The Right Way to Align Marketing and Fundraising

Marketing and fundraising are the lifeblood of social impact organizations. But too often, they're working in silos, disconnected, or even at odds with each other.

This is a huge problem.

Because when these two critical functions aren't aligned, it hurts your ability to build trust with donors, limits your fundraising potential, and ultimately reduces your impact.

In our latest episode of Designing Tomorrow, Jonathan and Eric dig into this age-old disconnect and uncover the strategies that successful organizations use to get marketing and fundraising working in harmony.

We explore how aligning these departments can:

→ Amplify your overall impact

→ Increase donor trust and engagement

→ Help you achieve your social mission more effectively

If your marketing and fundraising teams aren't collaborating effectively — or at all — this conversation will inspire you to fix that.

Episode Highlights:

• [00:00] Introduction: Why marketing and fundraising often operate in silos—and why it’s a problem.
• [00:14] A Powerful Metaphor: Jonathan compares marketing and fundraising to an orchestra’s melody and rhythm.
• [01:21] Core Responsibilities of Marketing vs. Fundraising: Eric and Jonathan define the primary functions of each team.
• [05:04] The Biggest Mistakes: Common pitfalls organizations make when these teams fail to align.
• [10:24] Shared Metrics for Success: How marketing and fundraising can measure success together.
• [13:45] The Role of Leadership: Why leaders must foster collaboration and set shared goals.
• [21:08] Strategies for Integration: Practical steps to align these two functions for maximum impact.
• [29:00] Key Takeaways: Final advice for nonprofit and social enterprise leaders.

Notable Quotes:

• “Integrating marketing and fundraising in the same way an orchestra integrates melody and rhythm—it’s harder to do than to talk about, but it’s what separates great organizations from the rest.” - Jonathan Hicken [00:30]
• “Marketing is an impact multiplier—it should make every fundraiser significantly more effective.” - Eric Ressler [17:18]
• “When marketing and fundraising align, you create a golden feedback loop that drives results on both sides.” - Jonathan Hicken [09:48]
• “The biggest mistake I see is a total lack of collaboration—teams working in silos without a coherent strategy.” - Eric Ressler [05:07]
• “If you’re not tracking donor lifetime value or acquisition cost, you’re missing out on key insights to align these teams.” - Jonathan Hicken [20:52]

Resources:

• Article - From Starvation to Sustainability: Rethinking Revenue in Social Impact
• Whitepaper - Going All In: A Digital-First Guide to Sustained Nonprofit Fundraising
• Article - How to Differentiate Campaign Messaging for Major Donors vs. Grassroots Supporters
• Article - How to Increase Supporter and Donor Action Using an Engagement Pyramid
• Article - 8 Reasons Why Donors Aren’t Giving on Your Nonprofit’s Website
• Journey Maps

Transcript:

Jonathan Hicken [00:00]:

When I think about marketing and fundraising in a social impact organization, I think of an orchestra, actually. I think of marketing somewhat like the melody and the strings, and I think of fundraising as the rhythm grounding and driving the momentum and translating that into meaningful engagement and purposeful support. That's the metaphor that I want to offer as the core of this conversation.

Eric Ressler [00:24]:

So I think the biggest mistake that is honestly, in my experience, way more common than you would think, is that there is a silo between marketing and fundraising.

Jonathan Hicken [00:33]:

There's often times a lack of shared results. You can think about a fundraising team, you're just dollars in new donors, larger gifts. You're laser focused on that, what success looks like for you. But unless there's something that's sort of almost like, codependent, right? We got to develop a metric that's codependent. I'm

Jonathan Hicken [00:59]:

Eric today is one that probably deserves an entire season of designing tomorrow, but we're going to do our best to get it done in one episode here, and we're going to talk about today the interplay between marketing and fundraising. Ambitious.

Eric Ressler [01:12]:

I love it.

