55% of Americans Read Direct-Mail Appeals From Charities, Survey Finds

Direct mail is the No. 1 way that Americans learn about the charities they support, according

to a new survey. Other top ways donors get information about nonprofit organizations: through their churches or from friends and relatives.

The survey also found that people are most likely to read direct-mail pieces if they are about charities or fund raising. Fifty-five percent of the survey’s participants said they read charity direct mail. By comparison, 36 percent said they read direct mail from financial institutions.

The survey was conducted in April and May by a Pittsburgh research company, Marshall Marketing and Communications, for Webcraft, the direct-marketing arm of Vertis, an advertising and marketing company in Baltimore. It consisted of telephone interviews with a random sampling of 2,000 Americans, age 18 or older.

Among the survey’s key findings:

• Eighty-seven percent of the respondents reported making a charitable contribution in the past 12 months. Ninety-seven percent of the respondents who earn from $50,000 to $75,000 said they made gifts, compared with 94 percent who earn $75,000 or more, 93 percent who earn from $30,000 to $50,000, and 80 percent who earn less than $30,000.
• Health organizations were the most likely recipients of the gifts — with 51 percent of the respondents saying they gave to such groups. Support for other kinds of groups varied according to the age of the donor. Thirty-four percent of the youngest adults, for example — those born from 1977 through 1983 — said they gave to religious groups, compared with 61 percent of the oldest adults surveyed — those born in 1929 or earlier.
• Women are more likely than men to get information about the charities they support through direct mail, while men are somewhat more likely than women to get such information through the Internet. Eleven percent of male respondents, compared with 8 percent of the female respondents, said they learned about charities through the Internet.
• Among those who responded in some way to the direct mail they read, the action taken by the biggest group was to visit a charity’s Web site. Thirty-nine percent of those who said they had read charity direct mail in the past 30 days reported going to the charity’s Web site. Thirty-two percent called a toll-free telephone number to respond to the direct mail, while 27 percent replied through the mail.
• Fifteen percent of the respondents said it was very important or somewhat important to receive some type of gift, token, or acknowledgment from a charity after making a gift.

Scott Marden, Webcraft’s director of strategic marketing, says the survey is intended to help nonprofit groups better understand their contributors and better tailor and direct their solicitations. For example, he says, the survey found that people who give to animal or environmental organizations are likely to be white women 46 to 55 years old who own a home and earn at least $75,000 a year.

The survey also identifies what kinds of people charities ought not to solicit. To “maximize your campaign,” Mr. Marden said in a statement, nonprofit groups should avoid “men who do not read fund-raising direct mail.” The data show, he says, that those men are more likely than the general adult male population to be single, hold a blue-collar job, and have no children.

The survey results also point to areas of opportunity for charities, Mr. Marden says.

Among the women in the survey who reported making no donations in the previous 12 months, three out of four said they didn’t have enough money to do so. The average annual income of those women, the survey found, was $24,790. Among the men who hadn’t contributed, however, the survey found the average income to be $38,580, and only one-third reported not having enough money to donate.

“In general, here is the opportunity to target men because the ones that aren’t donating aren’t giving solid reasons,” Mr. Marden says.

On at least one measure of American generosity overall — the percentage of all Americans who donate to charity — the results of the new survey stray significantly from those of the Independent Sector report on giving and volunteering, which is one of the principal sources of information on the topic.

Independent Sector’s most recent report, in 1999, found that about 70 percent of all households donated money the previous year.

Nearly nine out of 10 respondents to Webcraft’s survey reported making charitable gifts in the past 12 months; one-quarter of the respondents donated at least $500 to a nonprofit group.

For more information or free copies of an overview of the survey’s results, contact Mr. Marden at Webcraft, 1980 U.S. Highway 1, P.O. Box 6023, North Brunswick, N.J. 08902-6023; (732) 951-4801; smarden@webcraft.com.