An open letter

[resonant]

Dear Worthy Cause:

When George Bush was in his first term as president, I gave you a small donation. I didn't have a job, and it was all I could afford, but with Bush in the white house, I wanted to support your work.

Since that time, you've called me four times a year and sent me mailings at least monthly.

I'll be the first to admit that I don't understand the economics of these things, but I would guess that your efforts to get more money out of me have long since eaten up my original donation and then some. I thought you spent money on, you know, the actual Worthy Cause for which I supported you.

The next time I'm tempted to give you any money, I'm going to mail you some dollar bills in an envelope with no return address on it.

P.S. That goes double for you, Magazine Subscription.

Comments

[k8andrewz]

I've worked for a place like this (my university's alumni fund, not charity, but the same begging for money principles) and the fact is they wouldn't send those things out if they didn't return multiple-fold on the investment. To look at you, in particular, no, it's not returning money. But it's a very closely watched numbers game. For every X requests for money to Y previous donors, they get Z $. (You can bet they also micromanage for which mailers receive better response rates).

That may mean that they send out mailers to 1000 people like you, where they lose a small investment. But if (and I'm pulling numbers out of my ass here that might not add up, but you get the idea) only 10% of those people respond with a donation of $25 or more, that'll more than pay for the mailing. And if only 1% of them respond with $100 or more, they end up way ahead. It's absolutely worth wasting $5 a year on paper and stamps to you to land that 1%.

Plus, it's a well known fact that existing "customers" are far, far more likely to "purchase" again. Every ask they make of you has a seriously higher chance of a return than 100s of asks of people who've never been a 'customer'. The money they 'waste' on you is more than made up by what they earn from the % who end up coming back to the donation fold.

[the_shoshanna]

I once found myself on a political action group's mailing list twice, under two different spellings of my name. The first spelling was a basic normal donor, and got flyers and mailings in basic normal sizes. The second spelling was apparently the one that I'd made a rather larger donation under, or something, and was clearly on the group's SUCKER list; it got the exact same mailings, but blown up to practically poster-size.

[flaming_muse]

I'm not sure what you can do about the mailings other than send them a letter to ask to be taken off of their mailing list, but you can absolutely ask to be put on their do-not-call list the next time they call so as to avoid the phone calls.

[libitina]

Yes, but there's no excuse anymore. Email. It's wonderful. And it generates far less resentment on my part. They pay for a publicist to design it and possibly a service to distribute - but there's no paper waste, no fuel waste, and I'm right by my checkbook (aka Paypal) when they ask.

And, no, this isn't a criticism of you or your organization - I did notice the use of the past tense. But it is a reply to the logic you are explaining.

[mad_martha]

This. Also:

Dear Charity: My mother died in January. I know that you know this, because you sent me a letter of condolence. Why, then, are you still sending mailings addressed to her? Especially as I return them all, unopened, marked 'deceased, please return to sender'.

I shouldn't be surprised, I suppose. I still get the occasional letter addressed to Dad, and he's been gone over 4 years now. And they still misspell his name.

*sigh*

[k8andrewz]

It's not about excuses. It's about return on investment and statistical fact. Email is great for some people, like you, but it's a hell of a lot easier to ignore, get caught in a spam filter or put off for a 'later' that never comes, if you're so inclined. Add to that the fact that there are still people out there (like the older/elderly) that aren't online, and people of all groups who are still uncomfortable paying online. Less and less, true, and it may seem silly to those of us who live our lives online, but not using direct mail is literally throwing their money away.

Email may be the way of the future, and an indispensable portion of their fundraising strategies, but if they've got a mailing list of 300,000 and have a statistical track record of getting a response rate of X percent, those averages have a strong tendency to stay the same over time. It's a reliable income source they can't afford to toss just because email exists. If you're talking saving trees/energy, that's one thing, but the impression I got from Resonant's entry was a concern for the money wasted on her. And I'm telling you, they cost this shit out, and it makes them far, far more money than they spend, over all.

