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I use TweetDeck to subscribe to a search for the word “fundraising” on twitter, on Tuesday this update flashed up:

RT: @kanter RT @marionconway @marcapitman Fundraising Secret #34: Ditch your email newsletter?

The “RT” stand for Re-tweet, in other words this isn’t you’re idea you’re just passing it along.

The post pointed to this article that comes around to a good conclusion, but gets there in a way that bothers me.

I’ve heard this email-newsletters-don’t-work talk for a while now and it’s just wrong. What people should be saying is emails that have five stories and no clear call to action aren’t going to raise money.

That’s an important difference. It has nothing to do with what you call your emails. If you send out monthly appeals or alerts with five stories and one donate link buried in a sidebar its not going to raise money.

So regardless of what you call it, focusing your emails around a clear, urgent and singular call to action will get you better results. Not only because more people will respond, but also because they will be less expensive (in both time and money) to produce.

An article came across my “desk” this morning that I wanted to pass along. The ECFA is reporting that “most evangelical parachurch ministries exceeded, met or came very close to their 2008 fourth-quarter contributions goals.” You can read the rest of the article here.

Our experience with 25 evangelical clients is the same as this article. Most finished 2008 with higher income than 2007. The last quarter was nowhere near as bad as most feared. December was generally strong after a weak October and November.

The clients whose incomes are down are mostly struggling with issues unrelated to the economy, such as changes in their ministry that have weakened their fundraising offers, brand confusion or underinvestment in new donor acquisition.

None of us know what will happen in 2009, but we can be pretty sure that evangelical believers will continue to give. It’s my prayer that God will shake evangelicals out of thinking that giving just over 2% of their income is generous. Perhaps there could even be a revival that hits the pocketbook. Let’s pray it’s so.

I’m at the Phoenix airport getting ready to head off to Denver, then Dallas.  This morning I had a conversation with someone who has been involved in fundraising and, specifically, direct mail, for as long as me — 30 years.  I talked about why direct mail is still a good fundraising channel, but that with costs continuing to rise (printing, mailing, postage, list rental), and the rapid adaption of new media for fundraising purposes (Internet, email, social networks, viral video) we need to be in the process of developing the new fundraising paradigm sooner rather than later.

I thought my arguement was pretty straight forward and met the common sense criterion.   Even if the creation and adaptation of new media wasn’t part of the equation, the increasing cost of doing traditional direct mail is continuing to cut away at net income.  Sure, we can maintain a decent ROI by mailing smarter.  But we will be raising less net income no matter how you slice it.

My fellow direct mail veteran couldn’t have disagreed with me more.  He said, “I’ve been hearing this kind of talk for ten years and direct mail is still working.”  What he failed to see was the fact that we can still maintain an acceptable ROI in direct mail only because we’re mailing fewer people.  It used to be that you could break even on a direct mail acquisition campaign.  Today, the typical ROI for new donor acquisition is .6 or .7.  Think ahead five or ten years with me.  Costs double.  What happens to the ROI if you’re only raising 60 or 70 cents on the dollar today?

The solution is not to recklessly abandon direct mail.  The solution is to continue refining how you do direct mail while testing your way into integrated multi-channel strategies — online and offline. We also need new metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of this new paradigm.  If we don’t do that, and define the new fundraising paradigm, we’ll all be dinosaurs.  It won’t be pretty!

We have plenty of big successes, but sometimes it is good to highlight the small ones as well. So I’m creating a new thing for the blog, the “mini” case study.

Unlike our full case studies it won’t be as in depth and may be from a very small piece of a campaign. The goal is still the same: talk about best practices, share some knowledge and brag a bit about client success.

The Ministry

Union Gospel Mission Ministries Spokane (UGMM) is a rescue mission ministry in Spokane, Washington. After seeing Dave Raley at the AGRM Conference, they approached Masterworks about working together on an email to integrate into their fall feeding campaign.

The Opportunity:

UGMM had been collecting email addresses for a number of years, but hadn’t been communicating to constituents via email. We saw this email as an opportunity to test if email would be an effective way to communicate to this group. Both UGMM and Masterworks were realistic about the potential issues of emailing a list that hadn’t been used regularly.

The Creative

You can click on the thumbnail for a larger version, but the key piece of the email is the extra permission reminder at the top. If you are trying to reactivate a list that hasn’t been mailed in a while. It’s good to put that permission reminder right up front. Better to have folks use that to unsubscribe, than to mark your mail as spam.

The Results

Overall the email had a 34 percent open rate and a 23 percent click rate. Both of these are significantly above “industry standard.”

We also segmented the list into online donors, offline donors who had given in the past two years and offline donors who’s last gift was more than two years ago. As you expect, the group of “lapsed” offline donors performed the worst of the three, though still above average. What you might not expect is that the online and “current” offline groups both had 20-plus percent click-through rates. I would have guessed that there would have been a bigger drop-off from online donors to recent offline donors.

Looking at the revenue side, technical restrictions prevented us from doing all the tracking we would like, but we were able to do some apples-to-apples comparison.

Looking at just the online donations from the email audience, online donations were up 206 percent from last year. Even more surprising was the fact that there were a few donations from donors whose last gift was over two years ago.

