Turning your direct mail green

Direct mail is currently achieving great results – with so many more people now based in the home, engagement has soared.

Mail has long been a vital communication channel for charities needing to fundraise and communicate impact with their supporters. A mail pack gives unrivalled space to tell a story through beautifully written copy and impactful images that can really engage. And we know that the best mailings have longevity in the home, being held on to, re-read and passed on to others; all helping to build awareness, recall, and response.

But if you’re mailing thousands of people in every campaign, that’s a lot of paper, ink, and potentially plastic being used. So how can we manage this in a green and sustainable way?

With the climate emergency on everyone’s minds, we all have a responsibility to be looking at what we can improve to make our actions both more effective and kinder to our planet. For charities needing to communicate with large numbers of supporters and prospects, there is a lot we can do to ensure every communication is as environmentally minded as possible.

And it starts with the data. Your data and the mailing lists you use determine your campaign volumes, your engagement levels and success rates, but also your mailing wastage. Getting your data right to begin with is critical.

Communicate with the right audience

The more targeted campaigns are, and the cleaner the data used, the less waste your activity will result in.

If you’re sending cold mail, make sure you’re targeting the types of people likely to welcome and respond. Intelligent data selections, based on the cause and supporter behavioural insights, mean campaigns can be focused on tighter volumes with much higher potential. Essentially, we should be communicating only with those individuals most likely to be interested and to engage. To achieve this, you need to be clear on the profile of existing supporters who have responded to you more than once, and then carefully select prospects similar them.

Test your approach

Testing also plays a vital role. Determining what approaches work best and checking the accuracy of your profiling helps you to refine the creative treatment and messaging, as well as your target audience – again keeping mailing volumes tight.

Keep your data clean

Focus too on your data maintenance and general hygiene standards. This is really important when mailing both prospects and existing supporters for ensuring you suppress deceased, out of date, inaccurate, and duplicate records. Mailing these people not only causes distress, but can lead to all sorts of other issues, not least contravening the UK GDPR, and the printing and posting of unnecessary volumes of mail with its associated carbon footprint.

Ensure your supporter data is as clean and up to date as possible. Regularly verify it using the basic data hygiene techniques of PAF cleansing to ensure name and address details are correct. Use suppression and deduplication tools to remove unwanted and bad records. And of course, run any cold data you plan to use through these files too. If you use a data bureau to manage your mailing data, review these processes with them too.

Next steps

Once you have your data ready, you’ll want to ensure the rest of your campaign materials are as green as possible. Practical steps to take include:

– Check your paper source. Everything you use should be FSC certified or recycled.
– Encourage people to recycle your mailing once they’ve finished with it by including the recycle symbol.
– Are the inks you use harming the environment? Some still contain toxic chemicals so check the ones you use are non-toxic and biodegradable.
– Stop using plastic. There are good alternatives to plastic windows in envelopes, and for outer wrappers – some, like those made from potato starch, can be composted with food waste for example.
– In the design stage, make sure you’re making the best use of space to ensure mailings aren’t bigger than they have to be – although do balance this against having an accessible font size.
– Check the credentials of who you’re working with on the supplier side too. Your print manager for example should have ISO Certification for Environmental Management. The Chartered Institute of Fundraising has some useful tips on this in its Environmental Change toolkit.

The great thing is, follow these steps and it’s a win-win situation.

By employing good data practices and keeping the environment front of mind at each step of every campaign, it’s possible to achieve better results from your campaigns, that will also be kinder to the environment.

For help on this and other aspects of data specific to charities, contact Suzanne Lewis, managing director of Arc Data.