3 non-profit year end appeal ideas
Communicating with your donor base on a regular basis is key to implementing any donor management strategy for your non-profit organization. Lots of attention gets placed in particular to the year end appeal. We have seen thousands of non-profit end of year donor appeals and have experience running direct mail end of year campaigns for our non-profit clients. Out of this experience come suggestions that we think might help you increase the level of engagement you have with your donors. Here are some ideas you might want to think about implementing:
Multi-channel communication:
Do you often send out appeals through a single marketing channel? Did you know that engagement and open rates drastically increase if you pursue an omni-channel marketing approach? Omni-channel marketing utilizes direct mail, email marketing, and social media to launch an appeal. The point is that donors receiving your messaging repeatedly to drive engagement and interaction with your appeal.
Unique Print Techniques:
Many times the value of a high quality mailer is lost due to budgetary reasons, lack of print knowledge, and overall rush to get something in mailboxes. Non-profits like Lifewater International do a great job at creating highly engaging mailers that effectively communicate content through unique design and print elements. They’ll use die-cut features, non-traditional paper stock (thicker, super durable) all in an effort to guide donors through an experience. Their mailers are not only thoughtful and well organized, they are actually super effective in creating new donor relationships or increasing existing donor engagements.
Segmenting Donor Profiles:
The worst type of communication is one that you cannot relate to. Most non-profits have multi-tiered levels of donors. These donors typically fall into a certain range of annual giving and even have similar demographic characteristics. An idea to capitalize on these different donor levels and demographics is to tailor communication to each specific level of donor relationship. If you are communicating to your top 10%, you’ll want to deploy different messaging or even use a different communication medium compared to your donors who tend to contribute less on a monthly or one-time basis. You can make specific asks by segmenting donor profiles and even add in elements of personalization, which shows your ability to relate to your different donor profiles.
These are 3 simple ideas to consider when designing your year end appeal communication. Our experience helping non-profits with end of year appeals helps us understand this process and what can be done to improve response rates.
If you have questions regarding how to create a unique appeal experience for your non-profit, we’d love to help! Simply reach out here and we’ll begin the conversation!