An oldie but a goodie - this one is always true.
July 2017
What Counts and What You Should Count
I love counting things especially donations. But there are lots of other great things to count. First, you should count the number of gifts, the number of donors, average gift, the frequency of giving, CPDR, and ROI. But you can also count things like acquisition source, Package type, Personalization level, and stamp/indicia type. Zipcodes, age estimates, and rate of return by date.
If you have a robust, mature acquisition program, zip codes can be a great resource. At one organization after four years of running a traditional acquisition program, I started diving into my zipcodes. First I ran a report that counted how many gifts I had gotten in the last three years by zip code. Then I look at just the top 20 zip codes. These were the ones with the most gifts in them. I was very surprised by what I found.
Now a couple of things were not surprising. The area around the organization's headquarters and the area around our biggest program had lots of gifts. No surprise there.
But, I could have hardly expected that in a single neighborhood nowhere near our programs I had a very large number of gifts. Not only were there lots of gifts but when I looked at gift history and frequency, these donors were really coming through for the organization.
I used a census tracking program that I found online to see who lived in that zip code area. What I found were single-family homes, not a lot of kids and older adults. BINGO.
To test my theory that there were more people like the ones were already giving we did a carrier route presort acquisition mailing with personalization. What that means is that we mailed to 100k people who lived in the zip code area simply because they lived near other donors. We used are basic acquisition letter and made sure that the letter didn't just say "CURRENT OCCUPANT" but had the residents name on it. This cost a few cents more, but we thought it would be worth it. We could have tested and randomly sent some each way, but we preferred to err on the side on personalization.
How well did we do? When compared to our regular acquisition program the carrier route mailing did significantly better. Now should you just do carrier route and not use a more thoughtful acquisition program - nope you sure don't. This should just be one tool that you can use to maximize your acquisition program.
If we hadn't counted zip codes, we would never have known about a pool of great prospects waiting to hear from us.
EXTRA THOUGHTFUL IDEA
You should count people with old-looking handwriting. Planned Giving prospects have to come from somewhere.
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