Direct Marketing for Non-Profit Organizations: Part 2

Last week, we talked about how non-profit organizations can benefit from direct marketing through print mailers or email campaigns.

Geographical targeting is also a very important piece to this type of marketing campaign. There are many non-profits that are local versus having a national presence. With that in mind, targeting specific neighborhoods, zip codes, counties or even a radius around the location can be useful. Of course, they can target state-wide and nationally, too.

As with direct mail lists, all this applies to email marketing as well. Much of the same criteria can be determined when using an email marketing campaign in conjunction with direct mail with the results being highly successful.

With email marketing, the list broker or list provider will generally do the entire broadcast to the audience for you. This is to keep compliant with the CAN-SPAM act of 2004. They will provide the tracking reports showing the open and click through rates for the campaign.

Generally, it is good to mail and email more than once. Although many marketing budgets are prohibitive, there are generally discounts when doing these campaigns more than one time.

Lastly, the list broker/provider can take the non-profit organization’s current donor file and suppress those individuals out of the new marketing list. Generally, organizations should do a different marketing campaign to their current donors, keeping the new direct mailing and email list on a different appeal to acquire new donations.