RAF Association - Cold legacy direct mail

Cold legacy direct mail

After successfully testing a legacy pledge mailing to their warm existing supporters, the Royal Air Forces Association (RAFA) asked Cherry Tiger to position a similar appeal to a cold audience, without any direct connection to the RAF or the association itself. As almost half of legacies that come in to RAFA come from people unknown to them, they were keen to test the potential of a cold ask.

We sourced data targeting people of the right age, location and with a propensity to donate via legacies to military charities and then designed a pack that told more of the RAFA story and made the case for a legacy gift in particular. We needed to explain how dependent RAFA were on legacy income, and the beauty of a gift that allowed them to plan for the future. Finally responses to the warm pack included a number of very moving stories from pledgers, who explained their connection to the RAF Association, so we included some of these as testimonials.

The resulting pack delivered on all these objectives, while at the same time retaining one of the strongest features of the original pack; the incentive of a special edition pin badge, with which pledgers can show their support for RAFA, ‘Always’. To tie it all together, we created a new central proposition central for our pack. By pledging their support to RAFA, pledgers could help the charity keep their pledge to always care for every member of the RAF family.