Our Recommended Ask String Table uses these round numbers.

Major donors have the biggest influence on your annual fund result. Keeping their renewal rate high is essential. Gradually increasing their gift amount makes a big difference to the overall results.

Close attention should be paid to what you ask for from major donors.

For major givers with last gifts above $1,000 (smaller organizations) or $5,000 (large organizations) – or however you define major givers for your organization – different strategies are used by different non-profits. Here are some of them.

Customize the ask string based on your knowledge of their past giving or their capacity.

Ask for only one target amount.

Use no ask amount at all, just $________.

Or, use the suggested numbers from our Recommended Ask String Table.

Important! Whatever your method, the key to renewing or upgrading major givers is a personal follow-up before or after the letter is received. Don’t let your major donor support slip due to inattention!

For more help, download our Recommended Ask String Table and Instructions and our Primer: How to Use Ask Sentences.

Download Recommended Ask String Table

Download Primer: How to Use Ask Sentences

The post Above $1000: How to handle ask strings for major donors appeared first on Mailrite.

There are many people who can afford $10 per month but can’t afford a $100 check right now. Gaining them as sustaining donors at an affordable monthly rate may result in a larger gift or bequest years down the road.

Here’s how you can change your response card to boost monthly giving participation.

1. Make it prominent. Most monthly giving language is an option buried in all the other text on a reply card.Smith College features monthly giving on their   response form. Monthly giving is a big initiative for Smith College this year, especially for new, younger donors, and it is working well according to Kim Philbrook, their annual fund coordinator.Of course, being a college, they have a phone-a-thon follow up with the prospects, so the results are influenced by the phone-a-thon. They typically ask for only $2 to $3 per month, very affordable for a recent graduate. Their goal is to develop a life time giver, even if it starts at a very small amount.Note that the credit card draft continues until the credit card expires. They then call the donor to get a new expiration date, so organizing that (or sending out a renewal reminder in the expiration month) is an essential part of the plan to keep monthly giving on track.
2. Offer a bank draft option. This example from the YMCA shows you how to offer both a credit card and a bank draft option.

   

   If you are set up for bank drafts the fee per transaction can be less than a credit card charge, and if you leave it open ended, the bank draft lasts nearly forever.

   If you are not set up for bank drafts, you can still encourage an automatic bank payment as shown in this Star Island example:

   

3. Segment. Pick segments that will benefit from the opportunity to give monthly.
   • Smith solicits recent graduates for monthly giving.
   • Star Island solicits lapsed donors whose previous annual giving was under $250.

    

4. Send a special monthly sustaining solicitation letter.Some experts (like Mal Warwick) say that to really get it going you need to select a segment of loyal but low-dollar-amount donors and send them a specific, additional letter and reply form inviting them to join a monthly sustaining club. Be sure to give reasons why it is good for them and good for the cause.

The post How to upgrade your response card to put monthly giving to work for your non-profit appeared first on Mailrite.

Thirty years ago my wife and I got a direct mail solicitation that was compelling enough to get us started with our first donation. And since then we’ve never stopped.

But there are many great charities, and over the years our interests, loyalties and even beliefs have changed. So, why stick with Compassion International?

Two reasons: great donor communications and automatic monthly giving.

We are assigned to a specific child. We have a photo of the child and several times a year we get a handwritten letter from the child addressed to us in Spanish, hand translated into English by a local field worker.

Talk about effective, donor-centric communication! We know exactly where our money is going and who it is benefiting. Not only do we feel good about supporting that child, but we’d feel very guilty if we stopped supporting her. You see, we are not supporting Compassion International…rather, Compassion International is enabling us to accomplish something wonderful in a needy child’s life.

Tell donors what their money is doing, not what your organization is doing.

That’s why your donor communications shouldn’t be about how much your organization needs, how much you’ve raised, and what great things your organization is doing.

Your donor communications should be about who is being helped and how. Tell the recipient’s story. Tell the donor’s story.

Keep donors loyal through monthly giving.

Compassion International uses an automatic monthly giving model. Each month, $38 comes out of our bank account. To stop giving we would have to take positive action to stop supporting someone who needs us.

And there’s the beauty of monthly giving. We feel proud that we’ve supported these children so faithfully. Inertia is keeping us from ending our support, and we’d feel guilty if we did take action.

But…

Most non-profits see very low response to the monthly giving option on their response cards.

So, here are three things you can do to improve monthly giving.

1. Improve the language you use for monthly giving on your response card.
2. Call selected donors to convince them to switch to monthly giving.
3. Mail an invitation to selected donors asking them to become monthly, sustaining donors.

In my next blog I’ll show you how to improve your response card language.

The post Two powerful reasons why I’ll never stop giving to Compassion International and how those reasons could work for your non-profit appeared first on Mailrite.

