Direct Mail … Gotta Luv It!

July 23, 2008      Admin

As reported in the Chron’s online column, Prospecting, the University of Indiana’s Center on Philanthropy says that the 140 fundraisers they surveyed are getting bummed out … confidence in their expected results for the year is falling.

Except for this bright spot …

"With the exception of direct mail, fund raisers say that all types of appeals were doing less well in the past six months than they had expected when the year started."

Of course, this could just mean that fundraisers low-balled their direct mail projections so much that any returns look terrific! But I doubt that’s the explanation.

As Roger has commented, advocacy groups in particular have bucked falling donor acquisition and retention trends. A simple case of passion prevailing in that sector?

But the fundraisers in the Indiana survey presumably cover a wide spectrum of the nonprofit community.

Is your direct mail performing better, worse or the same as you expected back in January? If better, take credit … you deserve a raise! If worse, do you blame it on the economy?

Tom

 

One response to “Direct Mail … Gotta Luv It!”

  1. Tami Forman says:
    July 23, 2008 at 9:42 am

    Actually we have found our non-profit clients do really well with email. I guess that’s not suprising coming from a company focused on email, but our clients find it to have a very high ROI when done well. As an example, see this blog posting about the Women’s Bean Project: http://www.returnpath.net/blog/2008/05/email-fills-the-gaps-in-societ.php

    We generally find that the marketers — whether or not they are non-profits — that use a range of tactics have the greatest success.

    Tami Forman
    Director, Corporate Communications
    Return Path

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