Donation letters

[LtStick]

How many Fire Companies send out donation letters yearly? If so do you make up your own or do you use a company such as Municipal Marketing and roughly what percentage of the ones you send out do you get back? Any incite you can provide would be apreciated.
We do our own donation letters and send them out.

[Jhaney22]

We utilize Municipal Marketing. I believe the return is around 60% but don't quote me on it. Whatever it is, there was a much higher response with MM than handmade letters.

[SRVFD2]

We send out our own, and get a little better than a 60% return. I think our members would feel like we were wasting their money if we hired someone else to do it!

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God is our Fire Chief;
Jesus is our Incident Commander.

[LtStick]

Thanks Jhaney22 and SRVFD2 for replying to my post. I was hoping to get a better response but, two is better than none.
We have talked to Municipal Marketing but, decided it was easier and cheaper to print our own up. We have the mailing list on disk and all we have to do is get labels and print them out.
Good Luck

[firefighter8015]

We recently just completed our annual appeal. We printed up our own letters, and passed them out ourselves (we are a small fire protection district around 500 homes and a large industrial park). Many times when we were passing them out residents would ask if all the money was going to the fire department or if a marketing company was getting a cut.

[LtStick]

firefighter8015 we had the same thoughts although we mail ours out due to the fact that we send out close to 2,000 donation letters and they go to four different post offices. Some of us also thought that the letters from the marketing companies may be interpreted as junk mail and pitched. We also decided that why should we give a marketing company a percentage of our donations when we can do our own for less and cut them out of the deal. This only makes sence to us.

[pfpchief]

we used to use munucaple marketing but we have done it ourselves for last 15 years. we also send out a 2nd reminder . we have the letters printed up professionally and stuff them ourselves . we have the most up to date data base of addresses in our town so we use them