With the rising cost of postage/printing, we are rethinking what audiences we mail our quarterly newsletter to. We mail to about 30,000 donors & are looking for a way to decrease that number by half. Currently we use a combination of constituent codes (if someone has a particular code they automatically get the newsletter) and/or giving history (if they give more than $150 in the past year or $50 in past 2 years).  

What criteria do you use to mail your newsletter? Gift amount; if so, what are your parameters? Constituency? Both?

Thanks for your feedback!

We just did this for our Planned Giving Newsletter and our Programs Newsletter.  We actually created a grid breaking down the different categories in RE.  Then we put in a column for what criteria we used to pull for that newsletter currently -- direct mail donors had to be >$50 for the last three years and what the quantity was for that group.  And then I broke them down and analyzed what groups gave to that newsletter or directly afterwards.  Then we pulled only those groups that gave to the newsletter, or directly to that newsletter or had to get the newsletter (board members and family members get everything!) and dropped in new appeal codes.  I don't know how its going to do and we mailed the first Planned Giving Newsletter about a week, but we dropped nearly half our counts.

Good luck.