Customer Stories:

How UofM Boosted Donor Response with a Postcard-First Strategy

Who:

The University of Memphis advancement team is dedicated to creating personalized, meaningful experiences that resonate with donors and build lasting relationships. Angela Jarvis, Leadership Gift Manager, exemplifies this commitment through innovative donor engagement strategies.

The Challenge:

Angela and the UofM team recognized a significant challenge: many of their prospective donors hadn’t received personalized, one-on-one outreach before. As a result, donor engagement was limited, and initial outreach attempts often went unnoticed. UofM needed a warmer, more effective way to break through the noise and capture donor attention from the start.

Why evertrue:

UofM chose EverTrue’s integrated solutions—Pledgemine for impactful print outreach, ThankView for engaging video communications, and Signal to manage donor cadences effectively. This combination allowed Angela and her team to strategically coordinate personalized messages across multiple channels, significantly increasing the likelihood that their outreach would stand out and connect.

The results:

Angela tackled this issue head-on by creatively combining personalized print outreach via Pledgemine postcards with personalized digital follow-ups using ThankView. The campaign delivered outstanding results:
Increased Donor Engagement: The postcards immediately caught donors’ attention, leading to new gifts and enthusiastic responses.

Enhanced Personalization: One donor was so thrilled they requested an extra postcard to share with a friend—proof that personalized outreach was truly resonating.

Stronger Follow-ups: DXOs’ ThankView video follow-ups became significantly more impactful, as donors were already warmed up by the physical postcard.

The postcard that sparked stronger engagement and inspired donors to share.

The Full Story

Angela Jarvis consistently seeks innovative approaches to enhance donor relationships at the University of Memphis. Recognizing an opportunity to improve their initial outreach strategy to previously cold prospects, Angela creatively leveraged EverTrue’s direct mail solution Pledgemine to introduce a physical postcard element into the DXO introduction cadence.

Rather than immediately launching into digital communications, the team first sent personalized DXO postcards, effectively warming donors and preparing them for meaningful follow-up. Soon after, donors received a personalized ThankView video, seamlessly transitioning into the more traditional DXO outreach cadence.

The response to this thoughtful, multi-channel approach was overwhelmingly positive. Donors were genuinely delighted by the personalized attention, resulting in increased engagement, new gifts, and notably, a donor who enthusiastically requested an additional postcard for a friend.

Angela’s innovative use of cadence based outreach via direct mail and personalized video not only significantly enhanced donor experience but also demonstrated the powerful impact of integrated, personalized communication. The University of Memphis continues to lead the way, showing how creativity, strategic innovation, and donor-centric outreach can drive deeper, lasting donor relationships.