The Right Way to Align Marketing and Fundraising

This article is a summary of Episode 33 of our Designing Tomorrow podcast. Each episode is a conversation between Jonathan Hicken, Executive Director of the Seymour Marine Discovery Center, and Cosmic’s Creative Director, Eric Ressler. 

When thinking about marketing and fundraising in a social impact organization, think of an orchestra. Marketing is somewhat like the melody — the strings and the woodwinds — while fundraising is the rhythm and the drum beats. 

Marketing engages the heart and the mind, connecting through stories and memorable moments. 

Fundraising grounds and drives the momentum, translating that into meaningful engagement and purposeful support.

Think about listening to some live music — what's capturing your heart and what's grounding you, making you want to start dancing? That's what marketing and fundraising should be. 

But integrating marketing and fundraising in a meaningful way, the way that an orchestra can integrate the melody and the rhythm, is difficult to do. Let’s look at some definitions of the roles of each of these teams and some ways that organizations can start to integrate these two teams better.

The Core Responsibilities of Marketing and Fundraising Teams

Let's start with core responsibilities. 

Marketing's Core Functions

There are four core responsibilities for a marketing team:

• Brand: Building and maintaining organizational identity
• Engagement: Fostering conversation and online interaction
• Lead Generation: Creating pathways for potential supporters
• Content: Developing compelling stories and materials

When thinking about marketing — or the term we’ve been using more lately, activation — a lot comes down to modern content creation, evaluation, and iteration. Doing good marketing is about developing the muscle and the culture of marketing and having that grounded in some kind of marketing or communications philosophy. There's not only one way to do marketing, and having some kind of content strategy that bolsters and supports all of that is essential.

We’re going to focus more on content and lead generation as we start to talk about the integration. But first, let's talk about fundraising.

Fundraising's Core Functions

Obviously, the core responsibility for fundraising is dollars in. There are some key metrics that organizations track:

• Donor acquisition rates
• Retention rates
• Average gift size
• Fundraising ROI broadly
• Total revenues, especially for organizations with a blend of income streams

At the end of the day, fundraising is about the drumbeat that brings dollars into the organization. 

Now, with the melody that is content and lead generation and brand and activation, and the drum beat that is dollars in, how do we start to bring those things together?

Why Marketing and Fundraising Integration Often Fails

The biggest mistake that is, honestly, way more common than one would think, is that there is a silo between marketing and fundraising. Either there is no one in charge of marketing and an organization goes all in on fundraising, trying to skip brand building and marketing, or the marketing team or agency and the fundraising team or agency are not working off of any kind of integrated, synchronized plan. They're off doing their own actions and efforts. This happens a lot.

We sometimes see organizations where marketing might be strong, the brand might be strong, but fundraising is not a very developed, coherent, intentional thing. This is often seen with really charismatic executive directors where it seems like they can just walk into a room and get checks signed. That can work, but what happens when that executive director leaves? And what happens when that executive director has an inconsistent personality where fundraising happens in fits and starts?

The meta point is that there is often not a coherent strategy and an integration between these two actions.

What Each Team Needs From the Other

Let’s talk about what each team needs from the other team or what each team is expected to do and what's missing from their expectations that the other team can fill.

The things most wanted from a marketing team are leads, stories, and collateral — though the collateral itself is really just a vessel for stories.

When branding and marketing is done well, it builds trust and credibility for an organization. It starts to tell the story for any potential new donor or existing donor or partner about why the work is important, how the organization is making a difference, and how the organization is distinct and different from others in the same impact ecosystem. 

All of these things mean that by the time any fundraiser sits down with any potential donor, you're not starting from zero anymore. Sometimes it even gets to the point where donors are ready to sign.

The closer that marketing and branding efforts can get a potential donor to "Where do I sign?" — if not just donating online without even meeting — that is how you might assess success. These are the actions that marketers should be thinking about in order to set up fundraisers for as much success as possible.

A Feedback Loop is Critical

On the fundraising side, when receiving those things from the marketing team, there's a responsibility to reflect how those things are working back to the marketing team. This story worked, that one didn't. This story worked for that kind of donor. Or, leads coming from this source are not quite as qualified or developed as this other source. The responsibility as a fundraiser or fundraising leader is to share back what's working and what's not.

