Digital environments are hugely influential for many fundraising campaigns, but care must be taken not to attribute too much online conversion to online marketing and fundraising.
Reporting digital results against digital spending, unless those results are specifically and accurately attributed, can be very misleading. Correlation without such significant causation.
For example, it's safe to assume that some message somewhere has driven a search.
So good paid search should pick up those enquiries.
But additional paid search spend is not going to generate more genuine enquiries.
Television will often intentionally generate thousands of (attributable) page visits and searches...in some cases 100% of them, but the budget is rarely categorised as digital spend.
That TV campaign may make 'paid search' look to perform amazingly well and dramatically improve the 'digital' ROI without the TV spend is not credited with 'view-through; revenue. Take away the TV and spend more on Paid Search and you will be in trouble...(and we have the data to show this)
I have said before that we give too much credit to shiny new objects and ignore the ones that have given value so far. I am not going to take the pie from TV especially in India and give it to Digital. TV's magic is there and it is not going anywhere.
But can a smaller nonprofit bear the costs of TV? that's the tricky bit and in that case, digital becomes a strong medium. Especially during the neverending pandemic. That too needs to be done in an effective way. Ideally, I would like to use whatever medium works better for an organization to raise money.
As you and M&R have said, it's very messy.
Digital environments are hugely influential for many fundraising campaigns, but care must be taken not to attribute too much online conversion to online marketing and fundraising.
Reporting digital results against digital spending, unless those results are specifically and accurately attributed, can be very misleading. Correlation without such significant causation.
For example, it's safe to assume that some message somewhere has driven a search.
So good paid search should pick up those enquiries.
But additional paid search spend is not going to generate more genuine enquiries.
Television will often intentionally generate thousands of (attributable) page visits and searches...in some cases 100% of them, but the budget is rarely categorised as digital spend.
That TV campaign may make 'paid search' look to perform amazingly well and dramatically improve the 'digital' ROI without the TV spend is not credited with 'view-through; revenue. Take away the TV and spend more on Paid Search and you will be in trouble...(and we have the data to show this)
I understand your pain and frustration AD :)
I have said before that we give too much credit to shiny new objects and ignore the ones that have given value so far. I am not going to take the pie from TV especially in India and give it to Digital. TV's magic is there and it is not going anywhere.
But can a smaller nonprofit bear the costs of TV? that's the tricky bit and in that case, digital becomes a strong medium. Especially during the neverending pandemic. That too needs to be done in an effective way. Ideally, I would like to use whatever medium works better for an organization to raise money.
Thanks!