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The Campaign Life Cycle begins with a plan for the campaign. During this phase strategies for the campaign are formalised. Database segments will be decided upon and decisions will be made in regard to the use of rented lists.

Always have a response ready for the question ‘Where did you get my name’.

Direct marketing is one of the most popular approaches not for profits employ for reaching out to their constituencies. “Direct marketing” is an umbrella term for all types of email/mail/phone communications, not just fundraising communications. Here are some examples of what direct marketing encompasses:

•Fundraising appeals

•Newsletters

•Event invitations

•Other publications (i.e. Annual Report)

•Advocacy alerts

•Acknowledgements

Direct marketing has traditionally been a relatively low-cost way for not for profits to reach high numbers of supporters. It supports the development of a progressively deeper relationship with a supporter, in which giving ideally becomes a reciprocal relationship between the donor and the not for profit as they partner to further the mission of their shared cause. Direct marketing is often a stepping stone to other supporter strategies, particularly planned giving and major gifts.

These days, communications that integrate both email and snail mail, or postal mail, components are becoming more and more common. It’s becoming increasingly important to target communications to the right supporters via the channel that they prefer and that is more likely to increase results — whether that result is a gift, a request for more information, a click-through to a website, a sign-up to an email list, an advocacy action, or a volunteer commitment.

Direct marketing communications typically follow a similar life cycle no matter if the piece is a fundraising appeal or a non-solicitation communication. The cycle begins and ends with the central donor database. The cycle begins with planning, moves through execution, and finishes with analysis. The data collected from one communication (whether or not a supporter responded and what that response was) should be used in the production of the next communication.

In this guide, we focus on the “Segment,” “Send” and “Analyse” areas of this life cycle.

If your organisation has a small program that mails several times per year to all contactable constituents (a couple of appeals and a newsletter perhaps), it may be time to look into segmenting your data to glean information about who your supporters are, to take the management of your program to the next level, and to relate more personally with your constituents to maximise giving/participation.

If your organisation already employs a segmentation strategy, you can use tools to make the most of your plan.

There are many advantages to segmenting your data for direct marketing communications:

•Understand your constituencies better.

•Discover trends that help you improve your approaches.

•Gather knowledge to make intelligent decisions about who to target for different communications.

•Discover potential groups with whom you may not have been communicating.

•Use your budget wisely to communicate with those who are most likely to respond and engage with your organisation and do so in a way that makes their response more likely.

Note that segmentation does not have to be complicated. It works better when your plan is clear and makes sense to you. Your organisation probably already thinks about your constituencies as different groups (board members, major donors, current donors, lapsed donors, prospects, people with certain interests, people who have opted in or out of email, to name just a few), but perhaps haven’t carried that over to creating segments and measuring performance of each group. As you’ll discover in the next section, the level to which you take your segmentation should be determined by the level of detail you need to see in your analysis.

Segmentation of fundraising appeals is often organised around three axes: recency of last gift, frequency of giving, and monetary level of contribution (collectively referred to as RFM). Different combinations of these criteria can quickly cause an appeal to grow up to ten or more segments.

If your organisation hasn’t dipped its toe into segmentation, the first thing to do is develop your plan for an upcoming mail/email/integrated campaign. If you’re experienced with segmentation, you may find this process helpful for organising your approach to your next campaign.

The first step is to define the universe of constituents you want to include in your campaign. In addition to thinking about which constituents you want to contact, it is extremely important at this early stage to think about exclusions and channels that will be used.

Exclusions (also called suppressions) are the criteria that would keep someone out of your campaign.

Channels are typically email, mail and phone. It’s important to know at the beginning which channels will be used in this campaign so the segments can be created correctly.

Exclusion Example

•Deceased

•Email opt-out

•Mail opt-out

•Address lines blank

•Major donors

•Board members

•Organisations

•No solicit

•Recent donors

Next, break your universe into smaller groups and describe them. These are the groups whose performance you want to track and analyse. They can be simple or complex, depending on what you think you will gain from increasing the level of detail. This is one area where organisations can unintentionally make things hard on themselves — by slicing their segments too small to be significant in the analysis. Doing so creates extra work in the production of the campaign and makes reports confusing. Try to stay focused on key characteristics that are meaningful to your organisation. These are commonly based on financial, demographic, geographic or participatory criteria.

thankQ can define segments based on any data that is included on the contact record as well as certain associated records such as donations, relationships and classifications.

