As Direct-Marketing Returns Plunge, Expert Urges Charities to Take Risks

In The Agitator, a blog he co-founded, direct-marketing expert Roger Craver wonders why he keeps seeing “the same old tired [fund-raising] appeals, messages, and techniques in my mailbox … at a time when many nonprofits are clearly hurting and facing still further declines.”

The answer, he writes, is probably “fear of not meeting ‘the numbers’ copied from the previous year and discounted for the recession. Fear of not being able to convince the CEO or board to invest in what’s really required to research, test, and figure a better way into the future. Fear to dare.”

Mr. Craver advocates some “experiments” that charities should be taking now with their direct-marketing appeals, because, as he writes, “daring and risk-taking are essential rungs on the ladder up and out of the pit so many nonprofits are now facing.”

Among them:

• Get rid of this year’s plan based on last year’s activity. Instead identify the best donors and appeals and invest in those. Figure out how to get more of them.

• Stop worrying about how many members or donors are recruited and concentrate instead on how much each one is giving — and how to increase that amount year after year. If fund raisers are focusing their attempts to find new donors on quantity rather than the quality of their giving, he writes, “your future is dim.”

• Look into new marketing and research tools, such as statistical modeling, which is based on predicting which donors are the most likely to give and give the most. Such tools, Mr. Craver writes, “are now available to nonprofits at affordable prices.”