Multichannel fundraising leverages different communication channels to cultivate relationships with donors over time. A case study from Mercy Corps showed how integrating staff, budgets, and programs across channels, along with cultivating donors through different touchpoints, led to growth in key metrics like monthly donors and revenue. Care2's data demonstrated that acquiring donor leads online and following up through telemarketing, direct mail, and email produced the highest conversion rates. Effective multichannel approaches require breaking down silos, coordinating messages across channels, and testing different cultivation strategies to deepen engagement with donors.
6. Holistic, Supporter-Centric
Approach
Mail
Email
Your
Telemarketing
Mobile Supporter
Social Face-to-Face
Networks
Websites Television (DRTV)
7.
8. Takeaways
1. Methods to find and on-board donor leads for multi-
channel cultivation approaches.
• Meh
2. The latest and greatest multichannel approaches that are
yielding donor conversions, including monthly
sustainers, and producing strong fundraising results.
• Yes!
3. Methods for leveraging behavioral and demographic data
to enhance targeting and results from multichannel
campaigns.
• Meh
SESSION TITLE Slide 7
10. Who We Are
Mercy Corps exists to alleviate
suffering, poverty and oppression
by helping people build secure,
productive and just communities.
BREAKTHROUGH MULTI-CHANNEL FUNDRAISING Slide 9
11. Is Multi-Channel Value a Myth?
CY11 Revenue Per Donor Actuals
BREAKTHROUGH MULTI-CHANNEL FUNDRAISING Slide 10
12. Multi-Channel Fundraising:
A Case Study of Monthly Giving
1. Identify the Obstacles
2. Provide Three Takeaways
3. Reveal the Results
BREAKTHROUGH MULTI-CHANNEL FUNDRAISING Slide 11
14. Obstacles:
Multiple Programs & One Channel
1. Give For Kids
2. Heroes Against Hunger
3. Partners In Mercy
BREAKTHROUGH MULTI-CHANNEL FUNDRAISING Slide 13
15. The Journey:
3 Methods of Migration
Integration Cultivation Communication
BREAKTHROUGH MULTI-CHANNEL FUNDRAISING Slide 14
22. Results: Testimonials
“ Thank you for the little wool ram & note card about
Elena.
It has greatly personalized my sterile, monthly
donation made through my credit card. I have the
little ram hanging on my work cubicle wall to enjoy and to
remind me of why I’m making a monthly donation. The
world just became a little smaller.
- Lynn “
BREAKTHROUGH MULTI-CHANNEL FUNDRAISING Slide 21
23. Results: Testimonials
“Dear Dan,
I love the name “Partners In Mercy” and thank you for
your letter.
Mercy Corp’s effort in keeping donors aware of the work you
do and the way our donations are spent is well worth it. I
wish I could give more and am so grateful that my small
monthly donation is helping children around the world.
Best wishes,
Wilma
“
BREAKTHROUGH MULTI-CHANNEL FUNDRAISING Slide 22
24. Multi-Channel Fundraising:
A Mercy Corps Case Study
1. Overcoming Silos
2. Integration, Cultivation & Communication
3. Growth in All Metrics
BREAKTHROUGH MULTI-CHANNEL FUNDRAISING Slide 23
27. How Care2 and our 19 M Members
Benefit Nonprofits
VISIBILITY & TRAFFIC
• 16 M unique visitors/mo., ranked 115th in USA
• 150 M additional citizens reached via our our
network of media partners
VICTORIES for CAUSES
• #1 petition site in the world, with 90 M
petition signings over 12 years
• 60K new petitions created each year
DONORS
• Pioneer and leader in online, behaviorally
targeted, permission based recruitment of
multichannel donor leads for nonprofits
• 750+ major nonprofits use Care2 as a trusted
source to find new, prequalified donors
Slide 26
28. Multi-Channel Fundraising:
Some Actual Donor Conversion Results
800
Other
700 Telemarketing
# Leads Converted to Donor, Per Month
Direct Mail
600
Online
500
400
300
200
100
0
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22
Months Since Start of 22-Month Acquisition Campaign
29. Multi-Channel Fundraising
Case Study
Nature Conservancy Canada (NCC)
is a leading environmental charity
that conserves and protects areas
of natural diversity
BREAKTHROUGH MULTI-CHANNEL FUNDRAISING Slide 28
30. Case Study
• Channels Used
– Email, Direct Mail and Telemarketing
• Goals:
• Generate actions in support of
NCC’s mission and to build loyalty
• Generate new donors
• Including new monthly sustainer
donors
31. Online Acquisition & Welcome
Email Series
Most recent Survey
newsletter
8,000 new supporters
acquired from
Care2 in Feb-Mar
2011
0 2 wks 4 wks
Donation appeal.
