See What’s Out There

If you are not donor prospecting online you need to start. This is an emerging area of internet fundraising. Sending email to people who are not already on your list is spam, so you have to be more creative with online prospecting.

This is becoming more urgent for you because DIRECT MAIL PROSPECTING WILL DIE! Yes, it will die. For a long time you will send mail to your donors and for a long time you will have donors who write checks and send them back in the mail. But prospecting — getting
new supporters via mail by purchasing mailing lists of likely donors — this will die.

One reason is that eventually we will have a Do Not Mail list like we have a Do Not Call list. And everyone will put their name on it. While junk mail isn’t quite as annoying as spam, the environmental concerns with massive amounts of wasted paper are leading people to pay attention. Forest Ethics launched DoNotMail.org as a way to promote this idea. They have a growing number of signers and coalition members and I think eventually this effort will succeed.

We are working on creative ways to solve this. We have launched a Member-Get-A-Member and a Donor-Get-A-Donor product that uses your existing list to identify new supporters. We are using social networking sites, YouTube and video-centric microsites to bring in new people. All of this is very very new, but if you rely on new donors via direct mail, you would be wise to be thinking and working on expanding your online programs now.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 18th, 2008 at 6:35 pm and is filed under fundraising, see3, social networking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.