How to increase the dollar yield of your letters.

I have been writing fund-raising letters for 25 years. When I stopped counting I had written for hundreds of institutions.

With the single exception of the problem of the casehardened, longterm-nevergiver, which nobody may ever solve with anything short of house-to-house coverage

and/or blasting caps, I never felt it was hard to beat development office-written letters, because they were usually generalized to the point of saying nothing about what was wanted or why. What I had to do was make the letters less formal, more personal, more specific, less general, donor-focused rather than board-beamed.

I mention this to suggest that's all you have to do, too.

Some Basic Rules

Golden Rule #l: Forget about having to produce something official and write as a human being would write to another human being, in your own words--and think first about what's going on at your agency that would interest and if possible move your particular reader.

Golden Rule #2: Do not try to make the same letter work for both donors and prospects. If you do that, you miss the greatest single fact of fund raising by mail--almost all your net money comes from donors.

Golden Rule #3: Concentrate your letter entirely on three things, or at most four--the specific need at your end, the person at the other end who is reading and his or her specific relationship to you, the amount of money you want, and the benefits that accrue to that person in exchange for sending that amount of money.

Read any letter you or anyone else has written against this editorial standard and strike out anything not directly, immediately relevant to these four things. You will then have a much tighter, therefore more likely to be read, letter. What is more likely to be read is also more likely to be responded to.

A Question of Length

In the direct mail fund-raising world there is widespread sentiment for longer letters. I think length should vary according to the complexity of the proposition--and further, that most of the time agencies don't gain much from letting letters run more than a page. This is not an absolute, however. My rule of thumb is simply that if I can't cut a letter down to one page, and I feel it's a strong letter, I don't cut it further. Common sense, basically. Certainly there is no merit in writing a long letter simply because long letters are supposed to pull better! What that produces is long, dull letters!

Reply Envelopes: When to Use What

Should you pay the return freight on a donor's gift by enclosing a Business Reply Envelope in your fund-raising mailing?

Endlessly debated. In my experience, response usually lifts a bit when you pay the postage. If that's true, let's ask a more precise question.

Can using a BRE increase response enough to (a) cover the postage you pay, and (b) increase your net profit?

Expert Bob Feucht says you should decide to use or not use a BRE based on the average dollar value of the donor's gifts.

Suppose, for example, there are four segments in your donor file: 5,000 donors whose gifts average $5; 5,000 whose gifts average $10; 2,000 who give between $10 and $100; and 500 who give an average of $100.

Take the $5 donors first. A 10 percent response from this group grosses $2,500. For the sake of example, let's add a modest 2 percent response by using BREs. The gross income then increases to $3,000.

However, the reply postage you must pay costs you $270. So your true net increase is just $230.

What happens with the $10 donors? The 10 percent response grosses $5,000. Get 2 percent more response from this group by using a BRE and you gross $6,000. The return postage still adds just $270 to your costs, so your net income has now increased by $630.

Now look at the donors whose gifts average $100. A 10 percent response nets $5,000. Put the BRE in, add 2 percent response, and collect $6,000.

But the total cost of reply postage is just $27. You have increased your net income by $973 by paying the postage.

It is clear that as the average gift size rises, the net income gain from using BREs rises, too. In plain English, the more valuable the donor, the more sensible it is to use the BRE.

Among smaller donors, you make a little money by using a BRE. The middle range of donors have a value to you that justifies using a BRE even more clearly. And it is economic craziness not to pay the postage for major donors!

In fact, I favor using a live stamp on the reply envelope to major donors, on the ground that it makes the package more personal, harder to ignore.

Besides net income gains, there is another, non-arithmetical reason to pay reply postage for $100 and up donors. Each has tremendous long-term value to you, so you do everything you can to get each one to respond.

The arithmetic holds for lapsed donors as well, because the giving levels of lapsed donors remain what they were. A lapsed $100 donor is pretty likely to renew as one, if you make sure to ask for a gift in that range. So you use a BRE here, too.

BREs in Donor Prospect Mailings--In prospecting for new donors, you are concentrating on getting a maximum number of people to respond. Net income is not the main issue--the stake is the multiple gifts at least half of your newfound donors will ultimately send you!

