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The Direct Mail Addiction
Why Nonprofits Must Wean Themselves off Postal Mail as a Mass Medium
By Michael C. Gilbert, September 4th, 2008
I'll be teaching a short seminar in a couple weeks, entitled "Money on the Table", that describes the postcard method for transitioning stakeholders to email communication, based on ROI metrics. In the course of preparing for that workshop, I realized that I have been emphasizing the billions of dollars that civil society spends on printing and postage as my main concern, when in fact there is something far more important at stake.
The cost of paper may not ever include all the environmental externalities that it should, but at least the price has gone up enough to send the right signal. The postage rates of nonprofits and small mailers in the US should never have been sabotaged by large publishers, but at least it eventually sends the signal that oil is running out. Whatever the analysis, postal mail isn't cheap.
Fortunately, in the face of what can only be described as a sad decline of an old medium, there is a new medium at hand that can pick up much of the slack and which offers many new opportunities. In fits and starts, nonprofits are taking more and more advantage of computer mediated communication every year.
And yet, we are still addicted to the postal medium. We spend billions every year on a medium where a one-tenth of a percentage rise in a return rate is cause for breaking out the champagne and where acquisition of new donors costs so much more than the corresponding donations themselves that new organizations can rarely hope to pursue it at scale. In our hearts, we ourselves know that we're sick of all the appeals ourselves, and yet our answer to declining effectiveness is to send more of them.
What's going on? True, mail hasn't completely lost its effectiveness, nor have we been entirely priced out of the game. (Indeed, I think we'll eventually see a small, but exciting, renaissance of direct mail after it's finally abandoned for mass communication.) But given the trends and the available alternatives, why does our relationship to postal media still seem like an addictive one?
What's going on is this: Although we might like to imagine otherwise and as much as consultants such as myself have preached the virtues of shaping our media according to our missions, the communication procedures and management structures of the nonprofit sector have been utterly shaped by the media we've used.
When we make a transition to a new medium, two interesting things happen. At first, we take the practices from the media with which we're more familiar and we impose their structure on the new media. You recall, for example, how many early motion pictures resembled stage plays that happen to have been recorded on film? (That's more or less what many of us are doing right now to online media.) Later, we learn the strengths and costs of the new medium and adapt our communication and our management to them. It's this latter phenomenon that accounts for our current problem. Our organizational organs, if you will, have evolved to survive on direct mail.
We have had a hundred years to bury ourselves in cement. We have outsourced our fundraising programs to direct mail and telemarketing firms, thereby even further cementing into perpetuity the practices of the old media. If we haven't done that, then most probably we have done a fair amount of cementing all on our own, in-house. Maybe this is why so much innovation comes from medium-sized nonprofit organizations. They are large enough that they haven't had to outsource everything they're not ignoring, but they are small enough that they haven't got too much cement to chip off.
More specifically: We measure the wrong things - the outputs, not the outcomes; the processes, not the goals. The people in charge of so-called "communication" in our work are people who are selected and rewarded for producing fancy documents. We have changed the very meaning of communication from the real-world, two-way, interactive model, to a more "professional" definition that is artificial, one-way and broadcast in nature. Professional advancement and rewards are deeply tied to the old medium. We've developed painfully detailed abilities to predict the outcomes of our old media activities, raising the relative risks of change even more.
There are two consequences. First is our glacial movement into new media. By this I don't mean that we aren't pursuing new media, but in almost every case we are pursuing it as though it were something separate from our old media activities. We aren't aggressively moving our stakeholders from one medium to the other. More important is the second consequence. We are preserving a medium that, by its nature and by our practices, is impersonal and alienating, particularly when contrasted to the new media that our stakeholders are using every day. The dominant voice that our stakeholders hear from us is the one that we use in direct mail.
This voice lacks humor and irony. It is often pompous, cliched, and insincere. It almost never sounds like a real human being. It's overdesigned and of obvious expense. It is emotionally untouchable. Most critically, it provides for no listening whatsoever. It is utterly one-to-many in nature, with the single sad exception of our ability to receive funds. Every possible passion and every possible stakeholder asset is reduced down to that single form of reply.
Then, to make matters worse, this model of communication infects everything else we do. We write our email messages and web pages the same way. We discourage people from sending us email that isn't easy to answer, or we ignore it altogether. In effect, our addiction to direct mail has shaped the entire culture and character of much of our sector, making us sound like frightened corporate wannabes, less human than many enterprises that are far more rapacious and unkind than ours.
We have to end this. We have to do media-independent analyses of the relationships and communication flows that empower us. And we have to transition to new media, where we can rediscover what we all know is the heart of our work: the passion and humanity that brings us together in common cause.
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