اثر روش های بازاریابی مستقیم بر عملکرد: به درخواست مربوط به سازمان هنر

Prior research has affirmed the importance of direct marketing in various nonprofit industries, yet little guidance has been offered as to selection of those direct marketing methods that have significant effects on actual performance. This research investigates the effects of direct marketing on multiple measures of performance in the nonprofit arts industry. The results suggest that direct marketing techniques perceived as newer to the industry are likely to have differential effects on sales and fundraising performance depending on the communication program in which they are employed, and that the use of interactive direct marketing is positively related to both sales and fundraising performance. Generalized guidance is offered for arts organizations.

There exists a growing recognition that the“business” of managing nonprofit organizations is becoming more important than ever before.This is particularly so in the nonprofit arts industry,where people are increasingly rethinking,even revolutionizing, the way they operate,given disappearing government funding and increasingly discriminating audiences (DeLorme,Graham, Wood, & Laurin, 1995). As a result,direct marketing is increasingly viewed as an attractive marketing strategy within the nonprofit arts industry.Yet researchers have noted that relatively little is known about the current state of direct marketing within any of the various nonprofit industries in the United States (Peltier & Schibrowsky,1995). McCort (1994, p. 54) suggests that nonprofits “desire to implement and understand marketing strategies for the growth of their organizations, yet lack a sophisticated understanding of the possible nonprofit marketing strategies.” Even less is known about the effectiveness of direct marketing on objective measures of performance. Although some research has investigated perceived effectiveness of a variety of direct marketing methods (Peltier& Schibrowsky, 1995), no research has explicitly investigated the relationships between direct marketing and objective performance indicators in a nonprofit industry. Thus, the primary purpose of this research is to investigate how the implementation of various direct marketing methods by nonprofit arts organizations affects performance.

Direct marketing holds great promise for many nonprofit arts organizations—in reality the question is not one of whether arts organizations should employ direct marketing, but rather to what extent and in which situations do these techniques provide maximum effectiveness for the “bottom line.” The evidence presented here tentatively suggests that nonprofit arts organizations should concentrate on implementing tightly focused direct marketing campaigns, relying more heavily on interactive direct marketing media and recognizing that direct marketing techniques perceived as newer to the industry are likely to have differential effects on sales and fundraising performance depending on the communication program in which they are employed.