January 9, 2024
Most all nonprofits (left, right, charitable, health and welfare) have experienced in 2022 and 2023 a significant drop off in direct marketing returns.

On average, donations to nonprofits from donors giving under $250 are off about 25% and direct marketing costs have increased about 25%.

That’s a 50% hit to your bottom line—ouch. With credit to Bob Dylan, when it comes to direct mail/direct marketing, “the times they are a-changin.”  And by the way, they’re never going to go back to the good ol’ days.

Costs are not going down—not tomorrow, not ever going to happen.

For example, as far as the eye can see, regular postal increases (and the next one is January 21) are coming and the same for paper and printing costs.

About 20,000,000 donors have left the donor pool since 2000.  It’s my best estimate there are about 3,500,000 active conservative donors to about 1,500 conservative nonprofits.  Because of the lack of effective entrepreneurial leadership by most conservative organization leaders, the pool is shrinking about 6-10% each year.

Unfortunately, the left has over 21,000,000 unique liberal donors to their 20,000 single-issue organizations.

Remember, on average about 70-75% of the people who contribute to you never give again.

Why?

Well for many reasons including the strong chance that your nonprofit is weak or doesn’t have one or more of Viguerie’s Four Horsemen of Marketing^®.  Review your POSITION, DIFFERENTIATION, BENEFIT, or BRAND.  Are they weak or non-existent?

Also, do you have a TAGLINE that in the donor’s mind separates you from all others in your market?

However, if you’re marketing is seriously deficient, don’t throw up your hands and stop prospecting or decide to focus your marketing to the top 10-20% of your donors.

That’s a version of what most fundraisers did during the COVID pandemic.

Of the suggestions I’m going to give you, I’ll divide them into two categories, a 20% and an 80% category.

20% improvements may well result in an 80% increase in returns and money.  While the 80% will result in 20% more returns and money.

You certainly want to focus on getting the 80%, but it would be a serious mistake to ignore the 20%.  The additional 20% of gross may make the difference between a successful mailing and a failure.

Stay tuned, and in the coming weeks I’ll help you see a way forward.