Byline: DEBRA JUDGE SILBER
Easter Seals Inc. has been distributing its signature stamps since 1934, but this February 50,000 of the 15 million packs mailed out by the Chicago charity contained a small but significant alteration. Seals in those test packages were printed with the URL of Easter Seals' new national Web site, the cornerstone of an online network through which the 80-year-old nonprofit hopes to optimize existing client relationships, build new ones and, ultimately, boost donations.
In the age of e-commerce, e-tail and e-CRM, "e-Seals" seem a logical next step. The organization, among the top 20 U.S. charities in terms of revenue, has been phasing in an online network since September, launching integrated Web sites for 38 of its 94 local affiliates, distributing an e-mail newsletter and promoting online registration of events. But for all the Web's functionality - and as the small sample of URL-branded seals indicates - the organization whose identity has literally been stuck to postal envelopes for most of its history is not ready to force its core supporters onto the Internet.
"Direct mail is our bread and butter - it's what keeps our affiliates able to provide the services they do," explained Internet marketing director Shirley Sexton, who has been coordinating the effort to unify Easter Seals' affiliates via the network. Easter Seals sent out 50 million pieces in the fiscal year ending last August, leading to $38 million in donations - 29% of its $130 million total. Online giving for the same period amounted to only about $27,000.
But the 6 million donors on Easter Seals' direct mail list, whose average age is 72 and whose average contribution is $12, provide the group with a compelling reason to embrace the Internet's potential for constituency-building and fundraising. At the same time, the charity's own apparent hesitancy to embrace the Web demands it move slowly.
By unifying widespread affiliates online, Easter Seals is hoping to effectively connect for the first time with a dedicated group of supporters outside its national list. Despite Easter Seals' national presence, many of its constituents interact locally with regional affiliates that provide information and assistance to disabled individuals and their families in the supporters' areas. The organization, which serves 1 million Americans a year, also performs local fundraising and advocacy.
"There are a lot of people who aren't in the direct mail donor base who give to us and participate in our events, but aren't part of the regular direct mail communications," says Christopher Cleghorn, Easter Seals' executive vice president of direct and interactive marketing. "One of the huge challenges for us is to achieve a much more customer-focused, donor-centric way of relating to people who already have some relationship with us. Ultimately, what we'd like to do is optimize every relationship and every potential relationship we have."
While local affiliates had the contacts, they did not have the resources to develop these relationships, Cleghorn says. "One of the things we realized over time about our affiliates is they're primarily focused on delivering services to people with disabilities - that's their mission - and they didn't have the ability to devote a lot of expertise to this. Now there's the opportunity to do much more integration of constituents and donors of all ages and be better able to communicate with them."
Prior to the network's launch, Easter Seals' Internet presence was a hodgepodge of local sites with little consistency, varying degrees of interactivity and no ability to share data with the national office. "What we were faced with a year ago was there was no consistency at all, at any level, in any measurable form from one site to another," Sexton adds.
Planning for the network began in fall 2001 with Falls Church, VA-based BeaconFire Consulting; in spring 2002, Easter Seals partnered with Convio, an Austin, TX eCRM firm specializing in nonprofits (its clients include the American Cancer Society and ASPCA) to lay out the infrastructure. Convio provided Easter Seals with an integrated platform enabling the national organization to share branding, informational content and data with affiliates, while at the same time incorporating software to support online accessibility tools needed by its disabled clients. The national site (www.easter-seals.org) launched in September 2002 along with 10 affiliates. The plan calls for some 10 sites to roll out every other month, with a total of 55 anticipated online by the end of August. Sexton says she expects the remaining affiliates will come online in fiscal 2004.
Visitors to the network sites can register for Easter Seals' e-newsletter, make secure donations, apply for job and volunteer opportunities, sign up for events, and participate in advocacy campaigns. By providing information on Easter Seals services nationwide, the network also helps potential clients connect with one of the organization's 450 service centers. Efforts to drive newcomers to the network include stamping the URL on promotional items distributed by affiliates, as well as adding links on its site to other Web sites and portals.
Communications with online constituents are only just beginning. "We're going to be coordinating some campaigns together, planning a calendar of e-mail appeals, some of which are localized, some of which are not," says Sexton. But Easter Seals has already made its first move toward permission marketing with a front-and-center solicitation on its networked sites for an e-mail newsletter. Produced nationally but customized to highlight local events and issues, "it really feels to the receiver they got it from the local affiliate," Sexton continues. By late January, Easter Seals signed up 2,700 subscribers. Its goal is to gather 20,000 by August.
Newsletter registration requires only two pieces of information - e-mail address and ZIP code - which allows Easter Seals to determine the recipient's nearest affiliate. "It's a very innocuous piece of information - people don't think it's very personal, but for us it's a pretty strong start," Sexton says. A "thank-you-for-registering" e-mail provides an opportunity to update information with mailing address. "Once they are getting a newsletter, they will be getting multiple calls to action - online advocacy, online donations, being asked to sign up for events - that will require additional information," she explains.
While Sexton says they have not yet profiled newsletter subscribers, she and Cleghorn believe there will be little duplication with the direct mail list. Already, information acquired from local participants in last year's inaugural "Walk with Me" fundraiser show a very different demographic: an average age of 37, with 73 percent in professional occupations, according to Peggy Berg, director of event marketing.
Berg says that Easter Seals had hoped to clear $250,000 when it started "Walk With Me," a multisite walkathon, as a replacement for its spring telethon. But the five-month campaign, which drew 3,500 participants in 11 markets, netted $125,000 more than expected. Berg attributes the boost to about a third of the walkers who registered and solicited donations online. Their contributions averaged $342, more than three times the average for off-line registrants. This year's event, running from April 15 to Dec. 10, has been expanded to 25 markets.
Other efforts to tap online donations, which average $50 compared with mail's $12, have had mixed results. A holiday giving campaign, in which supporters were asked to honor friends and family with a contribution packaged as a gift of "inspiration, laughter, adventure, opportunity or independence," raised only about $5,000 against its $45,000 cost, Sexton says. Yet overall donations online were up, and site traffic the month of the campaign was four times what it had been the previous year. Sexton says 24% of that traffic was attributable to the campaign's marketing.
In addition to banner ads and appeals to newsletter subscribers, postcards advertising the online campaign were mailed to 50,000 donors from the house file. Only one gift, however, was directly traceable to the postcard effort, Sexton says.
The organization recognizes that offline donors who sustain Easter Seals may not be comfortable with Internet giving, notes Cleghorn. "We're testing the integration carefully," he says. "We probably could drive a lot more traffic to our Web site by using the mail than we do."
In the first quarter after the network's launch, online donations totaled $10,871 - double that raised during the same period a year before. It's nonetheless a modest start toward reaching this year's $160,000 goal for online giving, Sexton says. She believes Easter Seals can still meet that goal by the end of the fiscal year in August, as more affiliates come online.
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