FINCA® Canada works to alleviate poverty through lasting microfinance and social enterprise solutions that help people — women in particular — build assets, create jobs, and raise their standard of living.
FINCA came to ST as a list service client looking for fresh ideas to improve their direct mail revenue. Our list service experts reviewed FINCA Canada’s existing program and determined that their list selection, as well as mailing frequency and volumes, could be optimized to ensure they had as much cost-effective access to their prospective donors as possible.
ST also proposed cooperating with other fundraisers and creating a new source of revenue by charging a rental fee for select charities to mail FINCA’s circulation from time to time (while going above and beyond to ensure privacy compliance). ST provided FINCA with a thorough analysis, including a snapshot of that market in Canada and expectations for revenue based on the success of other charities that use this strategy to help support their own urgent missions.
Lastly, ST proposed running attribution analytics to ensure that any online gifts prompted by acquisition mail were captured as direct mail revenue.
Thanks to our strategic approach, FINCA Canada adjusted their list selection and mailing plan to maintain their target acquisition volumes while using more traded lists and fewer rented lists (traded lists are one-eighth the upfront cost of most rented lists). By charging rental fees to select charities, FINCA was able to raise an additional 35% in net new revenue from those privacy compliant partnerships. And ST’s attribution analytics was also able to increase revenue attributable to FINCA Canada’s acquisition program by over 20%.
This combination meant that revenue attributable to FINCA’s direct mail acquisition increased by 55% while reducing list costs.
