Trust Your Gut: Five Times The Fundraiser Is Always Right
If you’re a fundraiser, you’ve likely encountered someone within your organization (or at a dinner party!) who thinks of fundraising not as a profession, but rather, a fun job that any friendly person can do. I mean, what’s so hard about asking people for money…right? What these well-meaning people don’t know is that good fundraisers […]
A Smart Way Forward
The COVID-19 pandemic has sent a lot of charity leaders into a tailspin. In this unknown environment, many of us have felt that it’s somehow inappropriate to be ‘pushy’ about asking for money when so many are suffering. Wrong! Canadian donors have told us that they’re still generous – and that they still intend to […]
The Hectic Fall Season – Pandemic Style
For those of you that are savvy veterans of the direct mail fundraising game, you know that we are heading into the busiest and most important time of year, pandemic or not. For the vast majority of direct mail fundraisers, the September to December stretch is the biggest in terms of revenue coming in and […]
Direct Mail: Alive and Well!
A very long time ago when I worked in print, colleagues were concerned that the proliferation of computers would sound the death knell for the printing industry. It was assumed that books and manuals, for example, would all be saved to servers and floppy disks (ha! remember those?), and no one would want to buy […]
Choosing The Best Imagery For A Killer Direct Mail Campaign
How much thought goes into the creative of an appeal? In short … a lot! Above all, direct mail projects are centered around compelling stories that engage readers and show why a cause matters. This is what fuels donations. The imagery that’s used in a package is an important part of the process. Photographs are […]
When It Comes To Direct Mail – Does The Size Of Your Program Matter?
It’s officially summer vacation season, so if you haven’t yet gotten your hands on this year’s All-Canadian Direct Mail Benchmarks study, I’ll forgive you! (But it is a rather good poolside read, if you want to download it here.) We gathered data from 52 incredible organizations across the country, and uncovered Canadian-specific benchmarks for things […]
Search For New Donors The Smart Way
Where we’ve been In today’s direct mail marketplace, the fundraiser’s biggest struggle is the search for new donors. No matter how great our stewardship and retention efforts are, the fact remains that we need to replenish about a third of our direct response donor base annually if we want to avoid shrinking our donor pool. […]
Welcome to 2020 DM Benchmarks!
It’s here! I’m super excited to finally share with you the 2020 Canadian Direct Mail Benchmarks Study. And you can download it – for free – right here. (SOME OF) THE HIGHLIGHTS Direct mail revenue is GROWING in Canada! Direct mail revenues grew in 2019 by more than 5% from the previous year. And average […]
Big Fish, Small Fish
We have two big dogs at my house. They eat tons of food. They need to get haircuts (because they’re extremely shaggy!) and occasionally, they need daycare when we haven’t had enough time to play with them. Now, there’s a PetSmart just a couple of minutes from our place that does all those things. It’s […]