I had a really interesting conversation this morning with James, who works at a local (and great!) CRM company. We were discussing how some nonprofits are resistant to investing time and money into email campaigns and social media campaigns when they still receive a major portion of their donations via direct mail campaigns. These direct mail campaigns are targeted towards the demographics with the most money, those who are older (about 50+). In the next few years, people who are more familiar with email and online transactions (donating, shopping, etc.) will become this coveted age group. There will be a drastic shift from receiving direct mail donations to receiving email donations. Ensuring that nonprofits have established effective email campaigns will ensure that the infrastructure is in place for this shift. Nonprofits will be able to tell what works and what doesn't work for email campaigns and will be able to process donations online.
So many nonprofits have a short-term view. They have to--they can't be sure of where their funding will be coming from or if it will continue for the long term. Convincing these nonprofits that they need to invest in these email campaigns NOW because it will have such an impact on the future is a challenge that the companies (like James') face daily.
The shift from direct mail donations to online donations may be drastic, so those nonprofits that aren't on the ball may miss out on a lot of this money!
I would love to do more research to really crunch the numbers on this (sorry, it's a lot of ball park-ish), because I think that many executives would have to see the evidence in black and white to really jump on board with the email campaigns.
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