Jonathan Hicken [01:12]:

When I think about marketing and fundraising in a social impact organization, I think of an orchestra, actually. I think of marketing somewhat like the melody and the strings and the woodwinds, and I think of fundraising as the rhythm and the drum beats almost in that. Marketing engages the heart and the mind and connects through stories and memorable moments. And while fundraising is somewhat of, kind of grounding and driving the momentum and translating that into meaningful engagement and purposeful support, that's the metaphor that I want to offer as the core of this conversation. That's pretty deep, dude. Well, I mean, I think that there's the reality to it. You can kind of just sit and think about listening to some live music and what's capturing your heart and what's grounding you and wanting you maybe to start dancing. That's what I think marketing and fundraising is, 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. So today I want to offer a couple of, define first, some of the roles of each of these teams and some ways that listeners might be able to start to integrate these two teams better.

Eric Ressler [02:32]:

I love it. Let's do it.

Jonathan Hicken [02:33]:

So let me start with, you work with clients on their marketing and fundraising day in and day out. You're seeing every flavor and size and shape of marketing teams and fundraising teams. And so let's just start with the core responsibilities. I'm going to offer four core responsibilities for a marketing team and five for a fundraising team. And I want to see if you think there are any missing or if I've misdefined any of these within the realm. I would say that there's brand, there's engagement, lead generation and content. Is there anything missing from that list?

Eric Ressler [03:09]:

Brand? Well, what do you mean by engagement?

Jonathan Hicken [03:12]:

Well, I guess this would be conversation, online conversation, the engagement metrics that a lot of our,

Eric Ressler [03:20]:

Yeah, yeah. So you had brand engagement,

Jonathan Hicken [03:23]:

Lead generation and content.

Eric Ressler [03:25]:

Yeah, I mean, how do you break marketing down right into just four things? So I mean, I think those are solid, right? I'm sure there are some intricacies that maybe need to tie some of those things together in more detail. But at the end of the day, when I think about marketing or the term that I've really been using a lot more lately of activation, which I think marketing is part of, I think a lot about content, I think a lot about modern content creation. I think a lot about evaluation and iteration. So a lot of, in my opinion, 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 because there's not only one way to do marketing, and I think a lot about having some kind of content strategy that is bolstering and supporting all of that. So I think about it in those three things, but I could easily see how your for fit, maybe not perfectly neatly in any of those three, but in that general realm

Jonathan Hicken [04:29]:

For the purposes of this conversation, it sounds like we're pretty close and pretty close to agreement about the primary functions of a marketing team. I'm actually going to focus more on content and lead generation as we start to talk about the integration. But first, let's talk about fundraising. In terms of the core responsibilities for fundraising, I mean obviously the core responsibility for fundraising is dollars in,

[04:54]:

And there are some key metrics that a lot of us are tracking. Things like acquisition, donor acquisition rates, retention rates, average gift size, fundraising, ROI broadly, and even total revenues, especially for organizations who have a blend of income streams. So at the end of the day, fundraising is about the drumbeat that is bringing in the dollars into the organization. Agree or disagree at a high level? Absolutely agree. So now if we've got the melody that is content and lead generation and brand and activation, and they've got the drum beat that is dollars in, how do we start to bring those things together?

Eric Ressler [05:45]:

Yeah, I mean, I have some ideas or some reflections around how I've seen this not work. Well,

Jonathan Hicken [05:50]:

Let's start there.

Eric Ressler [05:51]:

So I think the biggest mistake that is honestly, in my experience, way more common than you would think, is that there is a silo between marketing and fundraising, which is probably obvious from the purpose of this episode. But where there is either no one in charge of marketing and an organization goes kind of all in on fundraising and tries to kind of 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, and they're off kind of doing their own actions and efforts. I see that happens a lot.. I sometimes also see organizations where marketing might be strong, the brand might be strong, but fundraising is not a very developed, coherent, intentional thing where you see this a lot with really charismatic executive directors where it seems like they can just walk into a room and get checks signed, and that can work. But what I've experienced is that, well, what happens if that executive director leaves or when they leave? And also what happens when that executive director, often that type is also not a very consistent type of personality where it kind of happens and fits and starts. So I mean, those are some just high level, very common problems that I see. But the meta point is that there is not a coherent strategy and an integration between those two actions.

Jonathan Hicken [07:18]:

So let's start by talking 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 fail. So I think Mark, what a fundraising team might need from a marketing team. I think that as a former full-time fundraiser myself, the things that I really want most, that I wanted most from my marketing team were leads and stories and collateral, but the collateral itself is really just a vessel for stories. 

