Host: Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Go Beyond Fundraising podcast. Today, we are diving into another episode of what we’re calling our “Mastering Omnichannel Fundraising” series. As part of that discussion, we wanted to bring to the table this whole idea of channel attribution and how you can accurately measure and track how your efforts are doing across all the different channels in this integrated fundraising mindset.

Joining me to discuss this important topic is Matthew Mielcarek. Matthew, welcome back to the show.

Matthew Mielcarek: Hey, Leah. Thanks.

Host: And then we also have Joe McLaughlin. Joe, welcome.

Joe McLaughlin: Thank you very much, Leah.

Host: Before we dive in today, I think some listeners are familiar with Matthew. If they don’t already know, you are one of our resident experts on analytics and insights for nonprofits. Joe, you’ve been on once or twice before, but would you please introduce yourself to our listeners?

Joe McLaughlin: Absolutely. I’m the VP of Analytics and Optimization at Allegiance Group + Pursuant. I oversee the team of data analysts for both digital and direct mail — our omnichannel direct marketing analysts, working with our clients on all aspects of data collection, reporting, and analysis. Really, at the heart of it, we make sure the efforts we’re all putting into these direct marketing campaigns are paying off and having the impact that our clients need to accomplish their mission.

Host: Awesome. Thank you so much. So, let’s get into today’s topic. Matthew, I’d love to start with you. You wrote a blog for the Allegiance Group website several months ago about the topic of attribution.

I want to start there because we know that’s one of the top questions fundraisers who take an integrated marketing and fundraising approach typically have. If you could go into some of the definitions and concepts behind omnichannel marketing and fundraising and how attribution plays into that, that would get us off to a great start.

Matthew Mielcarek: The core tenet here is that we exist as marketers and as fundraisers in an omnichannel universe. It’s the de facto standard for our clients, the de facto standard for how donors and our constituents want to engage. While sometimes you might focus on digital or direct mail alone or exist through single channels or even in a multichannel environment, the reality is that an omnichannel orientation — where we integrate across all channels and provide a unified customer experience — is how donors engage with us.

From that foundational belief, we then have to say, “Okay. We’re engaging our constituents in the way that they want to communicate with us naturally, whether that’s at their kitchen table, at an office desk, on a desktop, while they’re on a train, on their mobile device, maybe even at a concert or at a bar. We recognize this is the reality of the people we’re talking to today.” And so, when we have engagement strategies that measure across all those channels or engage across all those channels, then we need to measure across all those channels as well.

The first term that’s incredibly important is recognizing and differentiating omnichannel from multichannel. Multi means existing in all those channels and measuring performance in each channel alone. The differentiation there is we want to take a holistic perspective at engagement and then a holistic perspective at performance. So, I think that’s the most important aspect of differentiation here.

Host: That’s incredibly important because knowing that all these channels play off and influence each other is critical to remember as we look at measurement.

When we think about data analytics, attribution, and reporting in omnichannel fundraising, where do you come from or start from as somebody who works in analytics for a living?

Matthew Mielcarek: One of the most important things as performance marketers — because, in many cases, that’s who we are and what we’re doing — is that we want to assess the impact of our efforts. That often starts with the data we have at hand, and we can use email marketing as one of the best widely known examples of this. We send an email, direct it to a donor, and ideally, it’s driven an action to the response device, often an online donation form. And we can see among the people who were solicited, ultimately, who responded and who gave.

That’s often level one — the foundation of that measurement around analytics and reporting. But again, as we’ve established email marketing, digital marketing alone is often not the reality. What happens when you add additional channels to the mix, such as when that constituent is exposed to a social media post and then clicks that email later?

Here’s another common example: What happens when you have two teams with competing goals within the same organization responsible for these efforts? How do you drive attribution in that example? To be more specific, we often work with annual giving or annual funds teams that work side by side with major gifts officers and major gifts programs. So, it’s important to understand the impact that our campaign efforts can have on both of those teams within an organization. In that case, we’re looking at attribution within different program areas.

The same concept we’ve been discussing from an omnichannel perspective also comes into play for attribution around gifts and knowing which team might get credit for driving that. More fundamentally, which channel drove that relationship development and ultimately those gifts and that giving?

Host: What challenges do we face in measuring success in this complex, multi-touchpoint environment?

Matthew Mielcarek: Fundamentally, it comes down to accessing data and the data we have. I’m sure Joe will hit on this in more detail, but I mentioned level one is having access to both the list of individuals — the groups that we solicited or asked to support us — and to the responses and which donors gave. And that’s no small order, organizing all the individuals exposed to an appeal or a message and then looking at all the responses we received.

Email marketing, again, is so straightforward. We have a list. We targeted them. We know which email addresses we targeted. And then, if an individual used that email address, direct attribution is very easy.

