Raise More Money and Retain More Donors by Reducing Your Returned Mail

By Alan Sharpe (March 2010) E-book  $9.99

Tips, tactics and industry best practices for reducing your volume of “undeliverable” and “bad addresses.”

The problem with returned mail is that each piece represents a loss of around $481 to your organization.

That’s the cost of losing a typical donor.

Do the math for yourself the next time you run a direct mail fundraising campaign. Count the number of pieces of mail that come back to you as undeliverable. Then look up each donor in your database. Discover how often they gave and how much they gave. Use the add button on your calculator. Breathe deeply.

A charity I know did just that. They analyzed 151 pieces of returned mail  (also known as “undeliverable-as-addressed mail”) from a recent campaign (one that generated over 600 undeliverable mail pieces). Here’s what they discovered:

• Total number of gifts received from these donors in their combined lifetimes: 1,100
• Total gross revenue received from these donors in their combined lifetimes: $72,709.10
• Shortest amount of time a donor had been with them: 2 months
• Longest amount of time a donor had been with them: 14 years
• Smallest number of lifetime gifts received from a donor: 1
• Largest number of lifetime gifts received from a donor: 67
• Smallest gift received from a donor: $5
• Largest gift received from a donor: $4,000
• Average lifetime value of each donor lost: $481.51

If your charity is at all typical, you have a problem with address quality. Around 15% of the pieces you drop in the mail have addresses that are either incorrect or out of date. Some of those pieces come back to you, provided you use first class postage or pay the post office to return your undeliverable mail.

But a large number never even leave the post office. The United States Postal Service (USPS) reports that it disposes of more than six billion mail pieces each year because of poor address quality. These pieces go straight into the dumpster.  And you are paying the post office to throw them there.

The greatest loss with returned mail is the loss of future revenue. Every piece of mail that’s returned to you represents a donor who has stopped giving, or, to be fair, represents gifts that have stopped arriving, since many donors don’t stop giving as much as they move but forget to give you their new address.

This handbook helps you Raise More Money and Retain More Donors by Reducing Your  Returned Mail.

Contents:

• The two primary causes of undeliverable mail p2
• Christensen Study of 9.7 billion pieces undeliverable-as-addressed mail p3
• How errors creep into your database p4
• The cost of undeliverable mail p4
• Do the math yourself p6
• How to keep your list clean between mailings p6
• How to keep your rented lists clean p7
• How to clean your list before a mailing:  Address accuracy and standardization p8
• Use Address Correction Request (ACR) with every mailing p10
• Remove duplicate records p11
• Review proofs from your lettershop before the campaign drops in the mail p11
• How to reach donors who have moved and not told you (the nerve!) p12
• NCOALink p12
• Canadian National Change Of Address file p13
• Benefits of using the NCOA service p14
• Change Of Address Plus (COA+) p14
• Reduce undeliverable fundraising appeals by acquiring phone numbers and email addresses before donors move p15
• How to save time checking if a donor’s phone number is on file p16
• How to help your lettershop bungle your fundraising campaign (or not) p18
• Tips from your peers in the non-profit sector p19
• Glossary of Post Office and Lettershop Terms p24

Download this Handbook now. Start reading it—and profiting from its advice and examples—within minutes.

Product Details

Format: E-book in Adobe PDF format for immediate download
Pages: 25
Publisher: Andrew Spencer Publishing
Language: English
Dimensions: 8.5 x 11
SKU: sharpe032

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