"Mike has a point....how else will the NRA be able to support sending all that junk mail unless we send them money....."
This is the biggest complaint I see by people. They just don't understand why NRA spends SO MUCH MONEY sending out tons of mailings. I mean, after all, NRA must spend 150 percent of its annual budget on mailings, right?
BULL.
There's a VERY simple concept involved in direct mail marketing, whether it's grocery store coupons, requests for donations, or selling services -- the costs of the mailing are paid for by the people who respond to it!
Direct mail is, for the returns, the single most successful fundraising venture there is. Nothing else comes close to its effectiveness. Do you REALLY think that any organization would be so stupid as to pursue a fundraising methodology that in fact drained money from the organization? That's kind of a silly theory, isn't it?
Standard industry "success" figures are normally between .5 percent and 1.5 percent of a mailing. That's right, for 100,000 mailers, a highly successful campaign can be had if as few as 500 people respond to it.
For a directed purpose organization like NRA, response rates often are FAR higher than that. The higher the response rate, the higher the return on what is really a rather trivial investment.
These are some figures that I punched together for a post in TFL about a decade ago. Obviously the base figures have changed given increasing costs, but the concept remains that if direct mail wasn't successful, it wouldn't be done! This particular response was to someone who wanted to bankrupt HCI through its own mailings, and my response was designed to show why it would be very difficult to do:
The bottom line is this, though.
If may SEEM as if NRA is spending an inordinate amount of money sending you letters asking for money.
The simple truth is that you're making assumptions not based on facts, you're getting emotionally wrapped up in it, and you're failing to understand exactly why NRA keeps sending out letters requesting donations.
Hopefully now, though, you'll have a bit better of an understanding and you'll realize that these mailings are NOT the huge money pit you think them to be.
"Having spent a number of years in the direct marketing field for a major financial institution, I can tell you right off the bat that the number of people you'd have to get in on such a scheme would be pretty astronomical.
Depending on what it is, how complex it is, etc., the average "break even" point for solicitation is anywhere from .5 percent to 1.5 percent (the more complex and expensive, the higher the break even point).
I would suspect that for targeted "cause" groups like this it would be on the low end of the scale, or even lower, because people who are on the mailing list show a propensity to give funds.
Running a few simple & dirty scenarios through my head (without pulling out my direct marketing course materials), here's a quick & dirty breakdown...
Cost of mailing (including postage, manufacturing, & incidental costs associated with processing) - $0.20 (may be way high)
Cost to produce 150,000 for potential donors - $30,000
Figuring a return of 2.5% (which I think is relistic for a cause based group mailing from an established list) -- 3,750 responses.
Amount those 3,750 would have to donate, each, to make the mailing breakeven -- $8
Logical average amount those 3,750 would be expected to give would be as high as $25 per -- $93,750.
Total profit for this mailing -- $63,750.
Number of additional, non-contributing letters that would have to be mailed to negate all of the profit for the mailing -- 318,750.
That's just a quick & dirty figure.
And, you've got to figure that these groups purge their lists VERY frequently to weed out those who don't respond to their mailings.
Thus, you would have to have a HUGE database of people who would be willing to sign up every couple of months, but they would have to have different names AND mailing addresses. The comparator software used by organizations that do mass mailings for groups such as these is VERY sophisticated, and is very good at sniffing out schemes just like this.
There's a good reason why groups such as NRA and HCI continue to send out LOTS and LOTS of direct mail solicitations.
They're VERY effective at raising large amounts of funds.
And, finally, remember. What we do to them, they can do to us in return."
