A couple of days ago, a member of my team was talking about various fundraising ideas that one of our partners was coming up with, and one of their efforts included mailing out letters.

I was honestly a bit surprised because many nonprofits have stopped sending letters and have instead almost exclusively transitioned all of their marketing and fundraising appeals to digital.

It may sound counterintuitive in the age of the $0.49 postage rate for a first-class letter compared to reaching thousands of donors paying as little as $5 for a post. However, mailings of printed letters and postcards should still be part of your marketing mix, at least for some of your donors.

1. House File: Presumably you have a house file of donors and prospects with whom you have a regular relationship. Today’s world is full of content, especially in the digital world. Our social business regularly sends out emails to our internal archive and we have a response rate that can sometimes exceed 10 percent.
2. Multichannel: When you create emails, especially for your best followers, you make sure you reach them on multiple platforms and ways. Focus only reinforces your message and outreach to them. You don’t know that the moment is inspired to support you in some way. Letters, catalogs, and mailings serve to convey a subliminal message that you are available to them, whenever they are ready.
3. Test Opportunity: Mailing gives you an opportunity to try another method of reaching your followers. If you have a large database, target a random sample of, say, 10 percent of your donors, and then see if your response rate exceeded the cost of shipping. If you did, you have another way to reach your donors that will earn you money.
4. Important messages: When you send a letter or postcard through the mail, especially if it has first-class or non-bulk-rate postage, the recipient is likely to take a quick glance at what you have to say. Mailing is a great opportunity to provide donors, or major donors especially, with a critical message that might otherwise get lost in the sea of ​​emails that everyone receives daily and ignores.
5. Generational donation: I get that everyone always likes the younger, cooler generation, but the reality is that Generation X and Boomers give more to charity than Millennials or Generation Z. These two generations still have a higher propensity to open the mail. or look at a package, especially if it is a non-standard dimension or size.
6. Response rate: The reality is that direct mail still has a higher response rate than requests via email or social media. For 2017, Compu-mail noted in this article: “The household response rate for direct mail is 5.1% (compared to 0.6% for email, 0.6% for paid search 0.2 online viewing, 0.4% social) This is the highest response rate the DMA has reported since the Response Rate Report was published in 2003.1
7. Credibility: In the digital age, everyone is bombarded with ads and messages, and now you can “fake news”. People have learned to quickly dismiss and mistrust much of the content they see in the digital world. Direct mail provides an opportunity to build trust because if you’re investing in this form of outreach, you’re cutting yourself off from the digital herd.
8. Saturation: On any given day in the digital world, your donors and supporters are inundated with messages and pleas for help. there is only a lot there is content and a lot of it is low quality, low value content, which puts people off. Getting something in the mail is an opportunity to cut through the digital noise, and more brands are starting to go back to the mail so they can build deeper relationships.
9. Creativity: Marketers who are stepping back and taking another look at direct mail are doing so in innovative ways, and this should be something your organization should consider. Instead of a standard size envelope or postcard, creative marketers are experimenting with different dimensions or mailing tubes. For example, for years City Harvest has been driving home its anti-hunger messages by sending paper bags to donors and prospects.
10. QR and PURL codes: Marketers have also been testing the use of QR codes or personal URLs (PURLs) in their direct mail so that when someone receives a letter or card in the mail, they can be immediately redirected with their smartphones to the campaign page of a organization. Adding these elements to direct mail is a great way to integrate direct mail into the digital age.

According to the Data and Marketing Association (DMA), yes, the amount of direct mail has decreased, but marketers are thinking more carefully and creatively about how to send printed material. If you’ve moved all of your marketing to the digital world, you may want to consider treating at least some of your mail-in donors.