Strategy & Analysis

In January 2013, when I was a partner at Carl Bloom Associates, I wrote the cover story for the Journal of the Direct Marketing Association’s Nonprofit Federation on the surprising best way to inspire an online transaction (spoiler alert: it was direct mail). While the article has aged quite a bit, its fundamentals are still the same: You have to use multiple tools to reach your target market - even the ones that seem ancient. Some of you may have even received Amazon’s catalog in the mail last Christmas.

While associations tend to offer a huge number of services, we can’t forget that at their core, they exist to serve their members. Without a robust, vibrant, growing membership acquisition and retention program, they risk getting outpaced by one or more of the many competitors waiting in the wings. At its core, membership outreach is marketing and we can employ many of the same established direct marketing strategies from the retail, commercial and even non-profit worlds.

Most associations are wringing their hands about where their future members will come from. Are they students? Young professionals? What kinds of services and benefits will they want? What is their unique value proposition? We should be concerned - younger members don’t rely on organizations like the generations that came before them did. There will always be a strong appeal for association membership – we just have to work harder finding them instead of relying on them to find us.

In the association world, the greatest fall-out from the COVID-19 crisis has been our in-person conferences and events. Instead of counting registration and sponsorship dollars, event planners have tried to recast them as virtual events. But all too often, they try to cram the exact same experiences we enjoy face-to-face into an online mold. This has often resulted in a forced and awkward experience. Here are my thoughts on the right way to host a virtual conference.

One of the more common association offerings is its educational opportunities. These usually come in the form of conferences, publications, online resources, live webinars and an online community. But because these are staffed and created by different reporting units, they may be constructed and marketed very differently and disconnected from each other. But most associations have a great opportunity to unify their “educational brand” to better serve their members - especially their younger members.

A “community” website is a very powerful benefit for associations and their members - as well as for corporations for whom engagement is an important part of their retention strategy. But this is only true if the site was implemented in a way that fully integrates the community content with the rest of the website so that the member/customer experience is highly personalized and seamless. The payoff will be higher retention, higher revenue and a healthier membership.

I worked in nonprofit fundraising for over 20 years. When I told someone I worked in “fundraising,” everybody had their own preconceived notion of what that meant. And rightfully so – there are as many different types of fundraising…and reasons to give…and ways to get that gift…as there are people. So where should an organization start?

From Response Rate and Retention Rate to Average Gift and Long Term Value, there are a number of very commonly-used Key Performance Indicators in the Direct Response world for both individual campaigns and an annual plan. Taken together, they tell the story of the overall health of your direct response membership campaign.

I’ve had the opportunity to work on aspects of many many direct marketing packages over the past two and a half decades. In recent years, I’ve been able to design full campaigns on my own - from concept, writing and design to data to printing and production and finally to reporting and results. Here are some samples (I might add more if I can figure out where I put them).