New Rules of Attraction

This week the Nature Conservancy will kick off a campaign to ask online donors to give $1 apiece to help the charity plant a billion trees in Brazil’s rain forest. But conservancy officials have no idea if the electronic drive will meet its goal of raising $1-million.

The Plant a Billion campaign is designed to attract people who have never previously given to the environmental organization. But it could “go gangbusters or be a flop,” says Sue Citro, the charity’s senior manager for digital membership.

For an organization that raises more money than all but a handful of charities, such uncertainty is unusual. But at big charities across the country, fund raisers face that same queasy feeling as they try to figure out a solution to an unsettling reality. Traditional approaches to seeking new donors by mail or telephone are growing less effective and more expensive every year, yet online appeals are not raising enough to replace them.

“Direct mail is on life support,” says Michael Hoffman, chief executive of See3, a Chicago consulting firm that specializes in nonprofit fund raising and communications. “Charities that have relied on direct mail to get new donors have to start thinking about what’s next, or they will wake up one day and find that an aggressive start-up has taken their place.”

Mailings Lose Ground

Plenty of charities still raise most of their contributions with direct mail, but mass mailings are losing their power to attract new supporters. In 2007, the number of new donors who responded to charity mailings dropped by a median of 6.2 percent in a study of 72 of the nation’s biggest charities, on top of another 10.4-percent median drop in 2006.

Online fund raising offers a promising alternative, especially since people who make their first gift to charity online give one and a half times as much as those whose first gift was made by mail, according to Target Analytics, a Boston company that conducted the studies of both online and direct-mail results. Repeat gifts by online donors also tend to be larger.

But persuading donors to give online for the first time is not easy, says Ettore Rossetti, associate director of Internet marketing at Save the Children. The charity has solicited donations from people who signed an online petition to help needy children, but that approach has achieved only “mixed success,” he says.

“Advocacy people tend to be engaged in lending their voice, not necessarily opening their wallet.”

To figure out what approaches will attract first-time donors, many charities are hiring extra staff members to devise and test new ideas, and are upgrading software to analyze the results. Until such solicitations become more lucrative, however, most charities are still spending about as much as they did on direct mail, telemarketing, and other traditional ways of finding new donors.

“I get executive directors all the time who want to abandon direct-mail acquisition completely,” says Jeff Patrick, president of Common Knowledge, a San Francisco company that advises charities on online fund raising and marketing. “Online fund raising will continue to grow, but it will not replace direct mail in five years,” Mr. Patrick predicts. The movement from offline to online giving, he adds, “is an evolution, not a revolution.”

Other fund-raising experts agree that online fund raising has a long way to go before it becomes a successful way to attract new donors.

“This is an extremely confusing period,” says Mark Rovner, president of Sea Change Strategies, a Takoma Park, Md., fund-raising consulting company. “The old ways aren’t working, and the new ways are not clear.”

Still, fund raisers have found some new approaches in recent months that are helping them better attract donors who can eventually become the lifeblood of an organization. Among them:

Make pitches in person. World Vision, the international relief group, asks people who make monthly gifts to “sponsor” a needy child overseas to volunteer to seek donations from other people.

Two and a half years ago, the charity started recruiting people to give presentations about monthly giving to their colleagues at work or church. People who give at least eight presentations a year are named “Child Ambassadors.” Members of the ambassador group, which has grown to 255 people, must apply for the volunteer position and agree to a background check.

Last year, volunteers recruited more than 4,000 new monthly donors.

Vicki Casper, a flight attendant at Southwest Airlines, is World Vision’s most successful recruiter. She has single-handedly persuaded 400 people in the past two years to become monthly donors, including a passenger on a recent flight to Indianapolis. He offered to sponsor a dozen children for at least a year and, as he got off the plane, handed Ms. Casper checks for each child totaling more than $5,000.

If her results don’t attest to Ms. Casper’s dedication, the recorded greeting on her cell phone does: “Hi, this is Vicki Casper, World Vision Child Ambassador, standing as a link between you and the poor and needy of this world.”

With the ambassadors, “we’ve seen big potential,” says Miyon Kautz, World Vision’s national director of volunteers. In fact, she says, the charity has just finished training three new staff members who will recruit ambassadors regionally. The goal for each region: obtaining 1,000 new monthly donors over the next 12 months.

Tap existing online donors. Charities can take a lesson from the “member-get-a-member” drives held by professional societies, says Kevin Whorton, a Bethesda, Md., consultant. After running direct-mail fund raising at Catholic Relief Services for several years, Mr. Whorton now advises associations.

Holding contests and offering prizes or other rewards can improve charities’ ability to get donors engaged in finding new supporters, he says.

As an example, he points to the National Association of Home Builders’ annual membership day, in which local branches compete during the year to see which one can sign up the most new members.

Winners receive modest prizes, such as an upgrade to a better hotel at the association’s annual conference or a fleece jacket, notes Mr. Whorton. The most recent membership day yielded more than 12,000 new members.

“It is fascinating to me how the member-get-a-member thing, which is an old-school technique, gets new traction in this new world of online relationships,” says Mr. Hoffman, the consultant. He is now working with American Jewish World Service, an international relief group, to design an online campaign to persuade the charity’s donors to get involved in finding new supporters.

