The mailing that “tripled our recurring donors”
Here's a great story about the value of beautiful design and good storytelling.
Last October I received a beautiful mailing from Morgan Ormsby at The Bay, a former client. Here’s the cover of one piece:
And here’s a teaser of the whole mailing — really a beautiful thing:
(I’m not going to stuff your inbox with images, but if you want to see the full mailing — and it’s worth a look! — it’s at the supplemental page for this email.)
Two things got my attention right off the bat:
A gorgeous 16-page zine detailing the story of just one young person The Bay helped through their programs.
A letter from Morgan herself telling the story of her own experience as a youngster coming up in the world.
Right away, I thought this mailing was worth sharing with you, but I wanted to wait until we had a chance to see what the actual outcomes were.
So I reached out to Morgan recently to learn more. (Details here are shared with her permission.)
I must say I'm impressed. As a result of this mailing:
The Bay tripled their number of recurring donors.
A large number of the one-time donations were from first time donors.
Here’s some of what Morgan had to say:
Results and effectiveness:
Prior to the mailing, we had 7 recurring donors. Within a month of the mailing (with no other efforts to recruit monthly donors), we had tripled that number to 21. I was especially pleased with this, because our letter specifically made the ask for recurring gifts, which meant people actually read it!
Stories:
We have always struggled to highlight the stories of the youth we serve without feeling like we're exploiting them, so we've always tried to get creative about how we tell stories in a way that feels good to us. I felt comfortable sharing what The Bay means to me, and why I would've greatly benefited from our programs when I was young, so we made that the focus of the letter, and Nicole, the Gap Year student that was highlighted in the zine, has been wonderful about wanting to share her story.
Timing of this appeal:
One of the things we did differently as it relates to this campaign was, we put the resources we normally use for our end-of-year campaign into this. We always plan for a direct mail campaign that goes out in November that includes printed marketing collateral, but knowing that donors that can give at, say $25-$100, struggle to do so at the end of the year with so many holiday and winter vacation expenses, we wanted to experiment with putting that effort into something earlier in the year, and then did a simple postcard mailer for end of year efforts.
Investment/costs:
Everything was designed-in house by our team, so we didn't have any additional expenses for contractors, and we actually switched from our normal print company because we ended up getting a much lower quote from someone else for that component.
Evaluating “whether it was worth it”:
All in all, accounting for hard and soft costs, we netted ~$1,300 from one time donations, plus ~$250 monthly from the new recurring donors.
There are so many valuable lessons here. I might get more into those later, but for now, here’s the thing:
Morgan has solid indications that her recipients actually read the mailing — because the appeal was for recurring contributions, and this mailing pretty clearly tripled their standing in that category.
But why did they read it?
People are complicated, but here’s what I think:
They read it because stories are engaging.
Because donors are real people, and they care about real people.
This mailing, among all the other things it got right, told real stories about real people. And that gets attention.
All the best,
A.
P.S. The folks at The Bay really are doing great work, both for the people they serve and for their organzation. If you’d like a little inspiriation, I encourage you to check them out here.