Multi-Plat-Fornication!?
Posted by Michael Johnston on August 29th, 2005 at 11:33pm
Convergence is all the rage in the commercial sector, but in fundraising we call it a much more polite - Integration. How old and new medias connect to one another is important to raise more money and to build better donor relationships. This will be paramount with our younger donors. The term, ‘multi-plat-fornication’ comes from Van Toffler, head of MTV. He believes that when someone’s watching his MTV music awards on TV, he also wants to offer simultaneous behind-the-scenes TV on MTV’s complimentary broadband service — and have SMS text messaging coming back and forth — and so on and so on. Multiple messages — at the same event — from multiple mediums — gives the younger audience what it craves — a behind the scenes look at popular culture and lets them multi task at the same time.
This is the younger donor I think we need to connect with. A prospective 21 year old donor is writing a University paper and doing research for it online — while chatting on AOL at the same time — while watching a live music feed at the same time in a diminished screen — while answering their cellular phone’s text messaging too… it’s a complicated environment for older donors — but for younger ones this is what they are used to. What are fundraisers gonna do?
Under fundraising
3 Comments for Multi-Plat-Fornication!?
1. James Araci | September 20th, 2005 at 3:01 pm
Interesting article - does anyone have any research or white papers on “Multi channel fundraising”? Our internal research shows that donors come to us through a variety of media and request to be contacted through a variety of mechanisms - email, sms, letters, face - to - face.
We’re looking at how our databases can manage this - e.g. do we adopt a datamart or go for the full CRM package?
If any charities out there would like to share their thoughts with me, I’m happy to provide some insight on how we work.
I work within the Data Management Team for Cancer Research UK.
Thanks,
James
2. Jon | October 12th, 2005 at 9:07 pm
Interesting proposition. However, I pose two issues — 1) would this be cost effective? Younger donors do need to be cultivated, but considerationn has to be given to the ROI of any development initiative. Will their contributions justify the continuous investment to support such an initiative?
And, 2) what would be the required investment? MTV has massive resources from advertising to support this type of multi-channel programming — and, it is their mission to broadcast appropriate content in the most accepted manner to their market demographic. Non-profits don’t have the deep pockets, nor the in-house expertise.
Just my $.02.
3. Michael Johnston | October 13th, 2005 at 7:52 pm
I agree on ROI being an important part of investigating how we test, and use, new media in engaging younger donors. In our traditional mediums like the mail and phone or even the TV, we’ve got our ROIs down pretty solidly. Now we’ve got to begin to do the same for younger donors in new mediums.
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