A website visitor takes the plunge and opts in to hear from your organization. They get the obligatory “auto-responder” online, their first e-news and a thank-you.

Then what?

As the days and weeks pass, their ardor cools. Eventually the communications from their newly “adopted” organization become part of the growing flood of e-mail. A mailing finally arrives – but sounds like it could have been sent to anyone.

Recent data from around the sector is consistent and crystal clear – long delays are the kiss of death in asking online e-subscribers to become donors. Quicker is better. What’s more, e-mail combined with direct mail is far better.

Why?

E-mail is quick and takes new prospects back to your site, helping them find timely, cool stuff. But e-mail alone can do all the fundraising work, as results to your e-appeals have no doubt demonstrated. Add a prompt, personal piece of direct mail and now your message hangs around the house a while, becomes part of a prospect’s leisure time and personal pursuits.

Yes, it means you need to ask e-subscribers for their postal addresses. (Offer to send them something interesting and useful and they will.)

Those were exactly our questions. So we began to test a series of quick, highly integrated mail and e-mail messages targeting recent e-news subscribers, and other “non-donors” who registered online to receive information. Several custom e-mails and two or three mail appeals, all within a couple of months, collectively form a kind of “rolling welcome” series that provides new information and invites prospects to give.

The results?

More new donors are being acquired at affordable costs. More prospects are returning to the website, a steady flow of prospects who have all asked to be contacted. A list which can be used over time in a variety of ways.

Giving online in 2010 is still too often a virtual jungle, requiring a prospect to chop their way through forms that still demand their title, suffix, phone number, where they heard about us, and whether they want to honor their mother-in-law. (You don’t still ask for all this distracting stuff, do you?)

Fundraising by direct mail in 2010 still too often means that motivated prospects finally receive an appeal many weeks or even months after they first show their support. If then. (Some organizations still do not put their online subscribers and registrants into their prospecting mail.)

The truth is, too much fundraising e-mail and direct mail are still based on our production timetable, not the donors’ emotional timetable. It’s a mistake we would never make with major donors, but it seems hard to shift our thinking to accommodate interested prospects who come to us online.

In the old days, direct mail had to be printed in big quantities and stored. Now there is digital printing, a pay-as-you go, inventory-free, highly personalized alternative.

In the old days, e-mail was often isolated from direct mail programs, fundraising reports and donor databases.

Now there are tools for integrating communications channels as well as their collective cost-benefit analysis.

Fortunately, these aren’t the old days. Now you can make it easy for your web visitors to find their personal donor path while they are still excited. Believe me, it will pay.