A Primer An annual campaign is a fundraising campaign conducted every year to raise unrestricted operating revenues for your organization. By unrestricted we mean that the revenues accrued can be used for any purposes within the mission of the organization.
Many organizations send only one annual campaign soliciation per year. However, in most cases we believe that an organization should set a goal for the future to have quarterly mailings for annual campaign contributions. There are many reasons for this but primarily there are two important ones: “share of mind” and budgetary.
“Share of mind” simply expresses the need to keep your organization in front of the support base as often as possible - without going overboard. For those who are only able to make small gifts, it helps make you the principle recipient of their charitable giving. For those able to give more it provides them with additional opportunities. In the future these “share of mind” efforts should extend to anything sent to your support base – for example your newsletter and annual report should have a response card and envelope in it.
Budgetary reasons are often the principle impediment to “larger” gifts from modest donors. If they are given more opportunities to give, they will often take advantage of those.
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"Lillies of the Valley"
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Bulk vs. First Class Mailing
Generally speaking the mailings should be sent bulk, with one first class mailing per year as a means to update your database. If you are going to use your database system to send to a smaller “universe” of donors and potential donors you will want to create a code system to designate the “quality” of the donor. We recommend that at least 2 of the mailings go to the entire universe – and we’ll be discussing the universe of donors more later in this primer.
You can do bulk mailing in-house but it is very labor intensive and you will be better served to use a bulk mail house to do the mailing for you. In addition to having them code and sort the letters, we recommend that you also have them do the output of the actual letters, and the folding and stuffing as well. You can do this yourself, of course. However, again you will be using up several valuable days of time in this process. Between sorting, coding, printing, stuffing and mailing if you do this in-house you can plan on using four to six days of labor for an organization with a list of 1500 people. Multiply this times four mailings a year and you see that somewhere between three and seven weeks of time will be consumed by this task (all day x five work days per week). The mailhouse has everything automated and can do the task in 2 days once they have your text and list (obviously not including printing time if anything needs to be printed).
Creating the Appeal
There are two different schools of thought about appeal letters. Both have merit so we will describe them for you.
1. Short and Sweet
As suggested by its name this letter is short – one page preferably. This letter should be designed to tug at people’s heartstrings either through the memories it evokes or because of who is the writer. This type of letter should NOT be written by a committee and frankly it's best not to have it edited by a committee either. It should be a letter that comes from the heart and in order to hold together editing should be minimal.
There are four important considerations in such a letter:
First, it must be personal and use the word YOU when addressing the potential donor (and use it OFTEN).
Example (For a camp):
Don’t: Summer is fast approaching and we need new boats for the waterfront.
Do: Summer is fast approaching and we need your help to assure that the happy sounds of children boating will continue to reverberate across Smith Lake.
Second, be sure to clearly state the action you want them to take. Example: I’m asking you to sit down right now and make a contribution to assure the future of our beloved camp.
Third, it must be formatted in an appealing way. Use bold format and underlining sparingly – but use it. Bold and underline the one or two sentences that directly address the urgency and the personal nature of the appeal. Example: Delta would not be here without you. Your generous gift keeps the dream alive for generation after generation of boys and girls.
Fourth, always use a PS (in bold) to reiterate your main message. Throughout the process keep the following in mind: Current market research shows that the average busy person (read: our typical donor) receives 30 to 50 pieces of mail a day. Of those, one half go into the wastebasket in no more time than it takes to move his or her hand from the pile to the basket. 25% receive less than 2 seconds of time to look at the return address, flip from front to back, and then cast them into the trash; The remaining 25% of mail will be opened. Of those opened 2/3 will be thrown away in less than 1 minute. The trick is to make it into the last 25%. In fact, the return address of your organization, if you have a loyal base of support, in most cases will assure that.
If you make it that far, you want to be sure that you are making one or two statements that will cause that person to place you in his or her “to do” box. The bold statement within the letter and the PS are your best hope. From time to time an envelope with a special message printed on the front or back will also help.
2. Information Rich Appeals
An information rich letter is based on the assumption that donors want to have lots of details on what you have been doing, what it costs, why you need their help etc.
Often these letters are five or six pages long. We don’t like them, and we almost never read them, but the evidence from professional journals is that they are effective. This is the sort of letter that would be written by the director or a member of the board and provide substance to the “ask”.
Nevertheless, the rules stated above regarding use of the word YOU, the PS and the formatting objectives still apply. In fact, they are even more critical because you have to catch the attention of those who are not inclined to read such a long missive.
Try to put one critical sentence on the first page. If possible, use both sides of your paper and have the PS at the end be on the back page so that an individual who flips over the four pages after looking at only the front page sees the bold PS reminder.
