How to Help Your Lettershop Bungle Your Fundraising Campaign

By Alan Sharpe, CFRE
I know from reliable sources that the Mr. Murphy who coined Murphy’s Law (“If something can go wrong, it will”) worked as an account manager at a lettershop. After leaving his position of direct mail fundraising manager at a national charity. After all, in what other line of work, other than, say, launching a space shuttle, could you meddle with so many small details to sabotage your mailing? Murphy knew every way to mess up a direct mail appeal, but he had his favourites. Here they are.

1. Give the lettershop irrelevant data
Why supply only the donor number, campaign keycode, name, address, city, province and postal code (or state and zip) when you can instead add all sorts of extraneous data and personal information to each record? Why not tell the lettershop the shoe size of each donor? And the name of their pet? You’ll compromise donor confidentiality, increase the chances for mistakes, boost your volume of nixies and undeliverable mail, and compel your lettershop to order Prozac by the case.

2. Supply your date file with no field headings
The first record in your data file should look just like a donor record except it contains the name of each field instead of the data. But that’s so last Millenium. So add some colour to your lettershop’s vocabulary by submitting your data file with no field names. Let the folks in data figure out for themselves if the number in the field that looks like this <<$100.00>> is the donor’s last gift or the ask amount or the price of a Grande Latte No Whip at the Starbucks in Trafalgar Square.

3. Give your data file fields and your mail merge fields different names
If you have a field in your data file called <<first_name>> and you want that field to appear in your letter as variable data, call it <<name>> or <<F_nme>> or something more exotic.

4. Give your data file a no-name name
Just before you upload your data file to your lettershop, pretend that they were sincere when they said, “We treat you like you are our only customer.” Name your data file “mailing_list.csv.” Or just “list.csv.” They will know it is from you.

I know these methods work brilliantly at confusing lettershops because I have employed the first three to good effect. Only once each, mind you. There must be other ways to bungle a mailing. Let me know your favourites.

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