A lot of this sort of stuff feels counterintuitive from the consumer POV, but it's done because it has a solid track record of working out over a large population. It's the same principle as those annoying as fuck subscription cards that fall out of magazines. "Everbody" hates them, but they've got one of the highest response rates of any subscription pitch out there. If people stopped filling them out and subscribing with them, they'd go away tomorrow. But as long as the ROI is so high, it's absolutely worth the magazine's time to piss you off for ten seconds in order to get the extra subscribers.

I worked in an advertising agency that specialized in those ugly ass 1800 late night 'buy my shamwow/children's international/time life collections' type commercials, and the same principles were used there. It was my job to analyze the numbers, and it would always amaze me what people would respond to, because I was always like, 'but that's the tackiest/most annoying/least attractive commercial of the bunch.' But the numbers didn't lie.

It's not logic, it's statistics. This was about 8 years ago, so email wasn't *quite* as omnipresent as it is today, but we didn't even bother with email marketing. Partly because we were an oldschool agency, but partly because the response rate was so abysmal as compared to direct mail. It takes one click to toss X Charity's email request. You're forced to physically handle direct mail, maybe set it on your table to go through/toss later, and there's a decent chance you'll at least look at it before throwing it in the garbage. Other people in your house might look at it. You spend more time reading it, if you read it, than you do with email. And each second/rehandling increases the statistical likelyhood that you'll respond.

It's pure math. http://www.kinesisinc.com/marketing/mail-and-e-mail-are-the-most-commonly-used-media-for-marketing/

According to the above, Direct mail has a %3.42 response rate vs %1.73 for email, and that's just for house lists/confirmed addresses that have essentially opted in. It would be ludicrous for them to toss an income source that has twice the return rate, even if it costs a few pennies more per try.

[k8andrewz]

ETA: Re: the resentment factor (the intuitive part where you/i personally are like 'well see, if they hadn't done it that way, I've have responded, but screw them, they lost a potential donation' or whatever). Back at the university place, you would not *believe* the resentment I incurred, got cursed out on a near daily basis of people who were like 'I'm never donating to you annoying assholes, fuck off'.

In the beginning, I was like, 'aren't we scaring off potential donors?', but we were shown stats (and were ruthlessly incentivized/punished regarding our own) that proved that the $ earned far outweighed the supposed resentment. They don't give a crap about your resentment or Resonant's. They only care that this method has a time tested response rate that far outstrips other methods. If they don't, they're going to go bankrupt a lot faster than if they cater to your tastes or hers or mine.

[sara]

To be perfectly frank, most people who have enough resources to make meaningful donations to nonprofits (e.g. the kind of donations that keep the lights on) are old enough that they are not interested in getting fundraising reminders via e-mail. This is changing, over time, but it's a generational shift, and it's going to be a while before that's a strategy that makes sense for any organization with a donor base that includes senior citizens. Part of my job for a small nonprofit includes doing fundraising and I don't see us quitting paper mailings anytime in the next decade, maybe even the next two decades.

That said, I have stopped donating to both the ACLU and our statewide public broadcaster because they sent monthly mailings that annoyed the fuck out of me. There is a fine line, there.

[resonant]

I figured it must be working or they wouldn't keep doing it. Still annoys me, though!

[resonant]

Oh, dear.

I think that organizations have a brain (which directs things like the sending of condolence letters), but they also have an autonomic nervous system, which continues spitting out the advertising without checking in with the brain at all.

[resonant]

I just did that tonight. (Usually we solve the problem by simply not answering the phone unless we recognize the number on the caller ID, but I got curious about what all those millions of hang-up calls from Outreach Services were, so I picked up.)

[resonant]

Or maybe they thought your alter ego was visually impaired?

Word.

[lynnzo]

There are a couple of causes to which I've stopped donating simply because they wasted every dime I gave them sending me more mailings asking for money. I figure if they're that well funded, they don't need my $10.

[the_shoshanna]

Well, they definitely had no reason to think so...

[mific]

Yeah. I tried mailing various charities a letter once saying that I'd give them a donation once a year and not to hassle me otherwise. As you can imagine, that was a complete failure. So they just get filed in the trash now.