The Agitator

March 6, 2009

In the current edition of Mal Warwick Associates’ latest e-newsletter, Peter Schoewe kindly shares this analysis of year-end direct mail returns from the firm’s (and some other) clients. The results analyzed are from 1 October 2008 through 31 January 2009, compared to the same period a year earlier. And note: only direct mail returns are analyzed.

In sum:

"Overall, there was an 18% decrease in revenue through the mail this year-end, with 79% of the organizations experiencing a decline and 21% experiencing an increase. However, the greatest source of the decline was acquisition revenue, which fell 33%. House mailings saw a decrease of 15%. …

This year-end, we saw a 3.1% increase in revenue per piece mailed. This is a surprising result considering the extremely difficult economic climate, and reflects the switch in proportion of quantity from less productive acquisition mailings to net-revenue-generating appeals."

As Peter says, these results indicate that "the bottom did not fall out of direct mail fundraising in the year-end."

With many nonprofits indicating appreciable gains in online fundraising returns at year-end, we suspect that the total picture would reflect a decent chunk of that 18% decline in direct mail being offset by online returns … even if online returns were merely cannibalizing the mail channel and not reflecting "new" money.

How do your results compare? More sharing please!

Tom

This entry was posted on Friday, March 6th, 2009 at 1:00 am and is filed under Don't Miss these Posts, direct mail, direct marketing, fundraising, marketing metrics, nonprofit management, online fundraising. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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