With so many nonprofits today fighting for a slice of the fundraising pie, delivering a strong and consistent brand experience is critical.
There’s a lot of information coming at consumers right now. Donors, in particular, are hearing from organizations every single day. If they’re unclear about the impact you’re making or the work you’re doing, you’re losing out.
Breaking Down Barriers Between Fundraising and Branding
In the offices of healthy organizations, there is a partnership between the Chief Development Officer and the Chief Marketing Officer. They’re working together and leveraging each other’s expertise to drive the brand. Mail, email, and social media are all brand-building efforts in addition to being fundraising efforts.
Melding your marketing and fundraising helps create greater clarity around your organization and your mission for donors who may be engaging across channels and touchpoints. It helps ensure your messaging is simple and clear, and donors don’t have to work hard to understand what you do.
Taking an Omni-Channel Approach to Donor Engagement
The term “omni-channel” gets thrown around a lot. It can also be difficult to differentiate from terms like “multi-channel” and “cross-channel”. So let’s take a moment to define them:
- Cross-channel typically refers to getting someone to jump channels. So if a person is engaging through mail and you drive them online.
- Multi-channel means using several different communication streams. So you could be using digital, mail, social—but they’re not coordinated.
- Omni-channel actually takes all of those communication channels and weaves them together so the donor has a whole experience and sees a complete picture.
What we’re finding in unhealthy organizations is that mail and digital strategy are fragmented. As a result, constituents are getting a different message in the mail than they’re getting on digital. They aren’t coordinated from a relevancy, timely, and personalization standpoint. And that’s negatively impacting results.
The goal is to have an omni-channel communications strategy where what you’re putting in the mail, what’s on your website, what’s on social, they’re all telling a story that’s cohesive and driving your message home. And it goes beyond just these channels. It has to extend to everything from telephone and face-to-face to your annual report and your marketing collateral.
Any and every way your organization communicates—whether it’s labeled as “marketing” or “fundraising”—says something about your brand. Make sure you’re creating clear and consistent brand messaging across the board.
Get more tips for taking your brand and your fundraising to the next level. Download “The Intelligent Fundraising Health Check” now.