The effect of direct mail framing strategies and segmentation variables on university fundraising performance

Abstract

This paper provides guidelines to charitable marketers in general, and university fund-raising managers in particular, regarding the effects of direct mail framing strategies and direct mail segmentation variables on the performance of university fundraising efforts. Several direct mail framing strategies (factors) were empirically tested in a designed fractional factorial experiment that allowed the determination of not only the (main) effect of each factor, but also their interaction effects. These framing strategies included four factors: size of anchor (suggested donation), frame valence (whether a frame is expressed in positive vs. negative terms), and inclusion or not of two independent types of reference information. In addition, we studied the impact of the traditional direct marketing variables, recency, frequency, and monetary (RFM), as well as various demographic factors. Two performance measures were considered: 1) response rate, and 2) size of gift. Results indicated, among other things, that to a large extent the two measures are affected by different factors.