What’s your process like for creating direct mail fundraising? Does your process help or hinder your organization?
To (perhaps torturously) borrow from the famous first line from Anna Karenina,
“All organizations that have a successful process for creating direct mail are alike; each organization that has an unsuccessful process for creating direct mail is unsuccessful in its own way.”
After helping a couple organizations improve their process recently, I thought I’d share the process that I’ve seen be the most successful in case it’s helpful to you.
- Creative Meeting: this is where the goals of the project are confirmed, the offer and audience decided, the creative approach is determined, and which story to tell is decided. The more details thought through at this stage, the better.
- Creative Brief: all the details for the project are written down in the Creative Brief. The Brief then becomes the roadmap for the project.
- Copywriting: the copywriter follows the Creative Brief and writes the copy. The resulting “copy package” includes everything needed to design the package, including suggested art direction as well as copy for things like the outer envelope and reply card.
- Copy editing: the copy package is circulated, to as small a group as possible, for edits and feedback. One designated person makes the edits and resolves conflicting opinions. Additional rounds of edits are done only when necessary.
- Copy approval: the Project Lead gives final approval on the copy and it is sent to be designed.
- Design: the Designer designs the package, following the Creative Brief and the copy package.
- Design Review: the package is circulated for edits and feedback. Again, one designated person decides which edits will be made. The Designer makes the changes.
- Design approval: the Project Lead gives final approval on the design.
Then you’re off to the races…
Of course, there are all sorts of tweaks and changes that can be made. For instance, smaller organizations tend to have one person doing most or all of the steps, and the steps sometimes get combined. Larger organizations tend to have teams of specialists doing just one or two steps each.
But the most successful processes tend to follow the same principles:
- Think it all the way through at the beginning
- Follow the plan
- Keep approval teams small
- Empower one person (ideally someone who has experience with direct response fundraising) to make all final decisions, because decisions made by committees result in fundraising that doesn’t work well.
I hope this helps with your process. If you have any advice to share, or improvements to this process, mention them in a comment.
In my next post, I’ll show you the power of having a Creative Brief, and include a sample brief you can download.
