A couple of days ago, a member of my team was talking about various fundraising ideas that one of our partners was coming up with, and one of his efforts included sending letters through the mail.

Honestly, I was a bit surprised that so many nonprofits have stopped sending letters through the mail and instead moved almost exclusively all of their marketing and fundraising appeals to digital.

It may seem counter-intuitive in the era of the $ 0.49 postage fee for a first-class letter compared to reaching thousands of donors paying as little as $ 5 for a post. But print letters and postcards should remain part of your marketing mix, at least for some of your donors.

1. House file: Presumably you have an internal file of donors and prospects with whom you have a regular relationship. Today’s world is full of content, especially in the digital world. Our social business regularly mails to our home archive, and we have a response rate that can sometimes exceed 10 percent.
2. Multichannel: When you create emails, especially for your best followers, you make sure to communicate with them on multiple platforms and ways. The focus only reinforces your message and the approach to them. You don’t know that the moment is inspired to support you in any way. Letters, catalogs, and postcards serve to provide a subliminal message that you are available to them, when they are ready.
3. Test opportunity: Mailing gives you the opportunity to try another method of reaching your followers. If you have a large database, segment a random sample of, say, 10 percent of your donors, and then see if your response rate exceeded the cost of shipping. If you did, you have another way to reach your donors that will earn you money.
4. Important messages: When you mail a letter or postcard, especially if it has first-class or non-bulk rate postage, the recipient is likely to take a quick look at what you have to say. Mailing is an excellent opportunity to provide important donors or donors, especially a critical message that might otherwise get lost in the sea of ​​emails everyone receives on a daily basis and ignores.
5. Generational donations: I understand that everyone always likes the younger and cooler generations, but the reality is that Generation X and Boomers give more to charity than Millennials or Generation Z. These two generations still have a greater propensity to open the mail. or look at a package, especially if it is a dimension or size that is not standard.
6. Response rate: The reality is that direct mail still has a higher response rate than email or social media requests. For 2017, Compu-mail noted in this article, “The direct mail household response rate is 5.1% (compared to 6% for email, 0.6% for paid search, 0 , 2% viewing online, 0.4% social media) response rate that the DMA has reported, since it published the Response Rate Report in 2003.1
7. Credibility: In the digital age, the whole world is bombarded with advertisements and messages, and now you can “fake news”. People have learned to filter quickly and distrust much of the content they see in the digital world. Direct mail provides the opportunity to build trust because if you are investing in this form of outreach, you are separating yourself from the digital herd.
8. Saturation: On any given day, in the digital world, your donors and supporters are saturated with requests for help and messages. There is only a lot of content that exists and much of it is low-quality, low-value content, which puts people off. Receiving something in the mail is an opportunity to break the digital noise, and more brands are starting to return to the mail to create deeper relationships.
9. Creativity: Marketers who are going back and forth at direct mail are doing it in an innovative way, and this should be something your organization should consider. Instead of a standard-size envelope or postcard, creative marketers are experimenting with different dimensions or tube mails. For example, or for years, City Harvest has been taking home its hunger-fighting messages by sending paper bags to donors and prospects.
10. QR and PURL codes: Marketers have also been testing the use of QR codes or personal URLs (PURLs) in their direct mail so that when someone receives a letter or card in the mail, they can be immediately redirected with their smartphones to a campaign page. organization. Adding these elements to direct mail is a great way to bring direct mail into the digital age.

According to the Data & Marketing Association (DMA), sure, the amount of direct mail has decreased, but marketers are thinking more carefully and creatively about how to send printed material. If you’ve moved all of your marketing into the digital world, you may want to consider treating at least some of your donors by mail.