While many of us are working hard to meet our 2010 fundraising goals, we cannot forget to begin thinking about 2011 and how to improve fundraising appeals. Did you know that only 15% of the fundraising initiatives you take today will bring in short-term results? The remaining 85% of your efforts will be responsible for long term success. As they say, “Rome was not built in a day” and the same can be said for sustainable growth for any non-profit organization.  While preparing for next year, what actions are you taking that will help your nonprofit achieve long-term success?

Here are 3 steps you can take right now:

1) Engage donors - The average person is exposed to 5,000 messages a day but only remembers four. If you are not taking proactive steps to engage your donors then chances are your message is one that is easily forgotten. One of the ways you can engage donors is by reaching them through several channels including direct mail, email, and social media. Seeing a message in more than two channels increases the response rate by 10-15%. Another way to engage donors is through conversation. Find out more about them simply by asking (you can use PURL’s to do this) and apply that to future communication so you are reaching them on a more personal level.

2) Build relationships – As mentioned above, use whatever information you can find out about your donors and apply it to future communication so the messaging is relevant. Relevance is the largest lever on response in marketing and fundraising and is therefore key in building genuine relationships. Also, keep in mind that relevant messaging can receive a response rate 3 times higher than messages that are just personalized with a name. This is not just a once and done thing though. It’s important to maintain communication with appropriate timing and frequency to keep building that relationship.

3) Track results and utilize data – Tracking results is almost always done with fundraising but actually applying the data from the results to future fundraising initiatives is something that often falls through the cracks. Utilize data and make necessary adjustments to make sure you are achieving optimal ROI. 67% of marketing expenditures could achieve significant improvement in results without significant changes and without an increase in investment. These changes could apply to the messaging (perhaps you’ve noticed a change in donor motivations), marketing mix, and/or integration of different channels.

All in all, you want to ensure that the right person gets the right message at the right time and in the right way while applying the aforementioned strategies. If you keep doing this you can ensure fundraising success for your nonprofit both in the short-run and long-run.