Dear Caring Friend, Can I Ask You for a Donation?

How do you ask a donor for a gift if you can’t ask them for a donation? That is the challenge many donors create when they ask an organization to reduce communication or stop it completely.

What makes the request for less or no mail a problem is many donors don’t make ongoing donations without a regular cadence of communication. In a yearlong test, where TrueSense reduced the number of mailings to a test group by over 50 percent, there was a 15.4 percent drop in gifts and a 11.1 percent reduction in net revenue.

So, how do you resolve the need to raise money AND honor the donor’s wishes?

The first step is to consider the possibility that the donor’s preferences can change over time, or that the preferences originally assigned to the donor (on the file) were not an accurate reflection of their wishes. Often, the “no mail” flag is added proactively by previous fundraisers or during a data update process.

Another challenge to fundraising is how to manage a household record when the primary donor has passed away. When a donor dies, there are usually other members of the household (who were part of the giving decisions) still living at that address. When communication to that address ends due to the “deceased” flag on the record, any engagement with the remaining family members also ends.

Using Address Mailings to Improve Donor Data and Recover Long-Term Value

Both “no-mail” and “deceased” flags on donor records are obstacles to meaningful engagement between an organization and a donor. That is why we recommend sending a “Caring Friends” mailing during Thanksgiving and Christmas to “no-mail” and “deceased” donors. The mailing simply replaces the donor’s name with “Dear Caring Friend,” and creates an opportunity for someone living at the address to make a donation. This is considered an address mailing — which allows for continued engagement, and an opportunity to update a donor record with new donor information and communication preferences.

In addition to these benefits, the “Caring Friend” mailing also produces net revenue. Last year, The Salvation Army averaged a 2.2 ROI when mailing to addresses with a “deceased” flag, and a 4.0 ROI for mailings sent to addresses marked “do not mail.” In total, 2,042 donor records were updated to reflect the current status of donors living at those addresses.

The “Caring Friend” mailing is just one specific strategy you can use to keep your donor records up-to-date, and reduce the negative impact of data hygiene on communication with your most important impact partners: the heroic donors who fuel your mission.