What does integration mean to you?
Posted on Tue, Nov 16, 2010
By Brenna Holmes, Senior Strategist & Account Executive, Interactive Department
Everyone’s talking about it. If you’ve been to any nonprofit industry conferences in the last two years you’ve heard this buzz word an awful lot; but what does it mean to integrate?!
There are many ways to approach this – we’re direct marketers and fundraisers so one of the first things we think of is: Cross-channel integration.
- A direct mail appeal followed up by a telemarketing phone call
- An email leading the way for a direct mail appeal: “Watch your mail box!”
- A text message reminding supporters to check their email (or for smart phone users click through to the website right now!)
- A homepage feature highlighting your latest direct mail package
Or any of the other fantastic combinations of all these channels working together to utilize each channel’s strengths!
But there is also cross-department integration. Which is not only increasingly important to your donors’ experience with the organization, it’s critical to the organization’s own survival in this progressively interwoven world of ours. It’s just absurd if membership, programs, communications, and advocacy aren’t all working together. After all, don’t you all work toward the same goal of furthering the mission?
Personally, it helps me to think of integration from the donors’ perspective. To them there are no departments, no separate budgets that different directors need to meet, there is only the organization. And if you are not internally integrated that will come across to your donors. You risk the organizational voice being lost and being labeled as scattered or worse disorganized and ineffective.
So while it IS important to integrate your fundraising efforts across channels – and it WILL boost your response rates, it is just as important to integrate your entire communications calendar and really begin to build a donor-centric communications plan that includes fundraising, advocacy, education, and engagement/outreach opportunities that allow your supporters to become ever more vested in the mission of the organization because THAT is how you create life-long donors.
So now you’re asking, “How do I do that?”
Step 1: Get upper management buy in (this may be the hardest part) to move on to Step 2.
Step 2: Build an Outreach and Engagement Taskforce with key influencers from each department.
Step 3: Develop a master editorial calendar, showing all of the communications in all channels that a donor or non-donor supporter will receive each quarter for a full year.
Step 4: Develop a list of short and long-term goals
Step 5: Meet weekly to report back and refine the calendar, goals and the tactics that will be used to meet them.
So now that you know … just how integrated is YOUR organization?
