The right way to integrate your marketing and fundraising

Blame the donors. They’ve made it so the way nonprofits are often organized has gone from inefficient to catastrophic.

Donors are crossing the neat boundaries that exist in organizations. Most often, it goes like this:

The Development department sends out direct mail. A potential donor receives it. She then goes online to see for herself whether she wants to give. Oh dear — she’s just crossed into the marketing department’s turf.

The problem with that is the direct mail, created in the real world of direct response, looks and feels one way. The website, created in the fantasy world of marketing, looks and feels completely different.

The direct mail was about straightforward solutions to serious problems. It was urgent, concrete, and clear. With rough, simple, old-fashioned design. But the website is all abstract brand promises. High-flown claims of greatness, modern hard-to-read design. Happy photos that depict a world without any particular needs or problems.

The donor might conclude she’s in the wrong place, that the website she’s at is not the same organization as the direct mail that sent her there. Or she might decide the organization is duplicitous, saying one thing in one place and another thing in another place (which is precisely correct, unfortunately).

See the problem?

And that’s where we come to a slightly scary, truly radical, but very common-sense proposal from the Donor-Central blog, at Deconstruction – Org Moves Part III:

Development needs to lead all of an organization’s communications. Yes, that means that PR, web and marketing all need to fall under the control of development.

Why the development department? Because they’re the ones paying attention to actual donor behavior. I’m not talking about the useless blather that comes from focus groups, but real-life actual, measureable behavior of donors. Whatever is happening in direct response — assuming it’s moderately competent and regularly testing — is what actually works. What the marketing and brand people and their consultants come up with is what should work.

Two different things.

Marketing departments that operate in the real world (there are some — I’ve met them!) are a wonderful thing. They bring all kinds of great tools to the fundraising work-party.

Here’s how to get a marketing department like that: Put them in the development department.