Here are our Top Six Testing Tips:

To continue Avalon’s 10 essential elements of direct marketing testing:

To kick off our new Best Practices section of FYI, let’s run through Avalon’s 10 essential elements of direct marketing testing, and tips for setting up a good test:

Avalon has run a number of successful tests in our marketing efforts recently, so I’d like to share a few of our best results:

 

• In an acquisition program for an environmental advocacy client, we created a new control package by borrowing from a successful online appeal to update our existing control. We designed a new, visually compelling carrier and a new lead for the letter that referenced the envelope photo. We saw a 27% lift in response and a huge increase in net per thousand – a terrific reminder that a fresh, winning prospecting package may be hiding among your non-acquisition materials…

Farm Sanctuary Conference

Amy Padre, Jeff Mello, and I recently attended Farm Sanctuary’s first-ever National Conference to End Factory Farming, which brought together 300 experts and advocates from the health, environmental, and animal cruelty arenas.

The presentations were moving and inspirational, but also sobering, for example: Inside the Industry: The Treatment of Animals; Animal Sentience: Intelligence, Social Nature, Emotionality; Natural Resources Depletion: Inefficiency and Overuse; and The Inefficiency of Factory Farming in Feeding the World.

Our take-aways include many thought-provoking statistics, and the conference also reinforced the important work that Farm Sanctuary, the nation’s leading farm animal protection organization, performs every day.

Campaign Spotlight: Sustainer Recruitment

Challenge: At Avalon, we’ve always touted telemarketing as the most effective channel for sustainer invitations. One of our clients, a progressive advocacy nonprofit, asked us to confirm that telemarketing is the way to go, before they further invested in a channel that can be more expensive than direct mail.

It’s that time of year again … time to start hunkering down for year-end campaigns and for Avalon’s Top 10 tips to ensure your year-end fundraising is a success.

Held each spring, the National Breast Cancer Coalition’s Annual Advocacy Training Conference is the organization’s national meeting and Lobby Day for breast cancer advocates from around the world.  With this year’s theme “Changing the Conversation” I was really looking forward to it – hearing from the various researchers, medical professionals, grassroots leaders, and public policy experts about the organization’s firm deadline to end breast cancer by January 1, 2020.

So you’re looking for a new and innovative campaign to acquire new donors and retain those already on your file.  It’s not year-end and you want to try something different despite your compelling case for support that has worked well.  This was our recent dilemma for Farm Sanctuary’s March email campaign.

Fundraising always loves a villain. This month’s villain award goes to the National Rifle Association (NRA) for attacking the Center for Biological Diversity, an Avalon client, on the front cover of its members-only magazine, Freedom 1st.