Growth Chart Time for Online Supporters

09:00 PM Jan 08, 2006

For e-strategists pushing grenadiers around the 2006 theater in the war room, it's time to survey the online organizing scene from the commanding heights.

DoubleClick has a year-end survey of consumer e-mail usage, reporting -- no surprise -- that consumers are "increasingly reliant on the channel" and "increasingly sophisticated in their use of e-mail and ... more comfortable with marketers leveraging data to make communications more relevant."

E-mail is the ground game of the e-communications scene: boring, but essential. It's a near certainty that nothing you can do online this year will be more valuable than e-mailing consistently and intelligently.

Though one has to read the DoubleClick report through the prism of its commercial/marketing angle, and the self-reported results may leave some room for second-guessing, it forms an interesting cross-reference with a couple of other resources.

DoubleClick reports that "[s]eventy-four percent of respondents point to 'a brand I know and trust' as the element most likely to drive a response."

Now flip over to DonorTrends' October White Paper The Status of Online Giving in America. Among the trove of interesting numbers pointing generally to online giving's meteoric growth continuing in the next few years is a section underscoring online donors' stronger loyalty to particular charities -- and (slightly) greater readiness to ditch those charities in response to perceived poor performance.

So the challenge is transparency and accountability. But it comes with an opportunity. Online donors are becoming more numerous (the trend is especially pronounced for political campaigns and issue advocates -- see page 7 of the report, the 8th page of the .pdf file), they tend to be the best donors, and "online givers are significantly more likely than offline givers (59% versus 34%) to urge others to contribute, and 36% of online givers do their urging online."

And word of mouth forges the most trusted brand loyalty of all.

There's every reason to expect these distinctions to hold (perhaps somewhat diluting) as online giving grows into a monster over the next few years. And that means that the land rush is on.

That's probably the closest thing to a one-size-fits-all prescription for online success in '06. Start with the people who already like you and give you reasons to love you. Communicate with your supporters, frequently and honestly. Don't be afraid to ask for money. Show them what their support is achieving.

Do it and others will come -- brilliant viral outeach strategy or no.

Loyalty pays. It might pay your salary soon.

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