Eric Ressler [07:50]:

Sure, Yeah.

Jonathan Hicken [07:52]:

Are there any other things that you think that fundraisers should be asking their marketing teams for?

Eric Ressler [07:58]:

Yeah, I mean the thing that we've heard the most from fundraising partners, whether they're an agency or a consultant for our clients or they work in-house in the client, when things go well, the thing that I hear constantly is this is incredible. This makes my job so much easier. And if I were to unpack that more, I think there's a couple things that go into that. One, I think when branding and marketing is done well, it builds trust and credibility for an organization and it starts to tell the story for any potential new donor or existing donor or partner for that matter about why the work is important, how your organization is making a difference, how your organization is distinct and different from other organizations in the same impact ecosystem. All of these things that mean that by the time any fundraiser sits down with any potential donor, you're not starting from zero anymore. You might just be even sometimes to the point where do I sign? So in my opinion, the closer that the marketing and the branding efforts can get a potential donor to where do I sign? If not, I'm just going to donate online without even meeting. That is kind of how I would assess it. And some of the actions that I think we should be thinking about as marketers in order to set up fundraisers for as much success as possible

Jonathan Hicken [09:18]:

On the fundraising side, if you are getting those things from your marketing team, you have a responsibility also when you receive those gifts and the responsibility that you have is to reflect how those things are working. Back to the marketing team, this story worked that one didn't, or this story worked for that kind of donor and this story, or Hey, I've been noticing that these leads that have been coming from this source are not quite as qualified or developed as this other source. So your responsibility as a fundraiser or a fundraising leader to be sharing back what's working and what's not a

Eric Ressler [09:54]:

Hundred percent agree. And I think that's often when we do get the opportunity to work with savvy fundraisers on our client side, that's exactly what we're looking for and especially when we're bringing a new client on who's been doing fundraising for a while, they are just like a treasure trove of raw data for us that we can look at and say, what really gets people lit up about your story? Often what we're helping clients figure out how to do is to construct their narrative or tell their story in a more compelling emotional way. And fundraisers on the front lines are consistently some of our best voices for input there. I would say probably second would be the executive team or board who are also often doing fundraising. And so we're really looking at that feedback loop is really, I think the golden ticket here is that marketing is setting up fundraising for success. Fundraising is sharing to marketing what is working, what is not working and why. So I think that data around being able to evaluate and iterate on whatever marketing, collateral, materials, campaigns, stories that you're telling, that's really the reciprocal and synergistic relationship that I think marketing and fundraising should have.

Jonathan Hicken [11:14]:

Is there anything else that you think marketing should be asking for from fundraising? I happen to agree with you. I think the most valuable thing that Fundraising's team can bring back to a marketing team is this feedback. Is there anything else that's missing? And I'm actually thinking about this from my own fundraising days. I'm like, shit, what did I not give my marketing team that I should have?

Eric Ressler [11:35]:

I think vision, but does the vision come from the fundraising team or higher up? I think in certain cases, or in most cases, 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 is like, you know what? We are a major donor institution. We 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 I think 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 start and not build that roadmap for what's happening in the future. So I think, does that vision come from the fundraising team or the executive team or both? That depends. Probably 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.

Jonathan Hicken [12:49]:

So why don't marketing teams and fundraising teams integrate more than it seems so obvious that they should? So why they,

Eric Ressler [13:02]:

It's such a good question. I really don't know.

Eric Ressler [13:04]:

Really don't know. And I think it's really interesting to me 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. And I don't know the answer. I think maybe it's just that there's not enough institutional effectiveness around just how to manage the team. I mean, frankly, I think 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, and I think that's changing a little bit. But I think that even when I look in digital ecosystems and platforms trying to follow marketers in the social impact space for any one solid marketer that I find in the social impact space, I can find 20 fundraisers.

[14:02]:

There's just so much more attention given to fundraising. And I think in certain ways the lines between marketing and fundraising are blurry, right? There's not a hard line between the two. If you think about activation versus fundraising, what's even the difference, right? Fundraising is a form of activation, so maybe that's part of it. I do think sometimes it's really just organizations are just kind of flailing. They're just trying to get by. They're putting out fires so they 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 I've experienced. I think it comes down to three things.