1. Suggest a gift amount using an ask string.
2. Remind previous donors when they last gave and how much they gave.

The evidence is that doing so improves results.

Previous blogs discuss ask strings. This post shows some examples of combining them with the right ask sentence. For more examples, including the best performing example, download the Primer below.

Letter ask sentences

Generally, the letter asks for a gift without specifying the particulars.

• Prospects: Will you please make a donation today by returning your check with the enclosed reply card?
• LYBUNTS (Last-Year-But-Not-This) and Current Year Donors/Second Gift: Will you please continue your support today by returning your check with the enclosed reply card?
• SYBUNTS (Some-Year-But-Not-This): Will you please renew your support today by returning your check with the enclosed reply card?

Response Card ask sentences and ask strings

The response card usually has an affirmation and asks for a specific amount in the form of an ask string.

Prospects

Previous Donors

Use the word continue or renew, as in the following:

or

Past giving history may be used to further segment the previous donor ask sentences and ask strings on the response card. See more examples in our downloadable Primer. And be sure to visit our Response Card Design Gallery to see great examples of reply card design.

Primer: How to Use Ask Sentences

The post How to use ask sentences to sustain and increase giving appeared first on Mailrite.

Most of the Post Office’s very public losses (70 percent) come from Congress’s mandate in 2006 for the USPS to pay the next 75 years of projected health care benefits into the Federal system over the following 10 year period. Since Congress gets to count that money as budget revenue, you can see why they liked the idea – and at the time they thought the USPS could afford it.

Of course it doesn’t make sense now. And neither do many of the other restrictions that Congress places on the USPS’s ability to change, save money and innovate.

Strip away these non-operational mandates and the postal service is not in such bad shape.

Personalized, targeted mail is growing in volume. Learn more about ask strings and anchoring.

The mail that’s growing in volume is personalized, targeted, smaller, more focused mailings. That’s certainly what we are seeing at Mailrite. Fundraisers and marketers have found that multi-channel marketing gets the best results and that using the mail is still essential.

Another rapid growth area for the USPS is the ‘last delivery mile’. As we buy more products from the web, the USPS is delivering more and more of those products. That book you just bought from Amazon was probably transported across the country by UPS to the local post office, but delivered to your door by your postal carrier. The USPS has a last mile delivery system for small packages that UPS or FedEx can’t match and are happy to use.

Esquire just published an article titled “Do We Really Want to Live Without the Post Office”. It’s well written and balanced. Full of interesting information and pictures on how the mail moves through the system. It discusses the many ideas that could ensure a healthy future for the USPS. It’s well worth the read.

If you are reading this post it’s likely that using the mail is important to the success of your organization. You should know that there are good people working on the future of the postal service. Like so much else, it would help if Congress made some good decisions!

The post The Post Office has a future even without Saturday delivery appeared first on Mailrite.

I didn’t either, until I got Tom Ahern’s recent e-newsletter in my in-box. (I’d point you to it, but it doesn’t seem to be posted on his web site yet). Tom explains how to use this tool, and how much it can help your writing.

You know that keeping language simple and easy to read is the goal of all copywriters. But that’s not what we are taught in school or learn at work. Our communications are muddied with long sentences, big words and ‘corporate speak’. Want busy donors to read and understand your letter? Write at the 8th grade level. Why? It’s because they scan the mail (and every other communication), so your message has to be quick and easy to grasp.

To quote Tom: It’s not a question of ‘dumbing down’. It’s a question of speeding up.

Microsoft Word uses two common readability measures developed by Flesch and Kincaid.

The Flesch Reading Ease and the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level tests both use average syllable count and average sentence length to calculate the score. The meaning of the grade level score is obvious. Your goal is an 8th grade reading level. The meaning of the Reading Ease score is less obvious. What you need to know is that higher is better. You can take the average score of 65 for Reader’s Digest and 52 for Time Magazine as goals.

How to turn on the readability tests in Microsoft Office 2007

First, click on the Microsoft Word button in the upper left of your Word screen to get the drop down menu:

Then select the Word Options button down at the lower right to open the Options dialog box:

Select Proofing on the left side menu bar. In the proofing dialog box, make sure that Check grammar with spelling and Show readability statistics are selected.

How to check readability in Microsoft Office 2007

When you are ready to check your document, go to the Review Tab on the ribbon at the top of Word, and click on Spelling and Grammar. Work through any spelling and grammar suggestions that Word offers (like ignoring the suggestion to correct the sentence fragment in the first paragraph of this blog post).

Once you click Close, the readability statistics will appear:

Now that you know how to get the readability statistics, what do you do to improve readability?

Look for:

• Polysyllabic words. Ooops – I meant to say, long words.
• The words ‘and’ and ‘or’. They’ll often show you where to break one sentence into two.
• Any sentence that takes more than one full line…it might be too long.
• Adjectives and adverbs. They creep into everything. Ask about each one: is it really necessary?

