Fellowship of Christian Athletes

Client: Fellowship of Christian Athletes

Fellowship of Christian Athletes (FCA) challenges coaches and athletes on the professional, college, high school, junior high and youth levels to use the powerful medium of athletics to impact the world for Jesus Christ. FCA is the largest Christian sports organization in America. Since 1954 FCA has served local communities through 400 field offices by equipping, empowering and encouraging people to make a difference for Christ.

Challenge - Reduce costs without jeopardizing donor-receipt program.

Every year FCA receives 200,000 donations from approximately 70,000 donors. These donors are mostly cash-giving individuals, businesses, and foundations. A small percentage of the donations are non-cash such as vehicles, collectables, stock and more.

A critical component of their fundraising plan is to mail a personalized, heartfelt thank you from the field office receiving the gift as well as the receipt from the national office that includes additional giving ideas. This communication was felt to be generally effective, but there was also concern that the inability to personalize messaging with the receipt to donors was limiting ongoing relationship building and funding results.

In addition, FCA was pursuing cost reductions to allow more funds to be spent on their mission and was faced with the daunting challenge collecting communication channel preferences, such as email or mail.

Solution - Create a print automation system that both personalizes FCA's donor receipts and allows donors choose if they want to receive receipts via mail or email.

A strategic plan was developed to obtain email addresses and the communication channel preference of donors, whether it be mail or email. Donors were asked to select one of three options for donation receipts:

* Emailed receipts with each donation

* Mailed receipts with each donation

* One annual summary mailed at the end of the year

Interchangeable direct mail and email templates were created that utilize the same personalized information: name, address, donation amount, and timely marketing messages. This was designed to provide FCA donors with receipts for donations in the manner of which they prefer, while giving the FCA flexibility to change the variable messages and components as needed to deliver timely, relevant messages to their fans.

Using email and print automation, each donor receives the communication of their choice. To insure that these effective communications are not lost when an email address is not valid, if an email hard bounces, a mailed version is automatically deployed with a personalized message asking the donor to update