The 7 fastest ways to increase direct mail response (Part 7)

By Wayne Gurley
President & Creative Director

7. Make sure you mail to donors who are really donors and prospects who are really prospects.

In other words, your in-house list may not be very good.

Whenever I ask someone at an organization how many donors they have, they usually give me a number that is the total size of their mailing list, including donors and in-house prospects.

They do this because they’re used to printing that quantity for an entire mailing or for sending out a newsletter. But a mailing list is not a donor file, and what you think are prospects are probably better categorized as “suspects” or simply “people we’ve added to our list” over the years.

A lot of mailing lists have donors on them who may have paid to attend an event. These are not donors. You may also have a lot of people who have made memorial gifts. Technically, these aren’t donors, either. The motivation for making a memorial gift is the death of a person they knew, and they responded because they were told to send a gift to your organization “in lieu of flowers.”

Event and memorial donors usually don’t convert very well to regular donor status. You can try, but the success rate is usually quite low.

For this reason, it’s important to segment your file into groups that are similar so you can track response. You may find that the response from certain groups is not adequate and you may want to eliminate them from future mailings.

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