By Alan Sharpe, CFRE
What would you do if I broke into your office at midnight, sat down at your computer, and jumbled the mailing addresses of 1,200 of your current donors so they became undeliverable?
You’d be upset. My actions would cost you plenty. You’d waste money mailing these 1,200 donors, since all of your letters would come back to you. You’d lose money because you’d pay the post office roughly 75 cents a piece to have those packages returned to you. You’d lose future revenue from these donors, including any chance of a major gift or bequest. And you’d suddenly increase your costs, since, to be prudent, you’d have to spend money to acquire new donors to replace the ones you lost.
Worst of all, you’d suffer these losses not because of any error on your part, and not because of any change in your donor’s affection for your organization, but simply because the address you had on file no longer matched the address of your donor.
This scenario is hypothetical but it isn’t fiction. I just finished a direct mail fundraising mailing for a national charity. We mailed 43,000 pieces to recent donors. Twelve-hundred of them were undeliverable because the donors had moved and not told us. Bud did we lose money? No. Because we used the National Change Of Address (NCOA) service provided by our post office.
The post office keeps a file of people who have moved and given the post office their new mailing address. The post office lets licensed vendors (such as your lettershop) compare their mailing lists against this NCOA list before mailing. If a name in the mailing list matches one in the NCOA file (in other words, if the NCOA files shows that one of your donors has moved in the last six months), the post office supplies the new address so you can update your mailing list BEFORE YOU MAIL.
Because we used the NCOA service before we mailed our campaign, the 1,200 pieces that would otherwise have been returned to us on our nickel instead reached our donors at their new addresses. Plus, we received a file from the lettershop listing all of these recently-moved donors. We are updating our database (not by hand, I might ad) with the new addresses of individuals, families and businesses in our donor database.
Over 40 million Americans change their address annually. In Canada, 1.2 million households file a Change of Address Notification form with Canada Post each year. The majority of your donors will move and forget to notify you of their new address. I am seeing this first-hand in my mailbox these days. I moved to a new city three months ago. I notified the post office but didn’t notify any of the charities I support (not yet).
Every week I have received a fundraising letter from one of my charities. The majority of them have arrived at my new address with the Canada Post yellow mail forwarding label slapped across my old address. A few have arrived at my new address bearing my new address. These organization know I have moved. The others do not. Unless I tell those other organizations I have moved, and unless they use the NCOA service soon, I will vanish from their donor file in a few months.
You might be interested in…
Handbook Number 19
Mailing Lists: Where and How to Discover the Best Ones for Your Next Direct Mail Appeal.
Acquire new donors and members by mailing to people most likely to respond to your appeals.
And…
Handbook Number 16
Direct Mail Fundraising Arithmetic Demystified.
Master 14 common formulas that help you measure—and improve—your DM fundraising results.