Here’s an example of what I mean. The first draft of the first sentence in this post read:

I bet you didn’t know that Microsoft Word will automatically calculate the readability and grade level of your fundraising letter, annual report or newsletter.

Here’s the evaluation – it’s not so good.

So I broke up the sentence and got rid of the big adverb. See the improvement:

Of course I don’t check each sentence as I write. Do it when you’ve got a draft you like. Then go back through the draft, chopping, dicing and replacing.

And don’t forget to check your draft against my Fundraising Letter Check List. But first you have to download it!

Download my FREE fundraising letter writing checklist.

Review this checklist each time you write to your donors. I promise it will improve your writing!

Download Fundraising Letter Checklist

The post Meet the editor who will evaluate the readability of your fundraising letter in 6 seconds – for free. appeared first on Mailrite.

Then, prime the donor’s brain with an affirmation, a donor benefit word, and a suggested gift amount. Use words like invest, protect, participate, gratitude—words that remind the donor why she is giving.

When donors fill out the response card, it’s their chance to interact with you. This is their part of the conversation, so make it enjoyable, rewarding, and easy for them.

• Preprint their name and address so they don’t have to do it.
• Ask for a specific amount, personalized for the donor’s giving history.
• Give donors choices: let them manage their relationship with you.
• Collect and correct donor information.

This ask sequence on a response card combines several variable elements as indicated by the {} enclosures.

• The board member who will sign varies.
• The sentence can be varied between previous donors and prospects (I want to support, verses I want to renew my support).
• Previous donors are helpfully reminded of their previous gift amount and date, when appropriate.
• The variable ask string is based on the donors last gift.

Because choices are valuable to the donor and helpful to the nonprofit, donor reply cards are increasing in size and complexity. Even a well-designed 3.67″ x 8.5″ response form allows only limited choices and small type. Using a printed wallet flap envelope is even more limiting: it can’t be personalized. Why not make it more convenient for the donor? A 7″ x 8.5″ response form that folds to 3.5″ x 8.5″is now being used by many of our clients.

Collect phone and email addresses on the response card since this information changes frequently. But give a reason for your donor to update their information.

When should you use a non-personalized wallet-flap response envelope? When you are making a soft ask―that is, in communications that are not annual appeal mailings. For example:

• Insert it in your newsletter
• Nest it behind a holiday card
• Bind it into your magazine

In these cases including the envelope is a soft reminder and doesn’t contribute to over soliciting. Some will use it to return a gift, especially if you’ve done a good job describing the exciting ways donations are being used.

Here is a menu of items to consider for response cards and envelopes

A list of suggested amounts and what they accomplish can be a helpful addition to the response card.

• Donor commitment or ask sentence, with a thank you for the last gift (amount and date) and a reminder of how their new gift will help
• Suggested gift amounts
• Donor name
• Donor address
• Donor home, mobile and/or work phone
• Donor home email and work email
• Donor ID number
• Donor giving history (sets a baseline)
• Number of years in a row the donor has contributed (encourages consistency)
• Phone number to make a phone donation
• Website address to make an online donation
• Tax deductibility statement
• Date the fiscal year or campaign ends
• Choices for designating the gift to a specific need
• Giving circle or society choices
• List of suggested amounts and what they accomplish
• Option to make a gift in memory or honor of someone
• Choice for the gift to be anonymous or publicized
• Employer match information request
• Option to be contacted about making a bequest
• Pledge schedule
• Whether the donor wants pledge reminders and how often
• Credit card information
• Option to convert to monthly giving
• Option to give online, with website address
• Organization logo, address, website
• Development department contact person, phone number, and email address
• Mailing and/or donor ID code
• Option to be removed from the fundraising mailing list or be contacted only by email

Check out our Response Form Gallery for examples of effective response forms.

The post How to design a donor-centric response card for annual appeal mailings appeared first on Mailrite.

• Has the marketing proposition behind the appeal been worked out? Is it consistent with the organization’s case for giving?
• Makes clear what problem the organization is addressing and how a gift will help solve that problem “with your help”?
• Is the letter from one person to another? Not from a committee?
• Engaging? Personal, even chatty style?
• Creates a bond; uses “you” and “I”?
• Appeals to emotions via narrative?
• Uses a limited vocabulary, short sentences, and paragraphs? Have extra adjectives or adverbs, verbal crutches, circumlocutions been edited out? Uses active voice not passive voice?
• Includes a call for giving in the body of the letter (first or last paragraph) and in the P. S.?
• Asks for a specific amount, not just for “support”?
• Focuses on the difference the money will make in the life of an individual and how the gift will deliver the mission, not how much the organization needs the money?
• Includes “thank you”?
• Starts with a personalized salutation? May include the donor’s name in a critical sentence in the body text?
• Reminds the donor of the benefits of giving? Describes an opportunity for the donor to meet personal needs or achieve personal desires by supporting a worthy charitable aim?
• Are the claims in the letter believable and the narrative authentic?
• Is it clear why readers need to respond right now?
• Does the opening paragraph of the letter engage the reader’s attention?
• Does the P.S.disclose some benefit or intriguing fact that’s not discussed in the body copy? Is it especially interesting?
• Does an extra gift or upgrade letter lay out the reasons why the donor’s aims will benefit from giving more?