When working with savvy fundraisers, that feedback is exactly what's needed. Especially when bringing on a new client who's been doing fundraising for a while, they are a treasure trove of raw data. Looking at what really gets people lit up about the story helps construct narratives or tell stories in more compelling, emotional ways. Fundraisers on the front lines are consistently some of the best voices for input, probably second to the executive team or board who are also often doing fundraising.

That feedback loop is the golden ticket. Marketing sets up fundraising for success, and fundraising shares with marketing what is working, what is not working, and why. Being able to evaluate and iterate on whatever marketing collateral, materials, campaigns, or stories that you’re telling — that's the reciprocal and synergistic relationship that marketing and fundraising should have.

Where Vision and Strategy Comes In

The vision and clarity around where an organization wants to go from a fundraising perspective is very instructive — not just for fundraisers, but for marketers too. There should be some kind of coherent strategy or vision around where you want to go with fundraising.  

Whether that is diversifying fundraising or the opposite—doubling down on major donors as the focus—understanding where the fundraising strategy is going means marketing can build the roadmap for what's happening in the future, not just react to what's happening right now.

There should be some kind of coherent strategy or vision around where you want to go with fundraising. So, whether that is diversifying fundraising, or not, maybe even the opposite. Perhaps you determine that you are a major donor institution. You want to double click on major donors, and that is going to be our focus. The kind of clarity of vision and where we're trying to go from a fundraising perspective is very instructive — not just for fundraisers, but for marketers too, because remember, we're trying to set up the support, the foundation, the story, and the scaffolding to make fundraisers’ jobs easier.

So if we don't understand where the fundraising strategy is going, then all we can do is react to what's happening right now and not build that roadmap for what's happening in the future. Does that vision come from the fundraising team or the executive team or both? That depends — mostly on the size of the institution or the organization — but that kind of vision for where at a meta strategy level fundraising is going and what we're trying to accomplish is gold for marketers.

Why Marketing and Fundraising Teams Don't Integrate

So why don't marketing teams and fundraising teams integrate more than it seems so obvious that they should? We really don't know. It's really interesting, because we've worked with clients where there is a very clear pathway between the two arms of the organization and they're honestly kind of rare and they're usually extremely proficient in fundraising. Maybe it's just that there's not enough institutional effectiveness around just how to manage the team.

Frankly, a lot of attention is given to fundraising and the social impact space and probably not enough on marketing, just because of the nature of how the space has evolved over the years. That's changing a little bit, but even when we look in digital ecosystems and platforms trying to follow marketers in the social impact space, for any one solid marketer that we find in the social impact space, we can find 20 fundraisers. There's just so much more attention given to fundraising. And in certain ways, the lines between marketing and fundraising are blurry. There's not a hard line between the two. If you think about activation versus fundraising, what's the difference? Fundraising is a form of activation.

Sometimes it's really just that organizations are just flailing. They're under-resourced. They’re just trying to get by. They're putting out fires. Some of them don't even just have the time to sit down and have a coherent strategy or the right structures in place for marketing teams and fundraising teams to be checking in consistently. That's what we've experienced. 

Three Key Barriers

It might come down to three things:

1. Relationships: Are there structures in place that force or encourage marketers and fundraisers to be spending time together building that inter team trust? 
    
2. A Lack of Shared Results: Think about a fundraising team — you're just dollars in. I got to get either new donors or I got to get larger gifts, or whatever your metric is that you've been assigned your quota so to speak. You're laser focused on that, because that’s what success looks like for you. And marketing has a whole slew of metrics that they may be paying attention to, but unless there's something that's sort of mutually, almost like codependent, we got to develop a metric that's codependent where you kind of need your teammate to step up in order to hit your goal.
    
3. Celebration Culture: What we are celebrating with our own teams and externally? Often in social impact spaces, we're celebrating the donors. We got the donor walls and we got the big gift reports and we got the donor profile that made the transformational gift. But we're not celebrating the marketing wins in the same way, which might be why we’re finding three fundraisers to one marketer. That's something our industry has always celebrated quite a bit more vocally than the marketing side of things.

The Metrics Problem

There's a corollary example in the B2B space, which is why isn't marketing and sales talking to one another? This is like an age-old adage. So it's the same problem. The other thing is that marketers have been paying attention to the wrong things. We think marketers have been trained and taught to pay attention to engagement metrics and transactions and conversions. Those metrics matter, you should pay attention to them, but they should only be considered leading indicators. The end result of what marketing should be doing for most social impact organizations is driving income or revenue, whether that's through donations or selling products and services or a combination of the two.

