advertisement
Relationship Pathways: A Holistic, Strategic
Approach for Developing Constituents
By Vinay Bhagat
The Internet represents an extremely powerful and
cost effective relationship management tool.
However, today most organizations practice
one-size-fits-all communications. They send the
same communiqués and solicitations to
constituents, irrespective of their past
involvement, their reason for first coming to the
organization, or their interests.
This approach made sense while organizations had
small email files, basic online tools and very
constrained Web resources. But as email files
have expanded, many nonprofits are missing a
great opportunity.
Nonprofits should adopt a strategic constituent
relationship management approach - otherwise
known as CRM - to managing online relationships.
A CRM approach requires that nonprofits identify
key constituent segments according to their
current involvement or support levels; establish
goals as to how they would like to see them
progress; and define migration paths or"relationship pathways" along which they will try
and direct constituents. Examples of
"relationship pathways" or desired "conversion
flows" are:
- Moving people visiting your Web site to subscribe to your e-communications;
- Moving e-newsletter subscribers to take some
kind of action, such as participating in an
advocacy campaign or making an online purchase;
- Moving advocates to become donors;
- Moving new or one-time donors to become repeat donors;
- Moving repeat donors to become monthly or sustaining donors;
- Moving repeat donors to solicit donations and
other forms of support from friends, family and
colleagues; and
- Moving appropriate long-term, repeat donors to consider a planned gift.
Clearly it is possible to create many unique
segments and corresponding relationship pathways.
The art is in identifying the most important ones
that would benefit from unique treatment and that
you can reasonably define and manage.
One of the "relationship segments" that requires
unique treatment is new Web site registrants.
Traditionally, new registrants receive a single
welcome email (autoresponder) but are then added
to the organization's general email
communication. It's critical to engage and
attempt to convert new constituents in their
first 45-90 days on file, while interest and open
rates are highest.
Instead of including them in the general email
mix, strong results have been found by sending
them a unique series of welcome emails. In the
email series, they are educated about resources
on the Web site, encouraged to get more involved,
and asked to make a contribution two to three
times. If they make a contribution they exit the
welcome series early.
This email series and process can be automated.
Via this approach, clients have been able to
convert about one percent of new registrants to
donors within 60 days. This compares extremely
favorably with a typical email acquisition
response rate of 0.1-0.2 percent.
***
Vinay Bhagat is founder and chief strategy
officer at Convio in Austin, Texas. His email is
vbhagat@convio.com
***
This article is from NPT TechnoBuzz, a publication of The NonProfit Times.
Subscribe to NPT TechnoBuzz or any of our other enewsletters and get the latest nonprofit news and stories delivered to your inbox.
|
