Setting Goals for Emerging and Traditional Fundraising Channels

Your soon-to-be-released Revenue Opportunity & Action Report (ROAR) will provide another quarterly snapshot of your fundraising program.  If you have a year or more of ROAR reports under your belt, we hope you will use them as guides when prioritizing resources around fundraising efforts.

As you enter budget planning season for FY ’19, consider setting a goal of identifying three areas of focus that are in need of improvement.  Making incremental improvements in emerging and traditional fundraising channels will strengthen your program and spread risk, rather than betting it all on one effort.

That’s easy for me to say.  How does a small staff with multiple and ever-shifting priorities/duties juggle three additional projects?  CDP can help you move the ‘back burner’ projects to the front burners to help stations move the needle and improve NET revenue.  We will discuss those projects in a series of blog posts that address KPIs on the ROAR report and how CDP scaled projects can help improve those metrics—turnkey projects curated by the CDP team, which acts as an extension of your fundraising staff.

Prior to your budget meetings, I suggest you contact CDP to schedule a one-hour phone consultation with our analyst Lo Hartnett, who can help you identify those areas that are most pressing in the coming fiscal year.  CDP asks that stations have at least one year’s ROAR reports completed prior to a consultation to provide a wider breadth of data for analysis and identification of opportunities.

Goal 1: Recapture lapsed donors

CDP’s national reference file (NRF), comprised of stations delivering data for ROAR reports, currently shows 14 million lapsed donors.  If your station does not currently deliver data for analysis, we encourage you to do so in order to help you identify the low-hanging fruit in your file.

This “trapped value” in current NRF station databases amounts to more than $50 million.  Recapturing that trapped value has the potential to boost NET to mission significantly.

While 90% of stations send out lapsed mail, traditional efforts are costly and the ROI lackluster.  The CDP lab has found that a multi-channel approach using direct mail, social media, email and phone lifts response rates and 3 times the ROI of the single-channel approach.

“Great!,” you say to yourself, “but how do I do all of that when I have a one or two person shop and no additional budget for those channels?”  One answer is that CDP has not only created a multi-channel strategy using a predictive model along with assets and infrastructure to execute that approach using scale to save stations money and open the program to stations of any size.  The kicker is that we structured the pricing based on the performance of the program, requiring no upfront risk on the part of the station.  You pay only for members you reactivate.  It’s the same model we use for our Acquisition project.

Looking to FY ‘19, CDP can help you budget for lapsed recapture using our multi-channel approach.   Contact Mike Sharp here to learn more.

Next time: GOAL #2: Increasing Retention Rates