And so if you are not able to tie your marketing efforts directly to those business outcomes, then marketing's siloed and focused on their engagement metrics and conversion metrics and fundraising is siloed on hitting their quota for new donors or increased gift size or increased retention rate or whatever. And just the left and the right hand just aren't talking to one another because focusing on different metrics.

The Hiring Dilemma

There's a real-world dynamic at play here. Organizations that have hired a marketer, seen that person leave, and then replaced that role with a fundraiser have often seen fundraising results blown out of the water compared to the more marketing-oriented hire. 

That's probably a story that a lot of organizations have gone through. So, no wonder we've gotten here. It makes sense why we've gotten here. But what differentiates great organizations just from the run of the mill ones? The integration between the two teams is one of those differentiators.

There might be cases where having a second or third or fourth fundraiser is going to have higher ROI than using those dollars for a marketer. We think about marketing as an impact multiplier.If done well, it should make any one or five or 10 fundraisers significantly more effective in their roles. 

You have to think about the balance between those two roles. In certain cases, that balance might mean we're not at a point where investing in marketing is going to have the same ROI as just having another fundraiser on staff. Or maybe we should be just outsourcing our marketing instead of making this a full-time role. You're going to have to just look at your unique situation and assess what the right choice is there.

Strategies for Strengthening the Partnership

Let's talk about some strategies for strengthening the partnership between these two sides of the business.

1. Establish Joint Goal Setting

The next time you go into any sort of goal setting — whether you do that quarterly or annually or whatever your cadence is on goal setting — make sure that the head marketer and the head fundraiser are in the room together establishing their own goals and their own team's goals side-by-side. And make them share with each other as they're developing these goals to make sure that they're mutually reinforcing. 

Oftentimes we actually serve as a fractional CMO for clients — whether or not they have an actual CMO type role or director of marketing. Some of our clients do. Some of our clients don’t. This is exactly the way that we approach it: As soon as we know we're going to fill that role or contribute at that level with clients, one of the very first things we do is try and get clarity around the fundraising vision and set up communication and access to whoever is going to lead fundraising to make sure that exactly that happens.

2. Establish Joint Performance Metrics

These are the metrics that the marketing team or the fundraising team owns, but that there is some sort of dependence on the other team in order to be successful. So even things like acquisition costs per donor — that's a really simple one. We need to know how much it costs our organization to acquire a donor. The marketing team is acquiring the donor. So how much is marketing spending to acquire that donor? It's the fundraising team’s job, oftentimes, to convert that donor — especially if we're talking about major donors. The fundraiser needs to step in to actually shepherd that gift. And in that case, that's a natural pairing between the two teams. They're reliant on each other, but it's a singular metric.

Acquisition Cost Per Donor: 

The cost of acquisition is a very common marketing metric that’s getting harder to measure. You are never going to get accurate data on your cost of acquisition at a per campaign level because of how analytics software and privacy tracking has changed. So let's just take the example of an email campaign. You can't send an email campaign and accurately know how many people have donated from that campaign, because a lot of email clients, including Apple Mail on iPhone for example, block a lot of the tracking tools that you traditionally used to be able to use to track that.

Now you can get around that, not to go too into the weeds by setting up a particular landing page or form or et cetera, et cetera. But in general, we think you want to look at all marketing investments and activities as a blended program and then measure the cost of acquisition as a whole and be looking at that number. And you can track at a campaign level, but just know that trying to get too into the weeds on that is going to be a fool's errand.

Donor Lifetime Value: 

This is another metric that marketing and fundraising share, especially for organizations shepherding donors up the so-called donor ladder — where they're coming in as a small donor and they're slowly growing over time. Measuring that lifetime value is one that is inherently shared, especially if marketing is in charge of acquiring that donor at the lower level — let's say an annual membership or a monthly membership or something — that's where their value to the organization is going to begin. And at some point during that donor's journey, they're going to need to move into the hands of a fundraiser. And so a donor lifetime value metric is another example of one that we think is shared between these two teams.

A donor lifetime value metric is a good one to track. We've seen people say, “Well, our donor lifetime value is X,” which is kind of a reductive way of looking at it because no two donors have the same value. And even how are you measuring value? Is it really strictly just dollars in from that donor? What if a donor can't contribute very much financially, but they're highly networked and can introduce you to 10 other really high net-worth donors, for example? So people and human relationships are extremely complex, and so as much as we appreciate the goal of having some solid, measurable non-emotional metrics to measure by, we just have to be careful about how we set those up.

