May 20, 1999 | Read Time: 2 minutes
In November, thousands of Washington-area residents opened their mailboxes and found a white envelope that looked like it had been dropped off by a neighbor.
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All it said on the outside was “Please RSVP,” along with the sender’s name in what appeared to be handwritten scrawl.
The envelope bore no address, no return address, stamp, or postage mark — and the handwriting turned out to be mass-produced. It was part of an appeal that has become one of the most effective donor-recruitment pieces ever used by Whitman-Walker Clinic, a charity that helps people with AIDS.
The letter inside, from a person who lived in the same neighborhood as did the recipient, asked for a gift to Whitman-Walker’s neighborhood fund-raising drive.
The appeal was conducted by the charity with the help of ADVO, a Windsor, Conn., direct-marketing company. The company tries to help groups save money on direct mail by combining advertisements and discount coupons from several organizations into single mail pieces, called “shared mail.” Because it was part of such a mailing, Whitman-Walker’s appeal did not need its own postage or an address and was delivered along with an array of coupon offers.
Like other marketing companies, ADVO can pinpoint certain households in a zip-code area that have certain characteristics — such as home ownership and purchasing habits — that are similar to the organization’s consumers or donors. With Whitman-Walker, the company first examined 50,000 names and addresses of the charity’s donors and came up with a list of 35,000 households that had similar characteristics to the donors — and were therefore likely to give.
Then with the help of Malchow Adams & Hussey, a Washington direct-mail consulting firm, the charity designed the appeal for one of ADVO’s shared mailings to those households.
The appeal did far better than expected, netting $12,000. “You never make any money on prospecting, but we got an overwhelming 1.3-per-cent response,” says Sandra Paul, Whitman-Walker’s deputy director for development. “That’s higher than we’ve had in prospecting for several years.”
The appeal also generated an average donation of $51 — significantly more than the clinic’s usual $40 contribution from first-time donors.
What’s more, because Whitman-Walker participated in a shared mailing and was able to split costs with other mailers, the appeal cost substantially less than the charity’s previous mailings to recruit new donors: $284 per thousand, compared with the $377 per thousand it normally spends.
For more information, contact Sandra Paul, Deputy Director, Development, Whitman-Walker Clinic, 1407 S Street, N.W., Washington 20009-3840; e-mail: spaul@wwc.org.
