Yesterday, in our ongoing discussion of the acquisition-retention linkage, we presented acquisition Plan B, from one of our readers.

In brief, that model says use online and mobile media to capture as many impulse givers as possible … do this over and over … and don’t aspire to renew these folks. It is in the nature of the ‘new generation’ of donors to spread their money around and experiment … they’re not looking to build relationships. So fundraisers who focus on trying to build relationships with donors are wasting their time.

Reader comment hasn’t been too keen about Plan B.

Today we give you Plan C. This one’s from Stephen Best at Animal Alliance Environment Voters. Remember, he’s the guy with a 70% renewal rate for new donors … so he must be acquiring fairly decent donors. I’m excerpting from his full comment, which you can read here. From Stephen …

“In my view, there has never been a better time to find and develop lasting–indeed, lifetime partnerships–with new supporters. However, I do think that direct response, paid advertising is, generally, not the best route to go. In fact, I think it is a poor route to follow in most instances.

… Most non-profits have compelling stories to tell. The media’s need for story and many non-profits’ wealth of them make for a convenient marriage … Consider any “story” that appears in any media as the “appeal”.

Good stories move people to action. These motivated people are the “high quality” supporters with whom a lasting, even lifetime, partnership can be made.

The non-profit now needs a means to capture the people moved to action by the earned media—the “response device”. And here we have the Internet, in particular, an organization’s website or sites. The goal is to get stories carried in all media forms, and make it easy for motivated people to Google anything or anyone in the story and find the non-profit’s website, a website dedicated to the earned media.

… A website, in my view, should be first and foremost a response device–a place where a potential supporter can go immediately upon seeing or reading an organization’s story and support the movement by making one easy click of the mouse. Arriving at a website that makes no mention of the story that motivated the potential supporter is almost useless. To be effective response devices, websites must be able to be changed within minutes of a story being picked up by media.

… Let me put the above into an analogy. The earned media from the “story” (protest, interview, letter to the editor, magazine article, book tour) is the “Dear Friend” letter. The website is the “response coupon”. And, then, of course, there is the excellent, personal welcome for the new supporter as the “thank you” letter, extended within a day of the supporter joining the organization. That “thank you”, if you want to keep the new supporter, should be a personal phone call or a real not fake personal letter. Don’t send an automated email. All the elements of traditional fundraising are there, but adapted for the omni-media environment in which we now operate.

… with the model above your prospecting becomes, not an expensive expenditure on print, postage or ads, but a truly useful program activity.

Here’s the bad news: most non-profits’ installed-base of fundraisers—staff and consultants—lack the necessary expertise to realize this model. Creating stories worthy of earned media usually entails people who understand narrative and media relations, as opposed to direct marketing and data crunching.”

In short, Stephen is saying … Get much more aggressive about leveraging relevant media coverage, introducing prospects to you. Use very customized web pages to capture and convert those motivated visitors. Then use personalized cultivation tactics to keep them.

What I like about this is the core strategy of generating your own (better) qualified leads, rather than renting someone else’s.

If you are able to do this, you’ll find that the prospecting returns from these names can be phenomenal. In my own experience, we generated leads via a very successful online petition drive, then mailed to those names at an upfront profit (even in instances of two or three passes at the names, and accounting for the cost of generating the petition responses).

This not quite the same as Stephen’s suggested riding of the media (although our petition and its follow-up mailing hinged on a ‘hot’ issue with shelf life). But in essence, the principle is the same … figure out how to generate your own leads by playing off of current affairs/news.

And as he points out, online tools allow you to do this quite rapidly and effectively, leveraging the urgency of the moment. In the ‘old days’, we used to see superior acquisition results like this from prospect names generated by ‘member referral’ campaigns (as well as paper petitions). These methods were simply more cumbersome and expensive … and much slower.

So think hard about the ways your nonprofit can generate its own prospecting leads — they might be visitors to a facility, respondents to programmatic campaigns, event participants, better conversion of generic web traffic, or …??

As you can tell, I’m a fan of Plan C. Any takers?

Tom