Public media organizations have an advantage over other nonprofits when it comes to fundraising channels. TV and radio stations can broadcast or stream their mission-supporting messages directly into homes, cars, and headphones. And joint licensees—those that operate television and radio stations—have twice that advantage. 

However, regardless of how many channels are available or how public media content is consumed, what consistently drives annual membership revenue is direct mail campaigns. 

While joint licensees have a richer channel advantage, if most donors are giving through direct mail campaigns with an institutional message, does a station need to know which of their services resonate for any direct mail respondent? And in a digital age with constituents supporting public media content—especially news—streamed online or played on-demand, is the question still relevant? 

Historically, fundraisers say “yes.”  As such, joint licensee direct mail reply devices include check boxes giving the donor the opportunity to indicate which service they’d like to support—like this: 

That’s great but…then what?   

Are boxes getting checked? If they are, is the data being captured? What is the station doing with the data? How much data is there? Does it help drive future solicitation segmenting and messaging?   

Typically, a checked box does not determine where revenue is attributed which means the choice doesn’t impact how a station reports on its audited revenues. So, in the end, what is the true value of capturing this data?  

Fundraising CRMs keep track of who was engaged through which channel and when, and for joint licensees, each campaign is typically pre-assigned the “institutional” or “both” support designation— in other words, “where it’s needed most.” 

Recently, this practice became a lively topic of conversation at CDP.  We realized we had the data, but we didn’t have the analytics to answer these questions. So, we went in search of them.

CDP’s Member Service Bureau (MSB) is entrusted by more than 40 public media organizations, and nearly half of those stations are joint licensees. Every day, our innovative team ensures all our MSB partner stations have the tools they need to be effective local fundraisers while our marketing and operations teams manage membership fundraising activities at scale, including direct mail campaigns. 

Annually, CDP creates and sends more than 14.5 million pieces of direct mail—acquisition, renewals, additional gift and lapsed—and helps ensure donations are efficiently processed and posted to the CRM while capturing specific data from every reply device.   

CDP’s defaults “institutional” as the support designation for joint licensee direct mail campaigns, with copy more robustly showcasing the full offering of each station. Campaign reply devices include the checkboxes shared above, and our lockbox vendor records every checked box. Note that this data capture comes at a cost when using a lockbox vendor—every keystroke has an impact on expenses. 

The captured data is uploaded to the CRM and stored with the donation allowing us to know both the support designation assigned to the campaign as well as whether and what a donor checked on their reply device.  

We wanted to analyze a large data set, so we looked at all joint licensee direct mail gifts processed across all institutional coded campaigns over the past 27 months. 

We wanted a lot of data…and we had it. 

So, how many donors checked a box?  

In our data set, nearly 78% of donors to institutional campaigns did not check a box on their reply device. 22% is a relatively low engagement rate. 

Of those who did check a box, 50% chose “institutional,” the same support designation value already assigned to the campaign. 

Checked boxes on reply devices that match the campaign’s default support designation are not providing much value in terms of answering any donor motivation question. And for this larger cohort, 50% of the checked boxes represented unnecessary lockbox vendor fees. 

Let’s dig a little further and look at institutional campaigns by the type of solicitation. 

Renewals

Well, this is starting with a very loud pop!  

That’s because an eye-popping 99.5% of renewing donors to institutional campaigns do not check a box on their reply device. 

Could the boxes be going unchecked because donors are trusting the station to apply their philanthropic contributions appropriately? Regardless, if there’s no historic engagement, why have the check boxes on a reply device at all?  Could removing them improve response rates?  Could that allow the donor to consider other options on the form, like choosing a higher donation amount? 

Acquisition and Additional Gift

When compared to renewals, acquisition and additional solicitations are showing up quite differently—although not much different from each other.  

Approximately 40% of donors to both types of solicitations checked a box, and 50% of the checked boxes were “institutional.”   

For acquisition solicitations, the checked boxes that differ from the campaign default value could be valuable to understanding why a donor gives to the organization for the first time. 

For additional gifts, the checked boxes that differ from the campaign default value could help uncover why a donor would give more than one direct mail gift in a less than 12-month period. 

Either way, as the analysis reveals, when 50% of the checked boxes match the campaign’s support designation, your organization is paying for 100% of the boxes checked and keyed.  There should be value found in that expense.  

So, what did we learn through this analysis? Here are a few takeaways: 

• Consider removing the support designation check boxes from renewal reply devices.  In fact, when the dust settles on our new technology ecosystem, CDP will look at moving in this direction. 

• For non-renewal institutional direct mail campaigns, consider indicating the campaign’s default support designation on the reply device, and only ask the donor to check a box if they have another preference. Checked boxes could become less of an afterthought and more of a “donor passion designation.”  Plus, it will keep lockbox keystroke expenses low. 

If you have any questions about data, talk to us.