The Connecticut Project (TCP) is a two-year-old social change organization focused on improving the lives of low-income residents in Connecticut. With a small staff, they bring communities and resources together, developing solutions, and advocating for government policies that benefit low-income and asset-limited Connecticut residents.

TCP aims to create an environment where everyone has a fair shot at success, regardless of background or circumstance. Areas of focus for the organization include early childhood education and economic opportunity.     

Nonprofit Tech Shop (NTS), a strategy-focused, full-service agency based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and part of Digital Reach Online Solutions, specializes in helping nonprofits transform their marketing and constituent engagement using best-in-class technology, particularly the popular customer relationship management (CRM) platform HubSpot.

NTS chose Postalytics as the ideal solution to drive TCP results. They established TCP as a sub-account in their Postalytics Agency Edition account to take advantage of Postalytics’ built-in HubSpot integration, and its ability to produce and send direct mail campaigns in days instead of the weeks that the traditional direct mail process takes.

Direct mail is especially well suited for communicating with important portions of TCP’s audience that may not have ready access to digital messaging channels. TCP can easily target mail to the geographic areas they serve, and get information to the people who need it. Besides direct mail, Digital Reach helps TCP prepare and manage online display advertising and social media campaigns.

“Digital advertising is great, but it doesn’t always connect with certain segments of the population that we really need to reach. With direct mail, we could get pretty targeted around where people live and around the different strategic audiences that we knew we wanted to mobilize.”

Meghan Holden, Director of Marketing and Communication, The Connecticut Project

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Overcoming Traditional Direct Mail Barriers

As a relatively new organization, TCP had no established direct mail marketing strategy before engaging with Nonprofit Tech Shop. Without an automated direct mail solution like Postalytics, TCP would have faced the same traditional direct mail challenges faced by any non-profit organization, including:

• Long lead times (4-6 weeks per campaign)
• Complex workflows & vendor management
• Minimum order sizes

The small staff at TCP knew that mounting direct mail projects in the traditional manner would be prohibitive. They wouldn’t have the time or resources to administer the kind of constituent communications they knew were critical for success. And, stand-alone direct mail activities wouldn’t be integrated with the rest of their operation.

They needed a better approach.

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The Challenge

Nonprofit organizations and political action groups have complex data models and TCP was no different. Ideally, all this data should be consolidated, cross-referenced, and stored centrally so ongoing communications with the constituents can be initiated, tracked, and evaluated with automated and efficient software tools.

TCP needs to use the data they collect to drive effective communications, using all the channels they have at its disposal.

For the individuals they add to their database, TCP wanted to manage and nurture them as they progressed from the awareness stage to volunteers and supporters. Direct mail would be a part of this nurturing strategy.

TCP wanted all these activities centralized through HubSpot, providing them with a valuable method of executing and evaluating their efforts.

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The Solution

Postal mail is uniquely positioned to help TCP achieve the communication aspects of its objectives. It is a perfect medium for reaching a subsection of TCP’s low-income target audience. Receiving and reading postal mail requires no financial investment in computer hardware, internet access, or data plans. It is delivered directly to recipient homes at no charge to them. However, executing such direct mail activities without help from an automated direct mail platform would have been a more daunting process. 

With help from NTS, TCP implemented the HubSpot CRM and marketing automation platform, with tight integration to Postalytics. NTS leveraged the capabilities of their Postalytics Agency Edition to design and integrate automated direct mail with HubSpot assets and workflows they developed for TCP. The organizations work together to design direct mail pieces that spread the word about the work of the nonprofit among the people the organization works with and for. Postalytics leveraged TCP’s nonprofit mailing permit, which was incorporated into their Postalytics account, providing significant discounts and lowering TCP’s overall mailing costs. 

TCP’s outreach strategy also includes canvassers who go door-to-door to let families and individuals know about housing, early childhood education, voting, and other issues. TCP integrates its mail campaigns with its canvassing.  Postalytics-generated postcards not only introduce the TCP brand but also increase the effectiveness of the in-person connection efforts by incorporating specific messaging for the residents of different geographies around Connecticut. 

“When we know we’re going to be setting up community chapters or having our canvassers in the field, we’re using direct mail to help prime our audiences and get them to know who we are a little bit, what we’re talking about,” explains Ms. Holden. “Those mailpieces all tend to be geographically detailed. If there is something specific to the town of New Britain, for example, that we want to talk about, we’ll include that in the mail piece.”

TCP uses postcards featuring unique, personalized QR codes to enable immediate calls to action or to provide access to more information. A recent campaign by The Connecticut Project Action Fund focused on a proposed change in kindergarten enrollment ages. Residents used the call-to-action QR code on the postcard to contact their state representatives, urging them to modify the planned change. Supporters and lawmakers also received postcards with QR codes, which brought them to a downloadable The Connecticut Project Action Fund report, describing the impact of the legislation on families.

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The Results

Since implementing their automated direct mail campaigns, TCP has reported positive results. Canvassers are successful in their mission more often. The organization receives helpful feedback from direct mail recipients, and they are more accurate in their HubSpot CRM database. Attendance at community meetings continues to grow. People are noticing the mailed meeting announcements and are interested in – and responsive to – the content TCP includes in their direct mail pieces.

As they build out more campaigns, TCP has incorporated more segmentation strategies, including images of landmarks familiar to targeted localities, and creating Spanish and English versions of the communications.

TCP now sends thousands of mailpieces per month — a strong sign of their satisfaction with the results generated by their Postalytics-powered automated direct mail.

It’s easy to overlook classic offline tactics in the digital world, but just because they’re tracked differently than digital ads doesn’t make them any less useful. Direct mail has been a game-changer for our campaigns. It creates an entourage effect and can be hyper-targeted and personalized, often more so than digital channels.“

Mandy Thompson – CEO, Digital Reach Online Solutions & Nonprofit Tech Shop

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Next Steps

As a relatively new entity, TCP is gradually ramping up its direct mail outreach programs. On the roadmap for the near future is the expansion to more of the 169 Connecticut cities and towns that the nonprofit organization could serve. As they expand, they recognize a need for supporting documents in more languages, so translation for multilingual versions of their postcard mailings will also be a project for them to tackle.

The organization also plans to produce more educational materials. They want to help folks learn their rights, be notified about the results on issues that matter to them, and navigate the challenges they face. They will undoubtedly leverage the power of direct mail to inform their audience about obtaining educational materials and facilitate an easy way to access them.

As TCP acquires more data in its HubSpot CRM database, it will use the data to personalize the content of its mail pieces or to trigger new mail based on individual actions, dates, ages, and locations.

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Conclusion

Organizations of all kinds have choices in how they communicate with their audiences. Combining communication channels is usually the best approach.

Sometimes, however, the benefits of direct mail stand out among the other ways to send messages. For The Connecticut Project, postal mail has many advantages that make it a perfect choice to help them achieve their goals. And, working with an agency like Nonprofit Tech Shop, which fully understands marketing & fundraising through all channels, TCP can continue to ensure that its communications using digital channels complement its direct mail communications and vice-versa. 

Automated direct mail and the Postalytics platform allow organizations like TCP to sidestep most of the complexities and expenses associated with traditional direct mail marketing processes. And, with integration to HubSpot and other CRM systems, reaching an audience via postal mail is just as easy as using email or other digital channels.