October 8, 1998 | Read Time: 2 minutes
City Harvest, a New York group that collects perishable food for soup kitchens, wrapped up several new direct-mail contributions with a brown-bag appeal.
The solicitation was designed to remind people that some people cannot afford to fill a lunch bag with food. When it was sent to nearly 14,000 donors in May, it fared much better than the charity expected. Spring mailings, the group’s officials note, have generally done very poorly.
But the letter — printed on the outside of a brown bag, inside of which was a response card and return envelope — beat projections. It reaped gifts from nearly 7 per cent of those who received it. The charity’s fund raisers said they expected it to generate gifts from only 5 per cent of the recipients. The average gift was $50.27.
The mailing’s creative design, suggested by Amy Leveen, president of a New York direct-mail consulting company that bears her name, is a key reason that the appeal did so well, say City Harvest leaders.
Arlene Swartz, City Harvest’s director of development, says that at least six donors have called her to say that they loved the mailing.
“In my 18 years of fund raising,” she says, “I have never had donors call to thank me for sending them direct mail and to tell me what a great appeal it was.”
Although the organization had avoided spring mailings because they had done so poorly in the past, Ms. Swartz says, the response to the brown-bag mailing shows that the charity can raise money at that time of the year.
The brown-bag appeal worked, she adds, because it was “clever but not too clever. It happened to fit our mission but does not detract from the dignity of the organization.”
For more information, contact Arlene Swartz, Director of Development, City Harvest, 159 West 25th Street, 10th Floor, New York 10001-7203; (212) 463-0456.
