Well with one day of pre-con, one day of convo and one day (today) to go, the Bridge to Integrated Marketing & Fundraising Conference 2012 has hit its’ stride.  In it’s sixth year, AFP DC and DMAW have continued to successfully build this direct response and fundraising conference and content. Congrats to everyone volunteered to make it a success. You can follow the twitter feed #bridgeconf and @bridgeconf.

I attended yesterday and found every session I attended absolutely worthwhile. Great speakers, participants and take aways. I have collected the presentations from the sessions on corporate partnerships, cultivating donors with video email, monthly donor do’s and don’ts and personal and professional branding using social media here.

Highlights and takeaways:

Corporate Partnership Do’s:

• Network at events to open doors
• Send a BRIEF email including link to more information – one or two attachments only
• Have a third party endorser
• Invite for a visit

Don’ts:

• No spewing
• No spamming
• No killing trees

Thanks to Junior Achievement of Greater Washington, Deloitte and Capital One for sharing their insights and partnership success!

Email Cultivation Using Video – via Nature Conservancy

They sent two CULTIVATION emails with videos in mid-December – there was NO SOLICITATION.

• One email video was sent to their file saying thank you and it had an 11% open rate which was ok. But returned an average gift of $300+ without an ask.
• The other cultivation email with video was sent to mid-level donors, again without an ask. This got a 25% open rate with an average gift just over $1,000!
• While in this session a tweet came across that 96% of email solicitations are deleted. I am thinking cultivation emails (with video) may be the new new thing in online solicitation……Your thoughts???

Monthly Donor Care and Engagement

MINDset Direct implemented a mystery donor program where they became sustaining donors to a number of organizations to see what would happen. It is fascinating information and I was surprised in 2012 the challenges organizations are having communicating, engaging and keeping in touch with this important group of donors. Be sure you mystery shop your own program to see what’s really going on. Their suggestion overall: Don’t let systems run strategy – you need to find internal and external systems/vendors that work for your strategy.

Personal & Professional Brands on Social Media

Once again the dynamic duo of Farra Trompeter from Big Duck and Danielle Brigida of National Wildlife Federation gave us the low-down on how to engage ourselves, staff, and organizations in social media. It is always as great seeing them in person as following them on line – cause they have this personal professional balance thing figured out. What you see and read is what you get – insightful, funny, authentic, honest, experienced. Farra also wrote a great blog post for Big Duck on managing your personal and professional brands in social media.

Again, handouts and presentations from these sessions are available here. And for all the sessions from Bridge you can look up a speaker and their presentations here.