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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Recently we set out to determine if the gift ladder we have been using in our Special Appeals is in fact doing its job: getting as many members as possible to become multi-gift donors and maximizing the amount of their gifts.

Specifically, we are looking for ways to increase response and income, but are concerned that too many members are downgrading their gifts.  Although we realize that the weak economy is influencing smaller gift giving, we want to know if any of the suggested amounts are more compelling than others and we especially want to know how the donors are using the “Other” option; to go higher or lower? (Read on …)

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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 …)

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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 …)

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