If trying for a maximum number of new donors is the goal, Direct Mail Rule #1 holds: make it easy for someone to respond--in this case, by paying the postage with a BRE.

(By the way, some mailers swear that whether they use a BRE or not makes no difference to response--to which I can only reply that the dozen or so stamp-versus-no-stamp tests I've seen usually showed the BRE slightly but significantly ahead.)

This isn't the only word on the subject and it certainly isn't the last word, but Bob's approach to the economics of reply postage makes a lot of sense to me. I'll be very interested in your experiences and comments in this area!

The Value of a Donor

My nephew Josh, now a writer in New York, worked door-to-door for Greenpeace one summer. His older brother Ian, now an editor in New York (!) worked door-to-door for Massachusetts Fair Share one summer. They both liked the work, though it was tough. Ian told me that out in the far western part of our commonwealth, where men are clearly men, one of them met him at the front door with a raised shotgun.

Josh says he dealt with frequent rejections by starting a song on the way up the walk and concluding it on the way back down the walk. That way he didn't dwell on whatever happened at the house. Good idea--we might all try that!

Josh and Ian, and the other kids who go out in ever-increasing numbers to do this work every summer, permit people to think of them as volunteers, even though they're paid a large chunk of what they raise.

I was thinking about that. If the lowliest door-to-door people are getting 30 percent, you can assume other layers of management collect as much again. This means, conservatively, that 40 percent or less is reaching the organization. If you take off overhead and development office costs you probably end up with actual programs of the agency getting 10-15 percent of what was originally collected. If that.

I don't have a serious problem with this because prospecting for new donors costs a lot no matter how you do it. In fact, a net of 10-15 percent to acquire a new donor is not bad. Very few direct mail-based organizations do even that well!

Four organizations have gotten me to give this way (partly because I identified the young solicitors with my nephews).

One disappointing thing, though. In each case I simply remained part of the door-to-door pool and was resolicited by a doorbell-ringer at the same high cost as before.

I could have been put in a donor base and renewed by mail far less expensively--at a fund-raising cost of 20 percent, say, instead of the aforementioned 85-90 percent.

Pretty inefficient!

And not very smart, because when you have a new young person ringing the bell each year, you can bet the donors are not being given a remotely accurate picture of what their money is actually going for--i.e., the very large-scale door-to-door effort itself.

I don't feel the kids are at fault. But it is hard to see--and this is the reason I'm writing this--why the organizations involved don't understand that getting that 10-15 percent net of each dollar raised door-to-door is nothing compared to the other thing they achieved: a connection to a new donor.

That connection, properly husbanded and nourished, is the nearest thing to a perpetual motion machine we'll ever see in this life, friends. It is good for years of faithful generosity. It is good for the sponsorship of an ever-growing array of projects of ever-greater scope. It is good for bequests. It is good for the recruitment of other donors. It is good for developing the kind of grass roots political support most all organizations need at times. (Might say all organizations need at times!)

All contacts with prospects should be pointed at establishing that connection. It isn't a "net money now" affair, either, it is truly long-term.

A famous direct mail study in the Boston area showed that after 10 years, half of all the donors who had originally renewed once were still giving!

Study after study shows that if asked, donors will upgrade the size of their gifts and increase the frequency of their gifts.

If you base your direct mail planning on these two pieces of donor behavior, you will generate lots of additional income for your organization.

When you have acquired a new donor, write him or her a great letter, a friendly letter, a letter that's just as enthused as you feel, or certainly should be feeling. Better still, call!

Get a sense of mutual aims and goals going between you. Ask questions about what the donor believes, and listen, and write the answers down...

Base your further communications on what you learn from the donors about why they like to support your organization.

Talk with you soon, Con Squires.

Con Squires is president of the National Copy Clinic, a creative service for fund raisers in the boston area and publisher of a monthly newsletter, Con Squires' Copy Corner. He can be reached at National Copy Clinic, Inc., 17 Little Nahant Road, Nahant MA 01908. Phone: 800/845-1608. Fax: 617/581-5116. E-mail: csquires@tiac.com