DirectMail.com had scarcely finished toasting its success in bringing the National Wildlife Federation (NWF) back onto its client roster when the relationship faced its first challenge. In response to the Gulf of Mexico oil leak, the NWF wanted to mail an 850,000-piece emergency solicitation as fast as possible.
It was an odd request, given that DirectMail.com had been retained to coordinate the NWF’s renewal mailings. But Shawn Salta, a VP at DirectMail.com, knew his company had the production capability to turn the effort around quickly.
“We recommended a down-and-dirty fundraising effort, a #10 envelope with a window and a personalized 14-inch drop-cut letter,” Salta told Direct Newsline. “This allowed us to laser personalize the letter and the reply in one pass at the bindery.”
The package also contained a #9 prepaid business reply envelope, and the reply slip was detached from the letter. “The more additional steps recipients have to take, the less likely they are to take it,” Salta said. With this format “the reply is already loose. There is no tearing on a perforation mark.”
The ask ladder – the escalating dollar amounts recipients can check off – wasn’t left to chance. Because the mailing went to consumers with a donation history, each piece contained request amounts commensurate with recipients’ previous gifting history.
The list was pulled from the top 85% of the NWF’s million-name donor file, for a mailing more than twice the size of a typical outreach, according to NWF direct of marketing, membership acquisitions and renewals Martina White.
For White, the campaign’s emphasis was on speed. “We wanted to get the appeal out there as quickly as possible,” she said. “It was a restricted mailing: The money raised is going to the Gulf, not to keeping our lights on, and we wanted to give our members the opportunity to help as quickly as they could.”
Once the NWF signed off on the package’s creative design from its agency, Merkle, it took only five days to get the campaign into the mail stream. The effort went out on May 8 – less than three weeks after the initial reports of the spill.
At deadline the response hadn’t hit critical mass, White said. But she expects the initial response of a few hundred donations to balloon as the spill in the Gulf lingers in the news.
