Donations are the whole point to a fundraiser letter. But do you know how much to ask for? If you ask too much you may lose the potential donor. If, on the other hand, you ask for too little, you may either end up losing money or end up with an amount that would not justify all that effort. What payment options should you present to your potential donor? For example, should your price points on your ORDER FORM be $1, $5, $10, $___ OTHER or $10, $50, $100, $___ OTHER ? Im faced with the same question myself every time I draft a fundraiser letter. Here are two important variables to consider: 1) What is the overall socioeconomic profile of your mailing list? If youve rented a list from a mail company, what is the average income data on the Data Card? If you ask for an average $50 donation from a group that makes $20K a year (or $10 an hour), you may lose them right on the spot. Perhaps its better to ask for a one-hours wage ($10) instead of five from such a group. If however youre mailing to an $100K a year income group, that translates to $50 an hour. Such folks might not mind donating one hours worth of wages for a worthy cause. 2) What is your per-piece cost and response rate? Here Im going to make 2 assumptions: a) Your response rate is 2%, which is the generally accepted rate in the industry. b) Your cost per envelope is 50 cents, without any Business Reply Mail (which would add another 40 cents per returned piece.) If, lets say, you are planning to mail 1,000 pieces, your cost would be $500. At 2% return rate, youll get back 20 donations. That means your average donation has to be $25 to break even. To make more, you either have to increase your response rate or the suggested average donation. Probably there is more you can do to increase the response rate than to decrease your basic per-letter cost and thats where the art of copywriting comes into play. You can try mailing out different versions of the same letter in small batches and see which one has a stronger pull. Then you can make that your control copy, as called in the industry, and roll it out to a larger mailing list. Good luck and let me know if I can help. ------------------------------------------------------------- (410 words, Copyright May 2006 Ugur Akinci) by Ugur Akinci, Ph.D.
Creative Copywriter and Technical Communicator
writer111@gmail.com
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