To UW Greeks with love
By Cindy Safronoff
One new component of our “Compass the City” outreach project this year is direct mail. One day a week our team has been taking a break from our normal “boots on the ground” traveling outreach to write blog articles and work on other projects in the office. On Friday, June 9, we did our first direct mailing project to the Greeks at the University of Washington.
We found a mailing list of all the fraternities and sorority houses near the main campus and put together a packet of three recent Christian Science Monitor Weekly issues plus a cover letter offering them a free gift subscription for their house.
Thinking about how to write the cover letter turned out to be a very thought-provoking assignment. Both Bella and Izzy took a shot at writing a letter, and we did a couple rounds of edits until we had something we thought was a good sales pitch for college students.
We had a lot of discussion about the best way for them to say “YES” to our gift subscription offer. Traditionally direct mail letter have a toll-free phone number or a post card to mail, or a form with an envelope. But young people these days have different ways than other generations, and those ways tend to be digital ways. Should we ask them to reply by email? Since Bella and Izzy are college students like the UW Greeks, they seemed best suited to decide the right method. They both agreed there should be a QR code on the letter for them to scan with their smart phones which would open a page on our website with a welcoming message and a form to fill out on-line. They wrote the first draft of the text and I rounded it out. You can see what we came up with together here:
https://www.cslitdist.com/monitor
This idea also led to us changing the “Free Sample Copy” sticker we’ve been putting on the Monitors they hand out daily to shops in the commercial districts. The same QR code is now on the sticker with a simple message “Gift subscription promotional offer”. This solution also solves the problem of how to give people in retail stores who aren’t ready to say YES immediately (the “Maybes”) an easy way to get a gift subscription after they have had time to read the sample copies our team has given them.
As pioneers in this outreach work, step by step we are learning what works, what is needed, and what more we can do. Bella and Izzy have both contributed tremendously to the development of our methods.
We’ll do more direct mail projects later this summer, so we can reach more types of organizations beyond those in retail storefronts as we continue to “Compass the City”.