Do you appeal to donors who are in a pledge, outside of the pledge reminder and follow up reminders?

Staci Waterman

We recently hired a DD who has a great deal of marketing experience but no development experience. We will send out our pledge reminders in two weeks but she wants to send an appeal today and then in two weeks send our pledge reminder appeal. In my 18 years, I have only sent our pledged donors one appeal per year. My question is, does this make sense? Setting aside the fact that we will send another appeal in 2 weeks, do you ask donors who are already in a pledge to give throughout the year?

Tom Klimchak

In general, we remove the following people from our annual giving solicitations:

• Anyone with an open pledge (pledge status = Active or Pledge Balance > 0)
• Anyone with an active recurring giving gift type
• Anyone with an open Proposal/Opportunity
• Anyone with a solicit code of No Solicit

There are a few exceptions.  If the piece we're sending is more of an information piece with a "soft ask" then we might ignore a few of those rules.  But if it's an outright solicitation we will definitely remove anyone who is already paying off a pledge.  


There are lots of reasons for it, but we've found that it looks like we don't know what we're doing when we send a solicitation to someone and then a pledge payment reminder a week or two later.  It makes the solicitation seem very... impersonal... and it implies we don't know the person is already a donor/supporter....


 

Wendy DeCicco

We follow the same procedure as Tom Klimchak.

Brittany Czekaj

We too follow a similar process as Tom mentioned. 


Personally, if I received a solicitation so close to my pledge / appeal, I would be a little turned off.

Elizabeth Johnson

We have a slightly different approach. If someone is solicitable we send all our direct mail regardless if someone gave a gift or not this year. Our appeals are informative and it would be punitive to a donor not to receive our Head of School's message. What varies is the messaging. We have around 26 segments per appeal and off the top, we have two thanks only groups (there is a paperless segment for those that prefer that approach.) We do three direct mail appeals a year. The final one has a soft ask for those that gave before January 15 for that fiscal year. Our appeal just dropped and two weeks out we will send out our pledge reminders off. 

Michelle Geange

We complicate things further at our place...    we also have telefundraising in the mix, both corporate and community.  We do not mail to corporate as we call them instead.  For community, we call, and we also mail 2-3 times a year, depending on their preferences.  We eliminate all the usual's (DNC, don't solicit, etc), plus we eliminate those already allocated to a call.  Our regular givers, we only mail to them once a year at annual appeal.