The NonProfit Times - July 15, 2008 - (Page 16)

BUSINESS BRIEFS Specialists Acquires FR Group Of Rickard List Marketing In one of the few list company deals lately that doesn’t involve infoUSA, Specialists Marketing Services (SMS) in Hasbrouck Heights, N.J. has acquired the fundraising list services group of Melville, N.Y.-based Rickard List Marketing. In statement on the move, Mark Rickard, CEO and president of Rickard, said that the firm had made a strategic decision to get out of the fundraising list business.As part of the agreement between SMS and Rickard, Donna Tarantino Murray, Rickard’s vice president and director of fundraising list brokerage, is relocating her practice to SMS. She will operate from Hauppauge, N.Y. SMS CEO and President Lon Mandel said the firm was seeking to “augment our profile” in the fundraising direct marketing community.“Donna comes to us with a long and impressive track record in the fundraising list business, consistently producing successful results for a diverse group of prestigious nonprofit mailers and agencies,” he said. Mandel declined to discuss terms of the deal, other than to say it was a purchase and that it was based on the revenue the group was generating, not necessarily the number of clients. Among the combined nonprofit clients are: Greater Boston Food Bank, Harvard Health Publishing, Morris Animal Foundation, MSPCA, National Cancer Center, Planned Parenthood (NYC), Rhode Island Community Food Bank, St. Francis House and USC/Norris LA Cancer Center. SMS has been busy. This past May, Response Media’s List Management division was merged into SMS List Management. SMS acquired 21st Century Marketing this past August, and one month earlier aquired NRL Direct. organizations, according to Austin. “Using the Force.com Platform, Convio has developed a cost-effective and full-featured solution tailored to the specific needs of nonprofits,”said Clarence So, chief marketing officer at Salesforce.com.“Convio’s Aikido Charter Program is testament to the power of the Force.com Platform in enabling Software-as-a-Service pioneers to quickly build and deploy next-generation solutions to their customers.” For more information visit: www.convio.com/crm L.W. Robbins Snares JDRF Account Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF) in New York City has selected L.W. Robbins Associates in Holliston, Mass., as its direct marketing agency. Robbins will be targeting programs for cultivation of JDRF’s higher value donors, and refining segmentation strategies to target the best donors to maximize net revenue. Robbins will also assist JDRF with the integration of email and direct mail to boost overall campaign results, according to Shawn McKenna, director, Individual Gifts Program for JDRF. The organization had been with Barton-Cotton. The first campaign produced by the new JDRF-Robbins arrangement is a donor renewal mailing which will launch in July, according to Lynn Edmonds, president of L.W. Robbins Associates. Tom Gaffny Leaves Epsilon, Opens Agency Tom Gaffny has left his position of executive vice president of the fundraising division at Wakefield, Mass.-based Epsilon and opened his own agency, Tom Gaffny Consulting. Gaffny had been with Epsilon for 28 years. The new agency will target small and medium-size nonprofits, he said. At Epsilon, he oversaw a team of more than 50 marketing professionals, who provide consultative fundraising services and support to nearly 20 nonprofit organizations nationally and globally. In the past two decades, Gaffny has won 23 ECHO awards for creative excellence from the International Direct Marketing Association and more than 200 Creative Awards from the New England Direct Marketing Association (NEDMA). He has also been recognized by NEDMA as the region’s Direct Marketer of the Year, and has been singled out as Best Copywriter a record seven times. He is also a contributing editor at The NonProfit Times. “I was at Epsilon for 28 years, and loved all of it. I was sorry to leave, but it’s just time. I’ve always wanted to try my hand at doing my own thing, and I thought it was now or never,” said Gaffny. His first client is Covenant House in New York City. His email is tomgaffny@hotmail.com Convio Teams With Salesforce On New Database Platform The buzz about a new database program built by Convio on a salesforce platform was unveiled. Code named Aikido, it’s an open, Web-based constituent relationship management (CRM) system for tracking all constituent interactions across all channels, online and offline. Built on Salesforce.com’s Force.com platform, the product offers an on-demand solution that integrates with other open systems to provide tools. Currently deployed by selected nonprofit organizations, the product is expected to be generally available in the second half of 2008. Convio declined to discuss pricing for the product. According to Gene Austin, CEO of Convio, the program provides: • Feature rich donor management and gift tracking capabilities, as well as advocacy and volunteer management features; • A single view of constituents and better management of all interactions be they