These are times that try direct marketers’ confidence

THESE ARE TIMES THAT TRY DIRECT MARKETERS’ CONFIDENCE 
(to paraphrase Tom Paine)

Post #27

September 12, 2023

Dear Conservative Leader/Activist,

Every conservative organization I’m aware of is experiencing reduced income, significantly reduced response rates (especially for acquisition), and much higher costs which leads to reduced gross and net.

The purpose of my recent blog posts has been to help you get through these difficult times. As you may know, I’ve been doing this for over 60 years and I’ve been through lots of storms. We’ve always made adjustments and survived.

But don’t make the mistake and think the solution is to cancel your postal mail program and convert everything to digital/online.  Today, of the four major ways donations are raised through new and alternative media (postal mail, digital, TV, phones)—85-90% of the money comes from postal mail.  That may change but not for many years.  Direct mail is now and will continue for many years to be the workhorse of direct marketing fundraising.

Postal direct mail is a mature form of marketing—not so the internet.  We’ve not figured out how to fundraise on the internet as we have with postal.  We will, maybe soon, but more likely 10 or more years from now.

Everyone involved in nonprofit postal marketing needs to quickly make a commitment to change the way they acquire new donors, solicit active donors, and operate a professional postal program.

One of two people will change your nonprofit marketing from the way you’re presently operating.

• YOU
• Or your competitors

It’s your choice, but that day is coming. In fact, it’s even here now.

Here are a few more ideas to help you weather these storms.

1. Acquiring new donors.  Here’s an idea to grow your donor file with mostly donors not on dozens of other conservative organizations’ mailing lists, which means if they become a donor to your organization, they’re not daily getting 6-10 conservative fundraising appeals.

Develop projects for specific groups, such as veterans, seniors, small business owners, Evangelicals, Catholics, parents, grandparents, 2^nd Amendment supporters, etc. Identify a problem caused by Democrats and propose a conservative solution to the problem. Then seek out specific lists for each group and mail letters with an appeal to each group’s interests.

2. Development department.  If you don’t have a fully functioning development department, build one quickly.  Those conservative nonprofits that do not have a fully functioning development department will have the most difficult time navigating the storms.
3. Suppression file.  Review the names you are omitting/suppressing from your mail program—both housefile and acquisition.  I know of several conservative organizations that omit hundreds of thousands of names.  It’s hard to have a successful acquisition program if you’re omitting 500,000-1,000,000+ conservative names.  Re-examine the number of names you’re omitting.  You may well yearly be losing hundreds of thousands of dollars and in some cases tens of millions because of your omits to your mailing list.
4. Tele-townhalls.  Only a few conservative organizations use tele-townhalls to communicate with/keep in touch with their donors.  Those that do experience increased income from many more donors.
5. Digital Printing offers a great way to highly personalize packages and test copy. With recent major price increases for printing, this makes digital printing more price competitive than it was even a year or two ago.