We also scaled back heavily in 2020, but a lot of the feedback we received was that our donors missed hearing from us. We haven't really scoped out what 2021 will look like for us yet, but I suspect we'll aim for a middle ground between our typical tactic and our 2020 tactic.
We ran a direct mail campaign in fall 2020 at about the usual size. It was among the highest performing DM campaigns we've run.
Like all of our campaigns, of course, we did email follow up on the physical piece (rather than physical ones), so I guess it's kind of a hybrid campaign. It's also possible people reacted more to the emails than the physical piece, but we did get a lot of the gifts back via physical mail too.
We are in the same boat as Kate! We've been doing email follow-up on mailed pieces which has worked well, and we've gotten a good amount of gifts in the mail. We outsourced renewal mailings for 2021 that we were previously doing in-house to a co-op since we are not in the offices regularly and have limited staff. We also planned to reduce the size of some of our mailed campaigns in 2021 for budgetary reasons, so in those cases we will mail to the segments that have historically had the highest response rate to the mailings and email everyone else.
We were cautious with our first few mailings closer to the start of the pandemic, but our direct mail results were the highest they've ever been. Best conversion rates and highest donation average in the 14 years of full data we have in Tessitura. Our acquisition mailing in the fall to recent subscribers and ticket purchasers generated a 6% conversion rate with an average gift of $124. The ROI on the campaign is absolutely crazy for an acquisition mailing, and all of our renewal mailings are performing at almost double results compared to the previous year.My recommendation from our experience and Canadian studies that have happened is don't pull back unless you absolutely have to. This is the time when people are willing to support Arts the most!
Thank you everyone for sharing your insights and approaches, I really appreciate it. So glad to hear of your successes too, especially at this time. It seems the riskier option in the circumstances may be not to direct mail, given the response rates you've experienced, so finding a less risky way to do this is best. It sounds like a hybrid approach strikes a fair balance, and outsourcing may help. I note things in Australia might be a little different, and will loop all of this together with that of local organisations to help with our decision making on this one. Thank you and good luck for this year!