Monday, February 2, 2009

Multicultural enhancements for nonprofits

When searching for ways to beef up your bottom line in list rental revenue, consider multicultural Target Enhancement: enhancing your list to provide ethnic and religious segments such as Catholic, Hispanic, Spanish Speaking and African-American. Strictly speaking from the non-profit angle, these niche markets files have enabled us to attract many new mailers, expanding our coverage in the marketplace. What’s the attraction? Being that ethnic and religious mailers are not direct competitors, the normal restrictions that apply to mainstream nonprofit mailers don't apply to them. They are allowed to access some great selections such as One Month Recency and 'High Dollar Donors', making it easier to test the files.

When it comes to Catholic enhancements, most Catholic mailers will jump at the chance to test Catholic overlayed lists. And, believe it or not, will test Hispanic enhanced names as well. In fact, there's such a strong affinity between Hispanics and Catholics that the bulk of usage on Hispanic enhancements typically comes from Catholic mailers.

However, the hottest and strongest growing selection has been Spanish Speaking. Finally! For 20 years the conventional thinking was that the Spanish speaking market was the next big thing. Through trial and error, early DM pioneers discovered that the Spanish speaking market was much different then their English speaking counterparts. Spanish promotions were taken at their word; soft offers would receive 10% upfront response and crash & burn in the back-end – meaning, if potential customers received a "3 free issues, no obligation to act" piece, they took the 3 issues and were never heard from again. Yet, perseverance has paid off. Being the fastest growing ethnic group in the country, more data has become available over the years and as a result, the quality of databases used in enhancements has improved immensely. As the quality improved, so did the response - this being especially true for Spanish speaking and African-American overlays. Mailers who could never make enhanced files work before are doing so now.

To get your list enhanced, ideal candidates should be able to provide at least 750,000 names within a 36 month time-frame. The greater the input, the more revenue can organization can earn. Ask your list manager about costs incurred – or (warning: plug), at RMI, it’s a service offered free of charge. How/why you may ask? Enhancements are so successful that we make our money on the back-end. You reap the rewards.

Labels: list rental, multicultural, nonprofit

posted by Rich Leary at 1:10 PM   0 comments

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