HOUGHTON COLLEGE
PROBLEM | Commencing each fall, Houghton College holds a direct-mail fundraising campaign to draw support from alumni, family, and friends of the college. In the past, the campaign typically consisted of thousands of mail-merged appeal letters sent out four times during the calendar year. With an average response rate of 1%, each year the campaign struggled to hit its financial goals.
SOLUTION | GSB|Digital worked with Houghton College to introduce their fundraising to print 2.0. Our technologies allowed them to take several key steps that dramatically increased their response rate.
1. Personalizing the Message
Beginning with an October mailer introducing the school’s new president, GSB|Digital helped Houghton College utilize their database to more effectively establish a 1:1 message and to better evaluate the segmentation of existing data.
“For the first time this year, we are ahead of last year in fundraising. I just wanted to let you guys know, because there is no way in the world I would have gotten to this point without you!”
- Julie Palmer | Director, The Houghton Fund
Additionally, Houghton College required that a Customer Response Envelope (CRE) be provided so that donors had a way to mail back a check/donation. Thanks to a unique self-mailer technology from GPA, a sheet was utilized that, when folded with 400lbs of pressure, formed a self-mailer and became a CRE!
The piece went out to almost 16,000 people.
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The response rate was 20% higher than Houghton’s usual rate.
2. Integrating Variable Data & Imagery
For the December mailing, alumni, friends, and family of Houghton College received a heavily personalized fundraising appeal. Using text and image data from the school’s database, GSB|Digital incorporated over 100 different images, shifting salutations and text amongst 12,000 recipients. The images and text shifted unit to unit based on constituency, year of graduation, former donation history, and whether one or both spouses were Houghton graduates.
The response rate jumped 80% over Houghton’s consistent number of individual donors for their December appeal.
3. Developing Cross-Media Activity Through PURLs
In place of their traditional January fund-raising letter, Houghton sent 8,963 alumni, friends, and family a 6"x9" postcard with a Variable Data-supported message directing them to a Personalized URL (PURL). Thanks to the newly-available 13"x19" sheetsize, GSB|Digital was also able to print the cards four-up instead of the standard two, reducing the cost and allowing Houghton to maintain environmental responsibility.
4.7% of the recipients—almost five times Houghton’s normal response rate—clicked through their PURLs, and half of those made donations.
RESULTS | GSB|Digital’s work for Houghton College yielded dramatic results:
20 to 250% increase in traditional response rate on each piece.
Significantly increased giving from lapsed and first-time donors.
Surpassed previous year’s fundraising within three months.
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