Travis Manion Foundation is a national veterans service organization

Travis Manion Foundation is a national veterans service organization whose mission is to empower veterans and families of the fallen to develop character in future generations. Their programs are grounded in positive psychology, taking a strengths-based approach to the mental well-being of veterans and empowering them to serve as leaders in their communities nationwide and as mentors to youth. 

An important aspect of any nonprofit’s fundraising operations is acknowledging and thanking donors in a timely manner that lets them know where their money is going and the impact it’s having on their constituents and communities. TMF saw an opportunity to continue to do this in a hyper personalized way that simultaneously saved money and staff time. ‍

Old Arduous Process

On a weekly basis, staff at TMF were spending hours ensuring that donor acknowledgement letters went out in a timely manner. It was an arduous process, consisting of working with a third party vendor, pulling lists from Salesforce, and manually cleaning up those lists before sending them to the vendor to do a mail merge and send them off. They also had to supply the vendor with their own branded envelopes, paper, and materials. With this workflow, they were spending a lot of time on a single process and didn’t have a way to track the letter or know if it was actually received. They estimate that 10% of their mail was previously undeliverable. The original process was tedious and much more costly.‍

Cutting Costs by 50% through Automated Donor Acknowledgments‍

With Lob’s native Salesforce integration, the TMF team was able to use the data they had in Salesforce already to create a flow to direct donor acknowledgements to the right donor letter templates for special campaigns. This flow also ensures that the donor names are formatted correctly, and that addresses are deliverable. They’re now able to track each individual letter to make sure it was delivered. By implementing this automated process, TMF is spending 50% less money and freeing up hours of staff time that they can now use for more mission critical work. The end-to-end implementation took less than 10 hours of combined effort, allowing TMF to go live in less than a month. 

“It’s really incredible to know we can trust an automated Salesforce integration with the task of thanking donors via mail in a timely and meaningful way. It’s very important to us,” says Bryan.

You can access a full demo of how Travis Manion Foundation is leveraging automated direct mail here.

Learn more about Lob for Salesforce here.

We also offer a donor acknowledgement letter template to make it even easier for your organization to start sending automated letters to donors.

Travis Manion Foundation is a Lob for Good customer. Through our Lob for Good program, we offer donated and discounted products for nonprofits and mission-aligned organizations. Learn more here.