Sustaining a successful nonprofit takes smart fundraising. In today’s competitive environment, that means setting yourself apart from the competition by making your vision and purpose as clear as possible. Donors and sponsors are inundated with options, so naturally, they narrow their focus to find the handful of organizations that share their goals and vision best.

When searching for that perfect match, sponsors usually ask one simple but important question:

“Does this organization’s message and goal align with mine?”

Each year, over 4,000 franchise CEOs and marketing executives are surveyed to reveal the biggest trends happening in local franchise marketing across all industries.

The feedback is published in an annual report to give franchisors valuable insight into:

• The most effective lead generation activities companies are utilizing
• How much money companies are allocating to local marketing efforts
• How businesses are measuring their return on investment
• How well brands are utilizing emerging channels and media to reach more customers 

If you haven’t noticed, direct mail campaigns are getting smarter thanks to systems allowing mailers to finally track each piece being sent out. Now, direct mail marketers can see why a campaign either worked or fell short of expectations by analyzing this important data.

The USPS’s Intelligent Mail barcode (IMb) tracking system is a way to encode mailing information for letters and flats.

Given all the ways we communicate digitally through text, email, social media just to name a few, many wonder why “physical” marketing like direct mail is still used extensively by marketers.

With statistically longer lead times than digital as well as the expenses that come with printing and delivery, why do companies continue to connect with us through the mailbox?

In short, because it works––when it’s done right, that is.

It’s hard to market a franchise these days. No matter how much time and effort you devote to crafting great campaigns, distributing them throughout a national network of franchisees can be an enormous task.

Whether it’s a bulky, inefficient marketing supply chain or campaigns that fall flat time and time again, it can seem next to impossible to find harmony between your corporate marketing team and store managers operating on the frontlines of the business.

But as many franchisors have already discovered, the solutions to distributed marketing problems have less to do with your messages and more to do with the system you’re using to plan, produce and deliver them.