But what happens if we’re spending money on broadcast media, a radio spot, or a television broadcast show? Attribution isn’t quite as linear. By suddenly throwing direct response TV into the mix, for instance, we’re driving many individuals, and leaps need to be taken to move somewhat from a direct attribution perspective to one that’s indirect and makes broad assumptions. Doing that requires access to a lot of data from all the channels and the response mechanisms we might have.

When we have those in place, when we’re working with clients who are more sophisticated and can invest in systems to capture that, then ultimately, we can show them the impact of our collective efforts. We love partnering with organizations who drive us toward that and where we can fulfill and show bigger picture impact other than who responded to a single campaign alone.

Host: Joe, I’d love to piggyback off what Matthew shared and look at the tools omnichannel marketers and fundraisers use to measure success across all these different channels. Most nonprofits likely use many tools to broadcast their messages, and those tools may not necessarily all be speaking to each other.

Joe McLaughlin: That’s absolutely the biggest hurdle as we approach this omnichannel attribution project. There are all sorts of tools out there that folks are using. You’ve got your database of record that has all your transactions. It’s got all your offline donor history; it’s got a very specific view of your donors and their transaction data. You’ve also got an ECRM where you’re processing all your donation forms or online donations. You’ve got your email providers that monitor who you’re sending your email campaigns to and whether they’re being opened, clicked, and engaged with. You may have a digital advocacy platform. You’ve got social media tools.

Like Matthew was saying, there’s a large and growing number of ways that people interact with your organization across multiple channels, multiple devices, all these sorts of things. Getting your arms around this sense of where all the data is currently and what’s being gathered about your marketing efforts is the first step in building an attribution model and a picture of your overall attribution.

There’s an additional complicating factor to this, as if that wasn’t complicated enough, and that’s the issue of first-party data ownership. These are things you or your organization control and own. For example, your database of record — data that you gather and save, and you own it on your behalf.

But there are also third parties that you’re leveraging. Think of Facebook ads, Google ads, or any additional tools where other actors gather data about your supporters and how they interact with your social media posts, ads, donation forms, etc. You don’t have control over what data they share. Some of these tools are anonymized also. I’m thinking most specifically of Facebook and Instagram, but it’s true of many of these platforms. So, I could see and interact with an organization’s ads, but the organization wouldn’t necessarily know that it was me personally. Because I’m online, I’ve got certain data privacy rules in place.

A lot is going on that makes a full omnichannel picture complex, but the good news is it’s not impossible. There are multiple steps between starting from scratch and getting to a complete omnichannel view of your data, where you can make progress and gather critical information about your program and your donors. You can then leverage that to build a successful fundraising strategy.

You don’t have to be all one thing or all another thing. There’s a growth process involved for a lot of organizations. We look at it through a model, like a walk-jog-run model, which may sound a little pejorative to the initial steps. The walk model is direct attribution: we know we sent out this campaign to this many people, and we got this many direct responses back — people who clicked on the link in the email or the reply device. That’s a great spot to start, and that’s excellent progress from having no data about how your campaigns are doing.

From there, we can layer on additional indirect attribution. For instance, we can look at giving by people who received those campaigns throughout, whether directly to the campaign or through unattributed or tangential giving.

Host: I’d love to look at some tools or ways nonprofit organizations can collect all the data they’re measuring across these different channels — you mentioned social, email, direct response TV, all these things — to get it into one database where measurement can be applied.

Joe McLaughlin: It’s a good question. Having that comprehensive and accurate data saved somewhere that you can easily access is the critical piece of this.

Depending on the suite of tools an organization uses — their CRM, ECRM, email provider — there are some tools in the marketplace that all speak to one another. They’re built to share all this data back and forth, maybe out of the box, maybe with a little customization. Those organizations who have invested in those tools specifically can leverage a lot of the data and analysis directly within their own tools.

At the point where most of our clients are, this would be the exception rather than the rule. Most clients don’t have the perfect, ideal data warehouse where they can search through all this information, gather it, and standardize it to work well together.

The alternative solution is to build an external data warehouse that can aggregate all the important information you identify from each of these tools and pull them into a single place where they can be standardized and unified. Then, you can say Donor X received this many pieces of direct mail and this many emails, and they opened this email, and they clicked on that ad, and they finally gave a gift after seven touchpoints.

There’s a bit of legwork that goes into that piece of the puzzle of building a data warehouse. There are tools out there. There are integrations out there. They all vary from platform to platform a little bit. So, whether you’re using Salesforce versus Blackbaud, it’s hard to say exactly which of these tools is the ideal and the best way to approach it. But all of them have started developing integrations allowing you to build this data warehouse. That would give you more of a 360-degree view of your marketing efforts and how your donors and supporters are interacting with your organization.

