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4 year-end recommendations

It’s the end of the year, and that means it’s time for the End of the Year Campaign.

Every campaign is important, but at the DMA 2014 Washington Nonprofit Conference, Dolores McDonagh of Charity Dynamics, Anastasia Staten of the Foundation Fighting Blindness and Craig Zeltsar and Karen Gleason of NNE Marketing offered several recommendations for a year-end campaign.

Their overall advice was: integrate where appropriate; innovate where necessary. A donor’s past giving history is a predictor of what the person will give to the organization in the future.

Their specific recommendations were as follows.

  • Consider holding a test track out next year.
  • Engage people who have no giving history and encourage opening emails, then convert to donors.
  • Differentiate those with disease code versus those without.
  • Build segmentation criteria into email selection strategy. Don’t just “select because we can” but “select because we should.”

Develop targeted creative to speak to the variety of constituent profiles. For example:

  • Create a year-end giving “event” email message that emphasizes the importance of year-end giving.
  • Support the offline efforts with email copy that references the mail or phone channels.
  • Highlight URLs in the mail or on the phone to people who are “online responsive.”