The Friday Fundraising Quiz

A couple of weeks ago, @AlineReed started up a Friday Fundraising Quiz on her blog, Bluefrog Creative, and following some twitter chats, it’s become a rotating event. And this week, when the music stopped, I was left holding the quizmaster’s hat. So here goes.

We put a lot of emphasis on testing. One of the great benefits of direct marketing as a technique is that it’s both controllable and quantifiable - you can design and control a random test in a donor mailing or acquisition campaign and get measurable results back. It means that you can constantly refine and improve the quality of the work.

There’s really only a handful of things you can test in direct marketing:
- the audience (who you send it to)
- the proposition (what your offer is - how much you ask for, and for what)
- the format (shape, size and contents of the package)
- the creative (the copy and design)
- the timing (when you send it)

Right, that’s the background. Now here’s two unaddressed door drops I’ve received over the last year or so from The Children’s Medical and Research Foundation, the fundraising arm of Our Lady’s Children’s Hospital, Crumlin.

First of all, there’s this one:

(For the non-paddies reading, Gay Byrne is kinda like a combination of Terry Wogan and Michael Parkinson, only bigger and more famous)

That’s the cover - it’s an A5 leaflet. And here’s the rest of it… (it folds out to a 6 page A5, with a perforated envelope at the end)

And here’s the second one:

It’s a C5 window envelope, with ‘Dear Householder’ showing through the window…

And inside there’s a 2 page letter, an A4 donation form, an A5 leaflet and a reply envelope…

So the question is, which of these two door drops do you think produced the best response and why? And for a bonus point, how much of a difference in response would you expect between the two packs?

(Just to point out, CMRF aren’t one of Ask Direct’s clients, so I’ll be basing my answer on the results of comparable tests from campaigns we have worked on, rather than actual results).

Post your answer as a comment or tweet it @damianobroin.

Answers after 4pm today…