Rule #38: “Madison Avenue is right! (Multichannel = market penetration).”
Robert Johnson,
CFRE, Senior Creative Director
Doug wrote Rule #38 in his book “More Rules of Fundraising” more than a decade ago, making the case that nonprofits should use every channel available to reach donors: mail, email, social media, the works. Reading it again, what stuck with me wasn’t the list of channels, but the idea underneath it—that donors don’t experience our organizations the way we do. They don’t sort us into departments—direct mail over here, social media over there, digital advertising in its own silo. They just notice whether we show up where they are, with something worth their attention.
This is easy to recognize and hard to live. Every one of us has a channel we trust more than the others. The one that feels like “real” fundraising. The one we’ve relied on throughout our career. Or even the one that’s simply easier to defend during a board presentation. But Rule #38 doesn’t ask us to pick a winner. It asks for something more challenging: Set our instincts aside and let the data, not our gut, decide what best serves the mission.
The Rule tells us there is no room for I think, I want, or I believe. Just what works. Right now, fundraising budgets are tight, and every channel is competing for our shrinking attention spans. Discipline matters more than any single tactic.
Rule #38 is a great reminder that strategy isn’t really about print versus digital, or old versus new. It’s a reminder that an organization’s reach has to expand beyond the boundaries of any comfort zones—including yours and mine.
Read the next rule here . . .
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