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

By Amy Koop

One interesting point to note is that there is significant variation in premium use among the subcategories of nonprofit mailers. For instance, premium use by the nature/wildlife category has hovered near 95 percent (of unique campaigns) for the past three years. By comparison, premiums from humanitarian mailers have been tracked in only one-third of in-category mail pieces. Front-end premiums are most popular with Catholic mailers, who were tracked in the first half of 2005 to have included them with 66 percent of their mail volume. The disease/health and military/law categories saw about 40 percent of their mail volumes using up-front premiums.