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E-mail UsDo You Have a Pickens Plan?
January 5th, 2010Direct mail has been a fundamental tool in nonprofit fundraising for decades and, as a $50 billion a year industry, it isn’t likely to become irrelevant anytime soon. But it won’t be around forever.
Today, more than 1.4 billion people communicate through e-mail. If Facebook were a country, it would be the third largest country in the world. Nearly $15 billion was donated online in 2008 – 44% more than the year before.
Meanwhile, postage costs have increased 33% over the past decade and direct mail response rates continue to decline.
T. Boone Pickens has a plan to wean Americans off of oil. Do you have a plan to wean your annual giving program off of direct mail?
I suspect we will figure out the transistionb between direct mail and online sooner or later. I wish our org could go cold turkey but as you know, that won’t work right now. I am working on a presentation entitled “Fundraising in a Google-World” which will be addressing this topic- I will present at the Emerging Philanthropy conference in Pittsburgh.
Another good way to give your response rates a boost is to use personal urls. An example of a Personal URL would be: yoursite.com/Jim.Smith and when “Jim” visits his personal url, the website will usually be customized to him. It also allows the marketer to track who is responding. Learn more at: http://purlem.com.