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2. The charitable experience is shifting from a tight circle of donors to a looser circle of engagement.
“[Direct-mail fundraisers] build a tight circle of donors around our organizations with an expectation that … those donors will be quite valuable to us over time,” O’Brien said, adding that online fundraisers have the same goals but use an entirely different approach.
“We’re solving the equation in a very different way — paying less to acquire a name and expecting less value per name in return,” he explained.
3. People move fluidly back and forth across channels and up and down in their level of engagement.
Unfortunately, O’Brien said, supporters move much more fluidly than organizations do.
“As people move around inside that circle of engagement, we’ve got to get a lot better not only at tracing their movement, but at guiding it in directions that lead to stronger relationships,” he said.
4. There is a generational and technological shift from obligation to excitement.
O’Brien explained that fundraisers need to understand the different generations, how and why they give, and then adapt to their ways.
He called people 65 and older the “last generation of direct-mail die-hards,” explaining that many in this demographic aren’t online and those who are limit their use.
“There’s no multichannel strategy available for dealing with these folks,” O’Brien said. “But there is a big risk that as the center of gravity inside a direct-marketing program gravitates toward the online channel, the direct-mail conversation with DM die-hards will become less robust.”
Unlike their older counterparts, he said, baby boomers give because they believe in a cause, rather than out of a sense of obligation. And they can be reached both by mail and e-mail.
Finally, there are those “Internet-immersed folks” who are younger than the boomers — Gen X, Y and the Millennials.
“These folks are never going to evolve into the … philanthropic values of their parents,” O’Brien said. “Duty? Forget it. Relevance? To a degree. But the real watchword for these donors is excitement. They are used to having the world at their fingertips and to reacting in the moment to whatever is in front of them.
“And that defines their giving style,” he said.
The key, he advised, is to communicate with each of these groups in the ways they want to be communicated with, so as not to lose any of them.
5. What happens today in commercial direct marketing will happen tomorrow in nonprofit fundraising.
O’Brien said nonprofits should watch, learn and take a cue from commercial direct-marketing agencies.
“We’re in a fast-moving marketing climate where new trends and developments appear on a regular basis,” he said. “And looking outside of the narrow world of nonprofit fundraising to the broader direct-marketing community is really essential.”
6. There’s an urgent need to have an easily expressed, emotionally powerful identity.
“Every piece of communication we do on behalf of our organizations has two key functions,” O’Brien said. “First, it has to be engaging and compelling in its own right. Second, it has to reinforce and deepen the recipient’s understanding of the organization’s core narrative. Nothing about the emerging fundraising environment changes the importance of brand.”
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PURLs for Profit
Secrets of List Research (2nd Edition)