Jonathan Hicken [14:47]:

I think it comes down to one, relationships. So are there structures in place that force or encourage marketers and fundraisers to be spending time together building that inter team trust? Two, I think that there's often times a lack of shared results where you can 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, 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.

Jonathan Hicken [15:47]:

And I have some ideas about what those goals might be. And then the third I think comes down to what we are celebrating with our own teams and externally, often in these 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 necessarily the marketing wins in the same way, which is why I think you're finding three fundraisers to one marketer just because that's something our industry has begun to sell or has always celebrated quite a bit more vocally than the marketing side of things.

Eric Ressler [16:23]:

Yeah. This brings up a couple interesting points for me. One is that 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 there. I think it's maybe being solved a little bit aggressively as of late. The other thing I think is that marketers have been paying attention to the wrong things. I think marketers have been trained and taught to pay attention to engagement metrics and transactions and conversions. And we've talked about this many times before, but I think it's still rings true. And I think that those metrics matter, you should pay attention to them, but they should only be considered leading indicators for 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 over here siloed and focused on their engagement metrics and conversion metrics and fundraising is over here siloed on did they hit 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

Jonathan Hicken [17:47]:

Over the last couple of years at my, we hired a marketer and then that marketer left, and instead of replacing that job, we hired a fundraiser and the results for the organization fundraiser have blown the results out of the water from the more marketing oriented hire was focused on. And so I think also that's probably a story that a lot of organizations have gone through themselves. And so part of me is like, no wonder we've gotten here, it makes sense why we've gotten here, but what you and I like to talk about here on Designing Tomorrow is what differentiates great organizations just from the run of the mill ones. And I think this integration between the two teams is one of those differentiators.

Eric Ressler [18:39]:

And I think there might be cases where, and maybe this was true for your case, that is the right choice, having a second or third or fourth or whatever number of fundraisers is going to have higher ROI than using those dollars for a marketer. I mean, I think about marketing as an impact multiplier. And so if done well, it should make any one or five or 10 fundraisers significantly more effective in their roles. And so you have to think about the balance between those two roles. In certain cases, that balance might mean, you know what, 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. I mean, you're going to have to just look at your unique situation and assess what the right choice is there.

Jonathan Hicken [19:42]:

Let's talk about some strategies for strengthening the partnership between these two sides of the business. Sure. So first, I think the easiest place to start is 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 is 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. Is this a practice that you would endorse or that you've seen or heard about in any of your client's work?

Eric Ressler [20:27]:

Yeah, definitely mean. So oftentimes we actually serve as a fractional CMO for clients. So we are whether or not they have an actual CMO type role or director of marketing, some of our clients do. Some of our clients. This is exactly the way that we approach it is 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.

Jonathan Hicken [21:05]:

That sounds like whoever's doing that has got the right idea, and you're setting the example for that organization probably in a way that the scope of what they've hired you to do, it's greater than that scope. I mean, that's tremendously valuable that you're playing that role. Let's talk about the other thing you can do, which is establish some joint performance metrics.

[21:25]:

And again, these are the metrics that maybe the marketing team owns it or maybe the fundraising team owns it, 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. So we need to know how much it costs our organization to acquire a donor. The marketing team is acquiring the donor, and so how much is marketing spending to acquire that donor? It's the fundraising team job. And 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.

Eric Ressler [22:11]:

Yeah, I agree. And I think that cost of acquisition is a very common marketing metric that I think is getting harder to measure. And I think what I would recommend is rather than trying to measure that by any particular campaign or activity, I mean you can do that, but you have to understand that 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 necessarily 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, I 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

Jonathan Hicken [23:23]:

Donor. Lifetime value is another metric that I think is one that marketing and fundraising share, especially for organizations who are shepherding donors kind of 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. 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 that point, 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 I think is shared between these two teams.

