As Communications Manager at Pacific Forest Trust (PFT), I managed the organization’s year-end fundraising campaign in 2017, 2018, and 2019. My responsibilities included:
- Developing a plan
- Developing a creative concept
- Outlining and writing content
- Sourcing vendors
- Designing and producing each element of the print campaign
- Designing, writing, and producing digital elements, including emails, donation pages, social media posts
For each element, I received final edits and approval from the President/Co-CEO and some input from other staff.
My second time through the process in 2018, I created a two-part print appeal and coordinated it with email and social media outreach. Here are the elements of the 2018 campaign (with placeholders for variable content in pink):
Initial mailing
This mass mailer was sent to prospects and small donors.
In-house initial appeal
This high-touch mailer, which was sent to hundreds of major donors and major donor prospects, was produced entirely in-house and featured hand-signed letters (and sometimes handwritten notes from the Co-CEO).
Reminder mailing
This mailer was sent to all those who received either of the initial mail pieces.
This is just one example of the segmented, personalized emails that were sent throughout the campaign, which ran from October to the end of the year. Different groups of donors were sent to donation pages with differing giving strings.
Social media posts
How did we do? Pretty well, given the context. The in-house mailing (limited to long-term loyal donors, but expanded from 2017) was highly effective as predicted, with a 45% return rate; the mailing to our lapsed donors and prospects (some very new) resulted in more new and online donations than in prior years; overall, the appeal raised significantly more than the prior year. In addition, because this was the first annual appeal campaign PFT had run using The Action Network, I created important infrastructure for the following year’s fundraising campaign.