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’re all about crunching numbers and evaluating returns, especially when it comes to benchmarking how our clients’ program performance stacks up against similar organizations. We recently compiled Avalon clients’ fundraising results across various industries, like arts and culture, environmental and conservation, and advocacy – check it out for a sense of how your results compare. We’ve also included a quick reference guide to help you delve into your spreadsheets, recognize meaningful stats, and plan your next outreach to donors or prospects. And as always, Avalon is available to dive into the data beyond with you!

There are many ways to describe data – and its benefit to your fundraising programs.  The word beautiful, though, hardly comes to mind.  What a shame (really!)

In an effort to define benchmarking performance for Avalon’s clients – and our specific markets – Avalon has compiled 2011 online fundraising performance metrics for our clients and compared them to the 2011 benchmarking numbers from The eNonprofit Benchmarks Study (by M+R Strategic Services and NTEN) and The Convio Online Nonprofit Benchmark™ Study. The results are pretty impressive.

There are few things more valuable to a nonprofit’s fundraising potential than the integrity of its data.  For if our data isn’t clean and complete, how can we distinguish with certainty between a donor who has given 12 times over a lifetime vs one who has given only twice?  Clearly the way we recognize those two donors should differ … the way we interact with those donors … the way we solicit those donors.

Yet, I’ve recently witnessed a disturbing trend that ultimately negates the value of understanding one’s data, and therefore one’s donor file … and it’s happening during the database conversion process.

Target Analytics’ donorCentrics™ Index of National Fundraising Performance for the 2010 Fourth Quarter was recently released and has created quite a stir!  Although the organizations in the study held revenue steady in 2010 “donor populations have been shrinking consistently for the past four years.”

Targeted marketing … modeling … predicted response ... techniques we all talk about that are frequently used to go beyond traditional segmentation strategies.  But what do they really mean?  How do they really work?  To follow is an article I wrote recently published in the April issue of AdVents – DMAW’s monthly member newsletter – that outlines how one Avalon client used predictive modeling to maximize their net returns.

If you have any questions, I’d love to share other successful predictive modeling case studies.

Political campaigns and nonprofit organizations have increasingly embraced the power and potential of multi-channel direct marketing fundraising. Much resulting discussion has been devoted to leveraging the unique strengths of various media, ensuring consistent messaging across online and offline channels, and empowering donors to participate and contribute on their own terms.

 

Less discussed, however, is how organizations financially account for the complexities of multi-channel dynamics—and, specifically, the importance of “matching back” online revenues to direct mail sources in order to ensure marketing ROI is accounted for properly.

We’re still tallying the results from our clients’ 2010 year-end online campaigns—but if returns so far are any indicator, it was a very good year-end campaign season.

The strong performance we’re seeing also supports what we on the online team have always preached—that, online efforts can’t just be stand-alone fillers to year-end programs.  To be most effective, year-end online campaigns must be strategically designed as a comprehensive email series that is coordinated (across emails, as well as across all year-end direct marketing efforts), well-timed, and focused on a specific gift deadline.

For years results have proven that donors with phone numbers yield stronger returns than those who do not. But could the same be said of donors with email addresses? Is our assumption correct? Does appending email addresses to our files boost results?