By Alan Sharpe, CFRE
Your donor newsletter doesn’t have to be something that you mail to people after they give you a donation. If your newsletter, business model and board of directors allow it, you can use your newsletter as a way to acquire donors. An excellent example is a magazine called Vim & Vigor. It’s 8.5′ x 11”, full color, and actually looks like a magazine. It’s perfectly bound and looks like it could be sitting on the shelf right next to Cosmopolitan at the cash out in a supermarket.
If you look at a recent issue, in the top right hand corner, the subhead says “Touching the Hearts and Health of Our Community, St. Joseph’s Healthcare Foundation.” This is a hospital in the city of London, Ontario. This is a magazine
that gets mailed to people in the community who are donors, and also to those who have shown interest in supporting the organization but have not given a gift yet. You can see a sample of this newsletter/magazine at https://tinyurl.com/ygx67e6. Click the link for Chapter 1.
How long do you leave a contact on a mailing list before removing them? For example, if someone’s been on the mailing list since the inception of the ministry but they’ve never had any contact with monetary support. That’s up to
you. You have to decide if you’re using your newsletter to minister to people.
Some organizations will send a newsletter to people as long as they ask to receive it. Other organizations might be more fiscally responsible and decide they’re not in the business of just giving away information. They need to be responsible with the money they have and so they’ll keep a person on for a year or so and then send them a letter asking “Do you wish to continue receiving our newsletter? Yes or No.” And if they either don’t hear from them or get an answer in the negative, then they take them off the list. But you can do that every year. You can mail a letter to your newsletter subscribers, asking them “Do you wish to continue receiving this newsletter?” And you can clean up your list that way.
Learn more
Read Lucrative Donor Newsletters. Learn how to create, write, design and distribute donor newsletters that recruit supporters, renew donors, retain members, inspire action, build community and raise funds. See Lucrative Donor Newsletters.
