April 3, 2008 | Read Time: 3 minutes
When Lisa, a character in Tom Batiuk’s nationally syndicated comic strip Funky Winkerbean, discovered she had breast cancer last year, she and her husband visited the Gathering Place, a nonprofit group in Beachwood, Ohio, that helps cancer patients and their loved ones.
Benjamin Light, the Gathering Place’s development director, was inspired by the exposure and positive response the comic strip generated from newspaper readers and proposed that the charity create a comic of its own for the annual-fund mailing.
The effort has been highly successful. The charity’s direct-mail appeals cost $1,600 less than the previous year’s mailings, and the fund drive is well on its way to garnering $85,000 more than last year’s goal of $450,000.
Mr. Batiuk was too busy to draw the strip himself but recommended a fellow artist, Michael Ayers, to the Gathering Place. In the nine-panel comic strip that Mr. Ayers created, a man recently diagnosed with cancer comes to the organization with his daughter. A staff member shows the two visitors around, pointing out the children’s playroom, art-therapy facilities, massage and reflexology offerings, exercise classes, library, and other areas.
In the final panels, the staff member surprises the man by telling him that the organization’s services are entirely free — “in large part through the generosity of our annual-fund donors.”
Mr. Light says that about a third of the Gathering Place’s budget — which is $1.5-million this year — comes from the annual fund.
The Gathering Place sent two appeals that included the comic strip. One mailing, sent to 2,721 previous donors, was accompanied by a hand-signed note from board and staff members, and a second mailing, without such a letter, was sent to 7,825 people who had never donated to the annual fund.
The organization paid $350 for the comic strip and a total of $7,896 for the campaign.
Although the hand-signed appeals brought in $396,149, more than the unsigned letters, the comic strip appears to have been exceptionally effective in the more-generic set of mailings, compared with the last annual-fund drive.
The Gathering Place reduced the number of generic mailings by 12 percent, but has so far attracted 78 percent more gifts from the recipients of those appeals. In the current campaign, the 7,825 comic-strip brochures without a hand-signed note have so far brought in $21,131, or nearly 100-percent more than last year’s total of $10,604. The current drive ends in June.
The organization wasn’t trying to get a laugh from its comic-strip brochure. Its unusual format and understated message were designed to catch the eye of recipients sorting through their mail, says Mr. Light.
“We hoped that they might even tack it up somewhere, put it up on their fridge, in their cubicle, so that other people would learn about the Gathering Place,” he says.
Mr. Light says that the biggest challenge of creating the comic strip was “capturing the essence of the organization” in just a few words and pictures. A committee — including the executive director, the co-chairs of the annual fund, and others — developed ideas for the comic strip. Direct-service employees made sure the characters’ language was realistic, and the final product was printed on newspaper, for a low-cost touch of authenticity.
“The idea was, get noticed, be different, and I feel like this went off really well for us,” says Mr. Light.
