I Give Most Conservative Nonprofits an “F” in Fundraising
Post #20
July 25, 2023
Most conservative organizations rely almost entirely on direct marketing fundraising: postal, email, phone, and no personal one-on-one solicitation. I tell our prospective clients that 90–95% of ATA’s fundraising value is to identify the names of people who, with proper treatment through a development person/department, will contribute 10, 50, 100, or 1,000 times more than through the mail.
Direct mail has been both a blessing and a curse for conservatives. The blessing is obvious—it allows conservatives to go around the mainstream media and build and fund our nonprofits, get subscriptions to our publications, sell books, educate, pass/defeat legislation, identify activists, get votes, etc. The curse is it has caused too many leaders of nonprofits to become armchair generals. Instead of building a vibrant, active grassroots organization, they stay in their comfortable offices and rely on postal mail, email, and phones to supply the money to run the organization.
Over the years, I’ve had far too many clients take this type of approach: “Hey, Richard. It’s Friday morning and you haven’t given me any copy to approve this week.” Instead of building and operating a real nonprofit, they run a direct mail operation, achieving about 10% of what the organization should be accomplishing.
Another key to this is employing enough people in your development department.
Do you have $100 donors who never receive a personal thank you phone call? Who never get a happy birthday card with a handwritten note? Or a Happy New Year/just-thinking-of-you phone call? Then you don’t have enough people in your development department.
For every $1 you invest in a development person, you should receive $10–$20+ in the first year or two, and many times more in years to come.
This free post is brought to you by American Target Advertising™ (ATA) and American Mailing Lists Corporation™—“Conservative Donors R Us.” ATA was the world’s first conservative direct marketing agency and still is the largest with over 80 team members (increasing to 135 by 2024) that will mail over 300,000,000 postal letters in the 2023-2024 election cycle for 40+ clients who will receive over 7,000,000 donations from over 2,500,000 unique donors. |
Much of the information in GoRightGoBig.com is from Richard A. Viguerie’s new book, GO BIG – The Marketing “Secrets” of Richard A. Viguerie. Copies for yourself or as a gift can be ordered at GoBigConservatives.com or GoRightGoBig.com, or at your favorite online bookstore. If you wish to buy copies to be given free to high school or college students to encourage them to seek a career in conservative politics/marketing, go to GoBigConservatives.com. To subscribe FREE to GO RIGHT - GO BIG blog, click here. |
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