Canadian Wildlife Fed Goes Green, Cuts Back on Direct Mail

The Canadian Wildlife Federation has begun cutting its direct mail fundraising volume by nearly 10% and increasing its targeting efforts, as part of an overall efforts become more environmentally responsible and cut costs.

The Ottawa-based organization, which drops about 200,000 direct mail appeals per month is reworking its premium and paper-use practices, says Rick Bates, the organization’s Regina, Sask.-based executive director.

It’s also begun encouraging contributors to make small monthly donations to the organization in lieu of bombarding them with monthly pitches.

“We’re weighing our direct mail quantity so that we avoid over-mailing by better targeting, which helps the environment by being more efficient with paper resources,” says Bates. “We know direct mail is effective but we offer our donors monthly giving options to preclude sending them 12 monthly mail packages which reduces resource use.”

Implementing this plan has the potential to give the organization a predictable stream of revenue as well as saving on mailing costs, he says.

More precise targeting is also underway.

“Like most mailers we take the RFM (recency frequency monetary value) approach,” he says, noting the CWF is beginning to add more selects such as respondents interested in particular issues (like loss of habitat) that particular donors have responded to in the past.

“Those would not show up via RFM,” he says.

Another major area the CWF is working on is modifying its use of premiums.

“We have a calendar, Christmas cards and wrapping paper and notepads,” he says. “But we’ve introduced some non-premium items like surveys which are less-resource-intensive and we’re looking into things like reducing the size of a premium and things like that,”

One approach is reducing the number of sheets in a notepad premium, a move Bates hopes will not affect response too much.

The CWF also solicits donations through its website http://www.cwf-fcf.org/ , an area which Bates says is small but growing.

The average CWF mail-based donors are women at least 50 years of age who tend to be leaders in their communities, says Bates.

“But the online donors are not as young as you might think,” he remarks. “They’re not 18.”

So far, CWF isn’t doing much with social media or mobile though Bates acknowledges CWF is developing a mobile app.

In addition to reworking its direct mail, the CWF has taken other steps to be more environmentally responsible.

For example, the organization has added 12 solar panels to the 24 its offices currently have and has reduced staff travel.

“We now have meetings in Skype,” says Bates.

Bates could not quantify how much these efforts will reduce the CWF’s carbon footprint.

“Anything that you can do is helpful,” he says.

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