Example: This year we have traveled around the US visiting 20 different states and 30 cities and towns. We have held twenty recruitment receptions and attended eight camp fairs to help spread the news about Delta. In this complex world it is always a challenge to get families to take the time to see the importance of the Delta experience. But once we have their attention they begin to see what you already know. You know the importance of Delta to the development of a child. Delta is not just a place to have fun. . . since our earliest days, Delta has been in the character development business.
Printing & Preparing the List
Every mailing should contain the following:
1. Appeal Letter
2. Response card
3. Return envelope
4. Mailing envelope - may be standard envelope or specifically designed for the appeal with a particular text message on it. Be sure that it has the bulk mail indicia.
The response card should carefully outline choices for contributing. Be sure that individuals have the opportunity to note whether their employer has a matching gifts program.
If you are doing the letter in-house you can print personal letters directly from your database. You can also print labels as well. The challenge thereafter is to be sure that the right letter goes into the right envelope. This may sound silly but you would be surprised at how easy it is for mistakes to happen when you have been stuffing envelopes for two days straight. If you are having the mailing done by a mail house here is what we recommend:
Use your database to identify your “donor universe”. Sort by zip code for bulk mail purposes.
- Export those names with the following information
- Title
- First Name
- Last Name
- Second Name (spouse with different name, companion)
- Address 1
- Address 2
- Town
- State
- Zip
- Salutation
- Open the list up in an Excel spreadsheet (use text setting for the Zip Code or 0’s will be dropped from the front of numbers). This will allow any mail house to use your address document.
- Provide the printer/mail house with a text file of the letter, including a scanned signature.
- Have them print the letter, merging the names and addresses into it. If they can’t do this, you have the wrong mail house.
Your Donor Universe
The donor universe is the term used to describe the parameters you use to define your list for solicitation. You define your universe by using your database system and the various codes that you create to distinguish between contributors.
If your database contains several different members of a (nuclear) family, you will want to code the primary family member to receive mailings. There are few things that turn off donors faster than to have five solicitations come to the same address. The message this sends is that you don’t spend their hard earned money very wisely.
At least two of the annual appeal letters should be sent to this full universe, one of which should be sent first class because it will help you to clean up your database on an annual basis. If you wonder why this is, 46 million Americans move every year. . . ‘nuf said.
You may wish to focus on a smaller universe in other mailings but try to add at least some of those who are not regular donors. Do not assume that a lack of a history of giving on the part of any individuals means they should not be asked, for various reasons they may not have given yet but may if you keep at it or if you happen to strike the right cord with them.
Add to your Universe
Finding Lost Supporters
Every year you will lose some members of your donor community. If you have been wise and left their names in the database with a coding indicating that they are lost, you are halfway to expanding your base of support. If you have removed them, try to track down a paper trail that will allow you to add them back in.
You can pay for a service that will help find individuals, but unless you have a feeling that there would be a big payoff we recommend you use existing free resources on the Internet. Save your money to spend on potentially big donors that you have lost by using the technique described below.
The technique of tracking people down via the Internet works exceedingly well for people with unique names or for whom you have some idea of their location. It does not work well for people with common names
USSearch.com is the Website for a company called US Search. This website allows you to do a general search for people in their database. It is a teaser for the use of its service, but can be very useful for hunting down someone who is lost.
Parameters within which you can search: First Name, Middle Initial, Last Name, City, State and Age. The parameter that is required and most useful is Age because that will often help you to hone in on the correct individual.
A real example. Let’s assume that Moosewood President Wayne King is lost. He graduated from Camp Mowglis in 1969 (it was a great year by the way!) at the time he should have been 14 (he was 12 but we’ll ignore that) so he should be 49 today. He’s lost so we don’t know where he is. So we fill in his name, age and leave the city and state blank and do a search.
The computer database responds that there are too many Wayne Kings and that you need to narrow your search. If you know that his middle initial is D., that will help (you’ll get 158 Wayne D. King’s). Perusing this list you will see a Wayne King who is the right general age in Rumney, NH and Campton, NH, and a Wayne King, age unknown, in Laconia NH. Since we know that Wayne came from NH that’s a pretty good shot. Now you have narrowed down the field considerably. Now you go to any of the many Internet people search engines (we use http://people.yahoo.com/) and do a search on those three towns for Wayne King. Yahoo shows no Wayne King in Campton (probably because he grew up there but no longer resides there) and no Wayne King in Laconia . . . but in Rumney there is one on Stinson Lake Road with a telephone number! Pick up the phone and check him out or send him a quick note.
Service Providers, Contractors, Consultants, etc.
Don’t define your donor database too narrowly. Anyone with whom you have a relationship should be included in the full universe of donors and potential donors. For example: any business with which you have a relationship should be on your database and should be solicited. Given the amount of business that you do with your printer, for example, they should be making a generous donation every year to your organization. Likewise other local businesses will see the efficacy of making a contribution and if they don’t you should consider changing your provider – where competitive services are available, of course. A for-profit business would expect this kind of relationship and so should you.
