Strategy and Analytics
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.
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.
This past week I attended the DMA Nonprofit Conference in Chicago. It was wonderful meeting with clients, connecting with new folks, and catching up with old friends.
Many times, when I return from these industry conferences team members ask, “what was your favorite session?” or “what was your biggest takeaway?”
Yesterday, an article I wrote discussing the value of donor feedback was published on The Grow Report. I know for months I’ve been talking about the value of donor feedback, but this article sums it up nicely.
We’ve been promoting the first phase of Rapport services to our clients — solutions focused mostly on undeliverable mail and our ability to help organizations minimize mail that doesn’t reach its intended recipient and maximize the results of their fundraising campaigns.
As an industry, we are sitting on the precipice of momentous change. I am hoping that nonprofits see this as an opportunity to transform their current approach to donor cultivation, and begin leveraging and utilizing the resources that have always been at their fingertips. Merkle RMG has taken its first step to begin its own transformation with the launch of Rapport last month. Rapport is a suite of strategic solutions that focus on building deeper and stronger relationships between a nonprofit and its donors to improve donor retention and lifetime value.
The reason Merkle RMG is critical is because we are the eyes and ears for a nonprofit. Think about it — we are the first to engage with a donor. Whether it is processing a donation, flagging a piece of comment mail, responding to an email, or answering a phone call — we are first to react to a donor’s behavior.