Tested two
versions:
First welcome “Opportunity”
email and “Threat”
32. Direct Mail and
Telemarketing
Direct Mail Prospecting pieces
4 wks 5 wks 6 wks
Telemarketing calls
33. Case Study
Results
Cost to acquire = $20,000
Cost of DM and TM outreach = $34,284
Total Cost = $54,284
Total Revenue so far = $28,219 (as of 2/28/2012)
Net Annualized Cost Per Donor Acquired: $35.39
Net Annualized Cost Per Sustainer Acquired: $195.06
Average Gifts:
Single: $47.53
Monthly: $16.28 / month
Telemarketing & DM
6.1 % conversion rate
•Includes single donors and monthly sustainers (≈10 gifts/yr)
•There are 88 monthly sustainers so far
34. Parting Shot #1
Speed (Recency)
Matters
• Human Rights Campaign
reported donor pledge
rates via telemarketing
were more than 30
percent higher for newly
acquired online leads if
phone outreach took place
within the first four
months after acquisition.
Source: 5700 phone contacts (over 12 mo.)
with HRC supporters who were recruited by
Care2 in April-May 2010.
BREAKTHROUGH MULTI-CHANNEL FUNDRAISING Slide 33
35. Parting Shot #2
Donors and Information from One Channel
Can Feed Another Channel
•HRC’s acquisition campaign with Care2 included an
optional field for people to indicate if they were themselves
LGBT or not. This information enabled HRC to do targeted
Direct Mail pieces
Campaign Package Approach Response
April 2010 Traditional 0.26%
Targeted 0.61%
September 2010
Traditional 0.35%
Targeted 0.57%
February 2011
Traditional 0.12%
Grand Total 0.32%
• DM packages with targeted (straight vs. LGBT) messaging
strongly out-performed the non-targeted packages
BREAKTHROUGH MULTI-CHANNEL FUNDRAISING Slide 34
36. Parting Shot #3
Adding an
End-of-Funnel
Fundraising Ask
…to an Online Donor
Lead Acquisition
Campaign
BREAKTHROUGH MULTI-CHANNEL FUNDRAISING Slide 35
37. Combined List
Growth +
Fundraising
Campaign for
HSI
• Pledge
campaign for
HSI to identify
and recruit
Care2
members who
are passionate
about ocean
conservation
• Conducted
Feb/Mar 2012
38. Combined List Growth +
Fundraising Campaign
• Screen after
supporter
signs up
invites them
to take extra
step of
donating to
HSI, using
secure
donation
form / widget
Benefits:
• Some “instant” donors
• Faster payback on acquis’n campaign
• Good donor cultivation
• Sends signal to all newly acquired
supporters: You should expect to Form and donation processing
be asked for money sometimes via Engaging Networks
partnership
53. Results?
We piloted this strategy with three nonprofit clients:
• Human Rights Campaign
• Mercy Corps
• Oceana
For Online Acquired Prospects
• Email Welcome Series – THUMBS UP!
• Telemarketing – Thumbs Down / Meh
• Direct Mail – Double Thumbs Down
For Face-to-Face Acquired Prospects (HRC only)
• Email Welcome Series – Thumbs Down (may be warm-up effect?)
• Telemarketing – THUMBS UP!
• Direct Mail – Double Thumbs Down
Breakthrough Multichannel Fundraising Slide 52
54. What we learned
Email prospects are valuable
• Even without the multichannel conversion, acquisition of new email
prospects from sources like Care2, Change.org, and other vendors is
paying off for many nonprofits, within 12-24 months.
• The email “welcome series” works, but is very labor intensive. Only worth
it if you are acquiring large volumes of new recruits OR you can automate
it!
If your constituency has a festival or face-to-face opportunities, collect
names and test telemarketing those people.
We can still convert to multichannel donor on the followup, once we’ve got
their first online gift.
This strategy may still pay off if you have puppies, an emergency, and/or a
huge brand name.
Breakthrough Multichannel Fundraising Slide 53
58. Results & Learnings
Results
• Referencing DM piece in the email had little to no effect on the
performance of the email.
• We don’t know what the impact was on the performance of the mail.
