Check and Double Check for Mailing Errors

I remember getting an annual appeal letter from my university. It contained a pretty serious error, getting my wife's name incorrect. I must say when I pointed it out to them I got a phone call from the President of the University - one of the largest in North America. Pretty impressive as I had not given them a dime to that point.

Recently, I was sending out appeal letters to alumni that I did not ever know. I took the time to look up each and every one of them in our database and managed to catch a few errors along the way. My assistant was helping me stuff envelopes and found a few more. These errors thankfully never made it out the door. Even better, a colleague was helping us fold and stuff envelopes and he came across a few letters for people he knew better and we were able to add a more personal note to them. It's a good thing our office sees this as a team effort worthy of a good deal of effort.

Consider this - taking a minute or two to double check a record could yield a donation - even if it were only $10, for two minutes of work that is like getting paid $300 per hour to do the check! Now what if you don't do it and you make a serious error, offending someone? It could be a lifetime of lost gifts, hundreds or thousands of dollars or even more.

I'm not suggesting that a major university can check every record when they send out tens of thousands of letters. But if your group is small - our database contains less than 5 thousand mailables - it pays to be careful and take your time. It is tempting to get volunteer help to fold and stuff, or even to contract out the job, but you might pay a high price for free labor!

I took a full day to sign and prepare some 250 letters for mailing along with my assisstant's help but along the way we caught errors, managed to add personal notes to some people, and I familiarized myself with virtually all of their records and their history with our organization. It was time very well spent when I get ready to follow up on the appeal on a more personal level.