Multiple campaigns in December

Lynn Swain

In the last office hours chat, Dale raised the idea of running a retail holiday gift campaign at the same time as an end of year general operating campaign. Danielle suggested that if you split the lists, you might make it work but it would be complicated. As a similar example, here's what I had sent Danielle privately before the office hours, related to the two campaigns we ran in December 2009 at the Gardner -- one for gifts of membership and one for annual fund:

In terms of our two campaigns last December...here's where the internal dynamics and goals created lack of clarity for our constituents. We had some consulting help from Convio which set up our first gift of membership campaign for Mother's Day 2009. On our own, we applied some of those lessons to our winter 2009 strategy.

In early December, the membership department made a "Give a Gift of the Gardner, Get a Free Tote Bag" offer. We ran it to the entire active house file on Dec. 1. We ran it again to those who had not opened the first one on Dec. 11, and repeated once more to those who hadn't opened on Dec. 18. Returns diminished across the three sendings, but overall it yielded 61 memberships and $5885 in revenue. We considered this a success. To improve on it for this year, we've learned since to filter the send list differently; to be less afraid of offending our house file with repeated offers.

Then, starting in mid December 2009, we did a campaign for the Annual Fund. Two messages, on 12/21 and 12/31 to previous Annual Fund givers. No results from the first; one gift for $85 from the second. This was not considered a success. Our questions are: is it because we wore out the donors with the gift of membership campaign? Was the send group too defined? Are our Annual Fund donors still dependent on a letter rather than an email? Should we offer a premium for the Annual Fund, and make the motivation more transactional or continue to appeal to philanthropic motivations? Our goal of participating in this Convio Service module is to improve online Annual Fund results.

Since gifts of membership renew at a much lower rate than other first year memberships, I feel like this year we should come up with some sort of simplified or integrated online offer that will maximize our year end revenue, regardless of which budget line it gets credited to behind the scenes.

Since then, our internal discussion and feedback from the Convio Boston Users Group meeting (which also focused on end of year campaigns) has led us to this conclusion: We'll spend November focusing on a gift of membership campaign (probably only 2 parts, dropping approximately Nov. 15 & 29) and a mention in the sidebar of our December e-newsletter. Then, we'll switch for the rest of the month of December to focus on the Annual Fund (with the support of this service module!)

One clear caution from the Users Group was to watch how much clutter you put in your constituents' inboxes during December. Consider "pausing" some of your programmatic communications to focus on your fundraising campaign. If you explain to other departments in your organization that the campaign helps pay their salary, you may be able to negotiate some timing shifts so your campaign can take precedence in December.

-- Lynn Swain

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

Dale Anania

"We'll spend November focusing on a gift of membership campaign (probably only 2 parts, dropping approximately Nov. 15 & 29) and a mention in the sidebar of our December e-newsletter. Then, we'll switch for the rest of the month of December to focus on the Annual Fund."

I don't know what % of your income is from Gift Memberships, so would caution that the lower the % is, the less focus you should give it -maybe the 11/15 email and the e-newsletter sidebar would be enough. You could do a Thanksgiving Theme for the Give a Gift Membership campaign.

It can be difficult to make the Annual Fund (AF) ask seem urgent, but you need your AF emails to push that urgency button. The donor need to see a clear need and understand what her gift will go towards -something tangible, not just keeping the lights on. Even if the money is for the general fund, talk about some specific things it will buy. If the only urgency is the tax-deadline, you won't be very successful.

I don't know if you could do this this year, but what about an Adopt-a-Painting (AAP) theme. I assume paintings must need cleaning and restoration work done on them. Pick 4-6 popular ones and have donors make a symbolic "adoption" with the understanding that the money raised is for all the paintings. They could also buy AAP for someone else, who would get an eCard of that painting announcing the gift from their Uncle, etc. And members could ask their friends to give them an AAP instead of a holiday gift. Take a look at our Adopt-a-Seal product at http://www.marinemammalcenter.org/what-you-can-do/adopt-a-seal/

Rachael Ahrens

Dale Anania:

"We'll spend November focusing on a gift of membership campaign (probably only 2 parts, dropping approximately Nov. 15 & 29) and a mention in the sidebar of our December e-newsletter. Then, we'll switch for the rest of the month of December to focus on the Annual Fund."