Host: Speaking with a little bit of a personal example, there was an app that I recently played around with because I wanted to be able to get some automated reminders to follow up with people in my life who are important to me so that I could be a better human and a better friend to them.

This one particular tool that I looked at was able to import all the contacts from my phone, and then I could log in to Facebook and import the contacts from there, then go in and mark where a contact in my phone was the same person on Facebook. It also imported all the interactions in my text messages, such as who I’m texting most frequently and interacting with. It built a universe of the top 20 to 30 people I commonly interact with in a given year.

And then, I put in some custom reminders for myself and added notes where I might want to follow up with somebody. For instance, if they told me their mother was having surgery, I would like to check in a few weeks later to see how it was going. Or, if I need to quickly pull together a Christmas card list of folks who may want to receive that from me, I can go in and update their contact information from last year.

And it’s extremely Type A and nerdy, but it makes me think about how so many nonprofits have so much information partitioned off into different silos. If they could see the entire picture of how a given individual interacts with them through all these different touchpoints, how much more personalized and powerful could their overall communication efforts with them be?

Joe McLaughlin: That’s a great example. And the good news is you can see that there are tools in your personal life that are advancing and allowing you to do things this way. The tools and platforms nonprofits are leveraging recognize they need to get into the space as well. There’s a hole in what they’ve been providing for all these years, and organizations and supporters will start demanding it because they’re seeing it in their personal lives.

While it has gotten more complicated to manage all this data, many tools are recognizing that they need to help streamline and make a lot of those things easier as well. So, the trend line is heading in the right direction. Many of these tools will be more manageable, and organizations that may have struggled to unify all these data points are starting to get to a point where it’s becoming easier.

Host: Moving back into this conversation around measuring success across different channels. You mentioned the direct attribution method as well as this indirect attribution model. What are some different attribution models that can be helpful to have in mind, especially as we’re evaluating their strengths and weaknesses?

Joe McLaughlin: Single channel or direct attribution is certainly the easiest to understand and monitor. So, we sent out 10,000 emails, and 100 gifts came back with that source code. We know that we got this conversion rate and this much money. That is very valuable and tells a great story: this is part of the value of our email program. It’s generating at least this much money.

Indirect attribution gets a little more complicated. We know that we sent this many emails, and they went to a specific list of people, and we know who those people are because we had their email addresses. We then look at all the revenue that’s directly sourced to the campaign, plus all the revenue that’s likely tangential to those marketing efforts. Did revenue come in through the campaign donation form that didn’t include a source code? Was there unsourced website revenue, such as people who came to your homepage and clicked the donate button in your site navigation rather than clicking through from an email?

Looking at the data that way gives a broader view of how that email and campaign impacted your overall giving. We know not everybody will click the link in the email and do exactly what we want them to do all the time. They’re going to move around, and they’re going to support you in the way that they want to support you.

We need to zoom out a little bit for each campaign to get a bigger picture of how your marketing efforts are starting to shape your overall fundraising program. Beyond this indirect attribution is a step even further removed. It looks not at the revenue indirectly related to a specific campaign but is more time-based, where the gift may have come in and been sourced from anywhere.

It could be a lightbox on your homepage. It could be from a Google ad. It could be a generic, unsourced website gift. Perhaps somebody dropped a check in the mail without a reply envelope, so it goes into your white mail bucket. But it happened within 30 days, 45 days, 60 days of a specific campaign dropping. We want to ensure that we’re recognizing that as well, so we know that it’s not all direct attribution. That campaign did not drive 100% of that gift, but it had an impact. It was part of the reason why somebody came back and supported your campaign in that way.

As you step farther and farther back, the picture gets fuzzier in terms of saying this specific campaign had this much revenue impact. However, it gives a more comprehensive picture of the life of your donor because we know they’re moving from channel to channel. We know they’re supporting you in many different ways. We want to reflect that as well when we look at results and look at how your direct marketing campaigns and all these direct marketing efforts contribute to the overall success of the organization.

Host: Say I’m a nonprofit fundraiser, and I’m working across all these different channels and measuring them using these different attribution models, but I need to go to my board member and say, “Here are the channels that deliver ROI for us. Here are the channels driving some brand awareness, but they’re not directly driving ROI.” How do you approach those conversations knowing that some things will not be 100% indicative of performance?

Joe McLaughlin: So, where we have netted out with most of our clients is that our reporting takes a little bit of direct attribution. It takes a little bit of indirect attribution. It takes a little bit of time-lapse attribution.

