Don’t Mail Your Newsletter to Non-Donors

Let me save you some time and money: don’t mail your printed newsletter to non-donors.

The return on that investment is not worth it. 

I have tested this five or six times over the course of my career.  Each time, the nonprofit has lost money sending their newsletter to non-donors (even though the very same newsletter makes money from their current donors).

Does a non-donor or two give a gift?  Sure.  But it’s along the lines of ‘we mailed the newsletter to 850 non-donors and 3 of them gave a gift.  Put another way, it’s spending $1,200 to mail them and raising $170.  Even if you were to make an argument about lifetime value of those 3 new donors, it doesn’t pencil out.

If you’re interested, test it yourself.  Break your mailing list into two segments, one for current donors and one for non-donors.  Determine the Cost Per Piece, measure the response for each segment, and then look at the results for each segment.  You’ll quickly see how few (if any) non-donors reply to newsletters – even if your donors are responding in droves.

Here’s the lesson I’ve learned over the years: in the context of direct response fundraising, when you are trying to turn a non-donor into a donor, sharing successes from the past (which is what a newsletter focuses on) does not work well.  What works better at acquiring new donors is sharing something compelling that needs to happen soon and appealing to the donor to help by making a gift.

So if you’re currently mailing your newsletter to non-donors, I’d stop it.  Save the money.  Instead, send them an appeal letter.  It will cost less and acquire you more news donors than the newsletter currently is.