[Foundation-l] Fundraising ideas - bursting the bubble

[Anthony DiPierro]

On 6/14/06, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> Anthony DiPierro wrote:
> > Of course, if you have the person's address, I agree the point is
> > rather moot.  Even if it costs $1 to send a letter to someone donating
> > $250, that's only four tenths of one percent.    Email would be more
> > useful if there are donors making that size donation who don't want to
> > release their address.
> >
> > I suppose it might cost more than $1 to send a letter outside the
> > United States, but then again how many people living outside the
> > United States donate more than $250 to Wikimedia and then file a US
> > tax return where they itemize deductions?  Probably 0.
> >
> > Anthony
> How,
> I do not know how you arrive at that $1. It typically is substantially
> more. It is not only postage, you are sending something that is printed,
> there is the handling, there is a certain percentage that returns. You
> do want to maintain your database and register those RTS. You then have
> to consider how to follow up, do you want to find out what is wrong with
> the address. On average it costs over $5 to handle a RTS.

I don't know how you arrive at $5, but that's only for letters that
are returned to the sender.  What about the others, and what
percentage is generally returned to the sender?

And what if you just want to ignore those letters that are returned to
the sender?

Let's think about 1000 letters.  High quality business paper should be
less than $50.  Add $50 more for toner.  Envelopes are $10.  Labels
are $10.  A paper folder is $100 (should last a lot longer than 1000
letters, though).  That makes $220 to produce the letters.  Add in
$390 for postage, which assumes you don't have the volume to send at
the nonprofit rate.  Now let's assume you can't get volunteer labor,
which is probably untrue considering there are probably enough
Wikipedians just in the Tampa Bay area willing to help.  At 50 letters
an hour (slow) and $10/hour (expensive) that's $200.  Comes out to
$810, so at that volume with those assumptions we're still under
$1/letter with about 20% to spare.

If volume goes down price goes up, but take the volume under 500
letters or so and it's something Danny could do by himself in a couple
days.

Now I assume the foundation already has a decent laser printer.  Am I
wrong here?  And I was neglecting the cost of keeping the database,
because that's something that has to be done anyway.

> When you do
> not handle this well, you get yourself on the wrong side of
> organisations that monitor charities that ask for money. This can cost
> you your license in the first place but worse, it can give a
> organisation a bad name.
>
What license is going to be lost by making what types of mistakes?

> Once you decide to do professional marketing, you have to ensure that
> you maintain your database. This should mean that you commit to doing it
> well. The benefits can be huge and given our brand recognition it is
> likely to be huge. But please do this well or do not do it all.
> Thanks,
>      GerardM

I wasn't talking about professional marketing, I was talking about the
cost to send letters to people who donated at least $250.

If it really does cost $5/letter, you could always tell people to
include an extra $5 if they want a written confirmation letter.  But I
don't see where you're getting this figure.

Anthony