Are Your Donors Ignoring Your Appeal Mailers?

The 2013 Blackbaud Online Marketing Benchmark Study for Nonprofits found that “response and clickthrough rates in nonprofit email campaigns declined by 16% and 18.7%, respectively, from 2012.” The report went on to conclude that “declining response rates illustrate a saturated channel with non-differentiated messaging and campaigns.”

I was recently talking to one of my high value donor, he said in as refined way as he could muster -“The temptation to unsubscribe from your newsletters is becoming higher nowadays.”. But, then, one of my donors in mid-sixties dropped me a Watsapp message one-day saying – “Hi Wassup, I do not hear often from you guys.” And, I was like-“You receive our monthly newsletters, Don’t you.”. Then I got it, he missed our small and crisp real-time updates from the field which we used to send every week to all regular donors.

Now these are two high value donors, in two different age spectrum receiving same newsletter but having totally different responses to it. On top of that, some donors are interested in annual giving events, and some are interested in education programs and while some feel supporting capital expenditure is the best way to make a lasting legacy. I am sure, most of our Emperors thought the same way (That’s I guess made – Taj Mahal, Pyramid etc.) Another donation option, very popular in India is scholarship.

All of these are genuine and addressable needs of donors but the question is how do you address it and communicate what’s relevant to them. Hence segregating and arranging your donor lists is the best solution for it. Some good questions to ask are:

1. Can our donors choose their mailing frequency when they sign up?
2. Can our database/CRM capture donation preferences of donors or just the amount?
3. Can our database/CRM capture donor interests apart from donating of course?
4. Can our database/CRM segregate donors on the basis of their organisational position and skill?
5. Can our database/CRM capture donor locations?
6. Is our CRM social-networking enabled?

The solutions to the relevancy of our communications and content might lie in the nitty-gritty of segregating the donors as humanly possible rather than serving all people the same dish.

Happy Friend Raising……..

At times our donor database looks like this? especially during fund-raising events.

BTW, could you find the visiting card of the donor which got lost ?