In addition, think about conversion rate between a donor at a certain level and how many of them we moved to become a recurring donor or how many recurring donors who were under X amount per year we were able to nurture and build relationships with and move them up to the next level. So looking at the conversion between steps in the pyramid, so to speak, is another good way to look at that. Look at donor lifetime value as more of a range than just a number. It's never going to be just one number.

The Purpose of Metrics: 

Metrics are tools. They're a way to sharpen our focus and to get our team's attention to be doing the right behaviors, to move the organization forward. There's probably dozens of metrics that would accomplish this bonding of the fundraising and marketing teams. And so it's part of your job as a leader is to find the metric that is going to incentivize the right behaviors for your organization or help you get to the right ultimate financial results. The point is to find a metric for your organization that both marketing and fundraising have to be working together on so that they're delivering some result and kind of building that habit of collaboration.

3. Create Donor Journey Maps

Journey maps plot the path of a donor from their first touch with the organization all the way to whatever is the end state being sought. This is an exercise that's really effective for bonding the marketing and fundraising teams.

Here’s an example of a journey map: Someone learns about you for the first time online through an ad or through a social media post, and then they go to your website and then they decide to attend an event and then they decide to volunteer and then they make their first gift and then they make a bigger gift. Every organization's going to have a slightly different journey. You build out this series of touch points.

When you have marketers and fundraisers in the room together doing this journey, you force them to identify and define which team is responsible for each particular touchpoint and who is driving conversion to the next touchpoint. And sometimes there may be co-owners of these particular touchpoints. But the point is to get marketing and fundraising in the room together to define what that journey looks like and know exactly where their responsibilities lie.

Utilize Analytics Tools

This is a great way to start some conversations. One tip that we highly recommend is ensuring that you have some kind of marketing automation platform or donor engagement platform or CRM or some kind of combination of those things set up, so that you can track that stuff. Because what often happens is that if things aren't tracked, then you don't know the results. At the end of the day, as much as the process of journey mapping is worth doing — similar to the lifetime value— there is no one journey. And we've experienced this a ton in our own marketing efforts for Cosmic and being part of other marketing and fundraising efforts for clients — different people are going to come in, in different ways, at different stages, and be influenced and converted by different things.

So, having plans and ideas around what those journeys would look like is a really good first step. But then also make sure that you have the tools and the muscle in place to constantly look and see — okay, many new donors are actually coming in from their first touch with the organization through this old blog post from three years ago or this recent campaign

 Again, you have to realize that this data is not going to be perfect because of privacy tools, but you can get around that by having conversations or in your intake forms, having a free choice field where people can put in how they first got in touch with your organization. That's usually what we do — a combination of those two things to get around some of the downsides and shortcomings of modern attribution software and privacy laws.

Understanding that there is no one journey, but constructing these kind of micro-journeys and listening and learning from new donors, existing donors and supporters—how they're getting involved, how they're being nurtured, and continuing to build relationships with the organization—and having a way to track that and assess it and look at it and constantly iterate is crucial.

Find Your Focus

Smaller social impact organizations can sometimes get lost in the sea of information when what they need to do is to act and to move. One of the things to look for in your team is the classic 80/20 Rule. Let's do 20% of the work that gets us 80% of the result. Or in this case, 80% of our people might be going through a similar journey, so let's focus on that. We know that there's 20% that's different and we will get there. But we need to be excellent where most of the action is happening.

That said, some of these tools are, you set them up and then the data is being collected, and even if you don't have the capacity or the expertise to go deep on it now, having that data can be really helpful, even three, five, even 10 years from now. But you can get way too in the weeds in the data.

If you're not collecting that information, you should start collecting it if you have the capability of doing so. Even if you can't use it right now, it will be helpful at some point as your organization grows.

Taking the Next Step

Integrating marketing and fundraising in the same way that an orchestra might integrate the melody and the rhythm is harder to do than to talk about. We've had the opportunity to see this work play out. We've seen some mistakes and some successes.

At the end of the day, just the understanding that these two activities and departments need to be in collaboration is really the main takeaway. Figure out where you are on that journey and what would be the next step. Because we've never once seen this being executed perfectly. There is no perfect here. There's only gradations of perfect. So wherever you are, there's a benefit to getting to that next level. And often people are literally at step one. So hopefully you’re inspired to take that first step, whether that's just having a quarterly check-in or something more advanced, because we think the potential for payoff is huge.