Introduction
Businesses, governmental organisations, schools and churches all use leaflet distribution to advertise their services and inform local areas about their activities.
As a charity, you can do exactly the same. The leaflet is a very effective tool to both inform and help drive action. If you want to know more about how many people tend to keep leaflets for future reference or how leaflets compare to other advertising methods see our blog on the topic.
A charity organisation can use flyers to achieve a wide variety of goals. So, let’s have a look at the specifics of charity leaflets and what you should keep in mind when planning a campaign.
Goals of a charity leaflet campaign
As a rule, it is a good idea to keep a singular goal in mind when planning a leaflet distribution campaign. Leaflets are excellent at delivering a single message.
When things start getting complicated and too many ideas are being presented on the same flyer, campaigns tend to get considerably less successful.
Try to identify only one main and at most one secondary goal of your flyer. Here are some examples.
Informational
You might be looking to inform a local population of a given area about the issue that your charity deals with. If it is mental health, you might be looking to inform people about an increase in a particular mental health statistic.
You might want to inform people that help is even available if they struggle with a certain issue or spread the word about your helpline number.
If you’re a wildlife charity, you might be looking to share some new information about a success you’ve had with setting up new public footpaths or bird observation points in the local area.
Flyers are excellent at informing local populations. One of the great things about flyers is the fact that every household in the area you select for your campaign will receive your leaflet. Unlike online ads, flyers don’t skew in terms of demographics.
Every household with a letterbox in your selected area will receive your flyer.
Advertising an event
At The Private Postman we’ve worked with event companies and agencies for years.
If you’re looking to advertise a charity event with your leaflets, all rules of event advertising come into play. The most important thing here is that you start early and deliver more than one round of leaflets.
You want to make sure that you start your campaign at least a few months before your event date. 2-3 months is ideal.
You also want to ideally plan multiple drops in the lead up to the campaign. This means that you are delivering your flyers to the same households multiple times over the 2-3 months before your event date.
You can read up more about event advertising in this blog.
Fundraising
Fundraising could be another goal of a charity leaflet distribution campaign. In this case, the easier you make the process of donating, the better.
Leaflets are very good at driving relevant traffic to your website. This is important as you can setup an online payment/donation system and drive people to it via your leaflets. You can use a simple URL, a QR code or a combination of both.
You can also include your charity’s phone number prominently on the flyer for less computer savvy people.
Depending on how you structure your fundraising, you might want to consider not setting a minimum donation. For example having a £20 minimum donation might turn away some people that would be willing to give slightly less if you allowed for this.
However, these kinds of details should be largely dictated by your fundraising strategy and experience.
Recruitment
Another goal of your campaign could be to drive volunteer recruitment. This is where the fact that you can send people to videos via QR codes comes to play again.
If you deliver leaflets to 20,000 households in your local area and give everyone an easy way to simply scan a code on your flyer to watch a recruitment video, you can drive some serious interest.
You can feature your phone number on your flyer prominently again which can be helpful for older people who are likely to volunteer.
On top of this, the physical nature of the leaflet also helps develop more of a connection with your potential volunteers.
Older people prefer physical media and busy working people can simply leave the flyer on the kitchen table in the morning. When they return back home in the evening they are reminded to reread it and are more likely to act. This is hard to achieve with physical ads.
An important element to all this is the fact, that you can run multiple deliveries throughout the year in your key areas. You can do a couple of drops with leaflets focused on sharing information. Then you can advertise a local event with another drop.
By the time you get to fundraising with your flyers you’ve built a lot of familiarity, authority and trust. You can imagine what might happen if you follow a similar strategy for years, especially if you make sure to allow for longer breaks between drops to minimise exposure fatigue.
You can read up more on repeated drops here.
What a charity leaflet should look like?
The design of your flyer is ultimately what decides whether your campaign can be successful. A leaflet that is badly put together will not work, no matter how many of them you print.
You can have a look at this blog that discusses how a leaflet should be structured in detail.
To at least touch on some of the most important ideas
– Use a high quality image (photo or illustration).
– Focus on a single message and aim for a single goal with each leaflet.
– Use QR codes to send people to your website or custom landing pages.
– Prominently feature your contact information. Especially your phone number.
– Be conservative with the amount of copy/text that you use.
– Focus on a positive message.
– Include a call to action.
Even if some of these points might seam obvious or trivial, try to periodically check back on this list when you are in the process of creating your leaflet. You might be surprised by how easy it is for one of these seemingly obvious elements to be overlooked.