This analysis isn’t perfect, we weren’t able to look at offline donations in the time period to see if gifts were transferred from offline to online, but overall offline revenue data makes that seem unlikely.

Conclusion

By our calculations this appeal generated net revenue. The goal was to do a test, communicate to an underused list and see how many email addresses we had that were still good. We did all that and found that UGMM’s constituents respond well to and can even be reactivated by email.

Of course your mileage on an email list that hasn’t been communicated with before may vary. If you want to learn more about what we did for UGMM, let me know.

DM news recently had an interesting article on color use. Bottom line: traditional color doesn’t necessarily boost results. Creative color use does –

Forget the full color wash. Spot color or a chart of graph (or fundraising offer line) provides added visibility if you haven’t used color everywhere else.

Color can increase brand recognition by 80%. Think about consistent color use for the logo at least.

Innovate with color that stands out. Seth Godwin points out in his book Purple Cow:

“Brown cows, after you’ve seen them for a while, are boring. They may be perfect cows, attractive cows, cows with great personalities, cows lit by beautiful light, but they’re still boring. A Purple Cow, though. Now that would be interesting. (For a while.) The essence of the Purple Cow is that it must be remarkable.”

Today, color is affordable. The challenge is to use it in the most powerful way possible.

I’m sitting at Coffee Plantation.  I don’t mind the noise of the coffee grinder, the chatter of other customers or the constant flow of new customers coming in for their java fix.  I’m an extrovert so this works for me.  I’m also reading Jim Haudan’s book, “The Art of Engagement.”  This book is about how leaders can engage staff in an organization so that they are inspired, motivated and creative.

One of the most significant barriers to creating a workplace like that is fear . . . the “F” word.

Haudan says, “Fear causes us not to be ourselves as individuals.  In organizations, fear holds us back from performing at the level we’re capable of.  When we’re afraid, we’re guarded, cautious and restrained, and we do everything we can to regain a feeling of security.”

Fear kills creativity.  You can’t create when you’re afraid.  Fear is also the antithesis of who God is . . . God is not a God of fear but of love.

I’m not suggesting that you throw caution to the wind.  What I am suggesting is that you pick one thing today that causes you some fear and face it.  Perhaps suggesting a new idea to your boss . . . having a conversation with a co-worker about improving your relationship . . . trying a new concept in your job that might fail.

I read a book a long time ago titled, Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway.  Not bad advice.

Seattle’s “Fund for the Needy” hit a new high in December, up by $5,000 over the previous record, which was that 1999/2000 dot com bust.  A total of $668,000.  Just goes to show . . . “Hard times are here, and the America that gives more to charity, per capita, than any other country in the world is stepping up.” 

Sure makes me proud.  And good to remind others.  Get those heads out of the toilet.  This whole ugly thing can make us better.  These are mainstream, middle class Americans who are stepping up.  One 56-year-old woman from Kirkland, WA told her family to hold off on birthday presents for her, and give the money to the Fund for the Needy.  “It seemed we need to focus on what’s really important.  I don’t have many needs at this point in life.  I wanted to make sure other people’s needs were met.” 

Share that kind of inspiration and you’re sure to touch hearts. 

P.S.  The newspaper isn’t quite dead yet.  This fund is promoted almost entirely in the newspaper (Seattle Times).  Given the state of the newspaper industry, Frank Blethen, the publisher, didn’t mind declaring that “It (this successful fund) just further validates that not only do people continue to read newspapers, but in tough times they rely on them even more.  In these troubled times, it’s our classic role in connecting the community.”

In the fall of 2008, Seattle’s Union Gospel Mission launched its most ambitious and comprehensive multi-channel campaign ever.

In this webinar, Polly Yakovich from Seattle’s Union Gospel Mission and Dave Raley from Masterworks walked through the campaign step by step, sharing lessons learned and practical tips along the way.

Webinar Recording

Download PDF version of slides

1 Meal … 1 Hope Homepage and Video

One Meal . . . One Hope: a multi-channel integrated campaign

In the fall of 2008, Seattle’s Union Gospel Mission launched its most ambitious and comprehensive multi-channel campaign ever.

Tomorrow at 10am PST (2/17), Polly Yakovich from Seattle’s Union Gospel Mission and I are going to walk through the campaign step by step, sharing lessons learned and practical tips along the way.

Register for the webinar HERE.

A few things you can expect if you attend:

• To gain an understanding of the various channels that make up multi-channel marketing.
• To see practical, integrated examples of multi-channel marketing in action.
• To hear important lessons learned from the campaign.
• To receive suggestions for how to execute multi-channel campaigns for your organization.

Participants will be encouraged to ask questions – a valuable opportunity for anyone considering running a multi-channel campaign.

Webinar details

When: Tuesday, February 17, 10 am PST / 1 pm EST
Cost: FREE . . . but really, priceless
Register at: https://meetingvisuals.webex.com/meetingvisuals/j.php?ED=113040757&RG=1

Who should attend?

• Anyone interested in learning more about maximizing fundraising and marketing impact through multi-channel campaigns.
• Anyone in roles responsible for fundraising, marketing/communications, and PR.

Hope to see you there!

Here’s to a happy Valentine’s Day, and a lot of love. As you can see, there’s a lot of love here at Masterworks . . .