OPUSfidelis is a strategic marketing company serving both corporations and nonprofits. At the core of our marketing approach is the integration of online and off-line media.

No nonprofit can avoid reaching their constituents through multiple channels. Meeting the donor where they are has never been of greater importance – if they’re on Facebook then you need to be there, if they’re on Twitter you need to be there – and maybe they read and respond to both emails and direct mail. Well you guessed it – you still need to be there too.

At the end of the day all the channels combined create a rising tide that raises all ships. It’s getting increasingly difficult to determine just which touch motivated the donor to give a gift.  Did the email inspire her to mail a check when she received the direct mail package, or was it the other way around when the online donation came through? Who knows? In fact, on some level who cares?

You should care. You need to track, as best as possible, a gifts origin and what motivated the gift so you can do more of what’s working well and less of what’s not working. But it’s hard to get around the fact that it’s the sum of the multichannel effort that motivates response, advocacy and engagement.  It’s almost like one of those games where you stack pieces of wood into a tower of sorts and then proceed to pull them out one by one. It’s an ongoing balancing act trying to determine which piece is more important than the other.  In some ways it’s a fools game.

Our suggestion is to go full steam ahead with multi-channel fundraising and marketing. Analyze what you can for optimum performance, and more than anything else make sure the messages support each other in a cohesive manner. Then worry far less than you are probably doing now about attributing a particular gift, unless it’s blatantly clear, to a particular fundraising effort.  And simply enjoy the rising tide!

Read full article here. Source via NonProfitPro.