Informed Delivery: A Year-End Fundraising Strategy Often Overlooked

By Theresa Aide

Have you heard about a service that can increase the effectiveness of your direct mail fundraising campaign while decreasing your postage costs at the same time? This win-win solution is called Informed Delivery. You only have two more months left this year to take advantage of its dual benefits, so here are the answers to the frequently asked questions I get on this strategy that is quickly growing in popularity among nonprofits.

What Is Informed Delivery?

Informed Delivery is a service from the United States Postal Service (USPS) where residential consumers can sign up for free daily digests of their incoming mail in morning emails. The email shows a black-and-white scan of mailpieces arriving that day.

Mailers can add a full-color, ride-along ad with a clickable link below the black-and-white mailpiece image in the email. When adding an Informed Delivery ad to your mailpiece, it also moves it to the top of the email digest.

Why Should I Care About Informed Delivery?

For nonprofits sending fundraising mail, Informed Delivery offers the opportunity for a second impression of their message and a clickable link for recipients to go online and donate immediately.

Also, from now until the end of the year, any mail using Informed Delivery qualifies for a 4% postage discount as part of a USPS promotion. This is great timing to save money on your year-end campaigns.

Who Uses Informed Delivery?

The latest statistics from USPS show that there are 51 million registered users of Informed Delivery, which covers more than one in four households in the United States. This number is growing every day, averaging a million new signups per month.

The largest age group using Informed Delivery is those older than 65, which is a perfect fit for nonprofits whose average donor age is 68.

What Results Can I Expect With Informed Delivery?

On average, 25% of your list will receive an Informed Delivery email. The daily digest email averages a 67% open rate. Industry average open rates for non-profit emails are only 25%, so this is a higher likelihood that your message will be seen than your own email asks. If your donors are unsubscribed from your emails, this is also a great way to get back into their email inboxes.

Clickthrough rates average between 0.1% and 1%. One nonprofit received a $5,000 donation using the Informed Delivery link from a donor who had previously given less than $3,000 — a great success story!

How Do I Add Informed Delivery to My Next Mail Campaign?

You only need two things to add Informed Delivery to a mail campaign:

A ride-along ad image that is 300x200 pixels
Your target URL where you want to direct recipients to (your donation page)

Your print and mail service provider will do the rest of the work:

Getting USPS to approve the image and URL
Setting the job up in the online portal
Uploading the mailing list with barcode data
Requesting your 4% postage discount

Your provider should also be able to provide tracking data after the campaign to show how many emails were sent, how many emails were opened and how many times your link was clicked.

If your current mail provider does not offer Informed Delivery service as an add-on for your fundraising campaigns, it may be time to find a new partner that can get you these added benefits and secure 4% savings on your postage bill.

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Theresa Aide Author's page

Theresa Aide has more than 30 years of experience in print and mail services, and coordinates large appeal projects for nonprofits. She enjoys the process of taking a project from concept through to completion. Her previous role as a customer service representative means she has a detailed knowledge of best practices and can offer consultations and recommendations to deliver the best results.