Oceana Dives Into Multichannel Marketing

2. Because it is common — even among constituents who receive your e-mail — to navigate to a website rather than use embedded links, Oceana inserted a prominent graphic on its homepage with a lightbox (similar to the old-school pop-ups from back in the day) during the last few days of the campaign. (See image above.)

3. Oceana updated its Facebook page with calls to action for both monetary donations and donations of Facebook status to raise awareness and put pressure on decision-makers.

4. Mobile activists were sent text messages asking for a $10 text donation.

5. Oceana decided to venture into the world of telemarketing and conducted its first-ever phone campaign. Its telemarketing partner completed 2,700 calls targeting all online and offline donors, as well 
as selected groups of online activists. Constituents who pledged (or hedged) were invited to fulfill via daily e-mail "chasers" or through more traditional mail pieces, and thank-you e-mails with a fulfill-
ment link were sent to refusals.

6. Lastly, Oceana's small offline donor file (as well as the online donors and selected prospective donors) was sent a direct-mail piece. Perhaps interesting to the dinosaurs in our industry, this was a gamble for Oceana as it did not have a traditional direct-mail fundraising program.

The results

Oceana brought in $54,000 in one-time gifts and 84 new credit-card sustainers. Detailed breakdowns for each channel are provided here in the accompanying charts, but please keep in mind that each channel influences and supports the others, so focusing on the results of any one channel can be misleading given that the whole is typically greater than the sum of its parts.

Takeaways and recommendations

● Sustainer conversion: Use an aggressive, integrated approach to sustainer conversion. The combined approach of e-mail and telemarketing is very effective in generating new sustainers! Offering the monthly giving option on landing pages for one-time e-mails also generated sustainers. Oceana has since added a "sustainer upsell lightbox" (shown at right) to donation pages, converting even more would-be one-time donors to sustainers.