My pet peeve is getting those pre-printed address labels with “Mr.” in front of my name. If you don’t know me well enough or can’t be bothered to do the research to find out that mine is a woman’s name, don’t ask me for money.

BTW, I found your blog through a link from Michele Martin’s Bamboo Project Blog (http://michelemartin.typepad.com/thebambooprojectblog).

If you’re sending five solicitations, that’s one thing. If you’re sending four more, the same year, to people who responded to the first: That’s too many, in my opinion. Only my opinion, to be sure.

I work with a small nonprofit humane society/animal shelter in my rural Tennessee county. Upon the advice of a consultant, we began sending direct mail appeals last year. We had many discussions about how many to send and whether it would be annoying to recipients, etc. All we could do was try it. We sent out five mailings in the period between June 06 and Dec. 07. All but one of them netted us about $4000. The expenses to send the mailing ranged between 20 and 25% of the total response.

I don’t like the fact that 20 to 25% of each donation is “wasted” on the marketing effort. But the fact remains that the mailings have been lucrative for us, and it seems to work. When you consider the huge amount of time it takes to plan and execute fundraising events, these results are an enormous benefit for a small organization. It would be much cheaper to do this electronically, but in this community, our email mailing list is much shorter than our US mail list. People are not as universally connected as the internet world may think. And to grow our mailing list, which is the only way to spread the support, we use addresses on checks, adoption forms, and whatever else we get.

One more thing: the “money givers clubs” are a way towards a more stable income that we can count on for budgeting and deciding whether we can afford to hire a person for a few more hours a week or whether we can get the roof fixed this year.

The national groups that get the most press have staff members hired to create mailings. I’m not saying these groups are not doing great things, but please remember that the small local groups that actually make a difference in communities are not usually supported by those national groups. We are not a “chapter” of a national group. We have benefited from a few grants and some educational opportunities from national groups, but the majority of our work is done with money we raise ourselves. There are no grants available to pay for the water bill or to pay our minimum wage staff to clean the kennels. Granting organizations want to see a healthy, sustainable operation, and often require matching funds. Where do those matching funds come from? The people who support us directly.

If you want the most “bang for your bucks,” consider supporting a local group that is trying to make a difference for good in your own community.