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Email and telemarketing key to stewardship says report

More charities believe email and telephone marketing have more of a major role to play in fundraising stewardships than direct mail, according to a new report.

The interim analysis of the Relationship Marketing Stewardship Survey reveals 57 per cent of respondents believe telephone marketing has a major role to play in stewardship and is a medium that should be regularly used to communicate with a majority of donors.

Nearly 49 per cent of respondents believe that email has a major role to play, while only 44 per cent of respondents believe direct mail should be a key factor in fundraising stewardship.

The survey also reveals 56 per cent of respondents think there should be a common, accepted definition of fundraising stewardship and currently there is little consensus in the sector about what stewardship is.

Over 60 per cent of respondents think that thanking donors promptly and politely is an ‘essential’ part of stewardship, 13 per cent only see it as a ‘building block of stewardship’, while 16 per cent consider this to be a ‘self-contained definition’ of fundraising stewardship.

Relationship marketing director of development Gordon Michie says: “Once again I think what these topline figures indicate is the different concepts of stewardship that fundraisers hold and the different types of communication vehicle they think they’ll need to deliver their own idea of stewardship. It will be fascinating as we drill down into these responses to discover what correlations there are between how fundraisers scored definitions of stewardship and how they rated communications methods.”