Author
Stephen Hitchcock

ISBN
1889102121

Cost $24.95 + shipping

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Table of Contents

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Open Immediately!
Straight Talk on Direct Mail Fundraising: What Works, What Doesn't, and Why
by Stephen Hitchcock, 259 pp., $24.95. (Click here for quantity discount information)

If you want straight talk about direct mail fundraising, do what the title says: open this book immediately.

In it you’ll find 81 brief chapters examining virtually every topic of importance to those who raise money by mail.

Unlike other books that over-complicate the subject, Open Immediately!, by Stephen Hitchcock, does just the opposite. It offers an elegantly simple and inviting approach to direct mail by focusing on one element at a time. (This approach has the added benefit of making it easy to find the exact help you need.)

OF RELATED INTEREST: In Raising $1000 Gifts by Mail, Mal Warwick shows how to succeed with high-dollar mail, walking you through the process of identifying your prospects, crafting the right letter, the right brochure, the right response device, and the right envelope.

The book is divided into six major parts:

• Essentials of Direct Mail Fundraising
• Acquiring and Renewing Donors
• Targeting Your Mailings
• Writing Effective Letters
• Key Components of Your Appeal, and
• How to Ask

Within each part, Hitchcock offers specific suggestions with just enough detail to allow you to implement his advice. Take the section, ‘How to Ask.’ Among the topics discussed are: ways of asking for the gift, why it’s important to ask for the gift at least twice, when not to ask for a specific gift, how to increase the first gift (the key one as it dictates the size of future gifts), how to raise $1,000 gifts by mail, and how to ask for monthly gifts and charitable bequests. And that’s just a sampling.

Or take the section, ‘Key Components of Your Appeal.’ The 16 topics Hitchcock explores in these pages include a discussion of obsolete (and offensive) techniques, the cardinal rules of envelope copy, the misunderstood role of inserts, the use of multiple signatures, how to contain your costs, even a look at URGENT telegrams and whether they work.

With its clear-eyed realistic focus, there’s no other book on direct mail fundraising quite like Open Immediately! Hitchcock knows that your time is limited. He realizes too that you’re not going to upend your current program. But what you can do, he understands, is tweak your efforts to be more profitable. And, Open Immediately! offers you dozens and dozens of ways to do just this.

About the Author

Stephen Hitchcock is President of Mal Warwick and Associates, Inc. (www.malwarwick.com), where he has worked since 1986. The firm, which has its office in Berkeley, California, provides consulting services in direct response fundraising for regional and national nonprofit organizations.

Mr. Hitchcock, co-author with Mal Warwick of Ten Steps to Fundraising Success, has conducted workshops for both regional and national conferences of the Association of Fundraising Professionals. He has also taught seminars and workshops sponsored by the Public Broadcasting Service, National Public Radio, the Trust for Public Land, American Cancer Society, and Planned Parenthood. Each January he leads a Major Donor Fundraising Clinic.

His column about direct mail fundraising appears regularly in Contributions Magazine, and his articles have been published in GrassRoots Fundraising Journal and Successful Direct Mail and Telephone Fundraising.

