Guide to Long-Term Mailing Smarter
Before you read this post, you need to do one thing: open your desk drawer and pull out your Buzzword Bingo Card (c’mon, we all have them).
Now that you’re set, we’re going to have a paradigm-shift in which I’m going to facilitate your empowerment to diversify a culture-change to a donor-centric platform through mailing-smarter 2.0.
Unfortunately, the term “mailing-smarter” has become little more than an over-used buzzword. And a frequently mis-used one at that. For example, many people use the term to mean selecting donors that will maximize the ROI on a particular campaign. That is not “mailing-smarter”, that is “maximizing the ROI on a campaign”.
Mailing-Smarter is a big-picture project and involves, not just the upcoming campaign, but at least an entire year’s worth of campaigns.
Below are five steps to Mailing-Smarter for the long-term:
I. Identify Your Organization’s Key Performance Indices
KPI’s vary from organization to organization and depend on the group’s donor structure and long-term goals. A good way to get started with identifying your KPI’s is with a file audit. Some common KPI’s are: # of New Donors acquired annually, retention rates (2nd Year donors, Multi-year donors, overall), # of active donors on the file (for example, you may want to always have at least 1 million active donors), Upgrade/downgrade %, Annual revenue, Average recency
II. What Are Your Goals for Each KPI?
Do you want to maintain the current level or increase them?
III. What is Your Strategy to Achieve each Goal?
Do you need to mail certain segments more? Test messaging to certain target segments? Add trigger mailings?
IV. Select Who to Mail
When it comes time to create a mail file, the first step should be to address your KPI goals. If your goal is to increase Multi-Year Donor retention and your strategy is to contact all Multi-Year Donors with a recency of 8-12 months each month, then identify these donors and put them aside. Repeat this process for each KPI goal and put each targeted segment aside.
Once that process is done, then take the remaining universe and do your normal selection process (RFM, scoring, etc.)
V. Due Diligence on Non-Selected Donors
It’s a good idea to do one last sweep through the donors that did not get selected in Step IV. An important metric to look for is Last Contact Date. If you’ve got donors who haven’t been contacted in 60 or more days, you may want to consider adding them back into the mailing. Bottom line is that they won’t give if they aren’t asked.
