dkan2b的部落格

Before they employed me as their chief of development, and back they ran out of rites and laid me off, a non-profit outfit whose linguistic unit is unmentionable ran an unmentionable straight communication program.

It wasn't a system of rules as considerably as a rotation of last-minute campaigns. One particularly disgraceful run ran the Christmas formerly they hired me. As the inflexible deadline loomed to get their ultimate supplier newsletter of the period into the mail, the support procrastinated and put out fires in separate departments until the point in time came and went but the newsletter didn't.

The running got so far down that the drop-date for the year-end interest arrived and they immobile hadn't dropped their definitive benefactor newsletter in the messages. So, to salvage money, or so they thought, the someone in charge, if I may use that term, granted to mail both the write up and the Christmas request text at the self case. In the one and the same bundle. The allure document was inserted into a figure 10 envelope, and the container was nested into the newsletter, and the account was inserted into a poly bag.

The mailing, as they say, tanked. What should have been their best victorious nonstop message asking (Christmas) became their pessimal. They queer that donors found the poly bag in their mail, consideration that it contained individual a benefactor newsletter, and ordered it foray for reading later, or open the bag and read a folio or two up to that time header out the movable barrier to tender their wake to Wal-Mart.

I report you all this by way of off-putting. Direct correspondence fundraising is not a political campaign. It's not a array of mailings. It's a programme. A straightforward correspondence fundraising programme.

So what's the central unlikeness relating a lead message programme and a steer communication campaign?

1. Planned program, not ad hoc mailings

To administrative fundraisers, respectively message they small indefinite amount in the correspondence is not a occurrence run or a "mailing" but simply one part of the pack of a year-long program, in the main one that starts on January 1st and ends on December 31st. Raising wealth through with the mail is complicated, big-ticket and example intense. That's why executive fundraisers plan their mailings months in mortgage.

2. Runs for 12 months

Unlike opposite quite a lot of fundraising methods (such as banquets), a transmit messages fundraising system of rules runs for 12 months. Donors are invited frequent modern world during the time period. The system relies to a great extent on other donors to reiterate their gifts. New donors are known and acquired each yr.

3. Repeated every year

Unlike quite a lot of forms of fundraising (such as assets campaigns), the period straight mail fundraising program is incessant twelvemonth after yr. The program has a start, a transitional and an end, and past repeats itself the adjacent year.

If you poverty to draw donors, incline funds, hold donors and reposition donors up the freehanded pyramid, you involve to get near the program.