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📍What we're talking about this issue: 
Donor communications strategy Q+A, email vs mail, and more...

Photo by Lisa Sargent

Dear defender of good,

As a fundraising copywriter I get asked a lot about strategy. How often should we communicate with our supporters? Is mail better – or email? What if we can’t do the thing you suggest?

This edition of the Loyalty Letter (#7!) is about 550 words longer than usual. But it features common questions from readers – plus answers from me – that I share so you can do more good, too...

Fundraising Strategy Mini-Session:
Answers to questions that nonprofits long to ask
 

✍️ By Lisa Sargent
Fundraising copywriter

17 August 2024

With the hustle and bustle of year-end fundraising season (and next year’s fundraising planning 🫣) around the corner, we’re jumping straight in today with answers to questions I’m often asked by fabulous Loyalty Letter subscribers like you – and over on LinkedIn too:

Question 1: What should an effective annual donor communications calendar look like for my nonprofit?

Answer:  

First, let me say: I see you. Everywhere you look, it feels like someone is telling you that you’re mailing too much or not enough, or the wrong stuff. 

But hardly anyone is showing you what a working (and workable!), effective, sustainable, real-life fundraising calendar looks like. 

So on LinkedIn, I did – and exclusively for you, I’m expanding that here: 

I call this basic strategy the “dead simple donor comms calendar”. 

Yes, there are variations. (After the notes to the basic plan, below, you’ll find two alternatives.) Yes, you may need to adapt these plans depending on the maturity of your donor communications program, the timing of milestone dates/events in your nonprofit, and the capacity/skillset of your fundraising team. 

But this entry strategy is a great goal to work towards and, for the record, it's one of the plans my clients often use. 

Basic Donor Comms Calendar: [3 newsletters/3 appeals + reminder]

Approx size of organization working this plan: $3million+; 2-3 person team (**see Note2) 

 

Jan/Feb: Donor newsletter

Apr/May: Appeal

June: Donor newsletter

Sept: Appeal

Oct: Donor newsletter

Nov: Holiday Appeal

Dec: Holiday Reminder

Extra Mailings (*see Note1)

My design partner Sandie (aka Designer Sandie) and I have used variations of this basic plan to help clients achieve successes such as: 

• an organization that grew its active donors from 2,000 to over 20,000 (increasing to a nearly 70% retention rate),  
• a nonprofit that grew its direct marketing income six-fold, 
• another that routinely saw 10+ percent response rates to newsletters, 
• another that cross-purposes its comms to attract new supporters, encourage legacy gifts, and promote new services.

*Note1: You will have other pieces happening at the same time and/or be modifying your calendar to incorporate other, special appeals that may include: stewardship, legacy, monthly giving, new donor acquisition and welcome, etc. Bespoke TYs – custom-crafted to each appeal and newsletter – are built into these plans. For today, I've labeled these pieces as Extra Mailings for each calendar. 

**Note2: When I talk about team size, I mean on the nonprofit side. In my world, the other part of the team includes me (the fundraising writer/story strategist), Designer Sandie, plus the client's printer of choice or print management company, etc.

Here’s a second donor comms plan, one of the variations I mentioned a moment ago, a slightly expanded calendar...

4X4 Donor Communications Calendar: [4 newsletters/4 appeals + reminder]
Approx size of organization working this plan: Approx $8mil organization; 3+ person fundraising team (+ temp helpers for holiday)  
 

Early Feb: Thank-You Newsletter
March: Special Services Appeal
April: Spring Newsletter
June: Summer Appeal 
July: Newsletter [includes special gratitude premium]
September: Autumn Appeal
October: Autumn Newsletter
November: Holiday Appeal
December: Holiday Reminder
Extra Mailings (*see Note1 at basic plan above)

And here’s another for a larger organization, that incorporates multiple special mailings and replaces one of the newsletters with a stewardship mailing: 

Expanded Donor Communications Calendar: [3 newsletters/Specialized packs and multiple appeals]
Approx size of organization working this plan: Approx $20mil+ organization; 6+ person fundraising team  
 

Jan: Winter Newsletter
Feb: Tax Mailing
Mar:  Special Appeal
Apr/May: Spring Newsletter
June: Summer Appeal
July: Supporter Survey Pack and Survey Follow-Ups
August: Summer Newsletter
September: Autumn Appeal 
October: Special Stewardship Mailing
October: Tax Reminders
November: Holiday Appeal
December: Holiday Reminder

Extra Mailings (*see Note1 at basic plan above)

Hopefully this glimpse into real-life communications plans shines a light for you on how to chart your own donor communications strategy – and feel confident doing so!  

Question 2: Which is better - email or mail? 
(The answer everyone wants to know!)

Fast answer: tl;dr – The answer is both, whenever you can. 
 

Full answer [with side story and statistics]:

Not long ago in a response to my post about writing for older eyes, a nonprofit consultant who is over age 50 – they said so, fyi – wanted me to know “older givers” are tech savvy too, so why was I talking about print? They wanted me to know they immediately throw away everything that comes from nonprofits in the mail. 

There’s a much longer piece of this to answer at some point, that speaks to supporting donor preferences. And, so you know, I'm also over 50... and still advocating for print because results prove me right.

But for today I want to share an excerpt from Chapter 4 of my upcoming book Thankology, which looks at why the answer to the email vs. mail question is always “Do both, whenever you can.” (fyi: all nonprofits described in the previous section on donor comms calendars do digital and direct mail, even the smaller nonprofits).

