The Stories of Direct Mail and Everything Else - James Callahan

It drives us crazy.

Direct mail.

Snail mail.

And the darned U.S.P.S. - they love, love, love it.

Why-oh-why in a world of algorithms, AI, virtual reality, and an ever-younger, connected, online world does snail mail still work?

Direct mail - unsolicited advertising, appeals, and asks sent to personalized addressees through the U.S.P.S., to existing or prospective customers or donors. Good, old-fashioned letters, sometimes with accompanying gimmicks of address labels or coins (as in, real money) to stop people from tossing the letters unopened.

e-Anything is cheaper, easier to produce, edit, and target, provides instant feedback, and we’re sure it should work.

And none of that matters.

Some think it’s a matter of age - as in O-L-D age, old-folks, people still fascinated with the binary privacy of Facebook in an age of open and unrestricted access to what everyone is having for lunch. They have time on their hands and they’re lonely waiting for their kids or grandkids to call them on landlines or counting down the minutes until it’s time for the senior-special of chopped steak and cottage cheese with cling peaches in heavy syrup.

And since most of most of our donors are older, we have to concede defeat to survive.

We still spend time and money and effort with e-Anything because that just has to be the future. And we’ll be ready - we promise we’ll be ready because we’re so good at predicting the future, right?!

For now, our donors like direct mail, so we need to like direct mail. Enjoy it. Get better at it.

But nobody knows why direct mail works, still works, or will keep working.

No one!

My best guess is that direct mail works because it is another opportunity to tell a story - a good story. So we attend story-telling workshops and learn the basics. But there is more to a good story than a beginning, middle, and end, its arch, or tension-resolution.

Stories create reality. And in direct mail we create reality for our donors.

For technical writers - archaeologists of field reports, exact details like longitude and latitude, and more concerned with arcane accuracy than emotional triggers - all this talk of stories creating realities is nonsense. It’s a perversion of the pure truth, turning facts into fake news.

And if even a scintilla of that rant makes us nervous, we’re in the wrong profession.

Stories, reports, anecdotes, quotes, updates, testimonies, news, or any convenient category of information we employ doesn’t just exist for its own sake, in its own right, uninterpreted - pure and objective. They are always for someone and that someone is our donor.

We use stories in direct mail - every time we use direct mail - because they make the donor part of another world where their money does something good, they are important and relevant, and they’re changing the world.

The Greeks called this mimesis - imitation or the act of expression or the presentation of the self. They contrasted mimesis with diegesis or narrative where the story is told or reported instead of shown or enacted.

Diegesis is what we can call reporting, data points, and second-hand telling. But mimesis is a drama we create, a sense of realism, it’s for someone, it’s first-person - it’s a drama that creates reality. Mimesis is story for our donors.

As old philosophy professors like to put it: Mimesis shows while diegesis just tells.

Take another look at your stories - are you showing or just telling?

If you want help with your direct mail and storytelling, reach out. Let's talk - donorcomm.com

#nonprofit #donorcentric #donor #development #advancement #fundraising