We want to ensure we’re being as specific as possible and then zooming out and giving the full, broader picture where appropriate. Be very clear in your reporting and report numbers that are directly attributed. If you say, “Our direct mail acquisition campaign drove this many new gifts and this much revenue,” that’s the floor of the support generated by that campaign. So, that’s the starting point. On slide 1 of the deck, this is the minimum number we know that came specifically from this campaign.

Slide 2 then shows the next level zoomed out, where it’s a little more indirect attribution. We know that the direct mail acquisition campaign went to these specific people. These specific people gave through these additional channels — white mail, unsourced website giving, monthly gifts, a donor advised fund, etc. — to make sure we’re showing both the direct attribution and the indirect attribution to tell a story.

As you said, whether it’s the board, senior leadership, or people who are not in the day-to-day, you still need to be able to make a complicated story fairly easy to understand. You want to be able to walk people through and say, “Here’s where we started. Here’s what we sent out. It generated this much direct revenue.” For the next step out, “We know it generated this much indirect revenue.” And then even further out, “Here’s the full universe of people who received that mail and what they’ve done in the time since they received that mailing.”

It helps to paint the picture that a lot is happening in your program beyond the single campaign. You’re sending mail. You’re sending emails. You’ve got social media posts going. You’ve got people coming in to volunteer. You’ve got events going on. We want to make sure you reflect that in your reporting when we talk about campaign ROI or channel ROI.

Start to look at the overall health of the entire program — rather than specific campaigns — as the key indicators that other folks should also look at. Taking a broader view of program health comes into play there as well.

Host: Are there any real-world client examples where you have done exactly what you’ve described and helped a client see some opportunities for additional investment in different channels? Or do you have some caution against spending more in a given channel? Any examples you could share where looking at things holistically like this have led to more positive results for a client?

Matthew Mielcarek: I’ve got a great example, which often emerges for us. We might be working exclusively with an annual giving team or an annual fund that’s only part of a broader philanthropy organization. We and our client have some questions about what the role, value, and benefit are at an existential level for the annual giving program.

We often have this discussion with organizations that have robust major gifts programs. A lot of the health-based organizations we work with fit this profile: a big major gifts program, an annual giving program that’s substantial, that’s growing, but perhaps is much, much smaller. And so, we often get the question, “Why all this fuss when we could focus on major gifts and major giving, where the cost to raise a dollar is substantially lower than a direct response program?”

The answer we arrive at is that we often have to use indirect attribution to get there. Usually, the answer is beyond revenue alone, but it shows the impact an annual giving program has on pipeline development within an organization. Specifically, the tactics Joe talked about allow us to engage with leaders and leadership within a philanthropy organization and say, “Actually, 50% of the major donors who supported us began their relationship as part of annual giving, as part of the annual fund.”

To answer your question, the value of that attribution that we’re able to show and the value of those programs is not only a revenue within that program but also a list acquisition, relationship development, and ultimately acquisition for major gifts — even though it may have taken on average two years to get there and a lot of direct mail from the annual giving program. That indirect attribution, and looking at response with this wider lens, is vital to showing the overall impact of our efforts.

Host: That’s such a great example. Thank you so much for painting that picture for us. I wasn’t even thinking about it in terms of how not only your channels but also your different programs could influence each other and build pipelines for one another and how you can use data to tell that story.

So, to land the plane today, Joe, I would love to hear from you. What are three pieces of advice that we could offer listeners to get started?

Joe McLaughlin: First and foremost, a useful exercise is to create an inventory of your data sources. Understanding where you’re currently collecting and storing data will be critical. Write down that your transactions are stored in your main CRM or that your email stats are saved in your email service provider platform. You’ve got social media stats saved in Facebook and Meta and on Instagram and whatnot. Getting a sense of all the information that’s currently out there about your current donors and how they’re interacting with your record will be your first step.

A good second step, once you’ve identified what those data sources are, is to review whether the tools you’re currently using can speak to one another. Can you get your email data into your offline CRM? For instance, who you’re emailing, how many times they’ve been emailed, what messages they’ve responded to, all these sorts of things.

If those tools don’t speak to one another, then the next step is to think about building out a data warehouse or data repository where you can get all your critical information into a single place. You can then tell the story of your donors more broadly than focusing specifically on one channel at a time or one campaign at a time. That’s not how your donors interact with your organization, and it’s not how they think about their relationship with you.

So, figure out a way to identify those big-picture issues that might be happening more broadly across your program. Do you have retention problems? It’s hard to know if you don’t have a good handle on your data. Are you getting donors to upgrade? Again, it’s hard to know if you can’t get all those data points talking to one another. Starting to look at your data infrastructure is a critical piece in being able to begin to do attribution.

Host: Matthew and Joe, thank you for giving us some time today to discuss this topic.