How to triple your newsletter donations

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26 September 2012

How to triple your newsletter donations

Here's a happy story from Kivi's Nonprofit Communications Blog: How Overhauling Our Print Newsletter Helped Us Become More Donor Centric.

It's about how an organization called Workers Interfaith Network overhauled their newsletter -- and the dramatic improvements that happened.

Here are some of the changes they made:

Went from 8 pages to 4.
Changed from one color (printed on the office copier) to two colors.
Went from a self-sealed mailer to mailing it in an envelope.
Changed from a neutral, journalistic tone to a "direct mail" style of copy (using the word "you" a lot).
From long, complex articles to articles written for skimming.
Shifted from focusing on what WIN was doing to making it about what donors accomplish.

The results: Donations attributed to the newsletter have tripled.

You can do this too, and quite possibly see similar improvements.

Posted by Jeff Brooks on 26 September 2012 at 08:02 in Fundraising | Permalink

Technorati Tags: newsletters

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I'm guessing that the last bullet is the one that really turned the tide.

Posted by: Janet Levine | 26 September 2012 at 15:28

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The future of fundraising is not about social media, online video, or SEM. It's not about any technology, medium, or technique. It's about donors. If you need to raise funds from donors, you need to study them, respect them, and build everything you do around them. And the future? It's already here. More.

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Jeff Brooks, creative director at TrueSense Marketing, has been serving the nonprofit community for more than 20 years and blogging about it since 2005. He considers fundraising the most noble of pursuits and hopes you'll join him in that opinion. You can reach him at jeff.brooks [at] truesense [dot] com. More.

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