Most Charities Don’t Evaluate Results of Marketing Efforts, New Study Finds

Most charities spend less than $100,000 a year on marketing, according to a study released last week by the American Marketing Association and Lipman Hearne, a marketing company that serves nonprofit groups. But many groups don’t know whether their marketing efforts are making a difference, the study found.

The biggest goal of those efforts is to make the public more aware of their organizations, while the second most important goal is to raise money, the study found.

The study was released at a conference in Washington that the marketing association held to focus on issues of concern to nonprofit groups.

Charities said they thought that the best ways to build awareness of their organizations were through articles and broadcasts about them in the news media and through efforts to win attention from government officials and other leaders who could influence public opinion.

However, many organizations also confessed that they don’t know for certain how effective their marketing is. About one-quarter of the organizations surveyed said they don’t try to measure the effectiveness of many types of marketing techniques.

Marketing budgets also varied depending on the type of organization. Colleges and universities spend the most on marketing: Only 20 percent of them have marketing budgets of less than $100,000, for example, and 18 percent have budgets of more than $1-million.

Human-services groups spent the least: 62 percent had marketing budgets of less than $100,000, while only 6 percent spent $1-million or more.

The survey of 1,012 nonprofit marketing officials was conducted online in May.

A report on the study, “The State of Nonprofit Marketing,” is available free.

Instead of broadcasting a “one size fits all” fund-raising message to every potential donor, Goodwill of Greater Washington now tailors its appeals to different audiences and has increased the number of repeat donors by 60 percent over the past five years, Brendan Hurley, senior vice president for marketing and communications, told the conference participants.

Goodwill of Greater Washington classified its donors and other people it wanted to reach into 25 distinct groups, including donors of used goods, buyers of goods, affluent people who could make big donations or planned gifts, and leaders of corporate foundations, says Mr. Hurley.

To successfully increase donations, he says, “You have to know who you are talking to.”

Goodwill first reached out to each type of potential donor not with a request for assistance, but with an explanation for each group of how the charity’s work benefits them.

“You have to talk to them first, then ask for money,” Mr. Hurley says.

For example, Goodwill told people who make donations to the charity that “helping us helps you,” he says. Donors who give to Goodwill’s training programs help low-income learn the skills they need to earn more money. They, in turn, are able to spend more money, improving the local economy and the quality of life for residents.

Focusing advertising on specific types of donors has also reaped huge rewards at Goodwill’s stores, where the number of buyers has increased 125 percent over the past five years and sales rose from $6-million to $8.8-million, says Mr. Hurley.

Storytelling is a part of many school classrooms — and making it a prominent part of the DonorsChoose Web site has helped lift donations.

The number of visitors to the Web site who also made contributions increased by 66 percent after the charity redesigned its home page to emphasize the stories of teachers who were seeking support through the charity.

Erica Goldman, vice president of consumer marketing, told the marketing association conference that DonorsChoose, which allows donors to give money to buy supplies for public-school teachers, put teachers’ requests in a more prominent position on its site, and made it easier to click through 10,000 requests for aid.

Not only did donations from visitors increase as a result, but the charity saw a 62-percent jump in the number of visitors who browsed the teachers’ stories, says Ms. Goldman.

The charity has provided more than $20-million worth of supplies to some 55,000 teachers since it was founded in 2000.

The way in which teachers tell their stories to engage donors also helps increase gifts, Ms. Goldman says. DonorsChoose volunteers and staff members make sure that every story contains the following elements:

• A hero. The teacher is always the hero, and always tells a story in his or her own words, Ms. Goldman says. “The teacher is able to communicate her story and challenges in a way that’s very specific, very textured, very concrete,” she says.
• A challenge. The teacher describes what the class lacks and how the project will help meet a particular need.
• An ally. The ally is always the donor, Ms. Goldman says. DonorsChoose makes sure the donor is part of the story by asking each teacher to speak directly to donors about what they can do and how their donation will help. The charity has also enabled donors to post their own stories about why they give on its Web site. Some 47 percent of the charity’s donors do so, she says, and their stories stimulate gifts from others.
• A happy ending. “In our world, happy endings are when resources are delivered to the classroom and students have rich, meaningful learning experiences,” Ms. Goldman says.