Your Annual Holiday Campaign
Your annual holiday campaign may be the most significant fundraising opportunity you have each year.
- The campaign needs to be timely; if it's too late, your donors have likely given elsewhere.
- Poor list selection, based on no analysis and just gut feeling, may be more costly than beneficial.
- Time to do the job properly ... there are no shortcuts for a job well done.
Step One: Set up the Campaign you will use in @EASE. The reason for this is that you will want to create a Campaign Response File to ensure your results match your expectations.
Step 2: Create two Qualities in the Lookup Tables. One for the initial pull and one for the final selection.
Step Three: Choose your Q-Xpress Exclusion Categories and document them in the Profile Notes for the Annual Campaign you created.
- Exclude by Status ... Not For Fundraising, Deceased
- Exclude by Quality ... Do Not Solicit, Bad Address, others
- Exclude by Campaign
Campaign Year To may vary based on your current fiscal year. This removes donors who have already given in the last 3 months.
Step Four:
Begin your donor selection using the various criteria available in the system.
You will find that donors may be select using Q-Xpress Selections:
- Donor Selection: Donor by Donation Amount by Year. This selection has no duplicates and is based on accumulated giving by fiscal year and amount range. You can add Include donations that have not yet been updated to master to ensure a full selection of donors.
If you are running a Targeted Campaign based on a Breakout Code of Fund use:
Receipting Breakout Code Payment Method Date.
This is a powerful selection if you are looking for donors who have supported specific areas in the past. It is selected through individual receipt transaction records.
You can specify a dollar range and use Accumulated Dollars. A further option is to include the Shared Summary Records and the overall Dollar Value.
Below is a sample of the data selected.
Applying the Quality value once Exclusions are completed:
We have a simple selection as shown above.
Please Note: Total records = 58 and Unique records = 58. Where these two numbers are not identical, you can use the Q-Xpress Menu option to Remove Duplicates. If the Q-Xpress View window is open be sure the Refresh button to update the View window.
Once you have tailored your selection using the Excludes from above you can use the Select All button on the View menu and Assign the Quality you created. In this case it would be 000ANDO42025Final.
A final selection to ensure we have significant other names on our appeal will ready us for the export.
The selection above by Quality now includes the check box 'Enable Suppress Mail Option,' which will ensure that significant other donors will be on the same mailout.
You are now ready to Export the Data:
Using the Q-Xpress Export menu option to update the Last Date Solicited and create a Campaign Response file.
This export creates a MailMerge.txt file, which is all that is needed for letters or email output.
Note the criteria on the Q-Xpress Export:
- The Last Solicitation Date, including the Significant Other record, will be updated.
- The Campaign Response file records solicitations by postal code and tracks responses as donations are received. This can be useful for a Reminder Mailing.
We can run the Donation Analysis Report on the initial listing to be mailed.
This is only a partial report, but it shows by the Summary postal code how many donors are being solicited. As donations arrive, this report updates with percentages indicating where donor selection has been most effective.
Once donations begin arriving, the Donation Analysis Report changes to include the number of donors by postal code, a count of how the donations came by amount range and percentages.
The report can be used to determine a Reminder Mailing so that the most effective areas are included.
Historic Analysis
This Donation Analysis Report can be run on historic campaigns to see how they fared. No postal code range is required, and use the Summary format.