Mailing Made Easy: Setting You Up For Success With Your Appeals

It's hard to believe it is already November! With the holidays, and Giving Tuesday around the corner, we know you are all busy getting your end-of-year appeals ready! We've been trying to help you get prepared to send your mailings. Last month, we did a Spotlight on Data Cleanliness to get your records cleaned up and ready to send an appeal. In November, we are helping provide some tips and tricks to set up your appeal process. 

Your year-end appeal is powerful and creates exposure for your organization by educating others on your past, current, and future efforts. Solicitations can heighten awareness of your mission, build relationships, and increase revenue. Our appeal mailings allow you to easily get a tailor-made message to a specific group of constituents. I wanted to gather a few pro tips and resources together for you to have at your fingertips while you are setting up your appeals! 

• If you aren't familiar with setting up an appeal mailing, check out our article and video with steps on how to set up and run an appeal mailing. Even if you don't plan on sending the mailing through Altru, you can use an appeal process to export an Excel file of recipients to simplify the work you would need to do in query! 
• We get a lot of questions about how to get one member per household in query, but with an appeal process you can send one letter per household without having to set up a specific query first! Appeals make sending a mailing to one letter per household a much simpler process! 
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• While it is possible to exclude constituents from an appeal mailing, creating multiple letters within the same appeal mailing can make sure that your patrons don't receive multiple letters. The appeal process allows you to create simple queries, and use them in a letter and Altru will send one letter per constituent based off of which letter they meet the criteria for first! Altru is smart enough to deduplicate your lists, as well as only send one letter per patron.
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• In addition, we also get asked alot about how to include only one email address or one phone number in a query output. The great thing about appeals, is that you don't have to include anything in the output of your query. The appeal process will output everything you need for your mailing including Addressee, Salutation, Contact Addressee, Address, Email Address, Phone, and you can add anything else you need within the process! 
   

I hope this post has given you some things to think about! If you’re interested in pumping up your Annual Appeal even more, be sure to check out some of our best practice resources below:

• eBook: End of Year Fundraising Toolkit
• Video: Ignite Your Annual Fund Campaign: Fail Proof Steps for Your Best Fundraising Campaign

 
Does anyone else have any tips and tricks to share about running the Appeal Process in Altru? Would love to hear your comments as well!