Merkle To Help Feeding America Say Thank You
Anyone still struggling to get out the wedding gift thank-you notes will appreciate the task facing Feeding America, a hunger-relief organization that focuses on Americans: The organization generates nearly 500,000 responses to its solicitations every year, and wants to efficiently acknowledge every one of them.
Enter Merkle Inc.’s response management group, which recently won Feeding America’s response processing business.
Going with Merkle wasn’t exactly a stretch: The company has been providing creative support and donor data strategy for Feeding America for seven years, reaching back to the time when Feeding America was known as America’s Second Harvest.
The new work Merkle will be doing includes caging (processing and depositing donations), data capture, acknowledgement fulfillment and call centers services.
Not all donors are alike, and Merkle’s new contract includes a program that recognizes donors with a fair amount of granularity. Merkle has identified around 20 triggers that prompt anything from unique copy in their gift receipt, a handwritten note, or even a phone call from a Feeding America staff member.
Beyond that, Merkle is able to identify and recognize individuals who have achieved certain milestones within Feeding America, such as making donations for five consecutive years or doubling the amount of their donation from their previous gift.
With the award of the back-end business, Merkle now runs a beginning-to-end donor relationships on behalf of Feeding America. Merkle currently sends out approximately 22 appeals, along with four newsletters and 10 acquisition campaigns on Feeding America’s behalf. These solicitations generate the bulk of the half-million donations.
Merkle makes checks and reply documents available to Feeding America’s staff within 48 hours of receipt through a proprietary image viewer application, giving the organization’s executives an in-depth look at donor activity in mid-campaign.
Merkle also handles the analytics behind Feeding America’s outreach programs. For instance, Merkle has worked with Feeding America to time its communications for maximum revenue, says Merkle account supervisor Chris Madson. Factors include whether respondents are single- or dual-channel donors, their mail preferences, the current campaign offer, and overall campaign objectives.
“For some donors this means they’re being mailed once every couple of weeks, while for others it could be every couple of months,” says Madson.
