Direct response testing allows you to find out, on a small budget and with a limited sample size, what will and won’t work on a larger scale – in what we call the “rollout” campaign. At CBA we test creative approach, prospect and donor lists, incentives, offers and more to find the best performer, which will becomes the “control” mailer or email or phone message.

Knowing the statistical requirements for test volumes, we can predict with confidence the reliability of the test outcome. We’re able to project future revenue that will be generated by each fundraising campaign. Armed with this information we can help you create cash-flow budgets and annual income forecasts.

Testing is a sophisticated art and science. It must take into account your realistic budgetary constraints along with a determination of which kinds of tests will be the most productive for your needs. And the timing of testing is critical in order to get you moving in the right direction most quickly and efficiently.

Whether you’re a CBA fundraising partner or not, we invite you to contact us to discuss ideas that could bring your program to the next level.

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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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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 …)

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I recently (January 28, 09) listened in on a “Brown Bag Phone Meeting entitled Fundraising in Challenging Economic Times,” a discussion about fundraising in these difficult times. Our own Luke Vander Linden was one of the presenters. I thought it was productive and useful to PBS stations.

However, I just wanted to express a difference in opinion with one point made during the session.

If memory serves me, there was a comment in response to a question, that in effect, said that the best direct mail packages are the cheapest ones and that letters are just letters, and so, when writing to someone (donors) the best letter is one that is most inexpensive to produce. (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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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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Like everything else, it depends.

Special inserts have a place in a direct mail package, but it depends on their purpose, which should be very specific. The first rule, however, is that an insert should support the primary goal of the package, which is to raise money. It should not have a purpose of its own especially one that is at odds with or a distraction from the goal of fundraising.

A special insert that is time consuming to read or fill-out, like an application or survey, delays the impulse of writing out a check or filling in credit card information for a gift. Documents that entail extra work are going to prolong the quick action that generates a gift. If the insert doesn’t add promotional value to the primary goal, it will split the thought process between two different concepts and the reader will put down all the package components until a “better time” to read, thus ending in a lost response. (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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