DM Diagnosis : Thank You

There, that wasn’t so hard, now was it?

I’m beginning to think I’ve been placed on the equivalent of a No Fly List in one nonprofit’s direct-marketing database. Here’s what happened …

After much check writing on New Year’s Eve in 2007, I made my annual flurry of contributions, dropping dozens of BREs, CREs and the occasional stamped reply envelope into the drive-up mailbox at my neighborhood post office. One of the envelopes had come from the No Fly nonprofit’s acquisition control, and I used it to send my $250 check.

On Jan. 10, 2008, the funds cleared from my account, so I know the organization received the donation, even though it hadn’t yet been acknowledged. On March 26, 2008, the same acquisition control package I had responded to initially arrived. It was the only communication the nonprofit sent me in all of 2008. I thought surely there must have been a mishap, because how could any nonprofit knowingly let a $250 gift go unacknowledged?

So this past New Year’s Eve, I tried again. I used the reply envelope from the March 2008 acquisition control, wrote out another $250 check and popped it into the mail along with dozens of other donations. This year the check was cashed on Jan. 7, though my gift has yet to be acknowledged, and — once more, with feeling — the acquisition control arrived again on Feb. 6.

I’m used to not being thanked for my donations, sadly. But this is just downright weird. If I’m not on some kind of No Fly List, then this is surely the Direct-Mail Twilight Zone.

With another organization, I’m up to three years running with annual $50 gifts that are never acknowledged. Two years ago I checked my preferred two gifts to be sent free with my donation, but they were never fulfilled. So, this year I didn’t bother.

Unlike the No Fly nonprofit, however, this organization does send me more than one piece of mail annually. In the first two months of 2009 alone, I received a blizzard of resolicitations — five special appeals, two annual renewals and a magazine. Wow. The folks at this organization definitely know where I live, even if they don’t know or care that I just sent $50.

These two nonprofits are in good (?) company, I regret to report. More than 23 percent of the organizations I made contributions to in this last round of giving failed to acknowledge my gift after more than eight weeks. None of them are obscure, little-known groups; they are well-known, major mailers.

• MORE ON
• DIRECT MAIL