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Oct 27, 2021

Is Mail Still a Viable Origin for Mid/Major Donors?

I have some crazy good news. YES! Direct mail acquisition is still a GREAT source for filling your mid/major donor pipeline.

We recently studied over 20 organizations from three different categories (public media, food banks and missions). We were looking at the relationship between acquiring donors through direct mail over the past 5 years and the percentage of those DM-acquired donors who eventually gave cumulatively $1,000 or more in a year.

Drum roll. . . .

Consistently, about 4% of the DM-acquired donors over the last five years gave more than $1,000 in a year.

That’s huge.

I know the common narrative over the past decade is that direct mail acquisition is expensive and dying. But, like a lot of narratives in our world today, the data doesn’t support it. Contrarily, not only do direct mail-acquired donors have the best retention rates of any channel, but our analysis shows that a lot of direct mail donors you acquire today will be filling your major gift officer’s portfolios tomorrow.

So, if your board of directors is on the fence about the costs of direct mail acquisition, show them this stat. Cutting direct mail acquisition means reducing your future donations.

Micro-Sustainers to Lapsed Donors

Each fall, we here at Analytical Ones survey the trends in fundraising and come up with testing ideas for your fall campaigns. Last year, we recommended testing first class postage, to avoid the USPS’s SOP of delivering all nonprofit postage appeals on the same day....

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Part VII: How Analytical Ones Will be Using AI

Over the past couple of weeks, I have written about some potential effects that AI will have on the nonprofit sector. Today, I’m going to end this series on how we as a company intend to use AI. There’s no doubt there is a certain “wow-factor” using AI. It’s like Star...

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Part VI: The Environmental Impact of AI

Up to this point in our AI blog series, I have been discussing (some might say ragging on) the practical implementational challenges of AI in the nonprofit sector. In today’s blog, I’m shifting the focus on a more global issue: Is using AI environmentally sustainable?...

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