In a nutshell, online fundraising is working better than ever.

The Four Trends that the report discusses in extensive detail:

1. Online fundraising continues to generate positive year-over-year growth across the board; direct mail results continue to decline.

2. Despite economic challenges, nonprofits saw their online revenue grow during the fourth quarter of 2008.

3. Though the average gift amount stayed mostly the same, nonprofits received a larger number of gifts in the fourth quarter, which resulted in an increase in online fundraising revenue.

4. “Email open” and “click through” rates remain steady across all organization types.

Glancing at the report, these stats jumped out at me:

In 2008:

• online fundraising revenue rose 14%
• email file growth rose 28%
• website traffic rose 20%

I’ll probably pull out more juicy stats as I work my way through the report. Excellent stuff. Do yourself a favor and print out a copy.

In Communication World (May-June 2009 issue), Merry Elrick of DataDriven MarCom Inc. provides a short tutorial. According to Elrick, ROI is defined according to standards within your own organization. Basically, ROI is the measure of profits generated over and above the initial investment. It is expressed as a percentage of the investment:

(Gross margin – Communication investment) / Communication investment = ROI (% total investment)

Now, before you plug numbers into that simple formula, Elrick cautions that marketers should consult with the finance department to determine what constitutes gross margin, as well as developing a definition of what your actual investment is. Elrick insists the process is actually complex.

Elrick also insists that ROI doesn’t always work. “ROI is only useful for short-term, lead-generating campaigns designed to bring in revenue.” For example, a B-to-B direct mail effort yields solid ROI numbers. But for other efforts, developing ROI is not an option. As Elrick says, “Much of the work we do as communicators is not designed to bring in revenue. We may create marketing communications to inform or educate or predispose people to buy. We may create long-term brand-building campaigns that establish our company’s value in the marketplace. And those campaigns cannot be measured using ROI.”

Or maybe I’m just feeling bad for myself, because I have to read these things and I can’t seem to understand the point. These are Newsletters Without A Mission. Or maybe they have too many missions. Or maybe the people producing them just like to crank them out but aren’t really thinking about why they’re doing it in the first place.

If you put out a newsletter or publication or website — any regular form of communication — you need a reason. You need an Editorial Mission.

An Editorial Mission, according to Every Nonprofit’s Guide to Publishing (by Cheryl Woodard and Lucia Hwang), is “a succinct description of what your publication will do for its readers.” What do the articles accomplish? Who will read this publication? What information is most valued by these readers?

A well-thought-out Editorial Mission (which can sometimes take weeks or months to develop, or to reinvent) keeps editorial content tight, because everyone is on the same page about what is and isn’t appropriate in the publication. It keeps staff members and board members from suggesting story ideas out of left field. And it helps you prioritize your work and make good decisions.

The authors provide a nice example of an effective mission statement from Dollars and Sense: The Magazine of Economic Justice:

“We explain the workings of the U.S. and international economies, and provide left perspectives on current economic affairs. Our audience is a mix of activists, organizers, academics, unionists, and other socially concerned people.”

Mission statement work is one of those grind-it-out tasks that people often avoid. But if you can put in the hard work once, it can guide you over the long-term.

As sports snarkmeister Jim Rome implores his callers, “Have a take, and don’t suck.”

Indeed.

Email open rates remain strong across all organization types. Open rates above 20 percent for both email appeals and email newsletters suggest that nonprofits continue to get their message across successfully, despite increasingly crowded email inboxes. The Visitation, Performing Arts & Libraries vertical performed best in both metrics with an average open rate of 24 percent for email appeals and 28 percent for email newsletters.

Those are impressive numbers, and helpful info for anyone who’s not sure if the weekly organizational e-mail is actually getting read. The executive summary of the report is available here.

Donor newsletters are close to my heart. When I first started in the fundraising biz (back in 1990), I was given the task of writing copy for three regular donor newsletters that our organization produced. Since then I’ve written countless newsletters and even launched a few, and I think they remain a vital tool for many organizations. Although the good old print newsletter has been replaced in many cases by e-newsletters and blogs, the rules haven’t changed much. Basically, you need to be interesting, relevant and enriching to your target audience. And you need to write with the audience in mind, which will influence the words you use, the angle you choose, and the way you structure each element of the newsletter.

I recently came across a great article on why some donor newsletters just . . . aren’t . . . working. Tom Ahern, who is the top donor newsletter guru in the fundraising community, listed seven fatal flaws of a bad newsletter. They are:

Flaw #7 – It lacks the kinds of news that donors care about most (and reads like a brochure for the organization).

