When Should You Mail Your Fundraising Appeal Letter First Class?
The short answer is:
When it absolutely has to be in-home by a specific date or date range.
Or
When you are adding hand-written, personalized notes and/or signatures to the letter.
Otherwise, you should mail non-profit, standard class.
Want to skip all the details? Click here to read the last section about the importance of handwritten notes.
Let’s compare first class and non-profit standard classes of mail
First Class “retail’
Mail with a 66 cent stamp (or Forever stamp) on the envelope. It can be submitted to the postal service by you or your mail house in no particular order.
First Class “presort”
Is sorted and submitted by your mail house in a specific order dictated by USPS rules. This saves the USPS some processing cost so the postage cost for first-class presort letters is usually around 54 cents, saving you some postage money.
Both first class ‘retail’ and first class ‘presort’ are delivered across the country in 1 to 5 business days.
If the person is no longer at that address and the USPS has a forwarding address, they will forward the mail at no cost; if they don’t have a forwarding address, they will return it to you.
Standard Class
Now called Marketing Mail by the USPS, this is what people generally mean when they say ‘bulk’ mail. We’ll continue to use the term standard class throughout this article.
Standard class mail is sorted by your mail house before submission to the USPS.
It goes through a different processing stream at the USPS than first-class presorted mail, and if the USPS is busy, it gets processed after first-class mail.
Another processing difference is that mail that has to go a long distance is transported by air if it is first class, while standard class is transported by truck.
So, for standard class, we have a rule of thumb about delivery time. From our location in New England, figure a 1-week delivery to the East Coast; 2 weeks to the Midwest and 3 weeks to the West Coast. That rule of thumb works most of the time, though it can be quicker or sometimes even longer.
If the person is no longer at that address, the USPS will throw the letter away rather than forwarding or returning it.
These differences save the USPS money, so the price for standard class letters is around 34 cents.
Standard class non-profit mail is handled the same way, but Congress has mandated an even lower postage price of around 20 cents per letter in order to benefit non-profit organizations.
What is the benefit of paying more for First Class versus Non-Profit Standard Class for a fundraising appeal letter?
More accurate in-home timing
First class and first class presort have faster delivery, and therefore more accurate in-home timing, when time matters.
Some letters may be forwarded and you will get back information on undeliverable mail
The USPS requires that both presorted first class and presorted standard class non-profit mailing lists have been NCOA’d within 90 days of the mailing date (= National Change of Address Service). This catches any address changes postal customers have submitted to the USPS and identifies when the USPS database doesn’t have a current valid address for that person. Your mail house will make those address changes for the mailing and remove the undeliverable addresses from the mailing list.
But even after the NCOA, two to five percent of the addresses may still be undeliverable—because the USPS database doesn’t know that person is no longer at that address, often because they didn’t submit a change of address to the post office. With first-class mail, those letters come back to you so you’ll be aware of this for the next mailing campaign, but for standard class non-profit mail those letters are thrown away by the local post office.
First class mail looks different—sort of
In the next section we will address the claim that first class mail somehow looks less like “bulk” mail and is therefore more likely to be opened and more likely to be taken seriously, by asking: what is the difference and does it matter?
Any difference in appearance of first-class mail is due to the way postage is applied to the envelope
Mail with a first-class retail stamp
The first-class Forever stamp doesn’t have a price (denomination) on its face, so it can be used at any time, even after the USPS raises the first-class stamp price, which it does once or twice per year. This stamp comes in many designs, a few of which are shown in this screenshot from the USPS stamp order site.
They all come in sheets of either 12 or 20 stamps. The exception is the U.S. Flag Stamp, which can also be purchased in rolls of 1,000 stamps.
If you are preparing a mailing of a smallish number of letters in-house, you could order sheets of these online from the USPS or go to your local post office and buy them. If you are buying locally, call first as they might not have (enough of) what you want in stock.
