Burning Dollars in the (Snail) Mailbox

This is the direct mail piece the Sierra Club sent me trying to get me to join and donate money.

This is a very expensive package that includes non-recyclable envelopes, coated stock, and even a seed package.

My guess is that this thing cost over $1.00 a unit to print and mail (including the cost of my name and address).

The response rate will be about 1 percent, so they are spending north of $100 in order to get a $15 membership.

How’s that work?

Simple: the first letter is a loss-leader, and they hope to recover their sunken costs with 4-6 “special appeals” a year touting one contrived (or perhaps real) crisis after another.

In year one, they will still be losing money, and only hope to “go positive” if I renew and donate over 2-3 years.

Only after I have given them about $180 will a single dollar go to anything more than printing, postage, paper, and the direct mail “creative” costs for all these direct mail letters.

And, of course, entire forests will fall in order to print this kind of direct mail.

Go figure.

If anyone at the Sierra Club wants to open their direct mail books, I would love to see them. I myself once mailed millions of letters like this for nonprofits, and so I am a black belt in the business even if my price points are no longer up to date.

In an age of Facebook and email, sending paper mail to geezers (at age 60, I qualify) is to invest in buggy whips even as over 100,000 Ford cars have rolled off the production line.

To be clear, I am a fan of the Sierra Club and worked with them in roadless forest protection. They are a great group.

But, as Abe Lincoln once said, “as the world is new so must we think anew.”

It’s time to kick these kinds of gift-and-guilt direct mail campaigns to the curb. The Sierra Club can do better — and should.

So what's the rationale for these massive direct mail campaigns?

In truth, it's not often examined, and in the age of the Internet it needs to be.

Sure the direct mail consultants and vendors love them -- they make their money from printing, list sales, creative costs, and graphics. They tell not-too-experienced nonprofit executives "this is how you do it," and that the end result will be "more power on the Hill".

But it's mostly bunk akin to asking a horse carriage maker how to move goods across the country,

Don’t be surprised if they don’t suggest a train!

The Sierra Club’s TRUE power does not come from membership numbers; it averages less than a thousand members in most Congressional districts (look at their 500,000 magazine circulation numbers for true membership counts).

The Club’s true power mostly comes from the fact that it is seen as occupying moral high ground that reflects a core American value — environmental protection. That position, however, is in jeopardy as the Club takes millions of dollars from the oil, gas, and chemical industries.

For the record, the mechanics of direct mail are the same for the “humane” groups as well.

HSUS, PETA, the RSPCA, and the ASPCA are direct mail mills that spend pennies on the dollar doing very little of what their donors imagine. 

At least the Sierra Club is in the fight on roadless forest conservation, Arctic protection, and a dozen other issues that their membership imagines that they are helping fund, however inefficiently.

The dogs and cats being killed down at the local pound? 

The national humane organizations are doing next to nothing to help the local shelters.  The core business of the humane organization is direct mail -- and virtually nothing else.