Sanky Blog

Each June, DMFA Members show off their best direct mail and email fundraising efforts at the Package of the Year contest. This year, SankyNet submitted a donor cultivation e-newsletter rather than a traditional e-appeal to help demonstrate the effectiveness of “information-based” fundraising communications. The move paid off — we were awarded Runner-Up in the email category!

Our submission was an issue of the Covenant House Beacon, a monthly online newsletter designed and written by SankyNet to optimize giving with multiple fundraising emphases. Each story helps build awareness of Covenant House’s vital programs while gradually, yet methodically, building to an “ask” that links directly to the online donation form.

The issue submitted for the DMFA Package of the Year was part of a multi-faceted Matching Gift Campaign and “dropped” on the very last day that donors could take advantage of the match. By combining compelling stories about homeless kids with a reminder about the well-publicized campaign, Covenant House achieved a remarkable spike in online donations.

View the full screenshot of Covenant House Beacon.

Covenant House is the largest privately-funded agency in the Americas providing shelter and other services to homeless, runaway and throwaway youth. SankyNet is proud of our long and successful partnership with this truly amazing organization.

By Judy Maneval

In the last few years, we have seen a remarkable – in some cases a huge – increase in the volume of contributions that arrive as “white mail” – or gifts that cannot be attributed to specific appeals. For some organizations, this increase has not affected giving coded to individual appeals. For others, there appears to be a decline in coded gifts as the white mail line has increased.

A number of possible explanations for this interesting phenomenon occur to us, including one suggestion that donors think they will not be re-solicited if they use their own envelope.

We believe that the most likely explanation, however, is the increasing donor traffic between off-line mailings and online reading. Some are direct mail donors receiving appeals and then going online for more information. We speculate that they don’t retain the mailing pieces, but simply respond in their own envelopes. And, at the same time, there are people not on our donor or prospect lists who are finding our organizations online. Then those who are not comfortable giving credit card information online are sending checks in plain envelopes.

Let us know if you are seeing this same trend and if you can suggest other reasons.