Mary’s one of your loyal supporters. She really cares about your cause. So Mary goes to a party one evening where she mingles with friends and neighbours.

You come along with her. Between sips of wine and nibbles of cheese she starts talking about things that matter to her. And of course your cause comes up! She says how happy she is that your organisation is really making a difference.

Mary’s friends concur that it’s good to know something’s being done about this issue and they congratulate you on your work.

So Mary invites them to join her in supporting your cause by making a first-time donation. The next day she sends you the cheques she’s collected.

In a month or so you contact the new friends Mary introduced to you and you say ‘Remember me? I met you at the party with Mary. I’d like to talk to you some more.’ And off you go cultivating your own relationships.

Now what if you had thousands of ‘Marys’ doing the same thing all over the place?

We fundraisers can sometimes overlook the obvious and make things too complicated. The fact is: Every charity has its own ‘missionaries’ – those folks who love what you do and are ready to help beyond just writing you a cheque –if you simply ask and equip them properly.

In recent months we’ve had great success with an integrated direct marketing programme that harnesses the power and passion of our clients’ missionaries to acquire new donors.

This is a ‘Friends & Family’ programme a little like the marketing campaigns that commercial companies use to gain new subscribers.

Unique approach
However in our case we put together both offline and online tactics and tools (phone online and variable data print) to recruit equip and motivate missionaries to acquire new donors. This is a unique approach we believe.

Now you probably want to know whether our approach works or is just an intriguing idea –and the answer to that question is simple: Yes.

A national humane organisation a public issue advocacy charity a children’s hospital a primary disease charity – all of these and more have found success using this programme. While we wouldn’t suggest you drop your current acquisition efforts in favour of this one –even if it worked terrifically for you – we do think it’s worth a closer look as a possible way to augment your acquisition efforts.Using the commitment of your own supporters to reach out to their personal networks brings you a whole new audience – an audience you’ll never reach using direct mail for example.

Loyalty
Plus you’ll engage your current donors for greater loyalty – making them feel good about doing something other than giving money. In fact a recent survey of UK donors found that 60% would be willing to do something for a charity they support other than simply giving money.

Here’s how the programme works:

• We conduct data analysis upfront to identify donors most likely to volunteer.
• We set a provocative campaign theme and ambitious but achievable goals.
• We phone selected current and recently lapsed donors using an early script disclaimer that the purpose of the call is not to ask them to ‘make a donation’.

The pitch is simple:

• The organisation needs their help to reach more people to do more great things such as protect animals find a cure for diabetes or fulfil some other mission that evokes passion.
• We ask donors to become ‘volunteers’ by sending pre-printed first-person letters in the mail to 10 friends or family members and we assign each volunteer a modest goal that’s related to her or his own giving level.
• We send each volunteer a simple highly personalised kit – that’s not too expensive – and includes letters envelopes and a personalised Appreciation Certificate. (The kit can even be customised based on more personal information if you have it on your file.)
• We also create a personalised Web site for each volunteer so his or her ‘family and friends’ can make their gifts online by credit card instead of sending cheques to the volunteer. Volunteers can use their personal Web sites to check on their progress and send follow-up letters by email.

Whether online or by postal mail new donors send their gifts to the volunteers who bundle them and return the gifts in larger envelopes to the charity. Online donor information is captured and sent electronically to the charity as well.

To make sure as many kits are returned as possible we send a gentle reminder letter to volunteers a few weeks after they’ve received their kits.

Our more sophisticated clients continue to use the volunteers’ names on follow-up mailings and in phone calls – a crucial element we believe because you can’t treat these new donors the way you might treat new direct mail donors.

It’s important to keep the connection alive with the volunteer – it’s the reason they gave in the first place!

The bottom line is that this integrated strategy is bringing on new donors at break-even or even realising a modest profit per donor. We’re not certain every organisation will realise new donors and net revenue but the personal touch and offline/online strategies make this programme worth a closer look.

An extra plus is that often the volunteers subsequently respond better to direct mail appeals which makes perfect sense since now they’re really committed.

Let’s say in your traditional direct mail acquisition programme you spend R500 000 to drop 50 000 pieces. If you’re like many mailers these days and get a 1% response and R200 average gift you’re losing about R800 per new donor –a R400 000 investment. If your second gift conversion is say 50% you’ve recouped another R50 000 but you still need another 1 750 gifts to break even.

If you spend the same amount of money with an integrated ‘Friends & Family’ programme of the sort we’ve described you’ll likely end up having recruited more than 27 000 missionaries about 21 000 donations at an average of R200 almost 16 000 brand-new donors – and possibly a profit per new donor.

Truth be told the second gift conversion via direct mail to these newly acquired donors is likely to be lower than it is with traditionally acquired direct mail donors – but you’ve got more new donors that you would have never acquired via direct mail.

The challenge you’ll face is figuring out how to cultivate these new donors. Some will give via direct mail some will never give again and some small percentage might become major gift or bequest prospects. So far it looks as though the whole effort is well worth confronting this challenge!

Joe White can be reached at joe@leftbankconsulting.com Steve Hubley at shubley@rmgsite.com
Adapted fromMal Warwick’s E-newsletter November 2009 Visit  www.aherncomm.com .