Database Marketing

Once upon a time, the only customized marketing available was face-to-face (the First Age). That changed when people got mail addresses (Second). Then phone numbers (Third). Then email addresses (Fourth). Each media and age started as something both completely mass market and completely individualized, with nothing in the middle...

It seems like ages ago that everyone had personas in their marketing plans—and then they didn’t. All good things come back around...

I’m celebrating my 15-year anniversary as a fundraiser! In a blog post five years ago, I wrote about the best strategic ingredients for a successful fundraising program. Let’s try that again and see if I want to change my perspective now I’ve grown older. Fundraisers are gold. Quality fundraising staff makes all the difference. Without…

Every year I organize our neighborhood Easter egg hunt. I stuff and hide more than 600 eggs, and love watching kids run through the field searching for them. The excitement they feel when finding an egg is the same rush I get when I discover something actionable in a client data file. It got me…

For the more than 1.5 million nonprofit organizations in the U.S., data—big and small—has never been more important in terms of its potential impact on fundraising. The opportunity to further understand, keep and grow donor relationships is huge. But for many of these organizations, there’s a catch—as hopes have risen, so have confusion and concern about using technology to make it happen without draining budgets and sacrificing other efforts...

I’ll never forget the first time I came across an organization using Excel as a database. I’d taken on a part-time position as grant writer for a mid-sized agency working with women and children. Although I’d been hired to write grants, within weeks, the organization engaged me to write its annual Mother’s Day appeal...

Boosting donors to the next level of giving is key to sustainable fundraising. But where to begin? Who are your best prospects? We learned a few simple ways to prioritize your donor portfolio from Rachel Muir in our webinar, "Turn Year-End Donors into Year-Round Supporters". Here’s how to mine your data to target your ask…

About three years ago, the industry we knew as "direct marketing" slowly started to be redefined under the term "customer engagement". It was time for a change. The industry was evolving rapidly and the agencies within it were changing just as quickly, too. Indeed, in little more than a couple of years, the traditional group…

Our online lives have become highly personalized. Every digital action, whether liking a page on Facebook or binge-watching a series on Netflix, helps to create a clearer picture of who you are online—information that businesses use to feed into their future strategies. While the for-profit world has embraced these processes, there are far fewer examples…

Nick Ellinger has been busy. As vice president of strategic development for Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), Ellinger was tasked with unifying MADD's network of databases—including 20 in its home office and hundreds more in the field, with record systems running the gamut from custom databases to Access to Excel to pen-on-paper. It was a monumental task, one that's still underway, but with Ellinger's guidance, MADD has begun the critical task of achieving a true omnichannel marketing strategy.