As an aging baby-boomer, one of my pushes this fall was to transition to bill-pay through my bank. My days of buying stamps and writing checks are coming to a close.
As I was planning my year end gifts to my favorite and new charities, I began to add them to my bill-pay list. Suddenly, a scary list of questions occurred to me:
- Gee, in all the data files I receive from clients, I have never seen a source code for bill-pay; Why is that?
- How are nonprofit organizations coding these donations?
- Who in the organization is getting credit for my bill-pay gift?
Not knowing the answer to these questions, I separated out my gifts going to Grizzard clients and wrote out a check, put a stamp on it and dropped it in the mail. I want to make sure our agency gets the credit for these donations.
But this does bring up a huge issue.
For years direct mail fundraising (and fundraising consultants) has been evaluated solely by the money coming in from the mail (Sola Directa Maila).
Direct mail is still motivating gifts – lots of research to support this – but less and less of those gifts are coming through the direct mail. Yet we are still evaluating direct mail performance by gifts coming through the direct mail.
And that is no longer useful.
A study Campbell-Rinker did for Dunham and Company found that one-third of online gifts were from people who had recently received a direct mail appeal.
One of the ways we will be changing our direct mail pro formas and analytics is accounting for some of the online gifts driven by direct mail.
If you are still evaluating your fundraising performance solely by channel, it’s time to stop that nonsense. The theology of Sola Directa Maila has passed.
Tags: direct mail motivates giving, favorite and new charities, online gifts driven by direct mail, sola directa maila
December 16th, 2010 at 12:54 pm
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January 17th, 2011 at 12:37 am
“One of the ways we will be changing our direct mail pro formas and analytics is accounting for some of the online gifts driven by direct mail.”
How are you doing this exactly? We are definitely experiencing this same dilemma.
January 17th, 2011 at 8:33 am
JD,
First you have to benchmark how much online revenue is being driven by DM. This is relatively easy to do.
All you need are your mail files and your donation transaction database.
Just take your appeal mail files and flag those donors in the transaction file to see what percent of gifts from those donors mailed came online within 30 days of the drop date.
If you do that over a 2 year period, you should see a growing trend of donors going online.
January 21st, 2011 at 11:37 am
Bill
As always you ask the great question. It seems like there is an overwhelming inertia and fear of loss when fund raisers consider the downward spiral of direct mail. As a consumer of appeals (not a producer) I understand this trajectory. The creative sucks. Has an over reliance on analytics drawn the soul right out of the communication and story telling? Is there room for testing “great creative” instead of “great selects”?
Al
January 21st, 2011 at 12:02 pm
What about using a Giving Code? On whatever your organization is mailing out, you place a unique code and encourage the donor to use that in their check memo, “note” for their automatic online withdrawal, and also through the donation page on your website. That way you are getting feedback on how much your DM is affecting donations.
Organizations used to, and still do, put codes on the return envelopes, to identify which campaign the donor is responding to, but if they aren’t using the envelopes the method is moot. Why not just revise it? With all the technology available, it shouldn’t be hard to recognize and maintain the data of a memo field online.
January 22nd, 2011 at 3:59 pm
Al,
Good to hear from you. Yes, we are always treading a balance between the creative that generates the best response (that oftentimes doesn’t look so creative btw) and creative that builds their brand. It’s tricky.
Also, sad to hear the news about Steve. He was a good friend and mentor.
January 22nd, 2011 at 4:01 pm
Sarah,
That’s a great approach — if you can get the donor to cough up the code.
I suggest that you test a matching grant donation if they use the code online. That should be enough motivation.