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Table of Contents

Part I • Essentials of Direct Mail Fundraising

1. Top 10 Truths about Direct Mail Fundraising
   
2. Hairsplitting Traps to Avoid
   
3. Teaser Copy
   
4. Soliciting Too Often
   
5. Welcoming New Donors
   
6. Securing Donor Loyalty
   
7. Year-End Mailings
   
8. Monthly Giving Programs
   
9. The Value of Thank You Letters
   
10. Guidelines for Effective Tests
    
11. Donors’ Attitude Toward Mail
    
12. Telemarketing to Lapsed Donors
    
13. Last Gasp Renewal Strategies
    
14. The ‘Last Mailing Unless We Hear from You...’
    
15. Most Common Mistake
    
16. Conventional Wisdom that’s Wrong
    
17. Raising Money on the Internet
    
18. Nurturing Your Donors
    
19. How Many Mailings Per Year?

Part II • Acquiring and Renewing Donors

1. The Need to Continuously Acquire Donors
   
2. Testing Variables
   
3. Declining Response Rates
   
4. High Response, Low Renewal
   
5. How Important are Response Rates?
   
6. Repeat Mailings to Responsive Lists
   
7. Multi-Buyers on Rented Lists
   
8. Donors Usually Renew at the Same Level
   
9. Big Givers Likelier to Renew
   
10. Retaining Your Donors
    
11. Donors Acquired with Coffee Mugs and Other Premiums
    
12. Renewing Donors Acquired by Premiums

Part III • Targeting your mailings

1. Why People Respond to Fundraising Letters
   
2. Finding Out about Your Donors
   
3. Using Focus Groups
   
4. Baby Boomers as Donors
   
5. Guidelines for Segmenting
   
6. Creating Usable Segments
   
7. Donors, Not Segments
   
8. Mailing to Low-Dollar Donors
   
9. Calling Low-Dollar Donors
   
10. Vendors as Donors
    
11. Using Segmentation to Raise More Money

Part IV • Writing Effective Letters

1. Seven Deadly Sins of Letter Writing
   
2. Misconceptions about Writing Letters
   
3. Crafting Letters that Respect Your Donors
   
4. Writing Checklist
   
5. Distinctive Style of Fundraising Prose
   
6. How We Read Letters
   
7. Emotional Appeals
   
8. Emotions that Motivate
   
9. The Look of Personal Correspondence
   
10. Words or Pictures?
    
11. Varying Your Thank You Letters
    
12. Can Writing be Learned?

Part V • Key Components of Your Appeal

1. Creating a Direct Mail Package
   
2. Checklist for Evaluating Your Finished Package
   
3. The Five Key Variables
   
4. Seeking Brand Recognition
   
5. Techniques that Repel
   
6. Obsolete Techniques
   
7. The Role of Inserts
   
8. Multiple Signatures
   
9. URGENT! Telegrams
   
10. Self-Mailers
    
11. Colored Envelopes
    
12. Cardinal Rules of Carrier Envelope Copy
    
13. Peel-Off Stickers
    
14. Do Those Fancy Packages Work?
    
15. Containing Costs
    
16. Preferred Postage

Part VI • How to Ask

1. Ways of Asking for the Gift
   
2. Ask for the Gift Twice or More
   
3. When Not to Ask for a Specific Gift
   
4. Pre-Calling Before Sending a Mailing
   
5. Credit Card Option
   
6. Increasing the Key First Gift
   
7. Big Gifts by Mail
   
8. Attracting Larger First Gifts
   
9. Seeking Stretch Gifts
   
10. Asking for Monthly Gifts and Charitable Bequests
    
11. Increasing Credibility and Accountability

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Excerpt This article is excerpted from Stephen Hitchcock’s book, Open Immediately!
Straight Talk on Direct Mail Fundraising: What Works, What Doesn’t, and Why, ©Emerson & Church, Publishers. To obtain reprint permission, please call 508-359-0019.

Hairsplitting Traps to Avoid in Direct Mail Fundraising

The key to success in direct mail fundraising is making sure you have a schedule that includes enough mailings to give your donors, and prospective donors, sufficient opportunities to support your organization. If you’re spending all your time trying to make each mailing perfect, you won’t be able to get out all your mailings.

The other danger of hairsplitting is that you could end up spending too much money on paper stock, laser personalization, or graphic design. It’s unlikely that your more expensive mailing will produce enough income to offset the extra cost or generate enough additional returns to keep your membership or donor database growing.

Spending extra money, testing lots of variables — and hairsplitting in general — does make sense for those organizations that mail in large volumes and have very large donor bases. And, if your organization is blessed with lots of donors who send gifts of $100 or more in response to your mailings, then the cost-benefit ratio tips in favor of more elaborate and expensive packages, particularly the use of postage and personalization.

With that in mind, what are some things you can do to avoid hairsplitting traps:

1) Use white offset paper or a standard cream offset stock (and in almost all cases, using recycled paper doesn’t cost anymore and helps our environment). Besides costing more, most colored stock or glossy papers make it more difficult to read your letters.

2) Use standard sized envelopes. Yes, the firm I work with uses lots of odd-sized and oversize envelopes when mailing for our clients, but only when we’re mailing in large quantity or have been able to “gang” several projects together. The big disadvantage of non-standard envelopes is that they may fail to meet postal criteria or require additional postage.

3) Forget about using brochures or other inserts. Development staff and executive directors can spend weeks agonizing over the text and design of brochures or inserts. But in most cases these enclosures actually depress response. In direct mail fundraising, the letter is the workhorse of persuasion.

4) Don’t offer premiums for acquiring new members. The purpose of direct mail fundraising is to provide a convenient way for enlightened and generous individuals to support causes and endeavors they believe in. In some instances, offering a premium lowers the response rate. Ill will is often created as well since many organizations have a dickens of time sending out premiums in a timely manner.

5) Discontinue the use of business reply envelopes. For your best donors, you can put a postage stamp on the reply envelope, but for almost all your other donors and prospective donors, letting them pay the postage doesn’t decrease response and may in fact increase response.

6) Use black ink — and use other ink colors sparingly. When using two colors, you can hardly ever go wrong with dark blue for the signature and the organization’s logo (i.e. letterhead). Of course, the text of the letter should be in black. Any other color combination is hard to read (especially for older adults), reduces comprehension, and increases the cost of your mailing.

7) Don’t worry about the alignment of your teaser. In fact, don’t worry about teasers at all. Hardly any of the tests we’ve conducted for dozens of clients show that the addition of a teaser increases response. And it’s so easy to be too clever. Stick with your organization’s logo (unless it is too elaborate) and the “typed” name of the person signing the letter.

8) Save space and reduce confusion by not offering the option of making credit card gifts. Mailings whose reply devices have a line for credit card gifts often get lower response rates. Big DISCLAIMER: credit cards are helpful if you’re inviting your members or donors to participate in a monthly giving program. And many individuals seem to prefer using their credit cards in responding to telephone fundraising and when signing up for special events.

9) Have your executive director or president sign the letter. Don’t spend time trying to recruit a celebrity or worrying about which member of the board should sign. Members and donors expect the chief executive officer to know what’s going on, to care about the organization, and to be responsible enough to ask them to send a gift. For variety’s sake, in the course of a year, you may wish to have another staff member, board member, or other volunteer sign the letter, as long as they don’t edit your drafts to death.

10) Do spend more time and more money on your thank-you letters and notes, as long as you don’t delay in getting them out. Don’t try to save money by sending out your thanks via bulk mail. And don’t send out post cards.

Thank you letters are a lovely place to include inserts to keep your members and donors better informed. And I guarantee you don’t need to test, or split hairs, over the value of hand-written thank you notes to those who make generous gifts.

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