Last week, I wrote that the front door of donor acquisition moved online. That’s true, but it’s also only half the story.
Direct mail still drives direct response. It just doesn’t drive it the way it did in 2005.
The old model was designed for seasonal spikes and used tactics to drive immediate response. The old model was over-optimized for an RD plus check response, and it introduced prospective donors to organizations in a siloed way, with a dated presentation that often didn’t match the ministry on the ground.
But donors changed how they give. Today, 30% of direct mail acquisition prospects give their first gift online! The model, however, didn’t change with them.
MailStream is the new model.
MailStream breaks the old split between acquisition and cultivation. In a traditional program, those are two separate budgets, two separate calendars. Your current donors receive one version of you. Prospective donors receive something completely different. With MailStream, every mailing does both. You are acquiring while you cultivate and cultivating while you acquire all year long rather than relying on seasonal spikes.
Underneath MailStream sits a tool that we’ve been perfecting for more than a decade: the Marginal Response Index (MRI). Think RFM, but smart. MRI answers the questions every direct mail program has been guessing at for 30 years: who should actually receive this, and when. It analyzes donor behavior to show where one more touch will generate response and where it will only generate cost. High-value audiences get reached more often, and nothing or no one gets mailed out of habit.
The result is a file that grows more efficiently, not just a file that gets mailed more.
While MRI does the work of looking at every donor in your CRM and choosing the perfect audience for each mailing, prospective donors are injected into house-file mailings, putting your best foot forward directly into your cultivation pieces, with new audiences who have been vetted and shown to be the likeliest to engage with your organization.
Current donors + lapsed donors + prospective donors in every mailing.
And the mail piece itself still does what a digital experience cannot. Print is personal, and it has in-home staying power. It sits on a counter. It earns a place in the home. That familiarity builds the trust that turns a first gift into a giving relationship, and it lifts response across every other channel you run, including the online channels I wrote about previously.
Which is the point. These are not two competing stories. Mail can open the door that some donors are walking through online, and they’re giving a higher average gift while they’re there. Other donors will find you online and have their experience cemented with a limited print experience.
Organizations need to be empowered to take both wins.
