What a grand time. FundRaising Success ventured into the tricky awards arena for the first time this year. And even though it was all new to us, it was a terrific experience from start to finish. We had a better-than-expected showing — 33 packages in all, submitted by 10 agencies and two organizations — a small but enthusiastic group of judges and a lot of fun.
On a gorgeous summer day, with the sun streaming in the windows of the conference room in our new offices here in Philadelphia, Sue Seiter of the National Constitution Center, Martha Buccino from Philabundance, Tracy Gill from Inside Direct Mail and Paul Bobnak from the Who’s Mailing What! Archive took a magnifying glass to the entries, compared notes and picked their winners.
They were privy to the organizations represented, of course, and to the numbers associated with the packages (quantity mailed, total income generated, cost to raise a dollar, average gift, total out-of-pocket costs, response rate and cost per thousand mailed), but not to the submitting agencies.
Entries were broken into four categories: Acquisition (more than 50,000 pieces mailed), Acquisition (fewer than 50,000), Renewal (more than 50,000) and Renewal (fewer than 50,000). Each judge rated each package within the categories on a scale of 1 to 5 (lowest to highest) in four areas: Results, Revenue, Copywriting and Creative. Winners in each category were the packages with the highest combined scores.
The Package of the Year was the one with the highest overall score, and Grand Control of the Year was chosen from among 16 entries nominated subjectively by Bobnak, manager of the Who’s Mailing What! Archive, a property of our parent company, North American Publishing. Nominations were rated in the same way as the other categories, in the areas of Copywriting, Creative and Overall Effectiveness. In order to be considered a Grand Control, a package has to have been in the mail for at least three years.
There was one surprise, however, in that we had a number of outstanding entries that our judges decided were best classified as special appeals, which wasn’t a category this year. We separated them out of the pack and are giving the top points-earners special honorary awards. But you can be sure that Special Appeals will be its own category next year.
It was educational, to say the least, to be able to hold so many outstanding efforts in our hands and actually see the numbers that resulted from them.
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