One of the limits to having supporters send postcards is budget. PostBug's sender-pay-forward help campaigns send more postcards than they could normally afford.
Campaigns choose if they offer free-to-send, sender pay and multiple pay forward options or just some, including no free send option or can set the price for the paid options.
For campaign A (large environmental organisation), they chose to enable a free send option, a sender pay option and the pay forward option. Sender pay was set for £2.75 to cover the payment provider fees and pay forward was enabled for 5 x £2.75 and 10 x £2.75.
More than 2000 postcards were sent. 41% of senders chose to pay for at least the cost of their own postcards. This can be broken down into 32% paying for their own cost, 8% paying for 5 (4 so others send for free) and 1% paying for 10 (9 others send for free). In practice this meant only about £1000 of their original budget had been spend to send £5000 worth of postcards. As a result they could either promote it more or shift the unused budget to another PostBug campaign.
For campaign B (large child welfare charity), they chose a slightly different route. While they enabled a free send option, a sender pay option and the pay forward option, they only set one pay forward option at 5 postcards and they chose to enable supporters to send the postcards at £2/postcard and thus absorb the processing fee and the additional cost of sending the postcard.
In this case a little over 1000 postcards were sent. 40% of supporters chose to pay - an almost identical figure to campaign A. 28% of this was supporters paying their own cost and 12% paid for sending 5. The result was similar to Campaign A: they were able to send more than double their free send budget.
The transactions used the Stripe account which meant the payment email referenced PostBug (as well as each organisation name). In only two instances (one for each organisation) did someone email and ask to be refunded which was acted on immediately. A third person called FairSay/PostBug to ask about a 'strange transaction' on their statement. Once it was clarified what it could be there were appreciative of the service existing and happy to have it usable by the organisation they supported.
Having supporters help carry the cost of the postcard campaign is only one benefit. The organisation can also download the supporter action history and use it to help identify supporters who may be more open to becoming regular donors.
Most supporters don't mind being asked to contribute both time and money if it makes sense in terms of achieving change. Postcards cut-through the overloaded inboxes to get attention from a lower volume of quality postcards with personalised messages.
It is also obvious to supporters that sending postcards has a printing and a postage cost - so for many supporters it is reasonable to help pay for that as it is literally "less than a cup of coffee" and a one off payment.
So asking supporters to share the cost if they can is a win-win: supporters feel good about helping in a tangible way and organisations can send more postcards than the internal budget may allow. Ensuring a small but quality stream postcards is likely to help get needed attention to the campaign with those decision makeer you are trying to engage, and that might just help you win.
