Donor Cultivation Plan for New Offline Donors
7 Steps to Engage New Direct Mail Donors and Increase Donor Retention
Image by Daria Nepriakhina from Pixabay
New donors are precious, and cultivating new donors is one of your most essential fundraising tasks. But that cultivation must be done in a very specific way if you want to maximize your revenue. You want to expand your donor communications to use multiple channels – email, direct mail, and phone. This article will give you a donor cultivation plan for new direct mail donors.
Here’s a donor cultivation plan for new online donors
Multi-Channel Fundraising: The Goal of Cultivating New Direct Mail Donors
A study from NextAfter looked into the effects of fundraising on donors using a variety of communication media.
What it found was striking: Donors who give through more than one channel give three times more money than donors who give through only one channel. That ought to get your attention.
What it means is, no matter how new donors come to you, you want to transition them into a multi-channel communication plan as soon as possible. Not all of them will opt in to it, but for those who do, you are positioning your nonprofit for higher long-term revenue, better donor retention, and more recurring donors.
Right now, especially with offline donors, nonprofits are falling woefully short.
The study found that only 7% of nonprofits communicate in more than one media channel with their direct mail donors. 7%! That’s not too good, especially when you look at the data on multichannel fundraising more closely. The study found that offline donors who only give through direct mail but who also receive emails still give twice as much as offline donors who never get emails.
Don’t miss that point.
These are donors who never donate online, but who are on your email list. Just by being on your email list, and getting more communication from you as a result, these donors give twice as much money.
With than fact in mind, let’s look at a 7-step donor cultivation plan for donors who give through direct mail.
1. Ask for the Donor’s Email on the Direct Mail Giving Form
Image by Dean Moriarty from Pixabay
When you send out appeals to new donors using direct mail, include a space and a request for their email address. This is super easy and completely risk-free. The worst they can do is leave it blank. And that’s completely okay, because all that means is that this person doesn’t want to get emails from you, and probably wouldn’t have read or replied to them anyway.
But for anyone who does give you an email, now you have opened up a second channel of communications with them. You can communicate with them more often, and for much lower cost. And as the data above revealed, these donors are more likely to be more responsive and more generous to future direct mail fundraising appeals.
The NextAfter study found that only 28% of nonprofits asked their offline donors for an email address. Don’t make this easy-to-avoid fundraising mistake.
2. Refer Offline Donors to a Specific Page on Your Website
Another way to identify multi-channel donors is to create a special donation page that cannot be found by anyone unless they receive your direct mail appeal. Give this page a unique URL and refer to it in your fundraising letter.
That way, you will know that every person who donates through that web page did so after receiving your offline fundraising appeal.
Do you see the value of that?
By giving online through an offline appeal, these donors have identified themselves as multi-channel donors. They respond to and are comfortable using both forms of communication.
In the study, 19% of nonprofit direct mail appeals made zero mention of their website. This cuts off all except the most determined who prefer to give online. More giving options equals more revenue.
But here’s the really bad part. Of the rest of the nonprofits, 66% simply added their home page to their direct mail appeal. This means, if any of these people give online, you won’t know that the direct mail appeal is what motivated them to give. And you won’t know who your multi-channel and most valuable donors are. Only 15% of direct mail fundraising appeals included a unique, trackable landing page with its own URL.
3. Call All New Offline Donors – and Do It Right
Image by Piyapong Saydaung from Pixabay
Calling is powerful. It’s a real human voice. And even if no one picks up, you should leave a voicemail. They will still know that your nonprofit appreciated their gift enough to call.
And, you should do this for all your donors, not just the bigger ones. Smaller donors become bigger donors. Cultivating them from the start is how you ascend them. See more data on donor retention as it relates to your donor cultivation plan. And skip down to step 7 in that article for more details on calling new donors to thank them for giving.
Calling new donors – whether they gave offline or online – leads to higher donor retention and bigger second gifts.
Just like email, you will want to include a space for their phone number on your reply form. And again, not everyone will share their number. Doesn’t matter. For new donors who do, you call them to say thank you as soon as possible.
The NextAfter study had some sad data on this point too. Less than 10% of nonprofits called their new donors, and the majority of those did not even leave a voice mail. But even worse – all but one who did talk to them inexplicably asked if the donor wanted to designate the gift for a specific purpose.
