May 11, 2011

The Fund Raising School is your reliable resource for continuing education and professional development, offering the original Certificate in Fund Raising Management.

 Twitter for nonprofit jobs

Administrative Services Director - San Andreas Regional Center, California
The Administrative Services Director (ASD) is one of four members of the executive leadership team within SARC. The position scope includes oversight for human resources, accounting, information technology, facilities, emergency prepareredness, client transportation and vendor rate setting.

Click for full detail & to apply

See More Jobs from nonprofitjobseeker.com

7 Ways To Train Staff Online

Staff training and development can pay dividends for any organization, but because of the cost and logistics involved, they're often overlooked or ignored. Traveling to offsite trainings and conferences is expensive, and the nature of today's geographically-diverse staffs can make onsite training a challenge.

Technology can overcome many of these difficulties in many cases, without significant expense. A number of viable methods for professional development online make it likely your organization can find one that works. Here's a roundup of the more common options.

Use Existing Recorded Seminars . If your training is not organization-specific, for example, you want to train staff on particular software, fundraising best practices, or on constituent management, why reinvent the wheel? Take advantage of existing resources for an easy, cost-effective solution. Recorded online trainings range from full university classes ( www.academicearth.org ) and fundraising techniques ( www.grassrootsfundraising.org ) to best practices for boards ( http://www.boardsource.org ), and more. There's even online training about online training ( www.idealware.org ).

Direct Mail...
5 ways to increase multi-buyer performance

Multi-buyers are a successful component of many organizations' direct mail acquisition programs. According to Matthew Frattura, director, client services at Paradysz in New York City, for programs that might have lost their luster, consider applying a fresh strategy to significantly elevate multi-buyer performance.

* Package Rotation : A simple change in the offer or creative delivery being mailed to multiple buyers can reignite prospects' interest. A package that differs from what they received upon initial contact is important. Remember that sometimes exclusion can be as effective as inclusion of a “freemium” to invigorate an organization's appeal.

* Segmentation : Don't view all multi-buyers as one homogenous group. Many of these prospects are further qualified by the fact that they appear on three or more of your acquisition lists. Take advantage of that factor; if overall multi-buyer performance is lagging, mail only from the 3x+ pool.

* Bucketing : The ability to isolate pockets of your multi-buyers can be invaluable. Consider ranking your acquisition lists by Gross Revenue and mail only those groups generated by lists in the rank's top half. A variation of this concept is to mail multi-buyers derived from specific list types or categories. If, for example, Subscribers don't perform as well as Buyers , don't mail multiple buyers identified solely from Subscriber lists.

* Modeling : A ZIP code model can be an effective tool for mining your multiple buyers pool. If the pool is large enough to harvest, apply the model's top performing segments to reach the best prospects. If the pool is limited, use the ZIP code model to suppress the lowest performing prospects.

With methods of fundraising proliferating, nonprofit organizations will face a challenge of integrating various approaches for maximum results, rather than having them compete with or simply overlap each other.

At the DMA Nonprofit Federation 2011 Nonprofit conference, David Glass of the World Wildlife Fund, Jeff Regen of M+R and Vinay Bhagat of Convio offered insights into multi-channel marketing. As part of that discussion, they reviewed best practices for integrated marketing, and they reported on the results of groups they surveyed to find out how often they use them.

Their recommendations included the following:

* Acquisition integration practices. Send direct mail acquisition appeals to online-acquired prospects to supplement email appeals: 45 percent of those surveyed do this. Coordinate the sending of the mail solicitations and/or phone calls with email appeals: 40 percent do this.

* Renewals: offline to online integration. Include a Web URL in direct mail pieces as a way to respond online: 87 percent do this. Track the mail recipients who donate online in response to a mailing: 53 percent do this.

* Renewals: online to offline integration. Also send a direct mail ask to a renewing online donor if the organization has a mail address: 49 percent do this. Mail and email renewals creatively matched: 39 percent said yes.

The general belief is that acquisition is one thing and renewal is another, but at the DMA Nonprofit Federation 2011 Nonprofit Conference, one panel took a look at something different: using an acquisition approach for renewal. The results were intriguing.

A panel of Ron Bell of Target MarkeTeam, Cathy Jenkins of Paralyzed Veterans of America (PVA) and Priscilla Ma of Smile Train, moderated by Catherine Tavarozzo of PVA discussed the following:

* Depending on how the donor was initially acquired, certain aspects of that approach should be customized in renewal series.

* Add enhancements to standard renewal approaches to enhance response depending on source (e.g., add labels if label-acquired, coins if coin-acquired, etc.).

* A portion of the PVA nonpremium acquisition uses a coin/paper package (a nickel to nickel-acquired donors). Response increased by 46 percent, and gross per piece increased by 33 percent.

* The U.S. Fund for UNICEF acquires emergency responders using a “bounceback/mailing label” (a shipping label) in renewal. Response increased by 64 percent, and gross per piece increased by 23 percent.