 

Next, order the segments from highest priority to lowest priority. Do this by asking yourself the following question: If a constituent qualified for two segments, which one would be more important for them to be in? Don’t worry if your criteria overlap or are not mutually exclusive.

If necessary, get more specific about what criteria will be used to create each segment. For example, if your plan has included a segment for “Current Donors” up to this point, make a note of what that means, such as “anyone who has given a cash gift in the last 18 months.” You may need to split this group into further segments for “those who will receive email” and “those who will receive mail” for an integrated campaign.

Below is a sample segmentation grid for a fundraising appeal.

 

There are some conditions under which it may make sense to export raw data and create the segment groups outside of thankQ if your data must be merged/purged against another data set before the campaign is sent

 

In these situations, be sure to export all the data from thankQ that will be needed to create the segments outside of the system. In addition to the usual addressee, salutation and address fields, this often includes some summary giving information or demographic characteristics. The data extraction may include fields that differentiate between hard credit giving, soft credit giving, and combined hard-and-soft-credit giving.

 

Above all, be sure the Contact/Serial ID is included so that the records can be updated when the campaign is complete.

Measuring the Success of your Campaign

Before running a campaign you should understand how you are going to evaluate its success and what tools you will use to do this.

For example:

•What statistics do you need from the campaign?

•How do you know if it was a good result?

Understanding your database

•What were the giving patterns of the last 4 campaigns?

•How did the giving patterns vary when comparing this year’s and last year’s campaigns?

•Over the last 3 years, who gave the most?

•How many donors do you have?

•What is the demographic breakdown of your donors?

•What was the Gross Revenue from each of the last 4 campaigns?

•What did each campaign cost?

•What was the Nett Revenue from each of the last 4 campaigns?

•How many mailing items were returned?

•What strategies did you use to follow up on returned mail items?

•Did your campaign help to rebuild the relationship between you and your donors or did it simply raise more funds?

•Did you track your campaign on a week by week basis?

•What was the Attrition versus the Acquisition for each of the last 4 campaigns?

Using a SWOT Analysis in Preparation for Your Campaign

Analysing the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) is a useful way of reviewing your organisation’s activities. It’s a great tool for use during the Campaign Planning Phase.

Using SWOT you can

1.Remind your organisation of its competitive advantages.

2.Become aware of any weaknesses or gaps that you will need to avoid.

3.Capitalise on opportunities that a direct mail campaign could open up.

4.Understand any external threats that your organisation may need to take into account during your campaign.

Strengths

What can you offer that nobody else can? E.g. The size of your organisation, your reputation, supporter base, ability to network, public image, previous successes?

Weaknesses

What could stop you from reaching your direct marketing goals? E.g. Improving your database, responding appropriately, your budget, the clarity of your message, you ability to communicate with your audience.

Opportunities

What opportunities do you have? E.g. A growing population or geographical area that you can target, lists of lapsed members or donors you could attract back, a new product, appeal, scheme or offer or an ability to deliver something unique?

Threats

What threats do you face that could impact negatively on your Campaign? E.g. A similar/rival organisation active in the area, a similar campaign that has just been run by another group?

Developing an Action Plan

•Develop an action plan for your campaign?

•Use the findings of one campaign to formulate the strategies for the next campaign?

•Formulate your plan?

 

 

 

 

Testing your Package, Strategies and Design

Each campaign should be tested to check on the following.

The Strategy, Design and Package

•Use the results from other campaigns to drive your next campaign

•Choose a test element e.g. change one aspect of your campaign such as different offers, different formats, letter, length, pack size, response devices, creative format, target audience and timing and see if it makes a difference

 

Tests need to be run on a sample size of your data that is statistically significant.