Trendy … Yet Timeless

In the end, people who gave through the Web who received a follow-up e-mail solicitation converted at 0.2 percent. Phone donors who received a follow-up phone call converted at about 7.5 percent, and Web donors who received a follow-up phone call converted at 13 percent.

“And the neat thing,” Johnston says, “is the demographic group converting to monthly giving from the Web were young men ... the people we’d never been able to get to go to monthly giving before.”

Using the Internet as a fundraising medium is a relatively new strategy, so there aren’t any tried-and-true strategies, but, Johnston says, “clearly, using the phone as a follow-up with flash philanthropy is just an incredibly important thing to do, and most organizations haven’t done that.”

Dave Lavoie, core donor officer for Oxfam Canada, says it has to do with the trust factor involved in getting people to become monthly donors.

“It works best person to person,” he says. “It’s [one] person talking to another person and creating that trust that makes a difference.”

Things to think about
Many organizations have found success driving donations through DRTV spots. Johnston also works with clients to digitize TV spots and run them as online campaigns, which solicits and motivates people to give. SOS Children’s Villages Canada was running a DRTV spot featuring Mike Holmes, a craftsman with a popular home-renovation TV show, and features a digitized version of it on its homepage.

In Fall 2003, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence launched a branded online campaign and microsite, the NRAblacklist.com, supported by a print-ad campaign. The microsite featured a petition visitors could sign. According to Johnston, the site had a visitor-to-signer conversion rate of 40 percent and, as a result, increased the Brady Campaign’s e-mail list
from 38,000 to 101,257 in less than three months.