The rise of the digital age has directed attention away from a very important tool for nonprofit fundraising: direct mail. Direct mail should not be overlooked as it provides many opportunities for enhanced customer experience and direct messaging for donors to act on. The best option for nonprofit organizations is to use integrated programs with direct mail and digital fundraising combined. Sounds simple enough, right? Well, it can be a difficult balance, but we’re here to help!
Embrace Your Direct Mail Team
It’s really important to be able to measure the impact and the value of integrated communications. Now, you may be wondering how to best measure the impact direct mail contributes to your fundraising campaign. We are here to tell how.
Best Ways to Measure Direct Mail Impact
- Separating donation forms is a best practice, with direct mail driving readers to a specific URL. This will give your organization the ability to mirror the online form to the call of action in the direct mail piece, which will result in a better user experience (UX) and an increase in conversion rate. By using different URLs for different mailings you can test your results to determine which mailing works best.
- Tag your donor with a code attached to a particular piece of mail that they were sent. Using email or Convio ID numbers can make these donors easier to track. This allows your organization to run reports in Blackbaud that show how many people getting your direct mail made a gift within a certain period after the mail was dropped. It can also show the higher value of people who are opting into BOTH online and offline communications.
- What about acquisition mailings where the people mailed are not on the offline CRM? Many organizations have a “finder file” of names that were mailed an acquisition package. It would be possible to run a report of new online donors after an acquisition mailing and provide that to the direct mail firm and have them “match” the new donors to people on the finder file, which could help them provide “soft credit” for gifts from people who had gotten direct mail.
- An easy way to measure direct mail is by simply adding a survey question to the online donor forms asking “How did you hear about our organization?” and include “I got a mailing” as one of the answer options.
Direct mail is one of the most viable fundraising promotion options. Now that you know how to measure the impact of this tool you can prove it to be true. Here at Charity Dynamics we use these integrated programs to help you achieve your goals and to reach your full potential.