Why would you want to take an unrestricted gift and restrict it? Makes no sense. And NONE of those nonprofits uttered the simple words, “thank you.” The call was more like a formality, a box to check off.
Let’s be clear – you are calling to say thank you. You are cultivating a longer-term relationship with this new donor.
4. Donor Cultivation 101: Send a Thank You Card
For offline new donors in particular, this should be a no-brainer. These donors clearly respond to direct mail, so you want to thank them in their preferred form of media.
Sending a handwritten, personalized thank you card will be greatly appreciated by any offline donor.
But even here, 20% of nonprofits in the study sent zero follow-up communication to their new offline donors, up to four months after the initial gift was given. Not even a simple thank you card.
Don’t be part of that 20%.
5. For Your Next Campaign, Merge Email with Direct Mail
Steps 1 and 2 show what to do in your initial direct mail fundraising campaign to new donors. Steps 3 and 4 show how to respond immediately and thank them. Steps 5-7 show you what to do next.
For all direct mail donors who supplied an email address, you want to merge email with direct mail in your next fundraising appeal. Here’s the general idea:
- Send 1-3 emails in the weeks leading up to when your direct mail appeal will go out
- Send an email the day the letter is supposed to arrive
- Ten days later, send another email (or two)
In those last emails, you want to really push hard. You could make it a reminder-style email – “Did you get our letter?” You could take an encouraging approach – “Your support will make a huge difference.” And you can just repeat the same ask as in the campaign, whatever that might be. Whatever you do, just be sure to ask for a donation.
Sounds silly, right? Yet, 50% of nonprofits in the study did NOT ask their offline donors to give when they reached out via email! Again – a big missed opportunity to identify your multichannel donors.
The idea here is, sending direct mail is more expensive than email. But with this audience, direct mail is more effective. And by communicating with them through both channels, you increase the chances of a response and the amount that will be given.
After the campaign is done, send another email thanking them and showing them how their gift is making a difference.
This approach to donor cultivation with your offline donors shows why multi-channel fundraising does produce better results. Why? Because if you only communicated with offline donors using direct mail, it’s much harder to communicate impact.
You don’t generally send a whole direct mail letter just to say what a difference their gift made. Normally, you would want to include another ask as well. But with email, you can send a whole email just about their impact and make no request for more money.
The study found that only 6 out of 102 nonprofits sent emails and direct mail – multichannel fundraising – to their new offline donors. That’s a huge missed opportunity. One reason is because only 28% asked for their email in the first place, as mentioned earlier.
You need to do both. Get the email, and then use it.
6. Engage Your New Multichannel Donors with Online Donor Cultivation
Suppose you send out a direct mail appeal to 10,000 new prospects and get a 2% response rate, which is generally pretty good. That’s 200 new donors.
But suppose that of those, 50 gave online through your unique donation page URL, and 150 gave through the mail.
Should you use the same donor cultivation process for both groups? No.
For the 150, use the 7-step donor cultivation plan you’re reading now – assuming you got their email address. But for the other 50, these are already bona-fide multichannel donors. So start reaching out to them online as well as offline.
Use this 7-step online donor cultivation plan as a starting point
7. Ask for a Monthly Gift
Whether you reach out via email and direct mail in your follow-up appeal, or just with direct mail for those who don’t provide an email address, be sure to directly ask them to become a monthly recurring donor.
Again, if you don’t ask, you don’t receive. By asking early, you are setting the expectation that you are hoping they become a monthly donor. Few will probably respond the first time. But by continuing to make this part of your fundraising approach, they will be considering it from the beginning, rather than after receiving months or years of fundraising appeals from you.
In the study, just one direct mail follow-up appeal asked for a monthly donation.
One.
You can do better, and it’s not hard to do.
Offline Donor Cultivation Plan Recap
Here’s your 7-step donor cultivation plan for your new direct mail donors, once again.
- Ask for the Donor’s Email on the Direct Mail Giving Form
- Refer Offline Donors to a Specific Page on Your Website
- Call All New Offline Donors – and Do It Right
- Donor Cultivation 101: Send a Thank You Card
- For Your Next Campaign, Merge Email with Direct Mail
- Engage Your New Multichannel Donors with Online Donor Cultivation
- Ask for a Monthly Gift
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