Your mail-house may stock the rolls of 1,000 U.S. Flag stamps. They can load these rolls onto their stamping equipment and apply them by machine while addressing or inserting. But they don’t stock the stamps that come in sheets. They are not as high in demand, and if they do receive a request to use one of these stamps, they can’t guarantee they can get enough in time to meet the mailing date.
What does this stamp look like when your letter arrives? Typically, it has been ‘cancelled’. The word ‘cancelled’ means the postal service has printed a mark over the stamp so that it can’t be reused. In the very early days of stamps, it was quite common for letter recipients to steam stamps off of envelopes for reuse; which is why postal services began ‘cancelling’ them. However, according to anecdotal reports, this is not always the case.
Here’s what a cancelled stamp looks like:
Mail First-Class Presort or Non-Profit Standard Class with a Stamp
There are usually only one or two choices for First class presort stamps and Non-Profit stamps. These are only usable by mail houses who do the presort for you. Current versions (2023) of these stamps look like this:
First Class Presort
Standard Class Non-Profit
Cancelling the stamp is an extra expense for the postal service, so they don’t put a cancellation mark on letters mailed at presorted rates. But, they call these stamps “precancelled”.
Does the USPS charge more for these “precancelled” stamps? NO. The only extra cost is the approximately 2 cents each your mail house will charge to machine apply them to your letters.
Mail with a Preprinted Permit Indicia
Typically used for postcards, catalogs and other commercial mail, but not fundraising letters.
Metered Mail
Metering may be used by businesses sending out small numbers of mail every day or week, for example, bills, or gift acknowledgements. In the past, metering was often used for bulk mail, but mail houses seldom do that except for small runs, or mail going overseas. Nowadays metered mail tends to look like this – not a great look for the outside of a fundraising letter.
Now back to the idea that the appearance of an appeal letter sent first-class versus a letter sent non-profit could improve the response rate
The recipient will not notice the difference in appearance between a first class presort and a non-profit class presort stamp. To the recipient they are just stamps.
Only in the case of the letter being mailed at retail rates and ‘cancelled’, would the look of the envelope be somewhat different. Will that difference be worth the increase in cost from 20 cents to 66 cents for postage? We argue no, for the following reasons:
Testing. Direct mail guru Mal Warwick reported¹ that in six A/B tests mailing appeal letters first class versus non-profit class, four of them showed no difference, and two showed a higher response to the First Class, but the additional revenue was less than the additional cost of the postage.
More Testing. The Data and Marketing Association reports that 90 percent of direct mail gets opened and read. Worry that recipients won’t open the letters you send is misplaced.
The real purpose of the envelope. The primary purpose of how the envelope looks is not to induce the recipient to open it. It is to start the emotional engagement that will lead the recipient to donate after reading the letter. Whether it is a first class presort or non-profit stamp has no impact.
When to use first class presort for a fundraising appeal letter?
When it must arrive right before or right after an event, announcement, day of giving or following any other type of communication.
Mailing in the second or third week of December. Due to the slow delivery of standard non-profit class, appeal letters might arrive after the holidays, and may not perform as well.
The main reason to mail first class is when you are adding hand-written personalized notes on the letter
This is usually for your major donors, those with significant potential to increase their gift, or those with whom you, your board or staff have a relationship. Typically, between 50 and 150 letters are sent this way.
Because these letters have actual handwriting on them, the USPS requires that they mail first class retail. And therefore, they will get a cancellation mark, which increases the impression that it is a personal communication, along with printing the name of the sender above the return address and using a handwriting font on the outer envelope, as we explain in I Couldn’t Help But Open It.
For our clients who do this, we prepare and return these letters to them with the stamp applied so they can write the note, seal the envelope and drop it in the mail.
Of course, these personalized letters have the highest response rates and average gifts as we demonstrate with data in Insights from Mailing Analysis Will Improve Your Fundraising Results.
So, the bottom line is that you should send appeal letters with handwritten notes to your most important donors by first class retail from your office.
1 Mal Warwick, Testing, Testing, 1,2,3, Josey-Bass, 2003
