Direct Mail

Communications and development can, and should be, the soup and sandwich of fundraising.

Ah, I could talk about direct mail forever ... but I'll stop here! All this old dog asks is that all you skeptics out there take a few minutes to consider (or re-consider) direct mail — an old-fashioned fundraising tool that can breathe new life into your year-end fundraising.

In this webinar we discuss the fears surrounding mobile & text-to-give, interactive websites, and video… and how to overcome them.

Direct mail and e-mail are dull as dishwater, but they're fascinating to do. You have to have a detail-oriented personality. It’s ultimately about human behavior and analyzing it from a number of different ways. Whether it’s a for-profit enterprise or a nonprofit, it’s all about driving response, trying to get people to become engaged and invest their money. Seeing nonprofits do that is really interesting. You wonder what the thought process was, and why people aren’t aware of what works and what doesn’t work.

Just as people can sense when they're being handled, they can also sense when someone is being disingenuous in communications. It's not always something they can put their finger on, but you'd better believe they know it when they feel it.

There's a lot of money in the mail these days. Over a period of about six weeks, I racked up $4.65 in cash and checks from nine different nonprofits.

In today’s high-tech fundraising world, why wade into an old-fashioned topic like carrier-envelope design? The reasons actually are quite simple. First, direct mail is still the medium of choice for most large and small direct-response fundraisers. These days it’s fashionable to discuss the Internet and other alternative media, but the fact is that direct mail generates vastly more gifts than any of them. So improving direct-mail performance can have a huge effect on a whole donations program. And, experts I polled agree that the design of the simple outside carrier envelope can dramatically affect response rates.

Staying on your donor's good side can be a dicey proposition. People and relationships are full of paradoxes and contradictions. And that's doubly true of donor relationships, which are complicated by the fact that you spend a lot more time talking at your supporter than with her.

Here are 10 direct-mail fundraising best practices shared by Valerie Kagan, president of VK Direct, during her session at Fundraising Day in New York.

The Direct Marketing Fundraisers Association (DMFA) announced the winners of its Package of the Year Awards, showcasing nonprofits' best direct-mail and e-mail fundraising efforts.