Integrated fundraising strategy - what does it mean?

It means using all the latest technology,doesn’t it? I asked myself this question at the the annual conference of the Institute of Fundraising London Group. This was weeks ago, but two ideas have been going round my head in opposite directions ever since. I spent two days listening to a selection of the capital’s most with-it fundraisers, and although the sessions offered a wide range of topics, coherent and consistent themes emerged. An integrated campaign can yield great dividends, but the direct approach is still the top earner.



What do we mean by ‘integrated fundraising’? Just as there is a recognised need among database specialists to keep revisiting the definition of CRM, so it can be helpful for fundraisers to spell out what they mean by this phrase. Speakers at IoF London made clear that it is much more than running campaigns across multiple departments and multiple channels, as modelled in the table above. It is, (like CRM actually) a cultural paradigm requiring campaign managers to involve as many stakeholders as possible in the fundraising mix. The Battersea rehomer with a story to tell about dogs give new homes after months in solitary, and the visually impaired volunteer rattling tins for the GLFB were just two examples on the day of how the direct experience of the charity’s work can create an emotional connection with the donor that elicits the highest and most frequent gifts.

Of course, it’s not just about the next gift. It’s also about the range of ways that an engaged person can support the charity and ensuring that they have every opportunity to do all of them. I would say ‘cross marketing’ in old speak, but is can also be indirect, so it’s about ‘maximising touch points’ and being ‘demand led’ not ‘supply lead’ encouraging and facilitating ‘pull’ not just old fashioned ‘push'. Now you should be thinking about websites with video stories, mobile apps with incentives to go viral, not just Twitter and Facebook but and Yammer and Sprout.

But here’s the thing.
Along with the widespread agreement that integration is key, there was another story – the real revenue earning activity is still derived to a very great
extent from the warm list. You may say, isn’t online giving up very strongly?
Well it is, but even in the US, 92% of giving still offline and online is still
only really strong where it is supported by mass news media. For most charities, last year’s volunteers, last year’s participants, the regular donors – these are still the bread and butter.

Every cause needs new donors, and new technology is a great way to
attract new segments, but the foundation is still the direct approach to the
warm supporter. Yes, do as Guide Dogs do – get your lottery ticket purchasers thinking about legacies and your volunteers thinking about regular gifts. In other words, practise careful nurturing and growth of the contacts on the fundraising database. Key-note speaker Mark Astarita said it too in another way, when he asserted that

UK fundraising will ride out the tough times better than most countries (especially the US where the main model is still the annual pledge!) because UK fundraisers understand regular giving.

Well I would say that wouldn’t I, working for a database solution company as I do?

Are 19 CRM databases really better than 1?

This is the thought-provoking debate prompted by the latest blog by Richard Boardman who styles himself on Twitter as @crmadvisor. As is often the case with provocative statements I found I reacted to this in a number of different and contradictory ways. Firstly, as a leading supplier of Enterprise Wide CRM solutions to the charity sector: “19 CRM systems! What a nightmare!” followed by, “Only 19! We come into contact with charities all the time who say they have hundreds of CRM systems”, and finally “Well 19 may be too many, but you can rarely reduce all the complex relationships in a business to one single over-arching system.”

I can recall more than one instance of implementing a database alongside a team of consultants poring over many-coloured spider diagrams representing every known contact and relationship, only to learn that the [insert catchy name] single CRM project had lost out in the latest organisational re-shuffle.

Richard makes the point that many companies achieve great success with no CRM system at all, although he believes that this is because they never had a senior level business sponsor? He explains that by saying ‘..many organisations simply don’t have the right senior level staff with time on their hands’. I wonder however if the real reason is business need. There is, and should be, a Darwinian element to the rise and fall of systems. If a business, or charity, really needs a CRM it will create one. If that system costs more effort to maintain than the benefit it delivers, it will not succeed.

A core CRM system is an absolute essential for non profit organisations, because commercial accounting and ERP systems are just not suited for the main fundraising or membership application, i.e. the processing of high volume cash transactions with the only deliverable being a highly tailored communication or welcome pack. Cash books and sales ledgers and sales order processing systems just won’t cut it.

As an NFP, there is no doubt, you need a CRM system, but to return to the original question, do you need 19 or should you strive for just 1? At IRIS NFP Solutions, we take a pragmatic approach. On the one hand, many systems that have grown quickly in response to an urgent need, have natural marketing cross-overs with the core system, and should be amalgamated back into a single central system. The much sought after 360 degree view can, and does, provide exponential growth in activity by facilitating carefully targeted cross marketing. However, there may be good reasons in some organisations why even the most obvious candidates (event management, web databases, legacy marketing, regions, sales order processing, etc etc) should not be merged.

Our view is that we should encourage and support the move to an Enterprise-wide system that promotes the 'single supporter view', and we are uniquely placed to support this, but that we should only do this where the synergies are obvious, and the benefits outweigh the risks. Leaving aside the desktop databases, 19 is far too many CRM systems, but equally, one may prove to be an unobtainable mirage.