Mr. Hoffman suggests, based on his research into what makes such campaigns successful for associations, that charities include in their pitches to existing supporters incentives such as the chance to win a trip, a clear description of what difference donors’ participation will make, easy-to-use online tools, and concrete goals for enlisting new donors.

“You can’t just say, ‘Tell your friends about this great organization,’” Mr. Hoffman says. “It is far better to say, ‘Help us recruit 500 new members by June 1 so we can send 5,000 mosquito nets to Africa at the beginning of mosquito season to fight malaria.’”

Couple advocacy projects with online fund raising. The Planned Parenthood Federation of America knew that anti-abortion protesters planned to show up at 10 of the charity’s clinics over 40 days in the fall, so it used the occasion to start “I am Emily X,” an online video diary and blog.

The site featured videotaped statements from Planned Parenthood clinic workers who described the effects of the demonstration on both themselves and patients, some of whom were harassed by the protesters.

Visitors to the site were invited to post comments and messages to the clinics throughout the protest, and they were asked to pledge a small amount of money, anywhere from 5 cents to $10, for each of the 511 protesters Planned Parenthood counted in front of its clinics.

The site, coupled with e-mail appeals about the project, raised $96,531, and more than half of those who gave were new donors, says Tom Subak, Planned Parenthood’s vice president for online services. “We got a phenomenal response.”

Test fund-raising elements of Web sites. Amnesty International is using new software to randomly send online visitors to slightly different versions of a single Web page so it can see which online elements do the most to persuade people to make a donation or visit other parts of the organization’s site.

After two months, Amnesty found a version of its donation page that increased the number of people who made a gift from 35 to 55 percent, says Steve Daigneault, managing director of Internet communications. In the month of December alone, he says, Amnesty raised $128,000 more with the improved donation page; than it would have otherwise. Those returns, he adds, are many times greater than the cost of the software.

Mr. Daigneault is now conducting additional tests to improve the organization’s online action center, where visitors can sign petitions and engage in other forms of advocacy; that part of the site is the main way in which Amnesty collects e-mail addresses of potential donors.

“I don’t think many nonprofits realize how important this is,” he says of the tests. “Once people catch on, it will be huge.”

Get a celebrity to talk up an online appeal. Save the Children recruited 1,800 new donors and generated more than $50,000 with an online campaign that enabled visitors to its Web site to download or send electronic Valentine’s Day cards in exchange for a donation of $1 or more.

But the holiday alone was not enough to make the online greeting cards work for the children’s charity. The key to success, Mr. Rossetti says, was the actress Julianne Moore, who agreed to lend her support to the effort. To that end, she promoted the online cards when she appeared on The View, a popular daytime current-events show aimed at women. The actress has agreed to promote the e-cards again next year.

Do a year-end campaign online. Planned Parenthood has recruited thousands of new donors by sending a series of e-mail messages during the final month of the year. In December, before asking for any money, the charity sent 50,000 people a survey via e-mail to assess their interest in Planned Parenthood programs. That was followed by two other e-mail messages: a holiday greeting and a link to a YouTube video slide show highlighting the charity’s work over the past year. A fourth message asked for a donation.

The monthlong online campaign raised $1.6-million, including more than $500,000 in a single day, December 31. Out of the 8,957 donors, more than 1,200 contributors who gave a total of $246,000 last year were new to the organization.

The online year-end campaign has proven to be “one of our primary recruitment methods,” says Mr. Subak, the charity’s vice president for online services.

Promote online projects in social networks. Internet Sexuality Information Services, an Oakland, Calif., group, initially drew few entries when it asked people age 15 to 30 to enter an online video contest to express their views on sex education.

That began to change after two staff members began combing through social-networking sites, commenting on blogs, searching online news outlets, writing to reporters, and sharing the group’s own news — that it had received the first 10 entries, for example. By the time the deadline for entries passed three months later, the charity had received 70 entries.

While the video contest was not designed to raise money, the publicity efforts are helping the group attract contributions from new donors, says Deb Levine, executive director of the organization.

Three foundations have asked the group to submit proposals, two for six-figure grants. “This is a result of the visibility we generated through the contest and our positioning ourselves as thought leaders online,” she says.

Build a dedicated Web site. Some charities are creating stand-alone Web sites for specific projects, rather than just sending people to find information on one big site. The separate sites can be promoted to potential donors with related interests.

Avodah: the Jewish Service Corps, which involves young people in yearlong public-service projects in Chicago, New York, and Washington, has a new Web site that promotes its plan to start working in New Orleans in September. The charity tested the new site in December, using it to raise $15,000 to match a grant of the same amount contributed by an anonymous donor.

“People went to this site who we wouldn’t have contact with normally,” says Ilanit Gerblich Kalir, Avodah’s associate executive director. She says that the charity is seeking another challenge grant and plans to promote the site more aggressively online in coming months to people who have an interest in New Orleans and relief work.

“This is a low-cost way to get the word out to an audience you would otherwise not reach,” says Ms. Kalir. “We are a very small organization. We don’t have the money to do acquisition with direct mail.”