Culling your physical mailing lists--ideas and input wanted!

KC Bridges

Hi eTap community!


I wanted to get some input from the community on how you cull your physical mailing lists so that the size of the list doesn't grow out of control! Do you do it by location? Date of the last activity of someone's involvement? Randomized (and if so, how do you achieve randomization in eTapestry?) Or some other criteria entirely?


I also wanted to see if anyone culls based on whether someone has an email or not. My thinking is that if you cull someone from the physical mailing list but who remains on the email list, you are not actually losing a person from your comms cycle, but you are saving money by not sending them physical mail. But then that person does not get the full round of comms, ie, the mailings and the emails, so maybe in general the list becomes less likely to donate and it would be better to prefer to keep people in the physical mailing list if they also have an email. Does anyone have input or ideas on this issue? Am I overthinking it haha?


Thanks in advance!


--KC

Gabriele Wessendorf

A general mailing list that I compile consists of several queries each one different.  So far the only accounts I cull are actually from the database itself.  They would be accounts that have no history and the account itself I know has not been coded as an account we want to keep.  These accounts just happened to be dead weight from ages ago.  I can see it by the date created.  So I delete them from the database making room for new donors with history or accounts we need to keep in touch with.


So the list created for example has one query that extracts board members, one that extracts special donors we have coded as such and I may have other groups of accounts coded in a certain way or categorized that I also select.  Then there are the active donors that give and maybe depending on circumstances I may add in those donors that gave in-kind gifts or not.  All of these queries are joined together to create an extraction we use for a mailing.  The final step before creating the mailing list would be to remove those donors that have specifically said they want to be taken off any mailing list.  If there is giving history, I don’t want to delete them from the database and some people even though they are participants in some way don’t want to get mail.  These donors that don’t want mail are coded as such and then removed from the list at the very end.


As an on-going side project I am always going through the database looking for duplicate accounts and merging or joining accounts together as primary and members of a household (husband and wife).  My mailing list only selects head of household accounts in the final query.  I categorize this function as routine maintenance and not as culling because this is always going on here.  We have data coming in from other sources.


Decide on the total number of donors and work backwards by eliminating.  Instead of selecting accounts that gave the last 3 years, select those that gave the last 2 years.  Or eliminate a query all together, maybe a group of prospects.  If they did give recently, they would may be included in a different query.


I know eTapestry has emailing functionality but we keep physical mailings and emailing separate.  Constant Contact does its job removing those that don’t want email and we handled this function outside the database since it is handled by different staff members.


I hope this helps.

Sarah Nutbrown

Hi KC,


My first question would be why do you want to cull your direct mail list? I'm assuming it's a cost issue. Sean Triner from Pareto Fundraising wrote a really interesting blog post recently. It's a bit more about how you maximise value from mid-level donors, but I think it's probably relevant for this question too. http://www.seantriner.com/2016/05/pareto-principle-and-direct-mail.html


I would also look at how people respond to your fundraising asks. If you've already physically mailed someone five times and they've never responded, I would take them off the physical mailing list. If someone responds by direct mail but you have their email address, I would send them both. A direct mail, with supporting emails. I would never remove someone who responds to DM from a list just because I have their email address - they may not respond to email at all. Equally, if you have sent someone a mix of DM and email and they only respond to email, you could remove them from the DM, but I would be a bit careful about this as well unless you know for certain that the physical mailing had no effect whatsoever on their donation behaviour. I suppose what I'm saying in a nutshell is that I'd try to look at my donors' behaviour to determine how best to contact them.


I agree with all of Gabriele's points on segmentation with queries. If you're analysing this, you may find that a particular segment isn't responsive and you can remove them from the physical mailing list.


Good luck - let us know how you get on!


Sarah