Believe it or not, expanding a business and increasing profits is not the be-all and end-all of the uses for direct mail and marketing campaigns.
Direct mail can also do a lot of good with charities, as it is a very effective fundraising method.
Charity Direct Mail Provides ROI
In principle, a charity is still a business. Charities have to establish a brand, source their data, market themselves, and gain new donors, like normal businesses. However, they do not aim to make a profit from it.
Due to this, charities can approach their marketing strategies in the same way as any other business, meaning they capitalise on the use of emails, social media, billboards etc., just advertising a different message to that of normal business.
We also have figures to support the success of charities using direct mail. For instance, 70% of people said that they find direct mail more personal than emails or the internet.
Also, only 25% of people said they would open emails from a non-profit organisation.
To further stress the importance of direct mail for charities, Charities spend 61% of their advertising on direct mail, that’s £239m of £394m. A huge 79% of all charity donations come from direct mail.
Charity Direct Mail Fundraising
The ROI of fundraising via print is staggering: for every £1 spent, £4 in donations are received; below are two examples of big charities and how direct mail has influenced their fundraising.
The Alzheimer’s Society- In the Christmas of 2007, the Alzheimer’s Society launched a direct mail campaign, aiming to gain a 10% response rate and raise £99,750.
The charity achieved above and beyond what they could have expected by creating an emotive direct mail campaign, using a pack that an email could not provide.
While they only beat their target response rate by 1%, the average donation was nearly three times higher than the target average, bringing in a fundraising total of £165,164. A massive contributor to this was the charity’s use of varied direct mail put together to tug on each recipient’s heartstrings.
American Cancer Society (ACS) – In 2013, the American Cancer Society decided to halt all the use of direct mail for fundraising causing a drastic effect. The charity lost the gaining of new donors by 11% in a single year, and the donations from new donors dropped by a massive £7m.
The ACS’s own income dropped by £29m in a year from £572m to £543m, which proves to any charity that direct mail works and choosing to overlook it can have huge consequences.
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