• It’s hard to track the impact of multichannel marketing!
What We Learned
• If you are sending email and DM at the same time, there’s certainly no
harm in referencing the mail piece, but this IS extra work.
• Get your tracking in place before you test this!
Breakthrough Multichannel Fundraising Slide 57
59. Hypothesis #3
Post-TM Email to
Pledgers, Hedgers and
Refusals
60.
61. Pledgers Sample Email
Dear <first-name>,
Thank you so taking the time to speak
with us on the phone, and for pledging a
generous monthly gift of $X.
Please fulfill your pledge here using
our secure website.
62. Hedgers Sample Email
Dear <first-name>,
Thank you so taking the time to speak with us on the
phone, and for considering making a monthly donation.
Here at Nonprofit X, we rely on the support of members
of our monthly giving program to provide critical
assistance to families and children in desperate
circumstances around the world – including families who
rely on our help to survive the brutal hunger crisis in the
Horn of Africa.
Please help rush critical aid to people who urgently
need help in Horn of Africa and around the world –
make a monthly gift now on our secure website.
63. Refusals Sample Email
Dear <first-name>,
Thank you so taking the time to speak with us on the phone. We deeply appreciate your support for our
mission and your commitment to helping children and families in most desperate need around the world.
Here at Nonprofit X, we rely on our supporters to help provide critical assistance to families around the
world – including families who rely on our help to survive the brutal hunger crisis in the Horn of Africa.
Supporters like you are making a crucial difference by helping send food, clean water, medicine, and
much more to people fighting for survival in Somalia, Ethiopia, and Kenya, where 12 million people are at
risk after a devastating drought.
We’ve been able to help over 1 million people in drought-affected areas. But the needs are great, and
children are continuing to starve to death each day. We will continue to keep you updated on the situation
as it progresses, and as we continue to rush aid to the people who need it most.
Again, thank you so much for your support during this critical time.
Sincerely,
Signer
PS – If you’d like to make a gift in the future, you can help save lives of people in the Horn of Africa
and other desperate places around the world by making your monthly gift on our secure website.
64. 11 Sustainers
15 Donations
10 Sustainers
37 Donations
Results for sustainer revenue assume 24 lifetime gifts per sustainer.
65. What We Learned
This works! Produces a 3.5% lift on sustainer revenue and 6.5% lift on one-
time revenue from the TM calls.
But it’s a lot of work.
If your TM vendor can do this easily, highly recommended.
If it’s not easy to implement, though, probably not worth it!
Breakthrough Multichannel Fundraising Slide 64
66. In Conclusion
No reason NOT to do multichannel marketing
when it’s easy. Shared visual, message, timing.
When it’s hard, really evaluate the potential ROI.
If you spend $5,000 in staff time to implement a
strategy that nets an additional $3,000 in
revenue, it’s not worth it. Do the math before
you start.
Breakthrough Multichannel Fundraising Slide 65
This chart shows what successful multichannel fundraising results look like – expressed in terms of donor conversion results. These results were achieved by a national environmental group, over a 22-month period. The horizontal axis shows the number of months after the Care2 leads were recruited (signed up voluntarily for the nonprofit organization’s email list). The vertical axis shows the number of donors converting each month, through the client’s conversion efforts. (NOTE: With Care2 campaigns, clients receive email addresses AND postal addresses, which are vital to execute a multichannel conversion strategy.) In this particular timeframe, the nonprofit acquired a total of 330,000 prequalified donor leads and raised $1.1 M, for a net profit of $420K and a 67% ROI, by the end of the 22 months. The ROI only increased after that, as the donors continued donating, and additional leads converted into donors.