>> Statistic 1:  The effect of adding a communications channel 

Read as: What can happen when you add mail to an email-only program; or add email to a mail-only program:

A study of 2,000 nonprofits that ran from 2016 to 2019 and published in the Network for Good whitepaper, Our Digital Dilemma, found “a strong relationship between donor retention and consistent multi-channel engagement,” including:

“Nonprofits that increased the number of channels used to engage donors [from one channel to 2+] retained 11.89% donors year-over-year.”

>> Statistic 2: The effect of removing a communications channel
Read as: What can happen when, for example, a decision is made that "no one wants print" and nonprofit moves from a mail/email combo program to only email:

“Conversely, nonprofits who were using a multi-channel framework but reverted to single-channel saw their median year-over-year retention drop by 31.32%. (A join Virtuous/NextAfter study of 119 nonprofits showed mult-channel donors give 3X more, too.)”

Note for Statistics 1 and 2: 

Network for Good is now Bonterra. I’ve searched for a new link to the Digital Dilemma whitepaper and can’t locate one. If I find it, I’ll update everyone in a future Loyalty Letter. You can, however, get the 2021 Virtuous/Next After study on free sign-up, here: https://www.multichannelnonprofit.com. The study also found that for “donors who give both offline and online...their first-year donor retention rate is two times higher.”  

To sum up? 

Based on the research, and results we’ve seen over the years, the best answer is that if you want to keep your donors connected and giving, you’ll do both: digital and mail.

Question 3: For email vs. mail, what about thank-you letters? Do I send both? (What I told L.)

Before my full answer, here’s the question that L. – a reader from a small nonprofit in the UK – wrote me about what to do if she can’t afford to mail everyone thank-yous, and needs to use email-only for some:

L. wrote:
As a small charity, with no real advice to hand, I am really focussing, at the moment, on creating and writing top notch Thank You letters to our donors. The one thing that perplexes me most is whether to email or write a letter and at what level of giving a letter is more appropriate or whether it is entirely acceptable to just send emails (bearing in mind the cost of postage in the UK is absurd).

 

Here’s my answer to L.:

If donors come to you via online donations, remember you need some kind of disclaimer that mentions you'll communicate with them by post. (You want the option to do this.) 

Gift acknowledgment may fall into the ‘administrative communications’ gray zone for charity regulations, but I'd check those rules first if you haven't. It's super easy to add a notice to your donation page, by including a variation of this wording below your opt-in boxes online (again run past your legal team or check charity regs first):

We’ll also keep you updated by post. You can update your communication preferences any time at [link to full email of donor care for your org here]. And for more information you can see our privacy statement here.

Then, for each appeal and newsletter, you can craft one version of a thank-you for post (mail), and one for email. All of my nonprofit clients send post and email TYs to every supporter who gives (and has given permission to contact). The reason for this is gratitude and acknowledgment firstly, and secondly because we know when donors give by more than one channel (online/post e.g.) they give longer and stronger (see data in Question 2).
 
With that said, knowing your charity is still small and growing, you could tier who receives both post and email TYs, and who receives email-only. 
 
You’ll know your donors best. But for example, you might consider: 

• all new donors get both, 
• all monthly givers get both when they sign up
• repeat givers (so, second gift especially which is huge in importance, and beyond if you can)
• donors who give over a certain threshold/and loyal givers
• tax-efficient givers
• in memoriam/tribute givers, in-mems especially who we know have a connection to legacy.

Have a think on thanking these donors with an eye towards stewardship and retention, then as your organization grows, you can consider bringing more people into the double-thank-you strategy.
 

I went on to refer L. to my thank-you clinic on SOFII, free, no sign-up needed, gateway article here: sofii.org/article/how-to-write-a-better-thank-you-letter-and-why-it-matters  

Question 4: My head is spinning. Can you leave me with one suggestion to act on for today?

Answer: Yes! Spool up on – and start drip feeding across your communications – the opportunity to give through legacy donations. 

By this I mean:  Help show donors how they can leave a gift to your organization in their will. 

You’ll find tips on overcoming common bequest giving barriers – plus super easy ways you can start to incorporate legacy giving in your messaging, right here in my blog post, Legacy Logjams and How to Free Them. 

The simplest of all? Get a legacy checkbox on your reply form (donation slip, reply device, etc.) It has not, for us, suppressed response to appeals, just so you know.

You can keep it simple:
[   ] Please send me details on how I can remember the work of [your charity's name here] in my Will.

 

OR add emotion:
[   ]   I’d like to leave a legacy of love – please post free details to me on how I can leave a gift in my Will to [remember homeless pets, advance breast cancer research, etc].

One of our clients saw their first legacy donation about 18 months after we added these. We can't prove this made the difference, but they had never mentioned legacy giving to their donors before that.  

I so hope this mini-strategy session helped you...    

If yes, you can – if you’d like – let me know a few ways:

• Forward this Loyalty Letter to a friend (and if you’re that friend, you can get your own Loyalty Letter here)
• Reply to this email to let me know how this issue helped you
• Reply to ask your own question or suggest a topic you’d like covered
• Let me know if you’d like these Q+A editions every few months  

Thank you for reading today! I’m so glad you’re a subscriber. See you in two weeks... and until then, may your words work always for good, 

PS.  Life has been upside down over here – so I haven’t posted on LinkedIn as much as I’d like the last few weeks. But folks have seemed to find these pieces helpful/inspiring. You might, too: Yes, There Is A Reason and How Long Should Your Letter Be. Thank you again! 

©Lisa Sargent and Lisa Sargent Communications. This is a toothy issue, so just a reminder that the information in this newsletter is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be considered as legal advice on any subject matter. Thanks a million. :)

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