Services

When you read your direct-mail:

Do you recognize your organization?

Are you hearing your voice, or a consultant’s?

Does your donor understand what makes your mission and programs unique?

At Davidson & Co., we don’t have a bag of tricks, work from a standard menu of strategies, or default to red-meat tactics. Instead, we create programs fully customized to your organization.

We work with a select group of highly-valued clients, which allows us time to become “embedded” in your organization. Our process begins at the executive level, as we seek to understand your unique mission, programs, and strategic positioning. We want to know where the organization has been and where it’s going next – in one year, five years, or a decade.

We also work closely not only with your development staff but also with your program staff, be they economists or investigative reporters or field staff or academics. This is how we capture the nuances of your work, its animating principles, and day-to-day details.

The result is a series of direct-mail packages that could only come from your organization, one that reflects your organizational identity and captures your voice.

Still, the letter is only the beginning. Davidson & Co. is a full-service direct-mail firm. We help you define your goals, design strategies that will meet those goals, create a corresponding communications calendar, manage package design, list selection, and production. When the results come in, we provide a full analysis of those results and make recommendations for next steps.

Ultimately, your direct-mail program becomes an integrated component of your fundraising plan, enabling you to develop long-term relationships with donors that will carry your organization securely into the future.

Full-Service Programs

Davidson & Co. works with our full-service clients on the whole of their direct-mail program.

We help you define your goals, we design a strategy to meet those goals, and we create a corresponding communications calendar. We craft compelling letters which describe your programs and solutions and invite donors to invest or re-invest in you, all in your own voice. We recommend package design, choose the best lists for you, use our proprietary cost-savings measures to produce your packages and make sure they mail on time, analyze the results, and make recommendations for next steps.

Your direct-mail program will become an integrated component of your fundraising plan, developing long-term relationships that will carry your organization to the next level.

Mentoring

Davidson & Co. is keenly aware that there are too few people who know enough to master the countless intricacies of direct-mail fundraising. We also know many organizations don’t have the budget for a full-time direct-mail consultant.

Our mentoring programs are designed to help your staff become better acquainted with direct-mail and its finer points. We guide staff through the process of defining goals and developing a strategy, recommend a mail schedule, edit your copy, help you select lists, review package designs, analyze your results, and make recommendations for next steps.

Along the way, we explain our recommendations so your staff can, eventually, move forward without us. Are we training our future competitors? Perhaps. (There’s a long tradition of this in the direct-mail world!) But we know one thing to be true: the more good mail is out there; the more donors will respond to good mail.

Training

Davidson & Co. offers day-long trainings for your staff. We cover everything from direct-mail jargon to programmatic analysis. We prefer to keep classes small so your staff is free to ask specific questions and we can answer them in full.

Trainings are for organizations managing their direct-mail program in-house but also for those already working with outside consultants. In the first case, we want to help you stand on your own two feet. In the latter case, we want you to be an informed consumer. In all cases, as with all we do, Davidson & Co.’s trainings are customized to your specific needs.