SOS Children’s Villages drops all direct mail for a year
Howard Lake | 25 January 2008 | News
SOS Children’s Villages stopped all direct mail activity during 2007 – cold, warm, email – and reports that its annual income is about £3.4 million, about three times what it was raising five years ago.
In an editorial item on the charity’s website, Andrew Cates said: “we all felt good about stopping cold Direct Mail. I do not believe any charity really feels comfortable with the cost levels this incurs.”
He is keen to demonstrate that there was no other direct marketing activity to cover for this. “Just to be clear” he writes: “we also didn’t telephone canvas, didn’t run TV adverts, didn’t spend money on internet adverts and adwords (Ok, we ran two small paid adverts on a charity site), and did not do “face to face” (chugger) fundraising nor send out email appeals either”.
Instead of spending time and money on direct mail, the charity has been focusing on its website as a fundraising tool. Cates describes it as “cheap and cheerful and… far less sophisticated than the old one it replaced”. However, when it went live “the donation and new commitment rate went up twenty times overnight (that’s really 20x not 20%). Now we get about 4000 unique visitors a day.”
Indeed, he says that on the website “most people take out regular donations” and “the average one-off donation on the website is around £110 or ten times industry figures for Direct Mail”.
While he acknowledges that direct mail is not going to disappear, and that he “wouldn’t rule out warm appeals in the future” he is convinced that the Internet is the best medium for the charity to focus on.
He concludes with four elements of advice for other charities:
“Keep any website(s) technically simple.
“Do not be tempted to use Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) companies. Concentrate on human visitors and let Search Engines do their job.
“Never underestimate the surfers’ time and intelligence. Internet donors read more, think more and give more on average.
“To get links to your website, ask your supporters. If you don’t ask you don’t get.”
www.soschildrensvillages.org.uk/charity-news/editorial.htm
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About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.