Case studies to follow show performance – using a multi-channel strategy -- of 8,000 supporters (a.k.a. donor leads) who were recruited for NCC by Care2 via a campaign in Feb-Mar 2012. It was successful enough that NCC has come back this year for another campaign to acquire even more supporters this time.[Special thanks to NCC’s Teva Harrison for this data! It’s worth adding that Teva also guest blogs on the Care2 Wildlife and Environment cause channel – above and beyond the campaign she ran with us, and her posts generate lots of comments plus traffic back to her organization’s website. So that’s yet another channel she’s using in NCC’s multi-channel strategy – integrating editorial content with online action campaigns for a more holistic approach that taps multiple different sides of the Care2 community.]NCC sent the welcome email within one week of receiving the new subscribers. Since they use one of the major ECRM databases for which Care2 has built an API databridge, we are able to deliver the new subscriber data automatically, but in this case we delivered them via regular CSV files and then Teva’s team manually uploaded the records to their database.The welcome email specifically said “Thank you for signing up for Nature Conservancy Canada’s email list on Care2” and also referred back (for continuity’s sake) to the “Burrowing Owl” cause, which had been the focus of the petition Care2 hosted for NCC.Less than one week later, NCC sent the new subscribers their second email, namely the org’s most recent (March 2011) newsletter about many conservation topics, with volunteer opportunities, a downloadable annual report to donors and other member type news.Then within the following (3rd) week, NCC sent out a third email. This one was a donation ask. They tested two versions of this ask. One was based on a threat to the cause, and one was based on an opportunity. BTW, the clear winner in this test was the threat. The open rates and click through rates were much higher. The threat was to ”natural spaces” being lost through development, and provided scary stats about the rapid loss of wetlands and animal species. The opportunity was to help NCC protect more acreage, thereby protecting piping plovers, bison and wild salmon.Finally NCC sent out a survey. This survey had very high participation rates, with a click through rate 10% higher than on the donation ask email.After those four emails, everyone was put into the regular email stream. What IS the regular email stream? The bare minimum each month is to send three emails a month, which typically are 1 donation ask, 1 non-ask (i.e. a stewardship email) and 1 e-newsletter.In Oct to Dec period, NCC supporters also receive emails asking them to give to the org’s catalog as wellIn case you are wondering, NCC found that this cohort of 8,000 supporters performed pretty well for year end giving ("make your last min gift for tax season”) contributing several dozen new gifts, with an average gift of $58. Not giant, but a good spike.
These DM and TM steps refer to the treatment of the same cohort of 8,000 new Care2 supporters that we covered in the previous slide.It should be noted that NCC only did two mailings last year – one in the spring and one in the fall. They timed their Care2 acquisition campaign expressly to coincide with their spring Direct Mail campaign, so they could put the freshly acquired recruits immediately into that DM campaign. And in the DM campaign they used a similar issue to the one that was used in recruiting the new Care2 members.Before the end of the fourth week after the acquisition, at about the same time NCC was emailing out a survey to these 8,000 new supporters, NCC also sent out a spring direct mail prospect test and included this same cohort of new supporters.NCC mailed to everyone, whether they had a phone number or not. This was not going to be the last time that NCC sent direct mail to the newly acquired supporters. They did it again in the fall, as part of their Fall prospecting mailing.With these mailings, the ask was consistent with the approach taken via the online donation asks insofar as the ask gave donors the option of giving either on a one-time basis OR to become a monthly sustainer donor. Meantime NCC launched its phone conversion strategy, too. Again, the Telemarketing script stuck to talking about the same species that had been used in the Care2 campaign, namely the Burrowing Owl.The Telemarketing script started with a monthly sustainer ask, and then if this was unsuccessful, moved to a single gift ask. That's common best practice (esp in Canada and Europe, where monthly giving is more developed and accepted as best practice). Anyone who was unreachable on the first call received a second call from NCC. Likewise NCC made a second call to anyone who had given only a single gift on the first call, to see if they could be upsold into becoming a monthly sustainer.
It’s worth noting that in this case a data append provided a matching phone number for a large percentage of the Care2 leads delivered to NCC, and then NCC telemarketed to every one of these supporters. Not every organization will do that, because the cost of telemarketing is not trivial. But in Canada, Telemarketing is a long-established and typically very effective channel. ANOTHER RESULT – NCC reports that these leads have proven more loyal than those recruited from other sources, including from events. Of the 8,000 leads, they have retained 81 percent, or 6,451 of them.
As part of this same analysis, HRC found that “patience” matters, too. Of everyone eligible for this telemarketing campaign, more than 5% went on to become paid members of HRC. But this success was NOT immediate. As HRC found, some people donate immediately, but many don’t because they are not ready yet. In this study, 2% of the people who initially did NOT donate went on to become paid members over the next year – and some of these “LATE” converters actually became monthly sustainers.
Integrated campaignsUsing the same theme, graphics, timing in email and direct mail and telemarketingMultichannel conversion stream for new sign-upsLeveraging online data offline and vice versaUsing click-thru data from an email to hone a telemarketing listUsing offline giving history to ask people for the right amount of money online or to target them for sustainer asksOr, very simply, call everyone who gives you a medium-sized gift.