online or offline; • A system built on an open technology platform, Force.com, for greater flexibility and more highly customizable features. There is access to numerous third-party applications available from the Salesforce.com AppExchange marketplace, Salesforce.com partners and Convio Fusion partners who provide a wide range of consulting, implementation and other services. There currently is not an accounting function but the application can be adapted via custom programming. Salesforce.com is the market and technology leader in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) with more than 43,600 customers. Aikido capitalizes on the enthusiastic reception to the Salesforce.com Foundation’s version of the Salesforce CRM application for nonprofits, which has been deployed by more than 3,500 Denise I. Hubbard joins Specialized Fundraising Services Denise I. Hubbard has joined Specialized Fundraising Services Inc. (SFS), in Spartanburg, S.C., as director of sales and marketing. Hubbard’s responsibilities will focus on supporting sales of 60 managed lists properties and procurement of new accounts for SFS, according to Lisa Greene, president of SFS. Hubbard spent four years as a sales executive for Avrick Direct, Inc. where she worked directly with the list brokerage community to expand Avrick’s visibility and increase overall sales, especially in the nonprofit sector. Prior to joining Avrick Direct, Inc., she spent 19 years in list brokerage and management at Media Marketplace and MKTG Services. She progressed from an entry level position in Media Marketplace to senior vice president of MKTG before leaving in 2004. PRINTING Continued from page 15 getting the best lists, but also eliminating non-responders through predictive modeling. Predictive modeling can take many forms: Best customer, lifetime value, seasonality, offer sequencing, and most often overlooked is suppression modeling. The goal of suppression models is to eliminate the names on your list which are least likely to produce the desired results. Let’s face it: Paper, printing and postage costs represent the bulk of the budget. Add to those costs the current expense of transportation and it is evident that the smart thing for any direct marketer to do is remove the names from the list that are the least likely to yield results. Funny thing, though, most nonprofits still do not capitalize on the value of predictive analytics. Perhaps it is due to the No software can replace a masterfully talented marketing statistician. foreign concept of “multiple regression analysis, neural nets and vector support machines.” Or, it could be that list providers view it as a process that will cost them revenue because the goal is to mail smarter, not more. In actuality, the broker is possibly losing money short term so the nonprofit can send fewer pieces into the mail stream.There is a real cost to mailers who choose not to use modeling to improve their results. Predicting consumer donation behavior isn’t easy. And, all modelers aren’t created equal. Automated “canned” modeling tools make it easy for users to improperly “test” modeling. Software designed to speed up the process, but that has no marketing intuition, no “ah-ha” component for identifying potentially erroneous paths has produced lackluster results for many users creating a negative bias. No software can replace a masterfully talented marketing statistician. Return on marketing investment is the name of the game and high quality modelers are often willing to put their money on the line and build models based on performance. Back to saving print dollars -- if your organization normally mails 100,000 records per campaign, which generates a 1 per- cent response rate, a typical suppression model can identify the least productive records of the 100,000 and eliminate them. The end result is a 90,000-piece mailing that yields the exact same number of donors. Optimally, the list broker would “back-fill” to 100,000 with higher scoring records and that 1 percent would increase to 1.2 percent. Over time, this process pays for itself many times over. NPT Rita O’Neill is president of O’Neill Marketing Company, a full service list brokerage and management company in Fairfax,Va. Her email is rita@oneillmarketing.com Brooks Hall is senior account executive of direct marketing analytics at VeraData in Lindenhurst, N.Y. He is also founder of FreeNCOA.com. His email is bhall@veradata.com JULY 15, 2008 THE NONPROFIT TIMES www.nptimes.com http://Force.com http://Salesforce.com http://Force.com http://www.convio.com/crm http://Force.com http://Salesforce.com http://Salesforce.com http://Salesforce.com http://Salesforce.com http://Salesforce.com http://FreeNCOA.com http://www.nptimes.com

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The NonProfit Times - July 15, 2008 Web Triggers Direct Mail Response Limited 'Face' Time Building Vs. Blowing Up Contents 'Mark'ed Man Who Are They? Making The Case Predictive Modeling Business Briefs Awards Calendar NPT Jobs Resource Directory

The NonProfit Times - July 15, 2008

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