In my 15+ years working in and along with public broadcasting, there’s been a growing debate on the role of “membership” in individual fundraising and whether it should continue to be emphasized in pledge drives and direct mail — or even continue to be the model at all.  The generational argument is the one most often used — that Boomers don’t like to join things like their GI Generation parents did.  That they don’t like the perceived commitment but would rather just throw their money at something and take their tote bag and run.  And certainly many of those community bastion-type organizations popular in 50s and 60s civic life — the Lions Club and the Elks and their kin for example — have seen their numbers dramatically fall over the last few decades.

So, on public broadcasters’ websites, we don’t see “Join” or “Become a Member” as much as we see “Support this station.”  But is that still the right thing to do?  Has that tactic really borne fruit in the half dozen years or so since it was summed up best in a study that net consulting firm Adaptive Path did for PBS? (Read on …)

Last month, CBA issued a report on public broadcasters’ results from our co-op campaigns in August and November 2008 to see how stations were weathering the economic storm.  While November’s results were encouraging in that they showed a recovery from a soft August, the jury was still out for a sustained recovery.

The verdict is now in and the results from March 2009 seem to confirm a very positive trend.  Significant improvement was seen in response rate and ROI across all major areas of fundraising: New donor acquisition, Lapsed member reinstatement and Additional Gift campaigns.  Average Gift was for the most part unchanged.

Here is a summary of those results.
(Read on …)

Background
A few months ago, CBA Vice President Brooke Coneys wrote an article entitled: “What’s in a Name? I Should Know,” in which she described the testing we conducted for Tucson’s KUAT television and radio properties as they incorporate their stations into a new entity called Arizona Public Media or AZPM.

In the summer of 2008, we tested using the original station name and logos against the new AZPM brand in acquisition, add gift and lapsed fundraising campaigns.  We’d like to bring you up to date on the test results and progress in incorporating the change of brand into the membership fundraising program. (Read on …)

CBA has been in the business of helping others via direct marketing for over 32 years. We often receive praise and criticism from the organizations we partner with. But I don’t remember ever being critiqued by a member/donor who received our mail piece.

Pat Callahan, Director of Membership at AZPM Tucson (formerly KUAT), passed along notes written on our December ‘08 special appeal letter from one of her members.

(Read on …)

CBA has developed a ZIP enhancement model called the “ZIP Performance Index” or ZPI, to allow regional organizations to more effectively allocate their marketing resources by applying prospect selection and deletion intelligence based on geographic location and other influential variables.

Recent scholarship has shown that over the past several decades there has been an increasing level of clustering in America, such that people with similar ways of life, beliefs, and politics are self-segregating into states, cities and importantly, even neighborhoods.  Our experience in looking at results of direct marketing campaigns by geography has proven that certain areas – most easily defined by ZIP code – perform consistently better for organizations than others.  This behavior, when coupled with basic demographic data such as income, gender and age, and when analyzed correctly, leads to targeting the most profitable areas and the most profitable list segments for acquisition campaigns. (Read on …)

We were pleased to be mentioned in a recent e-newsletter and blog from Denny Hatch.

Denny puts out a regular e-newsletter presented by Target Marketing Group entitled, Denny Hatch’s Business Common Sense.

In this particular article, he discusses what The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles should do to get itself out of it’s own financial crisis.

The full article can be found here.

Be sure to read Carl’s comment.

About Denny Hatch:

Author, direct marketing guru, and always entertaining Denny Hatch focuses on a major story in the news and shows how businesses can take advantage of–or avoid the pitfalls from–the lessons to be learned in terms of marketing, sales, PR and communications.

It has been an unusually active year for our clients changing the names of their organizations. We have two public broadcasters and a health care client who did.  The need to reinvent themselves happened for a number of reasons — they wanted to come across as innovative or be forward-looking in embracing new media or primarily to honor a donor who gave them a huge endowment gift.

Their chief concern is whether current donors and members will recognize them as the same organization they’ve been investing in for years and whether they’ll appreciate and accept the change as justified and being for the better. (Read on …)

It couldn’t have come at a worse time. Public broadcasters were scheduling or into their pledge drives; service organizations, libraries and museums were planning their holiday and year-end direct mail campaigns; candidates were out looking for that last influx of cash before Election Day.

The credit crunch and resulting financial crisis has devalued people’s homes and their 401(k)s. And the resulting economic morass has put a lot of good people out of work.

These problems must certainly affect philanthropy. How much remains to be seen. It will be a product of the many uncontrollable factors of the market that keep hedge fund managers and development directors up at night. But it will also be the result of how each organization itself reacts to the tough times. (Read on …)

Many non-profit development offices are moving away from the raffle (sweepstakes), even though it’s a tried-and-true tool for obtaining extra gifts and acquiring new donors. I know a number of public TV stations that have dropped raffles from special-appeal and lapsed-reinstatement programs, and an advocacy group that has been doing raffles for years and would like to get rid of them. The complaints include:

• Raffles are too much work.
• It’s too hard to get prizes.
• They have to assign a staff member, part or full-time, to handle prize procurement, production, rules and other details.
• The raffle is an unnecessary or unprofitable expense.

(Read on …)

Public broadcast organizations are struggling mightily with drop-off in their membership. They’re not the only ones, but they have begun to focus on the problem as an industry priority.

So it’s surprising that more organizations aren’t trying new ways to use their member data. Specifically, the tried-and-true concept of direct-response segmentation can yield big jumps in renewals. It just takes a little work. Okay, maybe a lot of work. But it’s worth it.

(Read on …)