Case Studies

Islamic Charity Mailing

About the Client

Our client, a large well-established Islamic charity, work tirelessly to provide worldwide aid to change the lives of vulnerable communities across the globe. With a dedicated team of enthusiastic, visionary staff and volunteers, the charity is committed to taking a leading role in the delivery of aid and assistance in all areas of emergency relief. Direct mail is a core tool in the charities extensive fundraising activities and generates a huge volume of donations to allow the charity to continue its fantastic work.

Details of the Work

The charity has a number of campaigns that it sends out throughout the calendar year. They have seasonal campaigns such as Qurbani and Ramadan alongside a number of UK and international based projects, such as the extensive work they do in Africa helping orphans and refugees. The charity chooses to use Direct Mail, as research shows that 79% of all UK donations come from direct mail campaigns and 72% of donors stated they wish to continue to receive mail in the post to honour their support. With such powerful statistics, the charity places a huge emphasis on their use of direct mail however rising costs in paper and postage are a continual challenge for the charity and can have a huge impact on the ROI a fundraising mail campaign can generate. Central Mailing Services worked closely with the charity to provide a fully managed VAT free solution, allowing the charity to make the best possible cost saving on both print and reduced VAT postage.

The Solution from CMS

Central Mailing Services work extensively within the charity sector and have a huge amount of experience in providing fully managed campaign solutions for charities. A key area of this is postage price due to the fact that in many cases, this can represent the biggest expenditure for a charity. CMS worked very closely with the Islamic charity to cleanse the supplied data, removing records that had moved without providing a forwarding address and also removing any deceased records and duplicates. We also updated any mover records where we were able to flag the data so that we could change a recipient’s old address to their new address, and therefore continue to mail to an established donor. Once this work had been completed, we then suppressed any return records that we had recorded for the client from past campaigns. We provide this service on an ongoing basis for a large number of clients, as it works extremely well in conjunction with data cleansing, giving the end client the cleanest, most accurate database in which to mail to. The clean, updated data was then run through Central Mailing Services bespoke postal tool, which compares rates from all approved CMS postal carriers ensuring that we can pass on the greatest possible savings for the end client. With the VAT free solution, we have an agency agreement in place with both the postal carriers and also Royal Mail which means we can zero rate VAT on the postage cost that is provided by Royal Mail. With larger volume mailings, this represents a significant cost saving for charities and ensures that they get the best value from their fundraising campaigns.

The Result

The Islamic charity were not only thrilled with the mailing, but also the cost savings and the level of service we continue to provide. Central Mailing Services provide full campaign management whilst ensuring that the print and postage elements are zero rated for VAT, where applicable and that the project is delivered on time and below budget.

The on-going returns work and extensive data cleansing minimised any wastage and the cost saving delivered for the charity ensured that their projects and fundraising appeals benefit directly from money raised. Working with Charities to help them get the best value from their mailing campaigns is a core objective for the Central Mailing Services Client Services team.