Mail Gives Generously

Like many of you, I believe The Salvation Army do an amazing job.

They’ve been transforming lives for over 150 years. But in order to attract new donors, they had to transform something else: their entire marketing approach.

For 20 years the charity relied on a six-week burst of activity running up to Christmas to recruit new donors. They used only print media: mail, door drops, press and inserts.

But the birth of digital media brought with it a new way of finding new donors. For the very first time, The Salvation Army could now target people online as well as on their doormats.

The task to create an integrated strategy fell to direct response agency, MC&C. They added broadcast and digital to the media mix. Broadcast, to increase the reach of the campaign, and digital media to give donors an additional response channel.

This new approach attracted an army of new donors. But not only was there a big increase in the number of donors, the responses from mail and door drops went up as well. This supports the earlier findings from our neuroscience research, where we learnt that TV primes people to engage when prompted by mail and vice versa.

As a result, The Salvation Army had the confidence to increase their investment in both mail and TV by about £1,000,000 the following Christmas.

And their Christmas wishes were answered. The number of new donors and net income both reached record levels. MC&C were full of festive cheer too. They were awarded a Silver IPA Effectiveness Award and a Gold DMA Award for Media Strategy.

With mail, charity does begin at home.

You can find out more about The Salvation Army and their results here

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