Eric Ressler [24:13]:

Yeah, it is an interesting one too because I think it's a common one and I think a good one to track, but I think the mistake is if you just assume what I've seen people do is say, well, our donor lifetime value is X, which in my opinion 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 I appreciate the goal of having some solid, measurable non-emotional metrics to measure by, I think we just have to be careful about how we set those up.

[25:01]:

So I like to instead think about, or not instead, but 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 and even look at donor lifetime value as more of a range than just a number. It's never going to be just one number.

Jonathan Hicken [25:34]:

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. And I think 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. There's probably a whole nother podcast on just dissecting each metric and us sharing why one is good and why it might not be good or who it might be good for. But 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.

Eric Ressler [26:28]:

Yeah, agree. And just to put it on the record, I do think both of these are good to measure.

Jonathan Hicken [26:40]:

I'm a big fan of journey maps. We've talked about it in season two. It's this idea of plotting the path of a donor from their first touch with your organization all the way to whatever is the end state that you're looking for. And I think that this is an exercise that's really, really effective for bonding the marketing and fundraising teams. And just to give listeners an idea of what a journey map is, if you haven't worked with one, maybe someone learns about you for the first time online through an ad or through a social media post, and then maybe they go to your website and then maybe they decide to attend an event and then maybe they decide to volunteer and then maybe they make their first gift and then they make a bigger gift, whatever. Every organization's going to have a slightly different journey. So you build out this series of touch points, but when you have marketers and fundraisers in the room together doing this journey, you force them to identify and define who is responsible, which team is responsible for that particular touchpoint, and who is driving conversion to the next touchpoint. And sometimes there may be kind of co-owners of these particular touchpoints, but the point is, again, to get marketing and fundraising in the room together to define what that journey looks like and know exactly where their responsibilities lie.

Eric Ressler [28:03]:

Yeah, I think this is a great way to at least start some conversations. One tip that I would 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 I think what often happens is that if things aren't tracked, then you don't know because 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 I've experienced this a ton in even our own marketing efforts for Cosmic and being part of other marketing and fundraising efforts for clients, is that different people are going to come in in different ways at different stages and be influenced and converted by different things. So in my opinion, having plans and ideas around what those journeys would look like is a really good first step.

[28:58]:

But then also making sure that you have the tools and the muscle in place to constantly look and see like, okay, we've noticed that many new donors are actually coming in from their first touch with us, is this old blog post that we wrote three years ago or this recent campaign. And 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, but 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 your organization and having a way to track that and to assess that and look at it and constantly be doing. So

Jonathan Hicken [30:04]:

I'll challenge that a little bit just from the perspective of a smaller social impact organization. I think that sometimes we can get lost in the sea of information when really what we need to do is we need to act and we need to move. And I think one of the things that I would be looking for in my own team is the classic 80 20 rule, right? Let's do 20% of the work that gets us 80% of the result, or in this case, hey, 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.

Eric Ressler [30:46]:

Yep. Yeah, no, I agree. And I think 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 yes, you can get way too in the weeds in the data.

Jonathan Hicken [31:04]:

Yeah, totally. And actually, this is a really good point. If you're not collecting that information, even if you should start collecting it, if you have the capability of doing so, even if you can't use it right now, because it will be helpful at some point as your organization grows. So integrating marketing and fundraising in the same way that an orchestra might integrate the melody and the rhythm, it's harder to do than it is for us to sit in here talking about it. We've both had the opportunity to see this work play out. I've been able to make some mistakes and some successes in trying to integrate these things. Is there any other takeaways that you have or any advice for listeners on this?

Eric Ressler [31:43]:

I mean, I really think at the end of the day, just the understanding that these two activities and departments, so to speak, need to be in collaboration is really the main takeaway. And figure out where are you on that journey and what would be the next step. Because really I don't see, I've never once seen this being executed perfectly. I don't think there is no perfect here. There's only gradations of perfect. So wherever you are, I think there's a benefit to getting to that next level. And often people are really literally at step one here. So hopefully some listeners can be inspired by today's episode and take that first step, whether that's just having a quarterly check-in or something more advanced, because I think the potential for payoff is huge. Yeah.

Jonathan Hicken [32:27]:

Alright. Good luck out there. Thanks for joining me today, Eric.

Eric Ressler [32:28]:

Thanks, Jonathan.