Are Your Fundraising Plans Ready for 2019 Trends?

Nonprofit marketers making final tweaks to fundraising plans for 2019 may want to do a quick survey of this year’s top trends as identified by fundraising pros to make sure they are ready for all challenges. NonProfit PRO magazine cites three general 2019 trends that will affect both traditional direct mail and digital fundraising via e-mail, mobile, social media and website. First, nonprofits should include a commitment to story-telling in this year’s fundraising communications, the magazine says. Stories create an emotional connection to the mission and are remembered better than facts, studies show. NonProfit PRO urges creation of a story-telling culture via leadership buy-in, a mechanism to regularly encourage and gather stories, a story-banking method and regular and consistent story communications. “Personalization” is another marketing mantra for 2019, with success requiring clean up-to-date data and list segmentation to craft targeted messages for direct mail and e-mail. Finally, put that targeted story-telling into a video format to maximize results in a year when video is projected to represent 80% of Internet traffic. Meanwhile, the Nonprofit Tech for Good blog identifies some key digital trends to include in 2019 fundraising plans: 1) increased use of marketing automation software to create personalized appeals and individualized pathways and engagement with the general mission and specific programs; 2) more focus on a recurring-gift donor base and commitment to engagement strategies and technologies that nurture donors; 3) more relevant, personalized, contextual messaging based on data technologies; and 4) more disruption by commercial social media players like Facebook via removal of fundraising fees, matching funds and direct access to donor data and AI. The TrueSense Marketing blog came up with a whopping "21 Fundraising Trends and Best Practices You Need to Know in 2019" from a survey of fundraising pros. We’ll only cite a couple here, starting with a prediction that the visually oriented Instagram, which hit 1 billion monthly active users in 2018, including the 50-64 and 65+ age cohorts, will become a more popular platform for nonprofits in 2019. Another prediction is that, with data breaches continuing to grab headlines and a patchwork of data privacy regulations at the state level (such as California Consumer Privacy Act passed last summer), nonprofits will face added costs and changes in data collection and storage policies this year. For more, see our full on-site blog post at http://www.acculistusa.com/is-your-fundraising-plan-ready-for-2019-challenges/

Costly Bad-Address Returns Still Plague Mailers

With advances in data technology and systems offered by the U.S. Postal Service, such as National Change of Address, direct mailers should have seen a decline in "return to sender" address glitches in recent years. Not so, points out Direct Marketing News magazine Senior Editor Al Urbanski in a recent article. In fact, according to USPS figures, 3.7% of first-class mail was returned to senders in 2014, up from the 3.4% in 2004. That small percentage adds up to big costs for direct mailers. Urbanski cites estimates by Novitex, a mail management company, that each piece of returned mail costs marketers between $3 and $50 a piece, with the higher hit on transactional mailers receiving payments for insurance premiums, merchandise purchases, credit card payments, and loan payments. But all mailers are burdened by wasted printing, prep, postage and data processing spends, as well as customer churn and lost opportunities. What to do? The fundamental problem is bad mailing-list data, despite all the systems available to keep lists clean and updated. So Novitex urges using automated services for address updating, including NCOA; centralized returned mail operations to improve reaction and cut risk of postal service audits and lost discounts; and implementation of data technology to track mail behavior to the root causes of returns. For the complete article: http://www.dmnews.com/direct-line-blog/return-to-sender-is-still-high-on-mailers-playlists/article/421022/