PrePlanning Annual Fund Appeal Structure

Carol Flint

We are brainstorming new ideas for our annual fund solicitations structure and are looking for best practices. Do you preplan and have a structure using RE appeals and packages versus some other tool like reviewing data in Excel. Would you be willing to share your method and how you code them in RE? Thanks for any advice you can offer.

Crystal Bruce

Discussion moved to Raiser's Edge Community. Thank you!

Karen Diener

I've worked at two organizations that pre-planned and segmented every mailing list. One was literally in thousands and had maybe 6 mailings throughout the year with many segments. The other one mailed four times a year to around 20 segments. The latter is probably the easiest to explain, and freshest in my mind!

It was a school, so the Annual Giving director decided how she would communicate with various segments of the population - ours were Alumni in a reunion year, Alumni not in a reunion year, current parents, graduate parents, and other. Each segment was then broken down by recency of giving - current, lapsed, sybunt, long lapsed, and never. A query was created for every single group - Alumni current, Alumni lapsed, etc. It was tedious to set up, but once it was done it was basically done for the year. And the next year, we only needed to tweak date ranges on queries.

Set up an appeal with all of the packages you need in it. I highly recommend a thoughtful naming structure! For instance, ARL was “Alumni Reunion Lapsed”, and ANRL was “Alumni non-Reunion Lapsed”. After that is done, we used QuickLetters in mail. There is a segmentation tab on it which basically takes everyone in the database (you don't even always need a “starting list” query for this) and places them into their segment based on the queries you have selected on that tab. The queries should be placed in the segmentation grid in order of the most important. This helps to put constituents into the correct segment, if they might meet the criteria for two different groups.

The QuickLetters function results in one mailing list that includes the package code on it, so if you want that printed on a reply card it is already there. You can also add the assigned appeal and package to the constituent's record and update the Appeal record and packages to indicate the number of solicitations. When gifts are added with that appeal and package, it is a couple of clicks of a button to get some great reporting from the appeal record to see how successful each package was. We found early on that some groups weren't responding as well as others, or gave low numbers of gifts but higher amounts. That helped us refine our strategy along the way

That's pretty lengthy but also a pretty quick overview. I would recommend you check out QuickLetters though!

Karen