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

By Amy Koop

Regardless of the specific premium used, we’re also seeing that many mailers are rotating their creative design more quickly than ever before. Where a typical creative shelf-life used to be two-plus years, art is now turning over as fast as every six to nine months for some of the major nonprofit mailers. Again, the concepts of competition and list-universe saturation create an increased need to keep mail pieces fresh.