Apply the Lessons of Direct Mail to the Internet

By NICOLE LEWIS

In the Internet age, many in the nonprofit world have wondered whether

direct mail — long a fund-raising staple — is about to die.

But a new book says that it’s not an either-or proposition. While postal appeals may not be used in the volume they once were, many marketing principles charities use in direct mail will continue to apply online and in other new technologies, says Michael Johnston, a Canadian fund-raising consultant and editor of Direct Response Fund Raising: Mastering New Trends for Results (John Wiley & Sons).

What’s more, say the fund-raising consultants who wrote the essays in this compilation, postal appeals will never die out completely because they continue to be cost-effective.

But the Internet does have advantages, especially because it offers more multisensory, creative ways to tell personal stories than those that are conveyed through materials sent through the mail, say several of the authors in this volume.

Jason Potts, who oversees new-media projects at Burnett Associates, a direct-marketing company in London, says that those capabilities, combined with the ease of experimentation and relatively low cost, give Internet marketing some advantages over traditional mail appeals.

The United Kingdom branch of the human-rights group Amnesty International capitalized on such differences when it posted three different appeals on its Web site. The site was designed to figure out how advanced a user’s Web browser was so it could provide the Web page that was most suitable for each user. The most-sophisticated Web pages provided sound and animation to tell the true story of a woman who had been imprisoned and brutally tortured; simpler pages told personal stories and offered interactive quizzes about what people would do to protect their families if they were subjected to brutality.

Within six months, the site had recruited nearly 850 new members and received more than 100 donations, which Mr. Potts says should be considered favorable compared to the amount of time it takes charities in Britain to obtain gifts using other solicitation techniques.

Mr. Johnston says that the most successful fund raisers will be those who integrate online and direct-mail approaches to reach older donors who are comfortable with postal appeals and younger donors who are interested in receiving information through the Internet.

“If you use the mail in conjunction with a CD-ROM in conjunction with a Web site, you can raise more money and build better relationships,” he says.

Mr. Johnston urges fund raisers to move quickly to learn about the capabilities of new technology. “There’s a timidity, a technological anxiousness, for direct-mail fund raisers to use other media,” he says. “But consumers want it, so we can’t be timid for much longer.”

Excerpt from Direct Response Fund Raising

Today there are fewer and fewer excuses for fund raising that is generic, cold, or mass marketing at its worst.

And the building blocks for improved, personalized fund raising in this new millennium lie with the computerized database. Databases are becoming more powerful and capable of creating stronger relationships [between charities and donors] by uncovering the connections between actions, needs, and desires.

Nonprofit managers need to understand what these databases are capable of doing before they can use them to improve and (in some cases) revolutionize their direct-response fund raising.

Many nonprofit organizations currently use computerized databases much like they used their card files — which were replaced by the computer — to store the name and address of the donor (and maybe gift amounts). … However, many fund raisers have become aware that we all need to go beyond using our database systems only to capture names, addresses, and giving history. …

It’s important to remember that direct-response fund raising is not to be isolated from other areas of fund raising. For a long time, special-event donors were kept away from direct-mail donors who were separated from major gift or planned givers. The increasing power and sophistication of relational databases has to be a wake-up call to all fund raisers.

Technological tools now allow us to understand how a donor relates to an organization (often with a sophisticated and complex set of entry points, such as a volunteer, event goer, newsletter subscriber, and monthly donor), and we need to adopt values, initiatives, and fund-raising practices that recognize this fact. If nonprofit organizations fully understand the basics, best practices, and advanced abilities of computer databases, then they’ll be ready to fully understand what a donor wants from a nonprofit organization: a close, understanding, stimulating relationship.

— From an essay by Jeff Gignac, a Canadian fund-raising consultant, in Direct Response Fund Raising: Mastering New Trends for Results (John Wiley & Sons).