Working with a printer for the first time can be difficult, but like most challenges, it has a nice reward at the end — a beautiful printed piece that will do wonders for your fundraising, advocacy, or outreach efforts.

Big Duck project manager and printing expert Kat Sciolto has written up a few guidelines for printing to help make the process as painless as possible. Here are some of the topics covered:

• Choosing offset or digital printing
• Finding a printer
• Getting and reviewing samples
• Making a spec sheet
• Learning about colors
• Picking out paper and ink options
• Collecting bids from various printers
• Reviewing proofs
• Going on press
• Checking print quality
• Reprinting, if necessary

Fear not the printing process! Kat tells you what’s what. And when you’re done, you’ll have a print piece you can be proud to hand out to participants, donors, advocates, and others.

Kat Sciolot, The Duck Pond, Big Duck

Here are the hot points from this session, including a case study by American Heart Association.

What is modeling?

• Advanced statistical methods that analyze data which represent & predict future behavior

What can it do?

• Select donors on desired future outcome, not just prior reactions
• Help mail smarter & improve ROI
• Break down into populations & show which groups should be contacted more frequently

Co-op Database:

• Holistic view of philanthropy
• Each organizations history is used to influence the database
• Always make sure security & integrity are maintained

House file modeling:

• Combine co-op with organizations own RFM data
• Donors are scored & ranked from high to low
• Take information & mail to those who are higher – more likely to respond.
• Don’t mail as often to the lower deciles.
• Can identify donors who will upgrade significantly to larger gifts
• Look at age, length of residence, spending volume, # of adults in HH
• Then do thank you at point of acquisition via call or written letter

Mid Level Donor Cultivation Model:

• Group the more responsive donors & larger gift givers
• Treat that group differently to try & get a higher level gift

Sustainer Invitation Model:

• Identify those that are likely to become sustainers or pledge program donors

Acquisition Modeling:

• Zip level on upfront – applied pre merge/purge
• Household level model – applied post merge/purge

Warm Name Conversion Model:

• Gathered from walk, bike, gala or other special event
• People that are most likely to convert to ongoing DM Donors

Creating & Utilizing Profile Models – American Heart Association case study

The Dear Neighbor Program

• Volunteer based
• Mail letters to neighbors & collect donations

What is Profile Model?

• Analyzing a group that exhibits desired behavior & similarities
• Define objectives
• Define target group (i.e. $30+ volunteers)
• Analyze target group to create profile
• Average age, length of residence, income, interests, gender
• Apply model to desired universe & get tiered groups/buckets
• Validation
• Look at target group ($30+ volunteers) & see where they fall in bucket. They should fall in top tier.
• Application
• Let the model do the work

American Heart found that top tier prospects outperformed other prospects by 65%

Refresh models every 6 months – 1 year.

Laura Cox, Sr. Account Executive, Direct Media, Inc.

As video continues its great migration from the television set to the Web and smartphones, advertisers face a new challenge: how to reach customers in three places at once. The so-called "three screens" (TV, PC, and wireless devices) require different ad strategies to engage audiences. The ‘lean back’ TV viewer’s focus is watching programs, while the ‘lean forward’ PC or wireless user is multi-tasking: emailing, searching, phoning, and Web surfing.

So, is the third screen proving to be a vital new marketing channel?

The market for online video ads is certainly big. It will generate $768M this year in the US alone (Jupiter Research), and reach over $8B worldwide by 2012 (eMarketer).

And broadcasters are taking these developments very seriously. "We want new ad innovations we can introduce," says Albert Cheng, Disney-ABC Television Group Digital Media EVP, "so ad agencies are valuing what we’re doing."

A case study for this trend is the recently introduced iPhone 3G that has attracted brands like Ford, Universal Pictures, Electronic Arts, and Land Rover. These companies’ ad campaigns use AdMob, which calls itself the world’s largest mobile advertising marketplace. AdMob has served nearly 250 million ads over the iPhone to users in the last year, with 51 million iPhone ads served in June alone.

Yes, the third screen is a new, hot ad horizon. There’s no time like the present to boost your mobile ad efforts in every format.

Marketing Profs “Get To the Po!nt News” -  Howard Greenfield of Go Associates.

Although nonprofit direct marketing professionals typically aren’t – and shouldn’t have to be – experts in technology, it is helpful to have a basic understanding of today’s software options for managing constituent relationships to drive giving.

This is especially true if you have primary responsibility for selecting your organization’s constituent relationship management (CRM) solution or even if your role is limited to influencing decisions about your organization’s CRM software. After all, your success as a marketing professional depends, in large part, on having the right technology in place to support execution of your strategy and tactical plans.

