Bottomline: 

Oneicity delivered a complex, direct mail impact for a new client in only 4 days.

Background: 

Because of difficulties with the big advertising agency they were leaving, one of our new clients faced the less-than-optimal situation of a gap in their fundraising. 

Instead of the planned direct mail impact arriving in mailboxes, our new client was facing no communication with donors and worse, none of the anticipated direct mail income during that month. Oneicity wasn’t scheduled to begin our work yet, but when we heard about the problem, we rolled up our sleeves and got busy.

What We Did:

At Oneicity, we pride ourselves on our agility. We’re not saying everyone on our team can touch their toes, but as a team we are flexible and nimble. That’s just one of the advantages to working with our smaller team that’s led by the company’s owners. Oneicity moves quickly. The day we heard about the problem, we jumped on a zoom call with the client’s leadership team. We held a Creative Meeting with them to design the impact strategy to communicate with donors and keep the income coming in. This direct mail impact had a complicated mailing select, sophisticated data, and custom versioning. We created custom ask amounts based on donor behavior and history. Oh, and this is a sizable mailing file.

What Happened:

Our client loved the creative we built, and appeal was at the print house 4 days after we had the Zoom meeting! We began on Monday and on Thursday it was on the printing press. Everything worked flawlessly.

Oh, and donors loved it, too. The results were awesome.

Why You Care:

Emergencies happen. Organizations need to respond to pandemics and other events. You need your agency partner to be in the foxhole with you helping all the time, but especially when time is short. Big agencies often struggle to react quickly. This example isn’t a one-off, either. Oneicity has a history of incredibly quick responses to support our clients. It’s a key advantage to a smaller, family-owned ad agency. 

If you’d like an agency partner who can support your needs, even when circumstances are challenging, let’s talk.

Bottomline: 

Full-service Oneicity clients have an average retention rate of 62.9% compared to the national benchmark of 34.9%. 

Background:

If you have donors, you’re constantly thinking about how to keep them as your donors. Your Retention Rate (what percent of your donors are active year after year) is a critical metric. If you can’t retain donors, you’re stuck having to invest significant funds to find new donors. If you don’t, bad things happen. The cost to acquire new donors via direct mail, traditional advertising, events, or digital strategies is incredibly expensive. So, if you can retain more donors, you don’t have to pay to replace a lapsing donor with a new donor. 

What if you could retain more donors?

What We Do:

Oneicity’s full-service clients have the benefit of custom-designed fundraising strategies and messaging. They keep donors engaged and connected to the cause and the ministry. Our team creates a rolling cycle of communication, cultivation, validation, feedback, and fundraising messages. This plan is integrated across platforms (digital, direct mail, etc.) and from impact to impact so that donors receive messages that are cohesive and relational. We work with clients to integrate the impacts offline and online so donors can connect in whatever way is convenient at that moment.

Our communication includes not only great creative and donor-focused language, but we also utilize a technique we call “Leader Lensing.” Leader Lensing strengthens the bond between the ministry’s leader and the donor. As one client CEO put it, “I don’t necessarily have a personal relationship with our donors, but donors have a relationship with me!”

That personal relationship, combined with superior select strategies, evocative copy, thoughtful data strategies, and rock-solid processes keep donors connected to our clients.

We calculate retention rates without any fancy reporting shenanigans or hand waving. What percentage of donors in the previous 12-month period gave a monetary gift in the current 12-month period. Our clients average 62.9%. The highest is 67%. The lowest is 58.1%. The national average reported by Fundraising Report Card is 34.9%. You can find all sorts of “benchmarks” out there, so it’s important to understand how the “expert” is calculating retention rate. Make sure you’re comparing apples to apples.

Why You Care:

If you can avoid the dreaded “burn and churn” cycle (large numbers of donors lapse and trying to acquire more new donors to replace the losses) your organization can grow, even in the toughest economic times. A strong retention rate ensures your ministry’s growth and stability.

If you’d like to discuss improving your ministry’s retention rate, let’s chat!

Bottomline: 

Oneicity newsletter strategies combined with a strong in-house newsletter saw a 62% year-over-year increase in donor income, plus a 61% increase in the number of gifts.

Background: 

Historically, our new client produced their newsletters in-house. The newsletters the client produced looked nice, were well-written, and communicated in their voice. Their newsletter raised money, but they wanted to see what Oneicity strategies could deliver. 

Could Oneicity produce a newsletter that communicated and thanked donors, while raising more money?

What We Did:

Our creative team analyzed their newsletter content and design. We then changed some specific design elements to improve scanning and readability. Our copy uses several techniques to increase donor connections and influence donors to act. The team changed how the calls to action and fundraising requests were made. We used a different response device strategy than what was used in the past and used targeted data strategies to select the donors to receive the newsletter.

What Happened:

Comparing newsletter results, year-over-year, currently our newsletters have produced a 62% increase in income (comparing the same time of year and not mailing drastically more pieces). Plus, during the same time period, our newsletter produced 61% more gifts. The income increase wasn’t driven by a few large gifts, both the dollars and the number of gifts increased substantially.

Why You Care:

Fundraising is a fiercely competitive landscape wherever you are and whatever your ministry. Great donor relationships create stable streams of income for ministries that understand what it takes in today’s world. Donors need far more than just a “thank you.” They need validation and feedback that their gifts are changing the world as they intended. Donors respond favorably to a carefully crafted plan that includes direct asks, strong engaging newsletters, and donor validation elements. When newsletters are designed to thank, validate, and ask for support, donors respond generously. 

Let’s talk about how newsletters can grow donor relationships and your income budget!

Bottomline: 

Oneicity delivered a real, trackable, 4.74 ROI on digital ads during peak fundraising season (for every dollar spent, the client received $4.74).

Background: 

Digital advertising can often feel like a blackhole. You throw money in. Your “ad guy” tells you about the millions and millions of “Impressions.” But did anything really happen?  Sometimes your “ad guy” will project or estimate or even guess how much income came from the ads. But you have to wonder, “Is this really working?” “Are real people seeing these?” 

You really want a donor to take an action, like make a gift. “Calls to Action” are much better than “Impressions.” The Oneicity team are constantly learning, testing, and evaluating to improve results and track the effectiveness of our clients’ digital advertising. Last fall, we worked with a new client to roll out the strategy and technical requirements to directly track donor gifts that came from Google ads.

What We Did:

We created digital messages to inspire donors to give. We designed evocative creative elements. We built the cadence of impressions. We used our experience with keywords, geotargeting, and placement strategies to build a September to December campaign to connect with donors and encourage giving. We baked into this strategy the ability to track the online giving by the click! The campaign began September 1 and ended December 31.

What Happened:

At the end of December, after all the gifts were in, our digital ad strategy had delivered a 474% Return On Ad Spend (ROAS). That’s a 4.74 ROI!  We had directly attributable income. We had clear expenses. We had great new income. We had real dollars we could show came from  digital ads. 

Why It Matters:

Digital advertising is challenging to use effectively. The landscape and the rules change constantly. That makes dependable metrics and trusted advisors critically important. If you can’t track income, you can’t evaluate your digital ad performance. If you can’t trust the reporting or if the reporting is mostly projections or estimates, you can’t build the best strategy to communicate with your donors.

If you’d like to know more about our digital strategies, we’d love to connect.