Target Acquired: What Acquisition Can Do For You (and How Frakture Can Help)

Growing your email list through acquisition and partnerships is as controversial as peanut butter and bacon. Regardless of any personal uncertainty, though, acquisition is a major part of the organizing and communications world.

For those that choose to indulge, there’s three rules we’ve found to be pretty common: 1. It can be really valuable. 2. It can be really, really expensive, and 3. it’s hard to know if it’s worth it in the long term. That doesn’t exactly set fundraising programs up for success.

The truth is that for as necessary as list acquisition is, measuring success can be a challenge. Some of the best investments won’t pay off for months (or even years!), and tracking that data, analyzing it, and showing progress over that time is a difficult proposition if all you have at your disposal are an organization-wide data team and an Excel spreadsheet. But if you’re serious about investing in the future, acquisition buys, list swaps, promoted petitions and more are some of the best things you can do – if you know how to evaluate them.

And the best part is: Frakture’s origin source ROI reporting can help with that.

List acquisition is, in many ways, the key to success for your program; not in 2021, mind you, but in 2022, ’23, and ’24. It is the quintessential investment in your organization’s future, and like any investment, it can be nerve-wracking to put in a lot of money up front and not see the returns easily. And even if you do see some returns quickly, how will those new names impact your list – do they keep giving? Unsubscribe immediately? Mark your messages as spam?! *faints* Looking at your entire acquisition program comprehensively is the only way to be confident in your program’s investments, but it takes an understanding and view of all your different channels and vendors combined to really understand.

With Frakture’s Strategic Planning reports, that’s all available at the touch of a button. We track gifts not just by direct attribution, but by the origin source code of the donor: that means that when Jane P. Moneybags just loves your latest email and responds with a $100 donation, you know that they actually joined your list from that Care2 buy you did back in 2017 (and, probably, that your email writer deserves a raise). Now you know that a certain investment not only worked in the moment but also paid off big time — or was a total dud — down the road, and you can shift your current dollars accordingly! No spreadsheets for you, no headaches for your data team – it’s all updated automatically, every day in your Frakture reports.

That ease of understanding means less time spent tearing your hair out over how to justify your acquisition budget to your boss, and hopefully even less time tearing your hair out over poor performance. Those annual budget meeting decks that used to take weeks to put together are just a screenshot away, as all of your revenue across all your different vendors and CRMs is tracked back to original sources thanks to the Bots. Getting a holistic view of your program – what’s working and what isn’t – has never been easier, and so there’s never been a better way to understand your acquisition program.

So what are you waiting for? Check those reports and get your 2021 acquisition budgets ready – Care2, PACtion, and more are waiting to help make your program as successful as it can be.