Reviewing the Early Bidding: MAIL
It’s early days in this new climate, of that we can be sure. The health crisis is occurring at the same time as the financial crisis but the former will end sooner than the latter.
Nevertheless, it’s probably worth a quick look at what we’re seeing and hearing on performance. The more important insight from this descriptive review will be a more involved, deeper prescriptive guidance on where to go from here in the short, medium and long term. Look for those posts in the days and weeks ahead.
Merkle RMG is releasing weekly reports on their client base showing mail volume juxtaposed with donations and revenue. You can find those here and it’s worth a read because the report breaks it down by sector which will give you a sense of what’s happening with organizations similar to yours
The gist is that total mail volume (soliciting and non-soliciting mail) is going down as are revenue and donations. Not a surprise.
It was a bit unclear in the bulleted report when it comes to discerning the sector wide ratio of donation mail volume to actual donations, with the question being is it 1: 1, or better or worse? In some of the subsector reporting it appears to be worse than 1:1 for donations but better than 1:1 for revenue, which means we’re relying on fewer people to give more, which has been a recurring (but seemingly unsustainable) theme for years in the sector.
For example, donation solicitation mail volume was down 15.5% for February and March (compared to last year) for animal welfare groups with the number of donations down 28.1%, but revenue only falling 10.1%.
For all the talk of ‘engaging” supporters and doubling down on supporter experience, the percentage drop in non-solicitation mail is much bigger than the soliciting variety. We’d be the first to note that asking for money doesn’t necessarily preclude delivering a positive experience, providing a sense of donor purpose and competence and reinforcing donor identity and associated values but we’ll save that for the prescriptive posts.
We’ve also been hearing reports from DonorVoice clients and partners in Europe. And since those markets have been in full lock down for more weeks than the US (though not every US jurisdiction) it is perhaps a view out the windshield instead of the rear-view mirror.
- There is an uptick in Telemarketing to try and fill the F2F canvassing hole.
- TM contact rates are up (people are home after all)
- The calls are taking longer on average
- Upgrade conversion is lesser and at lesser monetary increases
- Reactivation and conversion of new leads (digitally sourced typically) are way down
- Some groups have already pulled the plug on TM because of complaint rates (and corresponding performance)
What are you seeing with your efforts?
Kevin
4 responses to “Reviewing the Early Bidding: MAIL”
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As a TM provider, for the most part we have seen an increase in response rates and average gifts, when contacting current donors. Naturally missions/foodbanks and healthcare foundations are seeing the strongest uptick but environmental and animal welfare are also showing positive results. Contact rates are like I have never seen before and calls are longer…..people are glad they have someone new to speak with! Naturally we have changed all scripts to address the COVID-19 crisis and always ask how the donor is coping and if they are safe and healthy, but donors understand that the work the charity supports must continue. Our callers are going through much of the same so it becomes very easy to relate and find a common topic. The only area where we did see a big drop in response rates was trying to convert on-line leads into donors. It does not seem to be the time to acquire new donors via the phone but as expected, existing donors are stepping up. Also worthy to note that some partners have started some stewardship calls, just to reach out to donors, thank them, let them know steps they have taken and wising the donor well. No financial ask, just the chance to speak to donors one-2-one and taking advantage of being able to reach people like never before.
We are in the process of putting up results from Aegis, a Moore company that does gift processing, caging, and CRM/database solutions and will link over to them when they are up. Short version: we aren’t seeing the same dip in mail responses shown in Merkle’s data. For Aegis, gifts in March were down less than 2% overall and the last bit of March had an increase. We also talked with Deluxe and DNP for payment processing and they also aren’t seeing this slowdown. We’re also seeing promising (above normal) results for many clients digitally, as are cross-industry vendors (e.g., https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2020/03/18/covid-19-google-ads-data). And the TM folks we’re talking to are seeing the same increase in contact rates mentioned, but not with the drop-off in response reported.
It’s early days, though. Whether your data fall good or ill, it’s one week and, for the mail especially, reflecting a less scared and economically hurt time, given how quickly events have moved and mail being a lagging indicator. We’ll try to keep reporting out what we’re hearing across clients to help the whole sector.
Nick,
Good to hear from you buddy, thanks for chiming in. One point to clarify or underscore, the Merkle RMG reporting includes not just response but mail volume. The mail volume is not a function of processing gifts but rather, a direct report from the charities (or their agencies) doing the mailings.
Even absent the crisis, if charities are mailing a lot less, they’ll get a lot less. If you are able to share not just results (output) but also solicitation volume (input) that will be the most useful point of comparison.
Unfortunately, we don’t have perfect volume numbers and I’m missing where the Merkle report has this in there. They do report on mail volume, but the subhead shows that to be “Comparing the number of mail pieces processed each week” so I’m thinking that is processed, not sent.
We can say no huge deviations for almost all of the organizations for whom we have mail volume so it should be fairly steady.
Aegis has started publishing our caging numbers on their COVID-19 page at https://www.aegispremier.com/covid19 and today’s just went up. For the past two weeks, donation volume has gone up, as well as average gift. For April 1-7, it’s a 3.5% increase in donations and a 6.5% increase in average gift.
This could be due to Aegis’s composition of clients or mix of acquisition versus donor mailings. However, these are the same clients and mix for the beginning of March where there were slight decreases in donation volume.
So all in all, we are very cautiously optimistic for the near term for mail…