Justin Perkins is senior director of brand engagement with Care2 and is founder of Care2’s digital marketing advice blog frogloop.com. He recently wrote an excellent piece in The NonProfit Times, titled: 5 Guidelines For Improving Your Digital And Multi-Channel Marketing.

His bottom line …

“Email still drives the most significant portion of online fundraising. Methodical, constant, email-based growth is the spearhead of the most successful digital and multi-channel fundraising strategies. Most nonprofits have a long way to go to maximize the potential of their email programs, and spread their resources or over-invest in less lucrative channels.

Social media, for example, is important, but only if done efficiently and at the right time, and not at the expense of more proven channels. Social media really falls into the more intangible realm of broader awareness and brand-building.”

If you don’t subscribe to that proposition, don’t bother reading the rest of this post. Go tweet something.

Here are some of Justin’s key observations …

• “For online acquisition, first max out your email program. Can you guess where your target donors spend most of their day, and give most frequently? It’s when they’re in the inbox at work. How many 40 to 70-year-old working professionals do you know spending more time on Facebook than in the inbox?”
• Email more than you think you need to because it’s noisy out there. Ask only four times a year, and you might as well not bother.
• The lifetime value of an email address is worth about $10 to an organization over four years. The return on investment (ROI) for paid acquisition can be 200 percent to 400 percent if best practices are followed.” [I’d like to hear some other online fundraisers comment on those numbers.]
• “The email record is the golden ticket for appending both offline (mailing address and phones) and social data. Email acquisition versus traditional direct mail list rentals can yield about three to four times the lifetime value because online donors will also give offline at about 10 times the rate of the older demographic of direct mail donors who give online.” [More stats to benchmark against.]
• “Ditch the time-and-resource-intensive newsletter that no one really clicks, and repackage only your most compelling content into bite-sized, single action emails.” [Uh-Oh … I hear newsletter champion Tom Ahern’s footsteps approaching!]