At the DMA Nonprofit Federation's 2011 Washington Nonprofit Conference, five fundraising professionals offered ideas for success and growth for this year and beyond. Jennifer Bielat, VP of direct marketing at Easter Seals; Neoma Harris, marketing director at St. Joseph's Indian School; Lane McKinney, senior director of production and analysis at ALSAC/St. Jude Children's Research Hospital; Sherry Minton, director of direct response at the American Heart Association; and Kim Walker, director of direct mail at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, joined Larry May, SVP for strategic development at Infogroup Nonprofit, in the session, "Getting Back to Growth: 30 Ideas for Success in 2011 & Beyond." Here are the first 10 ideas shared.

1. Mine your database

Invest in lapsed donors - they're more valuable than new donors.

Use models to identify best responders.

Verify and work with your warm prospects. 

2. Bond with your new donor

Use thank-you packages.

Mail second-gift packages.

Go back and use similar premium/themes that grabbed lapsed donors in the first place.

3. Model to optimize acquisition

Household-level models identify best and worst responders.

Cuts out 10 percent of the least responsive names.

Provides a 5 percent to 10 percent lift per campaign.

4. Manage your in-house prospecting

When the direct-response team took control of selecting in-house prospects for acquisition at the American Heart Association, response increased 9 percent.

5. Invest in analytics

Analyze and segment your pool of prospects.

Develop predictive models and strategies for donors at all levels.

Provide tools to make decisions about strategy and resource allocation.

Evaluate program progress and model future performance.

Forecast fundraising results.

6. Get to know your donor

Find affinity to programs or issues.

Recognize affinity through variable copy.

Will results in as much as 30 percent higher revenue per donor and 26 percent higher giving frequency.

7. Add an outsider's voice

St. Joseph's Indian School tested a mock newspaper article insert in its matching-gift house appeal. The control had a 3.97 percent response rate and $23.71 average gift. The mock newspaper insert resulted in a 5.63 percent response rate and $33.35 average gift - a 40 percent lift and $9.64 higher average gift.

8. Test state versioning

Reference the number of children treated (or animals saved, or hunger fed, etc.) from the donor's state on the outer envelope and in the copy.

Use state-specific artwork.

Resulted in a higher response rate and average gift for ALSAC.

9. 13-month telemarketing

Reach donors by phone 13 months after their last gifts.

Subsequent revenue from those who received calls from the American Heart Association increased 35 percent.

10. Go beyond RFM (recency, frequency, and monetary)

Examine:

Giving velocity - last gift amount / average of previous three gift amounts.

Time velocity - time elapsed between last two gifts / average time elapsed between gifts for the three previous gifts.

Ratio of giving years to total years - number of years where a gift was made / number of years the donor has been on the file.

Longest Ripken streak - maximum number of consecutive years where gifts were made.

First gift amount - simple, but indicative of overall giving.

In many ways, the joint birthday party in late January for 8-year old Sofia Segalla and her best friend, Clara Goulding, was full of traditional fun. What was unusual, and truly inspiring about Sofia and Clara's party, however, is that in lieu of gifts, the girls requested that donations be made to a Chicago-based nonprofit, Friends of the Orphans, to help children in need in Haiti who were affected by the country's devastating January 2010 earthquake. The birthday guests contributed approximately $900 to St. Damien's Pediatric Hospital.

With over $550 billion in investments, more foundations are trying to align their missions with the investments they make, and they are using proxy voting as a key tactic, a new report says. In 2011, for example, five foundations are the primary filers on 29 shareholder resolutions, says Proxy Preview 2011, a review of the nearly 400 social and environmental resolutions that investors filed at companies this spring.

As job hunts became tough after the crisis, evidence suggested that more young people considered public service. In 2009, 16 percent more young college graduates worked for the federal government than in the previous year and 11 percent more for nonprofit groups, according to an analysis by The New York Times of data from the American Community Survey of the United States Census Bureau. A smaller Labor Department survey showed that the share of educated young people in these jobs continued to rise last year....

What matters most in fundraising is the relationship you establish with your supporters. The stronger the relationship and the better the giving experience, the more people donate. The weaker the ties you build, the worse the results.  

This is especially true of the online experience. People go online because they're seeking to connect with other people, with things they like and with causes they love. Technology enables them to forge stronger connections, and people therefore come to nonprofits with high expectations for the way we treat them online. When we do little to build a relationship, it disappoints. And it hurts fundraising results. The data  proves it.

The nonprofit, Network for Good (a secure, convenient donation system that makes it possible to give to any charity, anywhere, anytime online), spent much of the past year analyzing lots of giving through its platform. The study covered $381 million in donations, including 3.6 million gifts to 66,470 different nonprofits from 2003-2009. The results: Just as the strength of the donor-charity relationship heavily influences offline giving, the online giving experience has a significant impact on donor loyalty, retention and gift levels. The more intimate and emotionally coherent the giving experience online, the stronger the relationship between donor and nonprofit appears to be. In other words, online fundraising is all about relationships.

Giving on social networks is growing, but donor loyalty is highest on charity websites that build strong connections with donors. Donors who gave through charity-branded websites via Network for Good started at the highest amounts - $180 in 2007. By the end of 2009, the average cumulative giving per donor had risen to $257, a 42.8 percent climb in value in two years compared to a 40 percent rise for portals and

8.8 percent for social-networking sites.

Personality matters

The loyalty factor for donors acquired through generic giving pages is 67 percent lower than for donors who give via charity-branded giving pages. Small improvements to the online experience can make a big difference in donations.

Technology gives us the chance to make the act of donating dynamic, compelling, and intimate - yet we rarely take advantage of that fact. Too often, we treat the online medium like a direct-mail appeal or an annual report. Our websites are information-delivery systems rather than relationship builders. And our appeals are sterile when they could be engaging.

Here's what people want when they donate online:

• To give quickly and conveniently.
• To make a difference.
• To feel personally connected to something greater than themselves.
• To feel useful.
• To get the warm glow of giving.

And yet here is what people get:

• A lot of pages to navigate in order to donate.
• A tax receipt.
• Statistics, facts and figures.
• A newsletter.
• An appeal to give (more) money.

The study shows how important it is to close this gap - and with technology we really have no excuse not to. It costs so little to have a branded, intimate

giving experience online. Photos and videos are easy to share. It's very little effort to segment our e-mail lists so we can connect with groups of donors according to what they most value. And it's simple to include one great story with a thank-you.

But while we're improving our supporters' online experience, remember that it's not something to do in isolation. We need to build our relationships online AND offline, together, with the same donors. Online relationships are often deeply affected by offline connections and cultivation. It's increasingly common for donors to switch among channels. They might get converted via telemarketing, then renew their gifts online, then perhaps respond to an offline appeal. Donors who give both online and off are the most loyal and valuable, and multichannel cultivation that blends online and offline elements is the best cultivation.

This year think about and build relationships all year long. Start with the online experience; then ensure it's integrated with everything else you do. That's the best route to true love of your cause.  

Excerpted from FundRaising Success by Katya Andreses, February 2011.