By Alan Sharpe, CFRE
You have a costly problem with returned mail. All non-profit organizations do. You mail perfectly nice letters to donors who have supported your cause for years, and then, one day, without so much as a by-your-leave their mail comes back to you marked RETURN TO SENDER.
Perhaps they moved and left no forwarding address. Perhaps they married and changed their name without consulting you. You don’t know. And what you don’t know will hurt you. The problem with returned mail, or, as it’s known in the trade, Undeliverable-As-Addressed mail, is not that it costs you money in wasted materials and postage. Your problem is not that you lose $1.75 with every bounced envelope ($1 for the letter & postage and $0.75 for the return postage). The problem with returned mail is that each piece represents a loss of around $481 to your organization. That’s the cost of losing a typical donor.
Do the math for yourself the next time you run a direct mail fundraising campaign. Count the number of pieces of mail that come back to you as undeliverable. Then look up each donor in your database. Discover how often they gave and how much they gave. Use the add button on your calculator. Breathe deeply.
A charity I know did just that. They analyzed 151 pieces of returned mail from a recent campaign (one that generated over 600 undeliverable mail pieces). Here’s what they discovered:
- Total number of gifts received from these donors in their combined lifetimes: 1,100
- Total gross revenue received from these donors in their combined lifetimes: $72,709.10
- Shortest amount of time a donor had been with them: 2 months
- Longest amount of time a donor had been with them: 14 years
- Smallest number of lifetime gifts received from a donor: 1
- Largest number of lifetime gifts received from a donor: 67
- Smallest gift received from a donor: $5
- Largest gift received from a donor: $4,000
- Average lifetime value of each donor lost: $481.51
No wonder Elvis Presley was so heartbroken when his letter came back RETURN TO SENDER.
If you hate the thought of throwing away $481 every time you throw away a piece of returned mail, drop me a line. I want to discover what others in the non-profit sector are doing to reduce their volume of returned mail. Tell me what your organization does to keep a clean database, eliminate duplicates, keep addresses accurate, stay in touch with donors who move, and locate those that leave no forwarding address. I’ll include your suggestions in my upcoming handbook on the topic of lowering costs and increasing revenue by reducing your volume of returned mail. And I’ll send you a complimentary copy. By email, of course.
You might be interested in these…
 Direct Mail Fundraising ROI Calculator Automatically calculate the 10 most vital formulas for measuring the return on investment (ROI) of your direct mail, with this special calculator.
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 Mail SuperiorityLearn the proven, step-by-step process for raising funds and friends cost effectively, year after year. |
 Handbook Number 27Raise More Money and Retain More Donors by Reducing Your Returned Mail. Tips, tactics and industry best practices for reducing your volume of “undeliverable” and “bad addresses”. |
