The best fundraising strategies stay true to their roots with uniform messaging transmitted via a network of diverse but seamlessly integrated platforms.

By Abny Santicola

Playing to Each Channel’s Strengths

Multi-channel marketing is a powerful force because it creates a multi-pronged communications strategy that plays to the strengths of each individual channel. Once you’ve established that it’s OK to contact individual donors through various channels, you can use each of them to your best advantage. Below are what Tom Gaffny, executive vice president of fundraising for Epsilon, sees as those individual strengths.

Telemarketing
Enables organizations to formulate and execute campaigns within minutes and, because it’s done in real time, provides instant feedback on what’s working and what’s not. It also affords leeway in negotiating offers or explaining things that aren’t clear.

E-mail
The channel of choice for younger donors, e-mail is relevant, interactive and fast, both in terms of execution and response. It’s inexpensive, customizable and highly visual, and can be passed to an unlimited number of people. “Because of the capacity to easily link to other things, I think [e-mail] can really be a tremendous educational and cultivation tool where you can direct people to multiple things right away,” Gaffny says.

Web
Like e-mail, the Web’s visual and interactive, popular with younger donors, and can easily be incorporated into other channels, e.g., putting a Web address on a direct-mail package. Open 24 hours a day, the Web’s the most receptive channel, able to handle the fundraising challenges brought on by natural disasters, and it’s available to more than just the target audience.

Direct mail
The tangible channel, direct mail lands directly in the donor’s hands, a virtue that shouldn’t be overlooked. It can be held onto and viewed at the prospect’s leisure, and is measurable, dependable and repeatable. “A lot of the more passionate, long-term relationships I’ve seen in the marketing arena revolve around direct-mail programs where people have year over year felt like they’ve had a very personal dialogue and communication with an organization,” Gaffny adds. — AS

f your idea of multi-channel fundraising involves sitting at a desk with a telephone receiver balanced between your ear and shoulder with your finger poised to hit “send” for an e-mail appeal as you drop a direct-mail package in the outbox, cease the blitz campaign for a minute and read on.

Multi-channel fundraising, which professionals across the board acknowledge is a strategy whose time has come, sounds easy when you break it down: You’ve got channels — multiples of them. Integrate them and raise funds. Simple, right? But while an all-out assault on potential donors from every which way might get your organization noticed, it probably won’t be the kind of attention you’re seeking.

Properly executed multi-channel fundraising involves timing, and an understanding of donors and prospects, tracking, and response-rate metrics, among other things, designed to result in a seamless amalgam of unified, branded messages that support each other and your
organization.

According to Tom Gaffny, executive vice president of fundraising for Wakefield, Mass.-based Epsilon, which specializes in customer relationships, it’s a relationship builder that demonstrates “the charity’s interest in the person, the commitment to the person, the idea of good stewardship and the fact that [the nonprofit] wants to have a relationship.”

It also allows you to offer donors a variety of communications, not all of which have to contain asks. If your direct mail is ask-heavy, for example, your e-mails could focus more on activism while your newsletter promotes news and advocacy. Testing to figure out the best combination of channels almost goes without saying.

But the key, Gaffny maintains, is ensuring that new channels supplement existing ones, rather than replace them. Moving a donor out of one channel and into another simply defeats the purpose. Your goal, he says, is to forge a well-rounded communication strategy that helps “support, cultivate, nurture and educate” a loyal and knowledgeable donor base.

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