Fresh Opportunity For Direct Mail Fundraisers

July 9, 2014      Admin

No direct mail isn’t dead. It’s the workhorse, delivering by far the preponderance of individual donations, at least in the US.

Still, if you need some encouragement about the future of direct mail, read on.

On numerous occasions, The Agitator has urged US fundraisers to shift some focus and resource to the growing Hispanic population. See here and here, for example.

Until now, our urgings have been based on the demographic realities of a shifting national population, with Hispanics growing in both numbers and purchasing power.

But here’s some additional direct response ammunition for our case.

According to this recent article in Target Marketing, Hispanic consumers respond to direct mail solicitations about 3.5 times more often than do other consumers. Useful supporting stats and context from Yankelovich Research and comScore support the proposition.

The article quotes an Hispanic advertising exec, who says, citing Yankelovich: “77 percent of Hispanics won’t discard mail before reading it, and 54 percent of Hispanic adults responded to a direct mail offer.”

I don’t know about you, but that would pique my interest in testing the Hispanic market.

Tom

P.S. Want to stay on top of Hispanic trends? Sign up for Pew Research’s excellent bi-weekly e-newsletter. And check out these resources.

P.P.S. Language is an issue; the experts seem to favor going bilingual. Be careful. Consider the mistake made in translating Perdue chicken’s classic tagline … “It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken” morphed into: “It takes an aroused man to make a chicken affectionate”!