Flaw #6 – It fails the “you” test. A good newsletter is friendly, even intimate, in tone — not an institutional voice.

Flaw #5 -It skimps on emotional triggers. When emotion is absent from your content, the donor feels little need to make a decision to support you.

Flaw #4 – It’s not donor-centered. The reader needs to see how his/her involvement is bringing world peace (rather than a glorified press release about how the organization is working on world peace).

Flaw #3 – It’s not set up for rapid skimming. Newsletters that are long on copy, and stingy with pull quotes, subheads, photos, captions, tables and other eye-pleasing features, almost “dare” to be read.

Flaw #2 – Heavy on statistics but light on anecdotes. That kind of approach will kill direct mail appeals, and it’s almost as fatal when newsletters do it.

Flaw #1 – Weak or ”fake” headlines. Ahern says this is the biggest sin of all. “A headline should tell readers what the story is about so they don’t have to even read the story. Ahern said elements of a good headline are enticing words, action verbs, a summary of the content and a hook that pulls readers in.”

I’ve had a long love affair with the daily paper, going back to my days growing up in the suburbs of Cleveland, when my parents subscribed to two newspapers — The Cleveland Plain Dealer, along with the Elyria Chronicle-Telegram. Imagine that, two papers per day going to one household! Nowadays, publishers covet the house that will at least take one paper. With cable TV and the Internet and busy schedules, no one has time to read. And with the brutal economy, maybe spending money on the paper just doesn’t seem like a priority.

I even worked for a local paper, The Lorain Journal in Ohio, as a stringer covering high school sports in the 1990s. They paid me $20 to cover a game, interview coaches, prepare the stats and write a coherent article about what I had just seen. The amount worked out to less than minimum wage on most nights. That’s the pitiful economy of journalism — the paper is cheap, and so are the words and the working conditions and wages.  

Sad. Print is taking a beating all over. Comic books, once available on every newsstand and in card shops, groceries and drug stores, are now only available in specialty shops, and the pitiful circulation numbers testify to how well the “direct market” is working out: popular comics like Amazing Spider-Man are lucky to sell 100,000 copies nationwide, which is a fraction of what they sold a few decades ago.

Print is still magical, but the business model seems to have betrayed many in the industry. It’s been a slow fade for a long time, but now for a lot of publishers it’s an all-out collapse.

Earlier this month I wrote that “Print Still Matters.” To me, and to a lot of people, it still does. If it didn’t matter, I wouldn’t mourn the sad state of the news dailies or the book publishers or the magazines or the comic books.

(It made me think of those times when you have lunch with co-workers. What’s the first thing someone says when you get in their car? “My car’s a mess, sorry.” It never fails.)

Today, you don’t hear it as much. It may be the advent of DIY web tools, or the fact that organizations know how to work with web agencies better, or increased investment in web content. Whatever it is, I see nicer sites all over the place. For those of us who worked in organizations during the 90s and into the 2000s — and who struggled mightily to get a nice site up despite small budgets and internal bickering and spacey web agency people — this new era represents the promise of the Web.  

And I am the latest example of how things have become so much easier. I finally updated my site today, using some simple online tools. For the past few years, I had a one-page site (yikes). I expanded it to four pages, and will add more in time. I also chose a color scheme that fits with my existing marketing materials. (At least I think so; I’m color-blind, so maybe it doesn’t match at all, ha ha ha.)

Take a look at www.rickmcopy.com and tell me what you think.

This is good news for anyone who still carries a torch for direct mail. It remains the most personal, and least intrusive, way to reach your target audience.

For communications people, it’s an annoying question, and increasingly difficult to answer. I suppose email and blogs and Facebook will reach some people, but there is still a lot of magic left in those tangible pieces we can hand to prospects and clients and supporters. In the March/April 2009 issue of Advancing Philanthropy, there is this fantastic endorsement of  print materials that you can touch, feel and place on the coffee table:

“There is still great value in print publications,” says G. Robert Alsobrook, senior executive vice president of Grenzebach Glier and Associates in Chicago. “That primary campaign brochure is proof of serious intent, showing that you’ve done your planning well and are focused on a set of strategic imperatives that will advance you along a specific path to reach an important goal — not only the campaign goal as measured by dollars, but also the campaign goal as measured by enhanced ability to achieve your mission.”

Alsobrook is in the fundraising field, but the same principles apply in corporate communications. Print, as he says, serves to show that your product, service or cause is serious enough to warrant the full publication treatment. It may not be the only way to communicate, but it’s still crucial.