Christmas / Holiday Appeal Results

Here in Australia, Christmas time is a big charity time and this was an unusual Christmas with people worrying about what may happen with the economic downturn and giving.

In February, I am going to have a look at as many Christmas house mailing* results as I can and give some feedback on this blog. I will be looking for:

1. Any information that shows whether Christmas 2008 bucked the trends


2. Any tactics / ideas people implemented - that worked or didn't


3. Clues to what may happen next.

Why? Not just for academic interest. The information can hopefully join your other inputs and research to help with your budget planning and also there may be some specific tactics you can implement next time.

Please help. Email me your results, or if you are an agency then any results you can get hold of- but only if you can give me a context. I will credit those who want it but won't be using the information in a way that can identify which charity / agency it came from - unless you explicitly invite me to use yours as a named case study.

*By house mailing, I mean mailings to people who had donated to you previously. I don't mind how long ago provided similar selections were made in previous years.

Let me know, for Christmas mailings of 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008

1) How many (warm) people were mailed

2) How many sent a donation

3) The total income - just immediate donations, if you asked for regular or monthly gifts, please add that in comments

4) Comments (eg '2006 was really high because we had a capital appeal...', or '...in 2008 we tried an entire new approach by...' 'also 55 new monthly gifts @ av $32.22 per month'.)

Please, please send it in Excel format, with the five years (2004,2005,2006,2007,2008) down the side and the four fields (mailed, responded, income, across the top. This will make it easier for me to copy and paste and do my comparisons. You can have a look at a sample below or here.

Thanks a lot,

Sean