Catholic Mailer Looks to Beef up E-Campaigns
A Roman Catholic religious order received a 3% response rate and raised about $100,000 from its first e-mail and web campaign to benefit victims of the tsunami in Japan.
Now, the Capuchin Order of the province of St Mary is looking to increase its online presence both in fundraising and donor communication, says John DeGraaf, the organization’s associate director of development.
In the Catholic Church, provinces refer to ecclesiastical districts under the jurisdiction of archbishops. The province of St. Mary includes New York and New England states, says DeGraaf.
Last March, the order—which relies mostly on small frequent direct mail donations—decided it had to work quickly to help victims of the natural disaster and tapped its 35,000 U.S.-based e-mail contributors for this effort.
This was the order’s first e-mail effort in connection with Japan, he notes.
“For this particular case we wanted to get the news out to our donors in a very swift manner so we developed an email correspondence in a matter of a day or two rather than waiting to develop a whole direct mail campaign,” he says.
“We mostly do direct mail during the year but in this particular event we just did an e-mail blast and it just kind of went viral on us,” he said, explaining that members of several other Catholic organizations responded to appeals on its website www.capuchin.org.
“And we were getting donations from other [Catholic] provinces and were getting reports directly from our friars in Japan about the situation,” he says.
“The emails were sent to our constituents here in U.S.,” he said. “And our friars in Japan all speak English.” The order has friars in 11 locations throughout Japan.
In contrast, its direct mail effort last year to benefit victims of the earthquake in Haiti only raised about $40,000. The organization has no current plans for any further efforts in Haiti, says DeGraaf.
The Capuchin Order of the province of St Mary is devoted to ministering to the physical and spiritual needs of people around the world.
The order has a total of 195,455 last-24-month direct mail donors who’ve given at least $5, 53% of whom are women, according to its datacard.
They tend to be older and religious, notes DeGraaf.
Going forward, the order is looking to increase its online communication and, to a lesser degree, fundraising efforts while maintaining its direct mail presence, he says.
“The latest thing we’ve been talking about recently about online is to increase educating our donors about what’s going on around the province instead of consistently asking for a donation, “says DeGraaf.
Trinity Direct Marketing assisted the order in its email efforts.
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