Fundraising the SMART Way: Predictable, Consistent Income Growth for Your Charity, + Website

Chapter 9Applying SMART Way Methods to Mass-Market Fundraising

Throughout this book, I have advocated for the adoption of scientific management disciplines more common to the for-profit world, to improve fundraising performance. My mission is to adapt some of the most beneficial and impactful tools developed in the for-profit sector, so that they can and will be used with similar enthusiasm to improve the capacity and mission achievement of the nonprofit industry. While it would be simplistic to say that nonprofits are completely unlike for-profits, and equally simplistic to say that they are entirely alike, there is no escaping the fact that the underlying disciplines of quality management, process management, and greatness, as described by Jim Collins in his monograph Good to Great and the Social Sectors¹, apply just as well to both sectors.

Regrettably, the data suggest that these disciplines have not yet become standard nonprofit operating procedure, to the detriment of the industry.

Mass-market fundraising employs all the techniques familiar to consumer marketing: advertising, e-mail marketing, search-engine optimization, lead tracking, lead nurturing, and related methods. The feedback derived from these techniques collates information about the words, phrases, campaigns, and techniques that worked well, which didn't, and which group of prospects was more likely to respond to this versus that. It touches the largest amount of prospects at the best cost/benefit ratio per ...