Now, unless you’ve been under a rock for the past year (make that a really large boulder), you’ve been hearing about "open CRM." It’s the latest buzz term whirring through the nonprofit community and an approach that’s beginning to gain real traction in the sector. At the same time, there’s seems to be a lot of confusion about what "open" means and why it matters. Everyone seems to have a different definition of "open CRM" and vendors particularly are adding to the confusion with ubiquitous, jargon-laden advertising and PR campaigns.

To help nonprofit direct marketers cut through the clutter to figure out what makes sense for their organizations, I’ve written an article [www.mpoweropen.com/laymansguide_july1808.shtml] that is a layman’s guide to the three levels of "openness" when it comes to CRM.

The bottom line: there’s open source CRM for nonprofits and then there’s everything else – solutions that have some but limited, and in some cases, very limited, flexibility for: 1) integration with other applications; and 2) developing additional features and functionality that your organization uniquely needs for effectively communicating with and motivating your constituents.

I trust that you will find this piece helpful and would love to hear your thoughts on the whole topic of open CRM for nonprofits.

Randy McCabe, Founder and CEO, MPower

Individuals in today’s workplace, whether nonprofit or for-profit, often make two common errors when thinking about privacy and information security.

First, people tend to think of information security as a technology problem — making it all about firewalls and encryption. Designing a truly secure information handling system instead requires a holistic approach that uses technology components, but first must address business processes, policies, and most importantly, people.

Second, people often think of information security in absolute terms. Information security is a risk management problem, which is all about making sensible trade-offs. Security improvements require decisions involving money, time, and efficiency, all of which must be evaluated against the risk they will reduce.

Key Principles of Design

The key principles of good security design transcend time and have little to do with technology.

1. Education — Educate everyone in your organization on their role in maintaining security, how to think about security, how to evaluate risks, and why information processes are designed a particular way.
2. Limiting the Need to Know — The risk of information being compromised increases with every person who has access to data. For example, only allow donor database access to people who actively work on it.
3. Avoiding Unnecessary Risk — Organizations don’t need Social Security numbers to accept donations, and since these are high-risk data items, don’t ask for them. Instead, create your own membership numbers.
4. Defense in Depth — Processes, technology, and people are all imperfect, and a system is only as secure as its weakest link. You should not rely on a single layer of protection for important information.
5. Continuous Improvement — Threats and technologies constantly change, and so do business needs. You should regularly review systems and processes, as well as shut down old systems that no longer are being used. Also, keep software patches up to date; most software breaches exploit weaknesses for which a patch had already been released by a vendor.
6. Enabling, Not Obstructing — If you make a habit of always saying "no" to requests for new information processes, people will resort to circumventing your security measures in order to do their jobs. Find ways to meet colleagues’ needs while still keeping data secure.

By taking a holistic approach to these challenges, organizations can establish more effective information security to protect important data from getting into the wrong hands.

Dr. David Crooke, Chief Technology Officer, Convio, Inc.

The open platform movement has officially hit the nonprofit sector. Leading software providers have opened their platform to developers and now some nonprofit technology providers are doing the same. More than a trend, the opening of platforms and APIs can be considered a movement. And this time, the nonprofit sector is on the cutting-edge.

There are a number of reasons why leading companies are opening their platforms. Perhaps the two most compelling reasons are the ability to foster greater innovation and provide more technology choices to organizations. For nonprofits, however, there are a number of additional benefits:

1. More choice: Not every organization has the same needs or requires the same set of applications, but chances are that there is some overlap. With an open platform, nonprofits will be able to choose from a variety of applications from common integrations of legacy software systems to automated gift transactions with commercial e-tailers.

1. Integrate multiple systems: Open platforms enable developers to more easily integrate with the platform, resulting in more choices and a more comprehensive understanding of donor interactions. For example: Most nonprofits have a constituent relationship management (CRM) system. If a nonprofit is using SMS technology to send text message appeals to constituents, that information is automatically stored with the SMS technology. Often, nonprofits do not have the ability to combine information to get a full understanding of all donor interactions. Open platforms enable integration of data into a single platform.

1. Create better solutions: Open platforms provide a foundation on which to build. By giving more people access to a solid and stable technology foundation, developers can add, improve and expand on an already strong foundation to create applications that meet an organization’s specific needs.

1. Cost-effective: Because many nonprofit organizations have multiple vendors for various systems, they often have expensive custom integration projects. Open platforms provide a cost-effective approach to custom application development and data integration ande mean nonprofits and their IT staff can save lots of time and focus fundraising.

Open platforms provide new solutions and the freedom to innovate. The open platform movement has proven successful in the for-profit markets and will prove beneficial to nonprofits, too by creating a donor experience that fosters life-long support and encourages a culture of continued philanthropy.