Design

• Looks like a letter?
• Photos or graphic elements are correctly placed: top right or middle left; no middle graphic crosses the whole page?
• Scanned signature is high quality; blue if possible?
• One signature, not several?
• Photos, if any, are of people and have captions?
• Uses spot or full color in one or more non-text elements?
• Do a few important phrases in underline, italics, or bold lead the reader on the first glance-over through the essential elements of the narrative and the appeal?
• Uses two pages (front and back) if needed to tell the story without crowding?
• No more than seven lines per paragraph?

Typography

• Uses a serif typeface?
• Text is in black only?
• Uses 10/12, 11/12, 11/13, or 12/13 point text/leading?
• No reverse type?
• Any color behind the text is limited to 10 percent tint?
• Headlines, if any, are in upper and lower case, not ALL CAPS?
• Text is flush left or justified?

Download my FREE fundraising letter writing checklist.

Review this checklist each time you write to your donors. I promise it will improve your writing!

Download Fundraising Letter Checklist

The post Want the most effective fundraising letter possible? Use this best practice checklist. appeared first on Mailrite.

It often reads like this:

It’s rare that someone checks either of these boxes.

So, why include it at all?

Ironically, donors say the number one reason they do not add charity to their wills is:

“It never occurred to me.”

Since repetition creates awareness, including a planned giving option on the reply card is a good reminder. But maybe there’s a better way to state it and help donors overcome inertia and take action.

Tom Ahern thinks so. He pointed out in his presentation Marketing Bequests at the 2012 AFP-MA conference:

“Planned giving” is jargon. Insider talk.

“Bequest” is everyday talk.

Since bequests constitute at 80 to 90 percent of so-called planned gifts, a bequest is what you want to ask for on your reply card.

And making it simple to take action overcomes inertia.

Here are some examples from Tom that are clear, direct, and action-oriented:

Leave a legacy. Please remember {Your Organization} in your will.

All it takes is a quick phone call to your lawyer to add a charitable gift to your will.

If you already have a will a quick phone call to your attorney is all you’ll need to add a charitable gift.

Mailrite client Anna Jaques Health Foundation has gotten even more simple and direct on their new reply card. Here’s how it reads:

Here’s the logic: It shows the donor how simple it is. The action you really want is for the donor to contact their attorney or financial advisor. That’s far more powerful than checking a box to have you contact them. That puts the donor in charge and gets the ball rolling.

And, then they can check a box to let you know they have done so.

Making it simple to act on is what makes an effective donor response card. That’s what I call a donor-centric response card.

The post Planned giving language for your response card that works appeared first on Mailrite.

“Solicitations should follow communication to donors of measurable results”

So, your fall appeal should follow your donor update newsletter or bulletin by several weeks.

“Yes, yes”, you say, “we’ve sent our donor-celebrating, results-communicating, story-rich newsletter. So, now tell me, should I mail the appeal before or after Thanksgiving?”

Well, a lot of appeals arrive right before Thanksgiving.

And, a lot of appeals mail in the first two weeks of December

So you have a lot of competition whether you mail before or after Thanksgiving.

The main points to keep in mind are that

1. 25-35% of giving takes place between Thanksgiving and New Years, so you do want to send an appeal in the November-December time frame.
2. Many people set the reply form aside to make a decision later, so it doesn’t much matter when it got there, but it does matter that you remind them to take action!

What’s best is to take the time to make sure the list, salutations, ask amounts, and letter are the best possible than to rush through everything trying to make a specific mailing date.

Having said that, here’s an actual example of a good schedule:

• November 10 – Letter Mailed
• November 22 – Reminder email
• November 30 – Reminder postcard mailed
• December 4-8 – Phone-a-thon
• December 27 – Reminder email

Here are the results from that schedule.

Notice that gifts came in during the entire period. Donors save their reply cards and don’t act immediately. Remind them!

• There was a bump in gifts received after the weekend of December 4-5. This probably reflects the influence of the postcard and the phone-a-thon.
• And many gave right after Christmas, when they sat down to make their end of year decisions.

Recommendation: 

1. Ask the first time in September or October
2. Ask again in November or early December
3. Use multiple channels to remind donors to take action

The post When’s the best time to mail an end-of-calendar-year fundraising letter? appeared first on Mailrite.