Marketing Imperatives for Nonprofit

About the Marketing Imperatives for Nonprofit

Growth-oriented fundraising organizations, who are seeking new donors and revenue streams, are challenged with increasing complexity in many aspects of their campaigns.

• Audiences: How can we add more segments to accomplish objectives, such as reaching a younger demographic to engage the next generation of donors; migrating our cause into multicultural segments; or reaching friends and family of current donors, who are also connected to the mission?
• Programs: How can we optimize budget and resources for legacy fundraising programs, even as the organization expands into new direct marketing donor programs, such as monthly giving, (new) events, advocacy, mid-tier giving, corporate and employee giving, etc.?
• Channels: What will it take to maintain a sound understanding of the shifting digital space, sort out the real opportunities for scalable revenue, and optimize spend across the channels?
• Data and Technology: How should we plan, assemble and deploy the right data and infrastructure to support our multi-channel fundraising vision and get that complete view of the constituent?
• Organization: Who will ultimately make this happen, and how must our teams evolve so they can work together to focus on the constituent and create a fully integrated experience every day?

In Merkle’s 2014 Marketing Imperatives, we highlight the greatest opportunities for organizations, both commercial and nonprofit, to meet these challenges. We introduce the digital audience platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Google, etc., that are assembling the tools, data and access (to a massive consumer base) necessary to drive giving programs at even the largest nonprofits – and they are capturing the fundraising budgets that go with it. As a result, they are now beginning to achieve addressability at scale (AAS) – literally providing the capability to target individual named prospects and donors with highly personalized advertising and engagement that change the economics of fundraising. And just as we have seen in previous marketing shifts, there will be clear winners and losers among these platform players.

The Imperatives further expound upon Connected CRM (cCRM)™, Merkle’s proven framework for exploiting the digital platforms and, more generally, for organizing your efforts to address each of the challenges outlined above. It turns out that to truly and effectively grow your fundraising programs, you inevitably will need to tackle the hard problems by using analytics to optimize across media, channels, and programs; assembling and building the constituent data and infrastructure; effectively restructuring around the constituent; and managing organizational change.

Within the Nonprofit Group at Merkle, we understand fundraising in 2014 and we’ve assembled the right skills and services to help you navigate this cCRM landscape. We encourage you to dive into the 2014 Marketing Imperatives, calibrate your organization against the big opportunities and sit down with our team to take the journey together.

Merkle has spent two years building the foundation of Connected CRM (cCRM), and through our award-winning, annual Marketing Imperatives initiative, we have been laying out the principles and framework for building customer strategy as a business strategy. The 2014 Marketing Imperatives build upon the 2012 & 2013 releases, and illustrate the massive opportunity of addressability at scale enabled by the evolving digital platforms. During this information-packed webinar, attendees learned how to: