Launching, updating, or redesigning a non-profit’s annual appeal campaign can be stressful for even the most experienced fundraising professional.
When putting together a successful annual appeal campaign, there is a lot at stake, beginning with the money that needs to be invested upfront to create an effective campaign. A poorly prepared and executed appeal campaign can greatly impact a non-profit organization’s fundraising revenue. At Trillion, we have seen how the right design and strategy can yield the positive results and data that non-profit organizations often seek.
The design of your outer envelope or the words of your email subject line are the most important components of your annual appeal campaign.
Here are 6 steps you can take to increase your chances of a successful annual appeal campaign.
1. Carefully Plan Your Calendar
Coordinating your annual calendar of events with holidays and appeal efforts can be challenging. The timing of your fundraising campaign is critical: you don’t want to overwhelm or confuse your donors. If there are multiple outreaches within your campaign, you will want to separate those donors who have already given to keep them from being included in subsequent efforts of the campaign. Schedule and plan accordingly for sending thank you letters and donation confirmations.
2. Define a Goal for Your Annual Appeal Campaign
It may sound obvious, but defining an obtainable, measurable goal is critical. It can encompass more than a total dollar amount raised. For example, a goal might be to:
- have the average gift of the campaign be more than $50
- gain 80 new donors
- increase previous donors’ gifts amount by 10%
- have gifts arrive by a certain date (maybe to obtain a larger matching gift/grant).
No matter how you look at it, defining a goal is a must.
3. Define a Realistic Budget
You know the adage: you need to spend money to make money. The funds you budget for your annual appeal are an investment in the future of your non-profit. Carefully consider the cost of a graphic designer for your annual appeal, the printing or digital production that is necessary to get the news of your appeal out to donors, and the cost of delivery (electronic or snail mail postage).
Postage can be among the most expensive line items on a budget when creating an annual appeal campaign and is often overlooked. Typical #10 business envelopes using a first-class stamp can cost more than $0.67 each to mail. If you use a non-profit indicia, the cost is drastically reduced to approximately $0.175 each! But in order to qualify for this reduced postage rate, certain requirements must be met (reach out to us for more details about how to save money on postage costs).
4. Define and Segment Your Annual Appeal Audience(s)
Depending on your available budget and resources, you may be unable to afford to send correspondence to every person on your list. That’s okay. It is often best to spend the time and effort on those constituents who are more likely to give.
Segmenting your donors and targeting them accordingly can be very successful. You may invest in a more expensive or detailed annual appeal campaign for those donors who have most recently given, considering them qualified to receive an extra insert or offer sheet. You can then create a modified outreach to donors who have not given recently, trying to re-engage them. We recommend focusing unique efforts on the segmented groups of donors or prospects you identify.
For this Annual Day of Giving Appeal, we individualized a letter to seven different segments.
Here are a number of ways to organize audiences into more targeted donor pools, rather than using the shotgun approach of contacting every name on your list with the same fundraising appeal materials:
- Major donors (gifts exceeding $500 over the last year)
- Regular donors (multiple gifts of less than $500 over the last year)
- Gave last year but not this year (LYBUNT)
- Gave within the last 3 years but not this year (SYBUNT)
- Prospective donors
5. Design an Effective Annual Appeal Campaign
The design of your outer envelope or the words of your email subject line are among the most important components of your annual appeal campaign. We regularly see non-profit organizations try to create an annual appeal on their own, focusing all of their efforts on writing a great letter, but they put little to no effort into designing the outer envelope or crafting (and even testing) the email subject line.
Similarly, an email’s subject line must be compelling enough to get the recipient to read the email. Think about what information would be meaningful or helpful to your reader. Keep the character count to 40-60; this ensures the subject line will not get truncated. Add a line of preview text; this appears in many email programs and can further entice your reader to open your email. The character length for preview text is recommended to be approximately 90 characters.
It’s critical to “cut through the clutter” and make sure your campaign stands out among all of the other mail and emails. Once you get a prospective donor’s attention, you can tell your story, show your photos and impact, share your data and do everything you can to compel them to donate.
6. Analyze Data from the Campaign
An annual appeal campaign consists of multiple tasks within a given time period. Your goals, audiences, budget, and design will dictate how you go about it. Following the appeal, you will want to analyze the data on how your list behaves in order to prepare messaging for upcoming campaigns effectively. This includes utilizing tracking codes on your printed materials and retaining the full contact information that has been provided by donors. Your staff must also accurately record gifts generated from the campaign.
You’ll have email metrics from whatever third-party email marketing platform you use, which will reveal who opened the email, what they clicked on, and their level of engagement. These platforms have tools to help you improve your open rate through better subject lines, send time, personalization, or preview text.
Additionally, make sure to obtain the NCOA (National Change of Address) from your mail house. Before your mail house addresses all of your printed materials, they process your list with the U.S. Postal Service and sync up any addresses that people have changed in comparison to your list. Updating your records will play an important role in staying in touch with those individuals.
Trillion Creates Successful Annual Appeal Campaigns
We create and help produce successful annual appeal campaigns for many non-profit organizations and foundations. If you would like to see samples of what we have completed or learn about the results and statistics, please contact us or give us a call at 908.219.4703. We look forward to helping you spread the word about your cause.
