Fund Raising Training

Successful Direct Mail in the 21st Century

The oft-predicted death of direct mail fund raising is yet to occur!

Many have predicted the death of direct mail, and to be sure we have seen a decline in the quantity of mail arriving in homes over the last five years. However successful fund raising programs still typically have a mailing program.

The “why” of this fact is mostly beyond the scope of this article, but briefly stated, for many of us charitable contributions are in a different category from bill paying. For many reasons the public at large has been slower to transition to electronic donation relationships with faith based and social service agencies.

Below I’ll offer an overview of direct mail basics. Of course much more could be said, but the following will serve as a primer. If you’ve got other questions just shoot a quick question and we’ll say a word back.

The Writing

The written content of a direct mail piece is pivotal. A reader’s mind must be immediately engaged as the letter begins. In the pummeling maelstrom of media messages, yours needs to get through. So pull out all the stops on the first paragraph and grab the reader’s attention with an alarming fact, a question, a quote….somehow. But….

Don’t manipulate! If you overstate your case and cross the mysterious line where the reader feels as though you’re trying to maneuver him to respond out of emotion, you may lose a donation instead of gaining one. Still…

Be sure to ask. Many organizations allow their requests for support to be watered down to the point where, if the reader gets to the end of the letter (and that’s a big if), they fail to clearly ask for financial support.

Don’t be afraid to use eye-catching strategies to get a person to read something.

Chances are your eyes drifted down to the sentence above almost uncontrollably. You may even have read that before you read anything else on the page! That’s what using bold, underlined, and italicized text does. Critics call this hokey. I call it effective. After all, you want people to read what you write.

A few final words on writing a direct mail fund raising letter, since this topic could be (and has been!) the theme of an entire book. Don’t make your letter to dense, too wordy, too complicated, too “internal”, or too long.

The Response Form

Every direct mail piece you send should have a response form. Many formats are acceptable. I recommend you personalize the form if you can. The easiest approach is a legal size sheet of paper with your letter up top and the response form perforated on the bottom. This allows the responder to easily tear it off, fill out supplemental information and mail it back to you. It makes your life easy when mailing it too because you don’t have to match anything.

The form should have the donor’s contact information, as well as some indication of what the mailing was. Upon receipt this information should be captured in your database, to allow you to make intelligent decisions about what to do in the future. Be sure to capture what mailing generated the response as well.

The Carry Envelope

Your envelope is critical! The most compelling writing in the world won’t do a thing if the recipient never opens it. The best direct mail pieces, in my opinion, have interest and compelling messages that are not overdone. Overdone means too many graphics, too slick. If your envelope is a blast of color that screams “I am a professionally designed envelope and I must be opened,” I contend that maybe it won’t be.

The best envelopes offer a clever phrase, a simple (small) photo with a heart warming quote, an intriguing question. These will be opened and will connect.

Most small organizations we work with complain there’s not budget to print custom envelopes for small mailings. True enough. Here’s how to solve that problem. First, if you limit yourself to text, chances are you can get your printer to overprint the number of envelopes you need, in one color, for a fairly low price.

If that doesn’t work for you, I recommend sitting down and planning (there’s that dreaded word again) a year’s worth of mailings. If you are mailing 8 or 9 times and you need 500 envelopes for each mailing, simply craft 3 or 4 messages along with photos for the envelope, and go to the printer with an order that lets him print 4000 or 5000 envelopes at once with slightly different messages on batches of 1000. Your price should be sufficiently better to make you feel good and the financial office happy.

A final word: use a window envelope letting the recipient’s address show through the window because then you really don’t have to do any matching.

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