Friend Ranking and profiling

So I read a few articles about Friend Ranking, and I got to thinking, is this so very different from traditional database profiling? Well of course it is, but its useful to set out the differences, or as the teachers used to say, “compare and contrast”.

In a traditional database, you would go about profiling like this: (skip this bit if you’re an old hand)

1) Extract your data and send it off to an agency for wealth screening. Load the new profile codes back in. American services offer more detail than in shy old England, but even here a lot of information can be gained

2) You have been creating links between all you contacts as you go – employees/ directors/trustees/board members/ family members and so on. (One major art institution I have worked with for a number of years monitors over 100 of these relationship types.) Then look for patterns where people have more than two or three – very often they will overlap with each other because they come from similar backgrounds.

3) Combine step 1 and step 2 and find out who is wealthy and is giving and who is wealthy and is not giving and who knows who.

4) Create an action plan for each of the prospects unearthed through this process. Apply Henry Drucker’s Seven Heavenly Steps, and off you go.

FriendRanking is a new tool offered by SocialMedia that will measure people’s influence by their interactions on social networking sites. The original purpose of this was to try to maximise response to advertisements by including references to your most influential friends.

Step 1 You create a presence on Facebook and other similar social networking sites.

Step 2 The ranking system scans your ‘friends’ and their interactions with each other to find out who influences who.

Step 3 You create an ad which relates to you, but which references the influencers of the people on whose pages it pops up.

Step 4 You turn these ads into appeals for your cause, and you have a sort of peer to peer fundraising network going on, with the profiling, such as it is, all done automatically done for you.

So what’s wrong with that? I have some problems with this approach:

1) The key to success on the Internet is permission – people always initiate their own actions on the net and anything that comes unasked for will not be popular

2) Social networks are supposed to be just that – Social. People do not want to have a financial proposition put to them when they are just trying to make friends. Maybe it could work on the professional networks like LinkedIn, but I have a (totally unproven) theory that LinkedIn subscribers use that network for self promotion, not philanthropy.

3) The whole point about traditional profiling is that you build a list of your best donors and prospects. While ultimately a successful Friendranking campaign might just generate some funds, if you have no direct relationship with either the influencer or the donor, how are you going to maximise the value of that relationship?

Will it just go away? No because Facebook already tried this with Facebook Beacon, and it did not take off – the fact that someone else is trying suggests that the developers are convinced that it can be made to work, its just the approach that needs to be perfected. I think we are going to have to take Friend ranking seriously whether we like it or not!

How safe is your Donor Data?

Had just sent off a piece to our marketing department on data security when I received my invitation from the Institute of Fundraising Technology Group to attend their session on this very topic (Sign up here)- so seems this is an issue on a few people's minds. I had started my piece by describing a cartoon I saw in a national paper recently, which showed one commuter saying to another ‘I never buy the Times anymore – there’s always those secret papers to read on the train these days’.

I sometimes wonder if stories of data loss is like those shocking crime statistics, that when you investigate them a bit further, you find out it was always going on but just not reported in the same way. Surely, in the days before the Data Protection Act we were always leaving large volumes of personal data lying around in some form or other? Well, maybe so, but actually we were constrained by the technology. For my first ten years in this business, all our client data was stored in Oracle databases on Unix platforms. Its not easy to leave that kind of stuff around on the train.

However, data sticks with Excel spreadsheets are a totally different proposition, especially now Excel 2007 has the 64000 row limit removed. We should not be surprised by the spate of recent embarrassments. The MOD, the HMRC, and the DVLA have all been in the news for the wrong reasons - I dread the day when a national charity features in one of these stories because the knock on effect for donor confidence could be severe.

So how do we minimise the risk of that happening? The key is to ensure that users can access their data, and move it around without removing it from the network. Let’s look at some scenarios. If data needs to go outside the organisation, perhaps to a mailing house or database supplier, there are two safe routes – you can encrypt it using a tool such as Private Crypto before emailing it, or you can copy it to an FTP site with a secure user-friendly utility like Filezilla. If you need to use data at a branch for a local event or mailing, most database packages will allow browser-enabled access to your central database across the Internet. If you need to share a report which contains thousands of rows of name and address data, and you don’t have a database with easy remote access, or it is not appropriate to grant access to the target audience, why not upload it to a secure document sharing site such as Microsoft’s Windows Office Live which is a freely available cut down version of Sharepoint? The IT For Charities site also has a number Internet Resources for UK Charities which should give you a few more ideas.

Of course as with all IT issues, the management side is just as important as the technical aspect. Database packages now make it easy to export data to spreadsheets, and from there to data sticks. Guidelines should be clearly set then, so everyone understands that when dealing with large volumes of personal data, leave it on the network or the Internet where it can easily be secured, not on the train next to the MI5 secret papers!