Earlier this month, I attended The National Breast Cancer Coalition’s (NBCC) Annual Advocate Summit, where more than 600 breast cancer advocates came together to share their Breast Cancer Deadline 2020^® work. As NBCC.org puts it, “Not content to just talk about it, advocates gave rousing presentations that included videos, photographs and stories of incredible actions they have taken at the state and national levels during the first year of the [Breast Cancer Deadline 2020^®] campaign.”

You never know what trends will pop up unexpectedly in acquisition programs. Recently, we noticed that multi-buyer list performance has been waning in one client’s direct mail prospecting program. A quick check revealed that this depression coincided with when we’d started using commercially compiled lists. So we did some analysis to see if, in fact, compiled list multi-buyers were pulling down overall multi-buyer performance. For this client, that turned out to be the case.

Pinterest is dead – already? Weren’t we just talking about how nonprofits are jumping on the Pinterest bandwagon? Pinterest was the third most-popular social network by the end of 2011, then dropped like a stone this spring. But is it over? Two blogs (of many on this subject!) examine what’s going on here and here.

The American Film Institute (AFI) made its historic return to the White House in April, where President Obama hosted a 50^th anniversary screening of the classic film To Kill a Mockingbird. AFI was actually founded in the White House Rose Garden in 1965, and what better way to honor AFI than with To Kill a Mockingbird, which AFI President and CEO Bob Gazzale called “…An American treasure – a film of family and fatherhood, justice and equality – all so richly embodied in the character of Atticus Finch." See more on this special anniversary here.

The League of Women Voters has a mature prospecting program. Like many well-established direct marketing programs, it was necessary to prepare for the future marketplace and go beyond traditional trades and exchanges. Avalon designed a modeling program to increase the League’s ROI, and give it a competitive edge in the mailbox by more tightly targeting our prospective donors.

We wanted to share with you a couple more case studies from Avalon’s MAXI Award submissions – the first is a direct mail donor acquisition test, and the second a multi-channel campaign.

 

While our primary objective was to acquire new and valuable donors for our client Farm Sanctuary, it was also important to know if an acquisition audience would be more responsive to tragic or cute animal images on the carrier. The control package focused heavily on the cruelty of the factory farming system and featured a bleak image of a downed pig on the carrier. Conversely, we had had much success with an email campaign featuring a cute animal.