Tips for using multichannel marketing if you’re NOT on the Obama Campaign
	Posted by Tad Druart at Jan 29, 2009 04:13 PM CST Categories: Email Marketing, Fundraising, NPtech

During the 2009 DMA Nonprofit Federation’s Washington Nonprofit Conference  this morning,  keynote speaker Meaghan Burdick, Director of Direct Marketing, Obama for America spoke about the success of President Obama’s campaign at using multiple channels to reach, engage and inspire supporters around a movement for change. While she talked about the success and failures of their traditional direct efforts, she also talked about how they used text messaging and online. One point she made about online stood out to me: “Online allowed Obama to speak directly to people- going around the traditional channels  in real-time.” In addition to creating a movement she said they had a staff of more than 5,000. Since most nonprofits are not even close to that, I was looking to the session that followed. Convio founder and chief strategy officer Vinay Bhagat’s session on multi-channel marketing with individuals in and out of the nonprofit sector who did not have the staff or money of the Obama campaign.

One of the interesting ideas floating around the halls is does online just pull money from the traditional direct mail, telemarketing or direct response channels? It wasn’t long before Terry Macko, Chief Marketing Officer of World Wildlife Fund shared their experience – in short “NO, it does not.”  You can listen to Terry talk about diversification of their channels in this YouTube clip. WWF took direct from 80% of their mix to 60%, but the dollar amount stayed the same.  Nice.

R. Scott Cone, Vice President, Client Leader at Merkle shared his experience with both nonprofit and for profit clients. A key point that he made is that few organizations or companies are doing it really well, but that’s no reason to not work toward integration of the multiple channels. He shared some stats that prove the ROI. But he also said it’s not just about the channels, the organization needs to integrate as part of operations. Break down the silos between roles, share the data, ideas and work together.

Celia Stokes, Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of K-12 a public company in the online education market (though as she pointed out in the presentation, that does not begin to describe her company – sorry Celia, but for space, I’ll leave it at that) talked about how there is no “silver bullet” to find the right mix in multichannel marketing. She also spoke about understanding your mix and knowing where the leakage occurs so that you can plug the holes where you’re losing constituents.  Optimize the low-hanging fruit, but don’t get complacent; “in my first year, the low hanging fruit was on the ground, now we have to reach up.”  One other key comment she made was never stop churning the water for new constituents.  At my breakfast table one of the people was telling us how they are cutting back on their prospecting given the economy.  According to the successful panelists, that is a bad idea.

Even the Obama folks tell us they had some bad ideas, but they worked through them. In a way Terry echoed what Meaghan said when he told the packed room to “never be satisfied.”

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