Leadership

In this month’s blog, we sit down for a Q&A with Merkle RMG CEO, Bill Sayre. Bill officially retires from Merkle RMG on May 31. Today we look back on his 20-year career at the company, reflecting on changes, meaningful moments, and visions for the future.

You may or may not know this about me. I was a competitive figure skater for nearly half my life. I haven’t attempted a triple anything in a decade, but I still like to think of myself as an athlete, albeit a former one. So while I’ve traded in my skates for a variety of different foot ware, exercise is never just exercise. Exercise is about performance—how to train more efficiently to maximize my performance.

This month, we sat down for a Q&A with Merkle RMG’s newest senior leaders: Lori Barone, VP of Human Resources and Alex Holtzman, VP of Client Services.

Happy Women’s History Month! My post is a tribute to all the women who came before me, a huge shout out to the women today, and a wish for the women of tomorrow. We are inspirational. We are powerful. We are the future.

2021 brings us all hope, optimism, and the opportunity to make a difference in the lives of our staff, clients and the communities we serve.

2020 was certainly a year like no other.  While we will not be able to fully move on from 2020 until COVID-19 is behind us, I am thankful that there are signs we will soon put the worst behind us.  Vaccinations are beginning to be distributed across our country, our employees remain safe and healthy, and we all have a renewed energy and sense of possibilities as 2021 begins.

Immediate

Everyone faces challenges in their personal lives and work careers. Some of those hurdles are big and some are small with everything in between, but nothing in my experience compares to what we are going through with the current pandemic. Unprecedented in this case is an understatement.

Recent performance trends confirm that nonprofits are acquiring fewer donors than ever before and retaining less of the donors they acquire.  Lackluster response rates in the low single digits continue to plague nonprofits' acquisition programs, while abysmal new donor retention rates remain in the mid-twenties.  Nonprofits need new donors far more than new donors need nonprofits.

Inspired by our industry’s fundraising benchmark reports, Merkle RMG has published our first Nonprofit Donation Processing Benchmark Report.  This report is a quarterly in-depth review of donation processing data to give nonprofits a view into the transactional side of fundraising.

Yes, “why are nonprofits losing half of their donors?” is an important question that fundraisers need to reflect upon.   But it’s not the only question they should be asking themselves, and certainly not the most important.

What are we doing about it? is the million-dollar question, and the answer is sadly, not much.

This month I’ve asked Amy Bobrick, Vice President of Strategy at Merkle Response Management group, to share her journey over the past year of refining and realigning our Rapport offering.