- Objectives
- The goal was to mimic the effort that the Development Office would go through with significant donors, which involves a personal phone call to collect a lot of information, but in a self-generated fashion rather than a time-consuming fashion. AlphaGraphics also wanted to teach donors about the Humane Society, such as additional features, training, adoption, foster families, pet bereavement and owners who need help paying for food.
- Results
- The objective was to gain more information, and 17% of the people communicated with responded with complete information. Unexpectedly, a campaign that cost the Humane Society $3,000 received a little over $4,000 in contributions. AlphaGraphics Seattle has done this campaign three additional times and each time yielded a 14-20% response rate, so the 17% response rate was certainly typical. And the Humane Society is very satisfied with the results! AlphaGraphics has also been able to determine that donors outside of a 35-mile radius are extremely unlikely to respond to the Personalized URL, but the incremental cost of sending to these donors is very low.
- Target Audience
- The target audience was new donors (non-significant donors) who have made a donation within the last 90 days. Having done this a total of four times, AlphaGraphics Seattle had a total of 1,600 records.
- Description
- AlphaGraphics Seattle, owned by Chuck Stempler in Seattle, WA, created a product for the Humane Society that had never existed in its mind and sold it to them. AlphaGraphics mimicked the effort that the client employed to collect information from significant donors by creating a multi-channel campaign that collected information from new donors in a self-generated fashion. They sent a letter from the CEO to new donors, inviting them to visit a Personalized URL to answer questions that would help the Humane Society learn more about donors and to help donors learn more about the Humane Society. 17% of the people communicated with responded with complete information, and, unexpectedly, the Humane Society received more contributions in excess of the campaign cost, even though it didn’t solicit donations. AlphaGraphics has run this campaign four times and yielded response rates between 14% and 20%. The Humane Society has been very pleased with the results, and AlphaGraphics has been able to leverage this success with other customers.
- AlphaGraphics Seattle sent a letter from the CEO to the donors inviting them to visit a Personalized URL site and respond to a series of question to help the Humane Society learn more about them and to help the donors learn more about the Humane Society. The Personalized URL site contained a series of 14 questions to capture the desired information. In order to arrive at these 14 questions, AlphaGraphics held a consultation session with the Humane Society to understand what information it wanted to capture. AlphaGraphics then refined those questions. With a welcome page and three pages of questions, the Humane Society was able to capture information about their customers, and since some of the questions asked about donor interests, the Humane Society was also able to provide customers with the information they wanted about the Humane Society. AlphaGraphics recommended to the client that the site should ask for another donation, however the Humane Society decided not to.
- Production Equipment
- Xerox iGen4
- Optimized PDF Composition
- Print Project Originator: Seattle Humane Society
- The Seattle Humane Society, founded in 1897, is a private, nonprofit animal welfare organization. We are proud to serve the people and animals of King County with a variety of programs including adoptions, veterinary services, dog training classes, a pet food bank, and humane education for children of all ages.
- Contact Person:
- Catherine Smith, Annual Giving and Donor Relations Manager
- Catherine@seattlehumane.org
- (425) 641-0080
- http://www.seattlehumane.org/
- Production Date
- Start date – May 1, 2009
- End date – June 30, 2009
- (Campaign is ongoing- most recently December 20th, 2010)
- Run Length
- 1500-2000
- Frequency
- AlphaGraphics Seattle runs this campaign 3 times a year, as the Humane Society tends to get the bulk of their donations at specific times during the year. AlphaGraphics sends the first letter and then a reminder postcard to non-responders two weeks later.
- Variable Data
- The names of the recipients and Personalized URL
- Data Processing
- Satori Software Bulk Mailer Business server for USPS address correction/sort, Microsoft Access and Microsoft SQL server for data prep/hosting.
- Business Logic
- Server-based XMPie PersonalEffect cross media publishing solution- uCreateXM, uCreate, uPlan tools used specifically for business logic programming.
- Composition Engine
- XMPie uProduce application manages web and print composition from single campaign data source (integrated with Adobe Indesign Server CS4 for print and Microsoft .NET for web composition).
- Finishing Equipment
- Cut, fold, insert, address, seal
- Job Ticketing
- EFI Pace MIS system and XMPie uProduce production file delivery integrated with Xerox
Freeflow DFE.