When Raising Money With a Mix of Methods, Tracking Results Is Both Vital and Tough

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals tried out a new tool to boost donations during its year-end fundraising push: online advertisements that can be targeted to specific people.

Retailers have been using the technique for years.

For example, customers who visit a clothing website without making a purchase will often then see the company’s banner ads as they move around the Internet in the coming days and weeks.

The animal-rights group set up a test in which 500,000 supporters saw its banner advertisements as they browsed the Internet, while another group of 500,000 did not.

PETA officials thought the online ads might help nudge supporters to contribute another way rather than by clicking directly on the ads.

That hypothesis turned out to be true. People in the group who saw online ads were 5 percent more likely to contribute, and their gifts were 12 percent larger than those made by people in the group that didn’t see the ads.

Jogging Memories

Nonprofits, like PETA, that coordinate their fundraising campaigns across multiple channels are betting that repeated communications make donors more likely to contribute and that a solicitation in one channel will spur supporters to give a gift in others: that, for example, an online ad will jog supporters’ memories about that direct-mail appeal they just received.

Because of that interplay, it’s not enough simply to count how much money is donated through the mail, online, or by phone.

To get the most out of coordinated fundraising, nonprofits have to track who receives which appeals and analyze how the different solicitations affect donations.

Charities can’t make smart decisions about spending if they don’t know which fundraising channels are having the biggest impact on giving, says Sarah DiJulio, a principal at M+R Strategic Services, a fundraising consulting company.

“Maybe they’re all working equally well, but maybe one of them is working fantastically,” she says.

“Without knowing which one is generating the bulk of the boost, it’s really difficult to actually then invest further in the one that’s working.”

Testing Techniques

But figuring out how various forms of fundraising influence each other isn’t easy. A large national nonprofit is conducting a test to find out.

The charity is running a three-month campaign during which supporters in six geographic regions will get different combinations of coordinated solicitations.

People in one region will get just direct mail; supporters in another region will get both mail and telemarketing calls; a third group will get direct mail, telemarketing calls, and online advertising; and so on.

At the end of the campaign, the charity will be able to see which combinations bring in the most money and how much it costs to get those results, says Walter Lukens, president of the Lukens Company, the fundraising consulting company that is helping the group conduct the experiment. (Mr. Lukens declined to name the organization.)

“We’ll be able to look in the rearview mirror about how this lifts the total response rate and where that growth happens,” he says.

Not every organization is willing to experiment this much, says Mr. Lukens.

In this case, he says, the charity has a base of older donors and is eager to determine the best way to reach out to younger people.

But some fundraisers say there are limits to how much nonprofits can learn.

An organization might know that it sent a direct-mail appeal to a donor, but there’s no way to tell if that person opened it, says David Chalfant, director of development for Whitman-Walker Health.

“You have to go a little on faith,” he says. “And you have to look at the campaign as an overall investment and do your best to extrapolate the return on the different channels.”