Award: Gold

Institution: University of California, Davis

Title of Entry: FY20 Unit-Specific Direct Mail and Email series

About this Entry: As the centralized Annual and Special Gift Program (ASGP) for UC Davis, we produce all annual giving solicitations for our main campus schools, colleges and other units, and for UC Davis Health academic units. To raise money for these 35-plus “unit partners,” our fall solicitation calendar focuses on unit-specific messages and those for our Annual and Parents Funds. This submission will outline the segmentation, marketing strategy and staff resource-based approach we used to increase the amount of money we brought in during our busy fall season in FY20 by 16.7 percent.
Last year the ASGP communications team added an in-house Digital Media Specialist who designs all our email solicitations. While we had an excellent working relationship with an outside vendor, being able to design and manage our email solicitations in house allowed us to expand our program to include Giving Tuesday in our solicitation calendar. It also enables us to be more nimble with strategy, variable data and design while managing a tight budget.
In FY20 we developed 70 pieces of direct mail and 98 emails between July and the end of December, comparable to the previous year. Using this strategic approach, we saw a 16.7 percent increase in funds raised during Q1 and Q2 between FY19 and FY20. We also saw a 7 percent increase in donors. Both of these numbers show exceptional growth in a program that has been growing in leaps and bounds over several years, due in large part to the strategy we use.