Margaret Ho, Vice President, Product Management, Kintera

When it comes to donations processing, it’s no longer enough to simply open the mail, deposit checks, and record donor information. Nonprofit organizations seek high-quality strategic information for analysis and donor management. There is great frustration in many organizations about getting donor information that is actionable. Some worry that they don’t know enough about their donors to facilitate their stewardship objectives. 

In the competitive nonprofit arena, innovation is a key to growth. Gathering timely information about your donors is essential for evaluating appeals and successful donor stewardship. Caging and cashiering providers combine traditional processing with advanced data capture and recognition, uncovering vital information to boost donor management.

Same Donor, More Value
Advances in technology, and an increasing emphasis on stewardship, have the leadership at nonprofits rethinking their whole approach to this process. The days of the paper-intensive caging and cashiering services are fast disappearing. Also disappearing is the process of manually keying supplemental donor information.

In their place: image and data capture of any document is sent to a caging and cashiering operation, including checks, appeals, membership forms, magazine subscriptions, and correspondence. This service enables nonprofits to accelerate donation posting, eliminating manual keying of donor information and feeds their analysis and donor management systems – a revelation for nonprofits used to managing reams of paper passed along by their providers.

How It Works
Although it is touted as brand-new, today’s caging and cashiering is an evolution of donation processing, with workflow management and image archive and delivery thrown in. Using sophisticated workflow techniques and business rules, new caging and cashiering systems help non-profits capture, manage, archive, and distribute valuable donor information in cost-effective, integrated ways. This automates donations processes such as change of address requests, credit card donations, matching gift processing, split designations, and group collections. The data from supplemental donor documents, such as reply cards or appeal letters, offer nonprofit organizations the information they have long craved for — learning more about their donors and gauging the success of their appeals.

The Key: Greater Visibility
The idea behind these new services is to help nonprofits gain better visibility into their incoming mail from donors, so that departments across the organization can use the data to achieve their outreach and stewardship goals. Nonprofits using outdated systems follow a "steam pipe" model, in which marketing, advertising, and donor service have delayed or limited access to data that come in through the process.

Many recognize that they need to get a tighter handle on their donor data, but questions as to where to begin bog down such inclinations. Advanced caging and cashiering services offer a logical answer. Armed with the donor data that "trickles up" from their incoming mail, nonprofits can become much more responsive, flexible, and efficient. There’s no question that this changing notion of donations processing is inspired, and helps improve results.

Marc Haskelson, Vice President & General Manager, Business Solutions Group Communications Data Services, Inc.

Nonprofits now realize the importance of specialization when it comes to communication technologies. With growing frequency, organizations are outsourcing large technology initiatives to Application Service Providers (ASPs). Meanwhile staff members focus on using these tools to more effectively communicate with their constituencies.

This generally has been a boon to the nonprofit sector, enabling organizations of all shapes, sizes, and budgets to take advantage of new technologies. But, selecting an ASP involves more than simply picking a vendor. Look beyond features. Unlike a traditional software purchase, using an ASP involves a long-term association.

Ask the following six critical questions up front:

1. How will my data be stored, managed, and backed-up? Who will have access to it?
Your ASP will be directly responsible for planning, building, and executing a technical strategy to guarantee that your data will survive a physical, electronic, or financial disaster. At a minimum they should take a daily snapshot for storage on a separate system.  Access to your data should be limited to those who need to interact directly with your account.

2. How will you get the data in and out of our donor database?
You will likely have to integrate data collected online with your traditional "offline" donor database system. An ASP should be able to take individual fields, and transform, replicate, and assign them, as needed, within your existing system. Most importantly, ask for references of customers with whom they have done similar integration.

3. How do you handle credit card numbers?
An ASP offering online donation or volunteer fundraising capabilities will have to take credit card numbers. In most cases, ASPs contract with a third-party vendor to handle the processing and interaction with financial institutions. Confirm with your potential ASP partner that it complies with Payment Card Industry standards and erases all credit card information immediately.

5. What software operating system and database is your system based upon?
Broach the subject of software operating systems with a service provider. If an ASP is using Microsoft, you may want details regarding measures that they have taken to combat any potential weaknesses. Generally, if they are using a UNIX-based system, you can be assured that these time-tested systems will be much more attack-resistant.

6. How are fixes and improvements managed?
Features and functionalities provided boil down to a set of software tools that require constant fixes and improvements. A true ASP will have written most of these applications from scratch. It will be able to quickly correct mistakes, and respond to new feature requests with minimal effect on system usability.

An educated, proactive consumer asks the probing questions to determine which providers truly offer what the organization needs.

Vinay Bhagat, Founder, Chairman and Chief Strategy Officer, Convio