Recently, a charity lost two generous annual donors because of a mistake that could have been avoided.
It seems that these donors lost faith in the charity’s ability to manage their finances when they received their annual contribution request in the mail.
First of all, they thought the full-color campaign brochure and over-sized envelope seemed like an unnecessary extravagance for an organization that was always asking for financial support. Secondly, what really shook their confidence was the fact that they received SIX of those expensive-looking pieces in the mail on the same day.
After looking more closely, they discovered that each of the six pieces of mail displayed a slightly different variation of their names/address – with and without titles, middle initials, first names, etc. Others identified their address as a street, road, circle or court. This carelessness with what they viewed as “other people’s hard-earned money” was enough to cause these donors to throw all six pieces away and decide to find a more responsible charity to support.
Even with a service that can help manage mailings and address lists, they can’t always prevent the same thing from happening to you.
So at this time of year when you spend a part of every weekend doing spring cleaning at home, consider doing a little “mailing list clean-up” at the office as well.
While it may seem like a tedious chore, this is a task that you can’t delegate to someone else. Take responsibility for the clean up yourself. Even the most conscientious data entry person won’t recognize the names on the list as well as you do. Besides, because of your relationships with your donors, you have more information than anyone else about who has moved, married, divorced, or changed jobs in the past year.
If you are relatively new in your position and don’t know your donors very well yet, you might ask some long-time staff and/or volunteers to work with you on the clean up. An added bonus of working with others on the task is that you can ask them to share insights and/or personal stories about people on the list, which can help you as you get to know them better.
We all want our donors to know we care about them and value their support. We can demonstrate that by making extra efforts to do the simple things that matter so much… like spelling their name correctly!
What other development chores are part of your spring cleaning?
