I’m reminded of a story I once heard from Paulette Maehara, Past President/CEO of the Association of Fundraising Professionals. She mentioned that, while on vacation, she visited an ancient temple on Crete. As she prepared to exit the temple, she noticed that the images of a number of men were painted over the doorway. She asked her tour guide who they were and why their images were there. The tour guide explained, “Those were the men that paid for the temple to be built.” Ah, this was a great example of an early donor-recognition wall. There are fewer “new” elements to fundraising than we might expect.

With their limited resources, nonprofit organizations need to prioritize their prospects and their outreach tactics. In the case of the Museum, I suspect the staff has reached out to higher priority prospects in appropriate ways. However, given the special nature of the challenge grant and the upcoming 20th anniversary of the institution, broader outreach is easily justified. While I do not know the outcome of the advertising campaign, I will point out that just one new planned gift could more than cover the cost of the ad.

As for your commentary about the Museum’s website, I intentionally did not comment just as I intentionally chose not to comment about or show the ad itself. Both would have been a distraction from the point that I was making: Be where your prospects are. The Museum’s ad execution or website presentation may or may not be worthy of positive comment. Those are possible subjects for another blog post at another time. It was not the point of my current post. Regardless of how one feels about the ad and website execution, the fact remains that the Museum did an excellent job of going to its prospects rather than simply sitting back and expecting its prospects to come to it.

Furthermore, my post was not advocating the use of display advertising. Again, the Museum story was simply one example demonstrating the need to be where prospects are. I could have just as easily written about the Philadelphia Children’s Alliance which recently sponsored the screening of a new documentary film, Boys and Men Healing. PCA brings justice and healing to the victims of child sexual abuse. The film was about men who were sexually abused as children. (One in six boys will be sexually abused by adulthood; among girls, the number is one in four.) By sponsoring the film, PCA was able to address an audience that had a high-level of interest in the issue at the core of PCA’s mission. The organization was able to provide valuable information to audience members (i.e.: helpline phone numbers, description of PCA services, etc.) while gathering names of individuals for its mailing list. Sponsoring this particular film made sense for PCA because that’s where its prospects were. By contrast, it would not have made sense for PCA to sponsor an unrelated film screened by The Philadelphia Film Festival.

Again, the simple point of my post was to demonstrate the importance of being where one’s prospects are. I think we can both agree that communication channels must be used strategically.

I agree that planned giving marketing needs to be ubiquitous. But not at any cost. Spray marketing is dead. You said it best Michael… “broad outreach doesn’t need to cost a lot of money.”

Before going further, if they got opportunity to advertise for free, then don’t read the following comments. If they paid for the advertising…. then see below.

While reaching out beyond your current database is recommended, one should only do so after less expensive marketing channels are employed (and perhaps even exhausted). Channels and media options can easily be tested for performance.

Furthermore, the linked page provided to enhance the campaign fails to meet basic landing page best practices. In fact, the web page breaks too many rules and best practices to list here.

I happen to be a donor. So I’d be curious to learn the metrics on the effectiveness of this banner ad. I doubt it was purchased with a cost per click model. And, I bet basic Google advertising using Adwords would beat this campaign effort hands down (while expanding the reach, providing better targeting and better metrics along with multivariate testing).

I would suggest they make use of their own website’s banner space in the main carousel before spending donor dollars on advertising at all. Then they could have used retargeting advertising employing the Google ad network by placing a simple line of code on their main website.

Worst part about this is found on their landing page. They should optimize conversions by developing a landing page that will actually generate leads. If you don’t have that, there’s no reason to advertise at all because doing so is like driving a car into a brick wall. This landing page is confusing at best and the only easy want to connect is by clicking on the email link at the bottom (if you make it that far). Again, basic online marketing best practices were ignored.

Almost all online planned giving marketing fails in a similar fashion. Sorry folks but this is just one more example and not really worthy of acknowledgement in a positive light.