Premiums are vital to many direct-mail, donor-acquisition progams. But address labels alone might not do the job.

By Amy Koop

For the purposes of this article, we’ll define a premium as an item of perceived value that is included in a mail piece (front-end) or promised as a gift, contingent upon a donation (back-end).

As part of its ongoing research, New York-based ParadyszMatera, an analytics and media-services provider, tracks 2,200 unique nonprofit fundraising promotions each year. That research shows that premium use within the nonprofit space has remained steady for the past three years, with between 55 percent and 60 percent of the nonprofit mail studied including some form of premium. Front-end and back-end premiums are equally popular, each accounting for roughly 35 percent of total nonprofit mail volume.