Direct Mail

Flesch-Kincaid is a small tool that can be a big help. Readability stats won't do your writing for you, but they can definitely make the writing you do stronger!

On March 20, two of our Engage presenters — Karin Kirchoff, vice president of Mindset Direct, and Steve Kehrli, foundation development director at the PETA Foundation — joined TrueGivers' Charlie Cadigan and DonorVoice's Angie Moore for a lively discussion on direct mail's part in a multichannel fundraising strategy. Until June 20, you can still catch the archived version of this FREE webinar simply by registering.

Congress is poised to tell the Postal Service it must continue all Saturday mail services, but the message hasn't been delivered just yet. The six-day-a-week service mandate, wrapped into a government spending bill on remaining fiscal 2013 spending, is the same one Congress has had for the past 30 years. The House has already passed the provision. The Senate is expected to follow suit as early as Tuesday.

In her October 2008 story, FundRaising Success DM Diagnosis writer Kimberly Seville highlighted several opening paragraphs from a number of fundraising appeals, including this introduction from the American Bible Society.

How do you know what creative to test? How do you know which offer to try? How do you know which concept to give a shot? How do you know?

With the rise of social media, many marketers think that direct mail is not needed. While social media is great at engagement, it’s horrible at consummating the marriage. Direct mail can help close that loop and give your ROI a huge boost.

The days of mass mailings are over, thank goodness. Is it time to rethink how targeted, affordable and testable direct mail can be reworked to add more value to your measurable marketing campaigns?

Go back to the basics and your success may amaze you.

In her August 2010 article, "S(p)ending Money to Make Money," DM Diagnosis contributor Kimberly Seville explained how some organizations were mailing coins to underscore the importance of every penny raised.

"Sometimes teasers are like bad pick-up lines. And with the split-second decision your donor makes when she glances at your outer envelope, you don’t get a second chance to talk your way out of a poor first impression … you’ve already been round-filed."

The United States Postal Service announced plans to transition to a new delivery schedule during the week of Aug. 5, 2013, that includes package delivery Monday through Saturday, and mail delivery Monday through Friday. The Postal Service expects to generate cost savings of approximately $2 billion annually, once the plan is fully implemented.

It's a fact of fundraising that some donors only give once and never again. Others give multiple times but then stop giving. But just because that's reality, fundraisers should never calmly accept it. Instead, we need to fight to the death to keep our donors, using the weapons of creative strategies that are designed to retain or re-acquire our donors.