Bombarding Donors With Mail and Telemarketing Appeals Backfires, Author Says

It’s not just donors who hate an unending stream of direct-mail appeals and telemarketing calls. Those tactics also frustrate fundraisers so much that many of them quit their jobs.

Such turnover is just one reason Penelope Burk, a veteran fundraising consultant, is on a crusade to persuade charities to rethink how they conduct mass appeals and focus more energy on building ties to doors who can afford to give generously.

Ms. Burk, who is about to publish a new book called Donor-Centered Leadership, conducted interviews and surveys with 12,000 nonprofit officials and donors over the past five years to figure out how charities could improve their fundraising.

One big part of her research focused on how to reduce turnover, and in asking questions about what caused fundraisers to quit, she discovered that the pressure on frontline fundraisers to conduct high-volume mass appeals was a key reason one-third of development officials said they left their last jobs. Fundraisers said they aren’t given enough time to figure out which solicitations work and why or how to improve donations; instead they are just told to keep sending more pitches.

‘Relentless Appeals’

Ms. Burk, who has spent more than 20 years as a consultant, believes direct mail and other high-volume appeals have a place, but they should be used primarily to find people who are interested in a cause, not to solicit endless repeat donations.

However, most charities “bombard donors with relentless pleas for contributions, creating an environment of over-solicitation and mistrust among the very people they depend on for revenue,” Ms. Burk writes. The result, in her words: “a lumbering, expensive fundraising system that is bleeding donors.”

Over-solicitation is now the most common reason donors say they stop giving in surveys that Ms. Burk’s company has conducted with more than 60,000 donors since 1998.

Those surveys have consistently found that, instead of the token address labels and calendars they get in direct-mail appeals, donors want charities to tell them what’s been done with their money before they’re solicited again.

She says such views are especially prevalent among young donors, leading to a rise in the number of people who never make a second gift over the past decade.

“Donors are abandoning causes sooner when dissatisfied,” she writes, adding that they are “avoiding fundraising solicitations altogether, preferring instead to decide independently whom they will support, when, and how.”

Paid Per Solicitation

Nonetheless, mass appeals persist, she says, because direct-marketing companies are very good at persuading charities that they are losing out if they don’t keep pushing people to give. What the companies rarely point out, she notes, is that they typically get paid for how many solicitations they produce, not the total raised.

And even if they were paid based on their results, she says, that calculation would leave out the money charities could raise if instead of sending appeals again and again, they formed close ties with people who could afford to give big.

Ms. Burk says she wishes charities would just thank people who make a first gift, then send them detailed information about how their money was used, rather than sending an immediate repeat solicitation.

She is so convinced that donors want results that she urges charities to do something most organizations prefer to avoid: Seek donations earmarked for specific projects instead of general appeals.

While nonprofits like raising money they can use for overhead and anything else they need, especially in mass appeals, Ms. Burk says that practice leads to vague solicitations that do little or nothing to motivate donors.

“There is too much reliance now on volume-based appeals in the mistaken belief that an organization can raise money indefinitely—and profitably—through arms-length approaches alone,” writes Ms. Burk. “At the other end, there is too little investment in the growth of major and planned-gift programs—the sophisticated strategies that build gift value donor by donor.”