What Aretha Franklin Can Teach Fundraisers About Direct-Mail Response and Online Giving

So, assuming you agree that tracking online gifts in response to your mail appeals is important, here are five best practices for making this happen:

1. Get senior management on your side — perhaps from both development and operations. Invest some time in educating management about the importance of your desired edits to the online-giving form or in building a separate landing page for you (and doing it today). Remind the higher-ups that accurate results tracking is critical to the success of to your fundraising program.
2. Mimic RIT's giving site by ensuring you have a good process in place to download that data and, if it is not already in place, adding that “Method of Giving” field to your database.
3. Create a simple, separate URL and online-giving form that incorporates your organization's website and the name of the mail appeal (e.g., mynonprofit.org/fallappeal), and drive people there, with several prominent mentions of it on every element within your mail packages.
4. Use a pURL site. Taking the above dedicated landing page idea one step further, a personalized URL brings your donor/member/prospect to her very own, prepopulated online-giving form. Use something like the donor's name followed by your organization's website, e.g., mary.donor/mynonprofit.org. A pURL provides not only fool-proof tracking, but the element of personalization may garner as much as a 400 percent lift in response as well!
5. Last but not least, use the track-back method. Every 15 days or so after the first response to your appeal, download a list of gifts via online response and run it against the final mailing list. If the names match, these responses — in most cases — belong in the “Mail Responses” column or tab of your response report.

There is no question that the choice to give and join online in response to direct-mail appeals will continue to grow. Some organizations have had sophisticated landing pages and tracking systems in place for a few years now, and online gifts account for 25 percent or more of their overall responses. Considering online gifts are about 30 percent higher, it behooves you to revamp your site/landing page, alter your creative to drive your constituents online to respond, and watch your net revenue grow.