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.”

Avalon’s Allison Porter, Amy Padre, Bill Tucker, and I attended this year’s annual Nonprofit Technology Conference – always an interesting gathering of charities and techies – here are some of our takeaways:

 

• The session Five Biggest Trends in Online Fundraising was based on Blackbaud’s benchmark study showing that while online revenues are growing, they’re still a very small piece of the pie. Which is why we continue to promote multi-channel marketing all the way! The Blackbaud slide deck is available here.

At this year's Direct Marketing Association Washington nonprofit conference in Washington, DC, Avalon President Allison Porter led a conference session entitled “8 Things Big Nonprofits Don’t Know That Smaller Nonprofits Understand,” which included presentations from several Avalon clients.

As VP of Analytics at Avalon, I always attend industry conferences with an eye out for new ways to use data more effectively. This year’s Direct Marketing Association Washington Nonprofit conference in Washington didn’t disappoint. A couple of data strategies particularly caught my interest:

 

• Target Analytics has a new product for targeting philanthropic web users with web ads. Something I’ll definitely look into, as we’re always looking for innovative ways to help our clients use data to cut donor prospecting costs, while maximizing the number of new donors acquired.

In January, Margaret Romig, Bill Tucker, and I attended Creating Change 2012, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force’s 24^thannual conference on LGBT equality, where nearly 3,000 lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights advocates met to celebrate recent successes, and strategize about the challenges ahead.

 

One of the highlights of the conference was Task Force Executive Director Rea Carey’s State of the LGBT Movement address (read the address or watch the video here). She highlighted the major steps toward full equality that transpired in 2011 – from the end of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” to marriage equality becoming law in even more states, to the elevated national conversation prompted by the bullying of gay kids and the subsequent new anti-bullying laws. And, the extensive changes made at the federal level urged by the New Beginnings Initiative.

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.

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:

Avalon attended the American Museum Membership Conference (AMMC) October 24-27 in Philadelphia. This conference is unique in that it is entirely dedicated to discovery and review of best practices in member service and fundraising for museums. The conference is held each year in a new city in the U.S. chosen to present visiting opportunities within museums that represent the best in museum exhibitions and traditions of excellence in membership fundraising. We had a great time learning with our clients and other museums about what's working for musuem membership programs. Don't worry, we made time for some awesome cheesesteaks, too!

Held October 3-5 in Baltimore, the Convio Summit brought together hundreds of nonprofits and vendors to share what’s happening in the online space.  Geared towards touting the benefits of integrating mail, phone, web, mobile, and other channels, the Summit offered numerous sessions on how best to coordinate direct marketing channels while staying on message.

One of the most interesting sessions I attended at the DMANF Conference last month was about coop databases … “List Coops: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.”  We have all had experience testing (and rolling out) compiled lists in our acquisition programs – and are familiar with predicting demonstrated donor behavior via modeling … but what’s the big deal about nonprofit coop databases?  And what could be so ugly about them?