From The Wall Street Journal

While Procter & Gamble used to aim its marketing at the huge middle class, now it is changing many of its products and the way they are sold, because many formerly middle class shoppers are trading down to lower-priced goods.  At the same time, upper income customers are not skimping on more expensive items. So P & G is now marketing to the top and the bottom of the consumer continuum, while targeting less towards the middle.

Does this have relevance for fundraising? Absolutely. It can’t help but affect the type and sizes of gifts that nonprofit organizations can depend on now and in the future. We share the same markets with P & G and every other organization that wants dollars from the public.

(Read on …)

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Our Director of Database Marketing & Analysis, Maciej Przybylowski, handed me a great article from the Wall Street Journal this morning that, while somewhat negative about the future of nonprofits, speaks to the need for organizations to become more efficient if they are going to survive this recession.  Of course, the stories of those that haven’t made it are often heart-rending, especially if they work in feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless or paying for the education of inner-city youth.

But looking at this from a solely business perspective, maybe there are just too many non-profits right now.  (Read on …)

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I have long been an advocate of using sweepstakes (or raffles) to raise money.  We had a very successful sweeps while I was at Thirteen and here at CBA, we’ve helped KQED run their very successful raffle for quite some time.

Sweeps got a bunch of bad press in the 90s as some of them (not ones that non-profits ran) were seen as deceptive, especially to the elderly.  As a result, many non-profits let theirs fall to the wayside (including Thirteen unfortunately).

That’s too bad, as sweeps can be very profitable because they give donors another way to give.  (Read on …)

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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 …)

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When the new presidential administration sweeps into town, bringing its agenda of change, public broadcasting won’t be immune as some major changes are in store in the world of PBS, NPR and the CPB.

An article published late last month by Steve Behrens and Dru Sefton in Current, considers those changes, many of which are laid out in a chapter from the New Democracy Project’s book “Change for America.”  This chapter — and the entire book — should be taken very seriously because Obama has used the services of 15 of the book’s authors on his transition team. (Read on …)

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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 …)

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