Fundraising with cold direct mail - how to make sure your great idea works from a data perspective

Having heard that cold direct mail is delivering some excellent results you may be considering adding it to your fundraising mix. You might already have a mail pack idea in mind and know who you will target and what success looks like – the core of a winning campaign. But have you considered these other less obvious points, which can make all the difference to whether your idea flies or not?

Be clear on objectives

Your strategic objectives for mailing require planning in very different ways and need careful consideration. It’s important that this fits with your long-term fundraising targets as well as around your donor experience and supporter journey strategies.

Start by first asking yourself again whether you are clear about what you are trying to achieve with your cold mail. Of course, you want lots of people to donate and to raise lots of money, but what’s beyond that? Is this a one-off emergency appeal for funds? Are you at the start of building an individual giving programme, or are you expanding your existing mature programme to welcome new supporters to a growing community? These considerations will have a bearing on your planning; from the number of data files you need, to what testing you will need to do.

For instance, if you’re a young charity looking to rapidly grow your supporter base by building awareness of your cause or mission, you're likely to need to test numerous data files. This level of testing may be more than one campaign can sustain, so you might want to drip feed tests throughout the year. It’s essential to balance the types of tests you want to run against the volume of cold data you are able to use, because you will need a large enough pool of data sets for the tests to be viable and to deliver the results you’re trying to achieve.

If your focus is more towards income, this will also influence the types of mailing lists you might select. Different data sets perform in different ways. Some are low responding but high donating, while others are the opposite. It’s always a good idea to have a blend of different data files that works for your cause and for the people you plan to contact.

If your focus is on replacing donors lost through natural attrition however, then you will probably need a small, highly personalised campaign, but several times a year; thereby enabling you to maintain an optimum number of donors.

Understand your audience and who you can target

Have you asked yourself why your target audience would want to engage with you?

Quite often with cold mail, organisations focus on what they want people to do – such as to sign up for regular giving, give a one-off donation, or buy a lottery ticket – and how much they need them to give to achieve their fundraising target.

However, organisations often fail to identify why someone who is not an existing supporter might be interested in giving to them. This is important and should be firmly front of mind as it’s your ethical and compliant responsibility (see my previous blog about legitimate interests) to be able to demonstrate why your audience profile might genuinely be interested in your campaign.

Also, contacting people cold is not the same as talking to your existing supporters. The people you’re reaching out to may not be particularly familiar with your charity – for instance, taking a well know brand such as the RSPB, an existing supporter will understand that the charity isn’t just about birds, but very much about the wider environment too. Someone less familiar with the charity may not be aware of this, and therefore less open to what they might see as an off-brand message.

Make sure it engages

At the cold acquisition stage, once you have your targeting data cracked, it’s really all about how well you engage with your audience. So, understanding how those individuals might perceive you and would therefore expect to hear from you is all-important, and insight drawn from your data can be invaluable here around brand and channel preferences.

It’s also about understanding what else typically drives people to respond to a cold ask. Some people give simply because they want to feel they are making a difference to the world, even if that difference has no impact on their own personal life. Others are more inclined to respond to a charity if they themselves have a personal connection or experience with the cause, or similarly, if someone they know has received help or support from that organisation.

Once you’ve identified why people might want to engage with you, it becomes much easier to create a campaign that will be successful because this enables you to reach out to the right type of audiences, with relevant messaging and storytelling.

In addition to a strong creative approach, it may be that an engagement device could work well for your campaign. Acquisition packs that offer something in return for support are very popular, for instance a soft toy that represents an animal being adopted or a lottery prize. Interactive enclosures that help to demonstrate the cause can also give a powerful boost to your message.

A word of warning though – while people often appreciate a free gift, they also don’t want one just for the sake of it, particularly where charity mailings are concerned. There’s a sensitive line between a meaningful gift to engage and connect with your supporters and the kind of unnecessary ‘guilt-trip’ enclosures that go against best practice guidelines. Both the Code of Fundraising Practice and the Chartered Institute of Fundraising’s resource on Direct Mail offer strict guidance on how to work with enclosures. If you do go down this route, it’s important to make sure there’s a clear reason for any gift or it could have the opposite effect to the one intended.

Think beyond response

What is the long-term impact of this mailing campaign? For every mailing you should consider the balance between response and initial donation versus supporter lifetime value and their ongoing relationship journey with you.

After the initial response to an acquisition pack, it’s key that your supporters make a second donation, and continue their support in a relationship that can really flourish.

Yet because acquisition and retention commonly sit in different fundraising teams, it’s all too easy for a cold campaign to be sent out focused on achieving the required response rate, without taking into account what happens next to this individual on their donor journey. How you care for your regular donors is integral to your long-term fundraising strategy and so thinking about how you will manage responses and the corresponding donor data must be a part of your planning process.

Be careful what you promise

One more area where charities can fall into difficulties is restricted funds. When you’re trying to be as transparent as possible and you want to give people a compelling reason to respond, it can seem like a good move to spell out in your pack exactly what you’ll use raised funds for. This is great until for some reason things change and you either can’t use the money for that reason or you raise more than you need for it.

If you’ve told supporters that you’re only going to use the money they give you to fund buying trees for a forest for example, you can’t then do something else with it. If you’re thinking of restricting fund use, be aware that this can bring challenges, including how you record which of your donors gave to which restricted fund.

While there is of course much more to cold mail than is covered in this blog, what I’m trying to get across here is that even with the best idea in the world it’s easy to come a cropper unless you thoroughly consider the data underpinning it. The points I’ve picked out here are perhaps the ones most overlooked, especially if you’re new to cold mail. Thinking about them at the inception of your idea could make all the difference.

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

Training course available: Adding Direct Mail to the Fundraising Mix

Arc Data’s founding director Suzanne Lewis runs a course in partnership with UK Fundraising, in which she explains and dispels the common misconceptions associated with using direct mail. She guides attendees through integrating the channel into the fundraising mix, and planning and executing a successful campaign. Contact Suzanne for more details.