiser's peril), it was carefully planned by Oceana. In addition to traditional donor behavior on recency, frequency and gift size, it utilized online behavioral data including supporter's time on file, whether a person had taken a recent sea turtle action, and whether a person had clicked on campaign donation e-mails but had not donated. In addition, records were appended with third-party data including age and charitable-giving history.

Communications stream

While we believe in the importance of data, you can't report on integrated marketing campaigns without looking at the messaging AND the message flow. In this case, Oceana tapped the major channels, and the message flow looked like this:

1. In order to engage and educate on the challenges the Gulf was facing a year post-spill, Oceana sent an initial advocacy e-mail and landed petition-signers on a customized donation page. That contact was followed by four donation e-mails with a specific goal ($50,000) and a deadline (the upcoming Gulf spill anniversary) sent over seven days. A week later, Oceana followed up with a sustainer invite e-mail to the full e-mail list, versioned with a special "thank you" for donors who had contributed to the campaign over the previous three weeks.