The Omnichannel Nonprofit

At the turn of the millennium, there was no bigger rage in the nonprofit world than multichannel integration. It only made sense — donors began to utilize many more channels beyond just the phone and mail, and naturally nonprofits needed to reach out to supporters in those ways.

In the past 15 years or so, the industry has slowly but surely begun to master multichannel communications. But with the exponential rise in new media continuing to alter how people interact with brands and each other in their daily lives, simply touching donors in all the various channels is no longer enough. Nonprofit supporters demand that the brands they interact with know them and touch them in a consistent, thoughtful and personal manner.

In order for that to happen, a nonprofit organization must be more than just a multichannel marketer — it must operate as an omnichannel nonprofit.

What is omnichannel?
Anyone who has paid any attention to the retail industry has heard the term omnichannel marketing, and increasingly, omnichannel is becoming the standard. But what does omnichannel mean? How does it differ from multichannel?

Multichannel refers to the tools with which a brand communicates with its customers or donors. Omnichannel is so much more. In a nutshell, omnichannel marketing is all about providing true continuity across all touchpoints with a consumer or donor — a unified experience for your target audience in which all channels work in concert seamlessly. In order to provide that seamless experience, an organization must adopt an omnichannel approach internally as well.

That means the right hand must know what the left hand is doing and act accordingly. So many retailers are making this transition, utilizing customer data and monitoring behaviors to feed remarketing efforts across different channels and platforms to provide more value to those customers.