Agency Founder Ann Herzog to Become Board Chair and Senior Advisor

Avalon Consulting Group is pleased to announce that Allison Porter has been named president of the full-service direct marketing fundraising agency. Ms. Porter’s appointment is in recognition of her long-time leadership as the agency’s Co-founder and Executive Vice President.

Since co-founding Avalon with Ann Herzog in 1997, Ms. Porter has played an integral role in Avalon’s growth and development. She is recognized across both the nonprofit and fundraising industries for her direct marketing expertise, creative fundraising strategies, and integrated, multi-channel approach to client programs. Ms. Porter has played a key role in expanding Avalon’s online fundraising practice to be a fully integrated and robust component of client programs. She has also guided the expansion of Avalon’s analytical and reporting capabilities through the development of the agency’s Avalon Analytics^® division and Merlin by Avalon^® performance reporting system.

In the role of President, Ms. Porter will assume full day-to-day responsibilities for company operations and, in doing so, will continue to further Avalon’s mission of helping its progressive nonprofit and political clients raise millions of dollars to achieve their visions for a better world.

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.

Target Analytics’ Index of National Fundraising Performance for the second quarter of 2011 is out. To see the full report, visit:   http://www.blackbaud.com/targetanalytics/benchmarking/nationalindex.aspx

According to an October 25, 2011 AP article, as of late September, Americans’ confidence in the economy is at its lowest since 2009, when we were in the midst of a deep recession. See the full  article at: http://news.yahoo.com/consumer-confidence-lowest-since-recession-160735732.html

Some highlights (lowlights?):

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.

Here’s what we’ve recently seen & heard:

• Google announced on September 20 that Google+ is now open to everyone. As the post goes on to say, “Brand pages are expected to be launched sometime this fall. In the meantime, nonprofit staff can prepare for the launch of the new brand pages, also known as Google+ Entity Profiles, by creating a Google Account and then setting up your personal Google Profile…these best practices will be a work in progress and updated regularly. To be alerted of when new best practices are posted, please subscribe to the Nonprofit Tech 2.0 e-Newsletter.

When budgets are tight and our clients are looking for ways to cut costs, the subject of bringing (or keeping) their databases in-house often comes up. We’ve learned by experience that moving your database out of house is one of the best investments your organization can make.  It should only take three good reasons to convince any skeptic:

The New York Times ran an extensive Giving section on November 2, 2011, in which many of the articles focused on the gap between on-the-ground, local charitable giving that helps individuals — like direct aid to food banks and homeless shelters — and philanthropists who want to find and fund ways to erase poverty and homelessness on a national or worldwide basis.

A group of Avalon staffers headed to Philadelphia in late October for the American Museum Membership Conference (AMMC).  AMMC is always a fun and informative conference, and this year several of us presented some great sessions. We thought we’d also share with you some of the take-aways from the sessions we attended: