Elevate Your Nonprofit's Appeal with High-Impact Direct Mail

Nobody likes direct mail anymore. I mean, sending a direct mail appeal just isn't gonna work. Well, maybe you have said that, or maybe somebody from your board has said that, or somebody else you know have said that, but here's a fun fact for you According to a 2021 study by the Print and Mail Communications Association, direct mail has an impressive open rate of 42.2%. Direct mail is still a valuable tool in your toolbox for fundraising. Today, we are gonna go over a simple template on how you can write an effective appeal letter quickly, even with a zero budget. And, as an added bonus, if you make it all the way to the end, I'll have a tip or two for you to increase your open rate way above that 42% rate. So let's get at it. Are you ready? Are you ready to go deeper? Are you ready to learn more? Are you ready to join a community of people who are walking the same path as you? Well, if you are, tim and I invite you to join the practice community. As a member of the practice community, you will have access to two things. First, you will have access to additional content. Tim and I will be recording additional shows that only members of the community can have access to. Second, you will be invited to our monthly office hours. Once a month, tim and I are gonna be hanging out on a Zoom call and members will be invited to join us. There'll be time to ask questions and to get feedback, not only from the two of us, but also from other executive directors who are walking right alongside with you. All of this for just 10 bucks a month. When you divide that out, it's only 33 cents a day. That is a whopper of a bargain. To join the group today. Go to the show notes and click on the link that says the practice of nonprofit leadership, and it has a plus sign at the end of it that will take you right to the sign up page. We are really excited to offer this opportunity and to be able to connect with you on an even deeper level. Please join us. You'll be glad you did. Welcome to Episode 122 of the Practice of Nonprofit Leadership. I'm Nathan Ruby. Well, welcome to the podcast today. If you're a new listener and this is the first time that you've listened to our podcast, welcome. We are so glad to have you. And if you're one of our longtime listeners, part of the family gosh, welcome back. It is so great to have you with us as well. Tim, my co-host, is off today. He'll be back with us next week and so we'll be. I'll be flying solo today. But today we're going to be going over a simple template, template that you can use to write effective direct mail pieces quickly and with even a zero budget. Well, you're sending a mail, right, you're sending a list, so it's not a zero budget. You still have stamps and you have some printing, so you have a little bit of cost, but, comparatively speaking, a very, very, very small cost. So before we get into the, into those pieces, we're going to make a couple of assumptions. So you kind of understand. I'm going to use an example of an organization. So here's a couple of assumptions that we're going to make. First is that your list is of a hundred people. Now your actual list may be 50 or 75 or 250 or a thousand or whatever it is, but for today's episode we're going to make an assumption that you have a list of a hundred people you want to send a letter to. We're going to make a second assumption that your organization's mission is to provide home repairs for low income individuals on a sliding scale based on income, so people pay what they can and that donor funding makes up the gap. So if that's you, if that's your organization, good for you. That's a tremendous mission, providing home repairs so people can stay in their homes. I don't know if you've tried to get home repair done lately. It is expensive, so great mission. And then our third assumption is we're going to make this short and to the point. 400, 500 words 500 words is typically a I think that's one sheet of paper. That's single spaced. So you could do this. The key here is that we don't want to make this long and we want to have plenty of white space. We want to cram every thought and every word and every character we can into as small a space as we can. We want to let it breathe. We want to have some white space on the letter. If you could get it done in 300 words or 350 words, great. If you need 500 words, that's great too. What I don't want is for this example today is a three page letter, so we want one page. If it rolls over into a second page by a paragraph or two, that's fine. Don't get too caught up on that, all right. So those are our three assumptions. So let's get into it. So, all right, we're going to split this up into three sections. So we're going to do the opening, what I'm calling the opening, then the body and then the closing. So those are the three sections that we're going to talk about today. So first off, the opening, and we're going to start with the salutation, and we are going to make the salutation as absolutely personal as we can. So if your donors have nicknames, we are going to use nicknames. So, for example, if your donor's name is, let's pick a kind of an obscure hopefully that's not calling your name obscure if this is your name but let's say Cornelius, all right, you don't hear too many Corneliuses anymore, but if you did, if you have a donor's name Cornelius but they go by Corny as a nickname, then you need to use Corny, dear Corny, because the big behemoth nonprofit in town probably doesn't know that Cornelius goes by Corny, but you do. So you want to leverage that personal connection with your donor. Giving is intensely personal, intensely personal, and the more personal you make this, the better chance you're going to have for responses. So for our letter today, let's say that we're just going to go with Dear Mike and Susie. So now their full name is Michael and Suzanne but using our salutation example, they go by Mike and Susie, so this letter would be Dear Mike and Susie. All right, now let's go into the first paragraph I typically use. I open most of my letters with a thank you and you know, saying thank you is a lost art form today. It is in our society. I don't know why. I'm not going to go into the all of the issues in our society. You know we all know what they are, but I always start my letters off with a thank you and it could be pretty straightforward like thank you for your giving. Straightforward, pretty simple. You can add something a little extra in there if you want, and say thank you for your generous giving, or thank you for your faithful giving, or thank you for your consistent giving. Now, of course that needs to be true. If you've got a donor who's only given twice before, maybe consistent for that donor is not quite appropriate, but you could say generous giving if they were a generous gift based on your organization. If you've got a donor that's given three times a year for three years, that's pretty consistent to me. So start off with a thank you. Next sentence is we could not fulfill our mission without you. It is only through gifts like yours that we can continue to impact the lives of the people we serve. So you've got to. We could not fulfill our mission without you. Your donors have to know that you're depending on them, that it's important for them to give. If they don't think that it's that you're depending on them, they won't give. They just won't. So and then the four sentence I use for that is, your gift does make a difference. So if you read and I love, your gift does make a difference that if you read appeal letters that I have written, probably 95% of them have a sentence in there somewhere. Your gift does make a difference. This way, if somebody came up to you, a neighbor, I'd say last week you helped a neighbor change a flat tire and they came up to you and said thank you so much that helping me last week. I needed that so much. It really helped me. It really made a difference for me. What does that do? It makes you feel good. It makes you feel like you've done something positive, something great to help your neighbor. So the same way here you are letting your donor know that they're important and that they're making a difference. So let's recap. So that's our first paragraph, thank you. So we're talking to Mike and Susie. So, dear Mike and Susie, thank you for your generous giving. We could not fulfill our mission without you. It is only through gifts like yours that we could continue to impact the lives of the people we serve. Your gift does make a difference. Boom, there's your opening paragraph done, and you could probably open with those same three or four sentences Every letter that you do and your donors wouldn't remember. Your donors, your donors, don't sit and keep the last letter and the letter before that and pull it out and say, hey, add, executive director, is using the same opening paragraph over and over again. What's going on here? They won't have a clue. So I'm not saying you have to make it like every single word exactly, but you could use that same template, the same format Again and again and again, and it will work and your donors won't won't remember. Alright, let's get into the body. So this is the second section, the body, and this is an appeal letter, right? And so we want to be up front, we want to be, we want to be crystal clear on what the purpose of this letter is. So how I do it is, I do a sentence that is a one, a sentence that is its own paragraph, and it should be something like today I'm writing to ask you to consider making a gift to the name of your organization, but before I do I'd like to share a story about the anderson family. So I'm writing today to ask you to make a gift to the organization, but before I do I'd like to share a story about the anderson family or something similar to that. So you want to do. You don't want to bury in the end of the letter that this is an appeal letter. You want them to know that you're asking them for a gift right up front. So we're thanking them first for their pass giving and now we're telling them that this is an appeal letter. So keep reading. Alright, I make that out its own, its own paragraph, so that it stands out that they can see it. Alright. So now we're going to talk about the anderson family and obviously, for confidentiality you know you probably will you know the anderson family is probably not the actual anderson family you can use an asterisk and or use parentheses if you want to say you know, family name change for confidentiality, or however you want to deal with that, but that the family story has, or the story about the family has, three components. So the first and remember, this is our organization is we're doing home repairs for families, for low income families. So the story is three pieces. First piece Is what was wrong with the house that needed repair, and this is about 10% of the story. So we are just we're stating the fact, what was wrong that needed to be repaired. So the toilet was leaking, the gutters were broken and the water drainage was threatening the foundation. A intruder damaged the front door. Just state what was wrong with the house. Alright, that's about 10%, maybe even 5%. One sentence, two sentences max. So what was wrong, what needed to be repaired? Second piece is what did you do to repair that issue? So again, we're stating facts. We had a toilet in our warehouse and one of our volunteers replaced it. We reattached the gutter to the house and replace the downspout. A local hard so hardware store donated a new door and we installed it. So we've said this is what was wrong with the house. This is what we did to fix it. So what we did to repair the issue. That's about 10% as well. So 20% of the story is what was wrong, what we did to fix it. Now that leaves 80% of the story, and this is where the emphasis is is how did it impact the family? So how did the situation negatively impact the family? So, by the toilet leaking. How did that negatively impact the family? Well, if the toilet continues to leak, sooner or later the floor underneath the toilet will be. You know, the toilet will fall through the floor. I mean, you can't have, it's not sanitary to have a toilet leaking on the floor of the bathroom and sooner or later you're going to have major structural issues with that. So that was how it was negatively impacting the family. And then the next piece, then, is how did the resolve situation? What did it mean for the family going forward? Well, there's a little bit of okay, they now have a safe toilet. That's sanitary, but it's more than that. It is that the family will be able to stay in the house over the long term. They can. They can have a better family. They can, you know, they're able to go to school, they're able to go to work, they're able to live their life because they have a safe, clean, sanitary bathroom to use. So it is. How is this impacting the family positively? That's where the focus of the story needs to be, because that's what your donors are interested about, that's what they care about, that's why they give. And also in there on the on the story, if you could get a quote from the family, that is that's gold. That is awesome if you could do that. But but the point is here is that you focus on the story and how what you did positively, positively impacted the family. That's why your donors give. Your donors give because they improved their dollars, improved, impacted in a positive way the family that you're talking about. Alright, so that's the main gist of the of the body, alright. So now we're coming down the home stretch. Here we're in the third portion of the letter and that is the closing. So in the closing we want a call to action. And in the call to action, what do we have here? In the call to action, you have to ask, and if you don't ask, you're not, you're not going to get, they are not going to write a check if you don't ask them to. So here's where we ask so you can use something like your gift today means that families just like the Andersons will have a safe and warm home to live in this winter, or something like your generous gift today means that families just like the Andersons will have a safe and warm home to live in this winter. Point here is that you have to use the word today. I think that is a really, really powerful, powerful question or powerful statement. And you want to use today because you want them to put the letter down, pick up their checkbook and write you a check. If they don't do it right, then right at that moment they're probably not going to do it. I mean, how many times have you've gotten something either you know something in the mail or an email or a text and you're gonna do something. They, a request has come through and it's like, yeah, I'm gonna do that. And then you get another text, you get another email, you get a phone call. You know your kids come in the door and want you or need you or whatever, and then you just never get around to it. That's just human nature. So you want them to stop reading, get their checkbook, write a check and send it that day, and so you need a sense of urgency. So your gift today gives you a better chance of them doing that. And then a last thing that you could do for kind of a last call to action is the PS, and every appeal letter I've ever done has had a PS in it, every single one. And typically in the PS you can put in even a stronger call to action. So my PS would be something like families in the Greenville area are counting on you. Please give today. Or you could just do, if you want, go a little softer. You could do. You know your gift today will help one more family live a better life. So just, it doesn't have to be long, it could be really short, it could be a little stronger or it could be a little, a little softer. Whichever way you want to do it, whichever you feel more comfortable, but you've got to add one more shot in there. Your gift today means one more family. You know families are counting on you because they. They are because if you don't have funding to go to the Anderson's house, you know the Anderson's may have paid a little bit. They may have paid, you know, $10 or $20 or whatever, but they didn't pay for that toilet, they didn't pay to replace that 100%. So donor dollars helped make that happen. And if those donor dollars aren't there, then you as an organization can't do this work. So they are. Families in Greenville are indeed counting on these donors to write these checks. So, alright, so now, as a reward, you've made it almost to the end here, so congratulations for hanging with me all this time. So here's your pro tip. So here's a pro tip on how to increase the open rate on your letters. Now, why is open rate important? Well, actually, open rates more than important. It's critical because an open rate is how many people, if you send this letter to a hundred people, how many of them open it? So, and that's important, because if they don't open the letter, they probably aren't going to give. I mean, some will. If you have, if you have donors that are like your top tier, number one, best donors, and you know they volunteer and they come to events and they respond to you on Facebook and you know those donors, they may just see the letter and say, yep, I'm gonna write my check right now. I don't even have to read the appeal letter or I don't even have to read what's inside. That can happen, but not often. That would be pretty, that would be pretty rare for that to happen. So if you get according to the percentage, up above 42% of people open will open an appeal letter. So if you send ahead a hundred letters, you get 42. They're gonna open that letter and read it. Well, what if we could get that to 50 or 52 or 55 or 60? Would that increase the the revenue that comes in? Yes, it would, because it's a math equation the more people that open the letter, the more likely, the more people will send a check. So how do we do that? Well, you have a couple of options that you can do. One is and this works really well is hand write the address. Now, yeah, it will. You know, yes, a hundred letters that your hand's gonna be cramped, you know. Maybe you can get in volunteer to come in and address envelopes for you. That's a great volunteer project. But here's why you want your envelope to stand out in that day. They might get two or three or four or five other direct mail pieces. You want them as they're standing at the mailbox, which is what I do. I stand at the mailbox in the street. I don't know why I stand in the street, what I do, and I just flip through. You know well who's coming, you know what am I getting, and if I see a handwritten envelope which doesn't happen very often, but when it does it gets my attention. So hand write the envelope. That is one option. Another option is write something on the envelope. You know you could do something like the name of your agency needs your help today, or local families need your help, or something like that, something that grabs their attention. And then when they look at the return address, it's like, oh, it's from xyz organization. I'm gonna open that, because part of the 42% open rate is that people don't even see it. You know they're just, they're flipping through it. Flipping through it's like nope, nope, nope, nope. And into the trash can it goes. If you grab their attention so they know it's from you, better likelihood that they're gonna that. They're gonna open it. So write something on the envelope that makes them stop for a split second and see that it's from you. And then you can also I don't know, this is maybe kind of what's not click bait, because that's an online thing but you know a different size, a different color envelope or different size, maybe. Again, we're wanting them to stop for a split second and see that it's from you. So any one of those things is going to increase your open rate. So try, try those and see how it works. Let's see what we have for time here. We got a little bit of time here. Let's do a pro tip number two and this is not, this is not for open rate. This is gonna help your response rate. So open rate is how many people opened your envelope. That is open rate. And then response rate is how many people actually wrote you a check. So if you write, if you send a hundred envelopes and you get five percent, that's a five percent response rate. If you get ten, that's a ten percent response rate. One of the reasons why we used a hundred as our example, because it's easy math for your host here. But so how do we get? And standard is I would typically you can expect five percent on a stand of response rate on a standard direct mail piece If you're sending to a smaller group, that that is more. You know, kind of your insider group, people that that are more passionate, I you know, probably eight or nine or ten percent is something you could, you could, expect. So what do we do here to raise that? You know, to increase that. So because again, it's math, it's a ratio the more people respond, the more money you're gonna raise. So here's something you do this real simple, doesn't take a lot of time. On the letter itself, right next to where you you sign, right next to your signature, I don't forget this. Sign up is write a short personal note to the donor. Now remember, giving is intensely personal, intensely personal, and you are competing against. You know bigger organizations with bigger budgets and you know they're sending fancy graphics and pictures and charts and you know they're using color and you know they have all of these techniques that you can use when you have bigger budgets to Increase response rates inside those, those letters. And you don't have that. You have no budget. So you're not gonna be doing. You know fancy graphics and charts and pictures and all of that you know. Maybe, if you're an expert at canva, maybe you could do that. If you can, awesome. But this is about a simple template that you could do with zero budget. So what you're gonna do is you're gonna leverage your personal connection with your donor. So let's go back to Mike and Susie so you might say something like great scene, susie at coffee last week. Well, you ran into Susie last week or two weeks ago and you just reference that because, guess what? That is intensely personal they are. It is gonna be hard for them, for Susie, if she's reading this letter and she sees, oh my gosh, the executive director remembers that we saw each other two weeks ago at the coffee shop. Well, it's gonna be pretty difficult for Susie to not write a check with that level of personalization. Or you could write something as simple as how are the roses doing this year? Question mark. Well, the president of the mega university who sent Mike and Susie a letter last week, president doesn't know that Mike is a three time reigning rose champion at the state fair. But you do so again. You are making a personal, something personal that connects you with the donor. That is going to increase your spot response rate considerably. So when it comes down to when it comes down to it, your donors are not going to care or even remember how well the letter was written. They won't care. They won't. They won't care or remember if you used a semicolon or a comma correctly. What they will remember is the story that you tell them and how it makes them feel. They will also remember how they felt when they got out their checkbook and they wrote a check. That's what they're going to remember. Now, when you write the letter, obviously we want you to proofread it, and maybe even have someone else proofread it, because you know we don't want glaring. You know you don't want to misspell the name of your own organization, all right. So we don't want glaring mistakes in it, but it doesn't have to be perfect. Write the letter, proofread it, then mail it. Thanks for listening today. We hope you'll take time to look at the practice community and consider joining us. You'll get extra content with Tim and I and be part of a community that is trying to change the world through their nonprofits. If you'd like to get in touch with us, our contact information can be found in the show notes, as well as the link to the practice community. That's all for today, until next time.