I don't know what % of your income is from Gift Memberships, so would caution that the lower the % is, the less focus you should give it -maybe the 11/15 email and the e-newsletter sidebar would be enough. You could do a Thanksgiving Theme for the Give a Gift Membership campaign.

It can be difficult to make the Annual Fund (AF) ask seem urgent, but you need your AF emails to push that urgency button. The donor need to see a clear need and understand what her gift will go towards -something tangible, not just keeping the lights on. Even if the money is for the general fund, talk about some specific things it will buy. If the only urgency is the tax-deadline, you won't be very successful.

I don't know if you could do this this year, but what about an Adopt-a-Painting (AAP) theme. I assume paintings must need cleaning and restoration work done on them. Pick 4-6 popular ones and have donors make a symbolic "adoption" with the understanding that the money raised is for all the paintings. They could also buy AAP for someone else, who would get an eCard of that painting announcing the gift from their Uncle, etc. And members could ask their friends to give them an AAP instead of a holiday gift. Take a look at our Adopt-a-Seal product at http://www.marinemammalcenter.org/what-you-can-do/adopt-a-seal/

LOVE the adopt a painting idea. This probably would be tricky to pull together before EOY however, like you said. Also, you wouldn't want to exclude folks who just want to give a gift or become a member. I'd use it as an additional, complimentary giving option along with the standard donation/membership form. It could be a campaign on its own another time of year though.

Rachael Ahrens

I have some thoughts on this. In my experience at Conservation International, we had good response from running both a holiday "gift" campaign while simultaneously sending standard appeal messages. Basically, nontraditional eCommerce-style holiday gifts were only a small % of our total EOY revenue so we didn't have a dedicated campaign. Instead, we sent a message in Nov and then a "last minute gift" email closer to Christmas. For fulfillment purposes, the "last minute gift" had an electronic notification only, no premium. The message we sent earlier had a calendar premium.

Then, much like we're doing in the service module, we sent a series of traditional appeal messages during the month of December. This composed the bulk of our revenue. The extra "one off" holiday gift messages were considered complimentary, additional giving options, but not part of our actual campaign. We reported on them separately. The messages even looked really different from our traditional appeals so that the donors would recognize the ask was unique and apart from other messages they got from us.

Our rationale was to give our donors several different ways to support us. We even saw that some folks made their usual annual gift and then purchased an additional symbolic gift for someone else. Because you have a limited amount of time, just be careful you don't bombard your list.

Lynn Swain

Rachael Ahrens:

LOVE the adopt a painting idea. This probably would be tricky to pull together before EOY however, like you said. Also, you wouldn't want to exclude folks who just want to give a gift or become a member. I'd use it as an additional, complimentary giving option along with the standard donation/membership form. It could be a campaign on its own another time of year though.

Hi Dale and Rachel --

Thanks for your thoughts!

Dale, I realized I didn't provide enough context for the gift of membership success last year. The Gardner membership is fairly small, about 3,400 members total. In FY10 we sold about 1250 new memberships, 456 of those weres sold online through Convio. So, those 61 membership in the end of year gift of membership campaign represented almost 13% of our total online sales for the year, and was our most successful online campaign to date. Not something I can just walk away from. The membership revenue goal for this fiscal year is $320,000, while the Annual Fund goal is $80,000. So we can't just cancel the membership drive to focus on annual fund; we need to find a way to co-exist. But I'm hoping that by shifting that campaign back into November, like my colleagues at the NE Aquarium, we do leave the field clear for the Annual Fund end of year campaign.

I do love the Adopt-A-Painting concept. I'm afraid of how literally staff would want to take that, and get into discussions of which paintings, when they're up for conservation, the cost of treatment, etc, and view it as a restricted gift tied to that project. But I think we can overcome that. When our programming dies down during 2011 while we're constructing the new building, seems like a particularly good time to get supporters re-focused on our permanent collection that way.

-- Lynn