Managing your charity’s reputational risk when sending cold direct mail

With any fundraising activity it’s important to consider the potential for reputational risk and how best to manage it. But when you’re reaching out to new audiences and contacting people through a ‘cold’ direct mail campaign, it’s even more critical to make sure you’ve covered all the bases.

This means protecting both yourself and the people you mail by doing everything possible to ensure it meets legal and best practice requirements, that it’s transparent, honest, and ethical, and that it has the full support of your organisation.

Here are the key areas I recommend you consider:

Internal buy in is a must

Get your campaign approved at the highest level of your organisation: not just by your fundraising director, but by your trustees and CEO. They should want to know how their charity is communicating with the public and they are ultimately responsible for how funds are being spent. Make sure too that you manage their expectations by being clear on campaign costs, expected outcomes, and the deliverability of the target income. 

Due diligence isn’t just a form filling exercise

Before you get started, can you justify sending out this campaign? With cold mail, you’ll be using legitimate interests as your basis for contacting people. For compliance it’s essential to have absolute clarity on who you are contacting and why. Keeping this at the centre of what you are doing will help you offset any potential impact to reputation further down the line if it should be questioned or even complained about. As with everything we do, we must be open, honest and truthful – so, for example, if you say there’s an urgent call to action, only say so if it really is urgent.

Meet your data protection requirements

As well as ensuring you have a sound legal basis for contacting people, you’ll also need to make sure the data you use is kept safe and secure throughout. So do the paperwork – complete a Data User Compliance questionnaire, an Impact Assessment, and Data Processing Agreements with anyone and everyone who will be touching the data. And remember, you are also responsible for making sure that the provider of your data is compliant with the law.

Prepare for questions

Undoubtedly you will get some questions. So, make it easy for a member of the public to find out where you got their data from by including clear contact details on your mailpack. Also code your mail pieces so when someone does call and ask, you can quickly explain its origin. You could also include a statement of origination within your mailpack. These do help the consumer understand what’s happened with their data, and we’re increasingly seeing them used, but bear in mind that these send those people who make the effort to get in contact straight to the data source, meaning you miss out on that valuable opportunity to speak to them yourself.

Be helpful

When a consumer does call, don’t just tell them where their data came from but if they want to stop direct mail, talk to them about their options. Tell them about the Mailing Preference Service (MPS). And you must always suppress someone’s details who makes a request to be removed from your database. After all, you don’t want to mail people who don’t want to hear from you, it’s not only illegal but it’s a waste of money and mailing resources to not keep on top of this properly.

Think of the future

A paper trail is essential, both for data protection compliance and for protecting your reputation, so record and file everything. Then, in two to three years time if you get a ‘stop request’ (which can and does happen) you will still be able to tell them where you got their name and details from, quickly and efficiently.

None of this is rocket science but it can be easy to overlook a key detail when you’re working hard on putting together and managing a campaign. Ticking these steps off will help to ensure you’ve properly considered and planned your campaign and its potential impact on recipients. It will also help you to ensure you are working with the right suppliers, who, like you, have best practise and legal compliancy at the heart of what they do.

For more help on this and other aspects of direct mail covered in this blog, contact Suzanne Lewis of Arc Data.

Training Course:

Adding Direct Mail to the Fundraising Mix, 20th April 2021

Arc’s founding director Suzanne Lewis is running a course in partnership with UK Fundraising, in which she will explain and dispel the common misconceptions associated with using direct mail.  She will guide attendees through integrating the channel into the fundraising mix, planning and executing a successful campaign. Find out more here.