Kent State University’s multichannel fall campaign focused on nostalgia and school pride. The mailed solicitation pieces went to a general audience comprised of LYBUNTs and SYBUNTs and provided recipients with a keepsake university pennant.

For this campaign, we conducted an AB test to inform our future campaign strategy for mailed solicitations. The test included two appeal versions, which were sent to randomly selected portions of our lists. The first version was a letter – or “Ugly/Basic Betty” – solicitation with a tear-off pennant, and the other was a self-mailer solicitation with a foldout pennant. We hoped the performance of these pieces would help us determine whether to continue to use self-mailers or switch to the letter format for some of our future campaigns.

Although the self-mailer raised approximately $6,000 more than the letter version, the ROI for the letter was significantly higher (368%) than that of the self-mailer (239%). Because of this, we plan to use the letter format for some of our larger campaigns.