Under the headline, Is Direct Mail Really Headed for the Exit? Frogloop – a blog about non-profit online marketing – breathlessly reports on a startling new study just published by the ‘research’ firm, Borrell Associates. Chuck Pruitt reports.

Chuck Pruitt is Co-Managing Director of the A.B. Data Group. Visit www.abdata.com.

The folks at Borrell allege that money spent annually on direct mail will decline by 40% in the next five years. In grave tones, Borrell concludes: ‘Direct mail has begun spiraling into what we believe is a precipitous decline from which it will never fully recover.’

For as long as I have been involved in the direct response fundraising world – now over two decades – the prediction of the impending demise of direct mail has been a recurring theme.

Younger demographic
With the advent of the Internet, this has taken on a new dimension. For now, according to the ‘direct mail is dying’ chorus, online fundraising will step in and provide a way to raise all the money direct mail used to produce and capture a growing share of a younger demographic waiting to give.

What has always mystified me about some (but far from all) of the online marketing community is their insistence that for online fundraising to rise, direct mail fundraising must fall. And what angers me about ‘studies’ such as those offered by Borrell Associates – and given legitimacy by blogs like Frogloop – is they camouflage their underlying biases.

Borrell Associates is, according to their web site, ‘a media research, consulting and project firm specializing in Internet advertising’. It should come as no surprise that such a firm would be predicting that the demise of direct mail is occurring while, according to Borrell, ‘email advertising continues to surge and is now the number one online ad category’.

Quite frankly, the Borrell study has about as much credibility to me as the tobacco industry’s studies on the health effects of smoking in the 1960s and 70s.

This gets me to my second point. The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan was fond of saying, ‘You are entitled to your opinion. You are not entitled to your facts’. So let’s try to elevate the ‘direct mail is dying and will be replaced by email marketing’ debate by looking at a few salient facts.

Fact: The direct mail donor universe is alive and well and actually shows little signs of rapidly diminishing – at least in the next decade.

Evidence: In 1995, my firm, A.B. Data Group , joined with The Mellman Group to conduct a national survey of 800 progressive direct mail donors to analyse whether direct mail was endangered.

We found that progressive donors were aging rapidly – so rapidly they would soon disappear. Their average age was 65 years and actuarial analysis revealed that 40% would expire within ten years.

In 2007, we conducted a new survey – this time sampling 600 direct mail donors and 600 online donors. Our 2007 survey – 12 years after the first one – discovered that a new generation of contributors has been found via traditional direct mail fundraising.

Direct mail responsiveness, we learned, is a life cycle, not a generational phenomenon. Donors’ responsiveness to direct mail solicitations appears to be a function of their stage in life, rather than characteristics of a particular generation that has largely passed.