Channel Surfing: A News Roundup
Although there are some new findings in the recently released 2011 donorCentrics Internet and Multichannel Giving Benchmarking Report, online to offline migration is still going strong, much as it was in the last report three years ago. The Report’s release has (re)fueled the conversation fire in the nonprofit community.
The data clearly shows that integrated direct marketing is essential for maximizing the long-term value of online-acquired donors. But why aren’t more organization’s doing it?
Several bloggers and journalists attempt to answer this age-old question in the following coverage from around the sector:
Direct marketing guru and blogger at The Agitator Roger Craver shared the following tough love comments in his post Online Ghost Haunts All Fundraisers: “I’ve long suspected that too many of us find too many excuses for avoiding the multi-channel integration challenge. I don’t know whether it’s sloth, incompetence, lunch with printers, or just fear that the income from a donor won’t end in ‘my’ bucket. What I do know from this Target Analytics study is that ignorance and sloth are ruinous. The writing is on the wall, it’s in the data and, frankly, it’s staring us in the face. As this report so clearly indicates, we’re not seizing the opportunity and it will come back to haunt us all.”
Mark Phillips, the founder and CEO of Bluefrog shared an in-depth analysis of the report on his blog Queer Ideas: “For me, this report offers a challenge. It shows that where we fail to engage donors, we also fail to raise funds. If we are to tackle this situation (and improve the retention rates of all supporters) we need to look again at our websites and ask ourselves if they give donors what they want? Because when it comes to fundraising, this report firmly suggests that we aren’t.”
In MultiChannel Donors: Real? Or Yeti? on the NTEN Blog, NTEN’s Holly Ross writes: “For those of you waiting for the direct-mail death toll, it looks like you’ll be waiting a while longer. The study confirms what we already know: online donors are younger, have higher incomes and give larger initial gifts than offline-acquired donors. But they tend to make that second donation online only about half the time.”
On Katya’s Non-Profit Marketing Blog, Katya Andresen of Network for Good points out in her post Welcome to the silo: The sad death of multichannel marketing that “Many studies in the past couple of years come to the same conclusion, quite rightly: The best way to build a relationship with donors is to acknowledge the fact that people like to give in a variety of venues: email, direct mail, Facebook,etc. There are not just pure “online donors” and “direct mail” donors – there are donors who choose to mix it up. So multichannel marketing is key to a fertile fundraising landscape.”
Additional coverage
• The Nonprofit Times covers the Report in Study: Online-Acquired Donors Switch To Mail, Not Vice-Versa
• Joanne Fritz shares her takeaways in Unraveling the Data about Multichannel Donors on About.com.
• Fundraising Success writer Joe Boland, penned the article Direct Mail Still Rules the Day in Fundraising.
Where to go from here
Blackbaud’s Allison Van Diest published an accompanying commentary focused on improving overall giving through a multichannel approach. It’s a great guide for making the most of your channel-surfing donors.
Similiar Articles
- Why Online Donors are Worth More than Offline Donors [INFOGRAPHIC]
- 2011 donorCentrics Internet and Multichannel Giving Benchmarking Report
- Multichannel Fundraising: Magic or Myth?
- The Secret to Achieving 3X Better Fundraising Results [INFOGRAPHIC]
- Three Ingredients for Successful Year-End Fundraising
-
Melanie Mathos
-
http://www.kisstoryburch.com Tory Burch Shoes


Subscribe to the RSS feed
Follow Blackbaud on Twitter
Follow Blackbaud on Facebook 


