The Address in Hobe Sound
On the third Tuesday in January, in the small white shaker-style post office on Main Street in Litchfield, Connecticut, a mail bin behind the counter holds, among nine hundred and forty-two other pieces of mail, a heavy ivory envelope from a small liberal-arts college in central Pennsylvania. The envelope is addressed in a faux-handwritten font to Mrs. Eleanor Crawford-Hayes, at the white clapboard farmhouse on the corner of Rossiter Road and Old Stoddard Lane that has been her home since 1981.
Eleanor Crawford-Hayes is, on the third Tuesday in January, four hundred and twelve miles south of the farmhouse, on the screened porch of a coral-colored townhouse on a quiet cove off the Indian River, in Hobe Sound, Florida. She has been there since December eighteenth. She will be there until April third. She is seventy-one years old. She is drinking, in a small jelly-glass with a thin chip on the rim, a glass of pink grapefruit juice. She is reading, with her reading glasses pushed up on the top of her head, a one-page letter from a nature preserve in Vero Beach that has, by some quiet act of grace, sent its annual appeal to the right address.
The envelope from the college in Pennsylvania will sit in the bin at the Litchfield post office until April fourth. By then, it will be one hundred and seventy days closer to expired. By then, the capital-campaign deadline it announces will have come and gone. By then, the small specific moment in Eleanor Crawford-Hayes's January life when she would have, with grapefruit juice in her left hand and a felt-tip pen in her right, sat down on the porch and written a check — will have happened, and the check will have gone to the preserve in Vero Beach.
The college does not know any of this. The development office in central Pennsylvania believes it has mailed Eleanor Crawford-Hayes. It has not. It has mailed a mail bin.
The query nobody runs
There is a query a development office can run, in any reasonable CRM, that will return a list of donors who have a second address on file with a city in coastal Florida, the green hills outside Tucson, the Lowcountry of South Carolina, the high desert of California, or the small barrier-island towns of the Gulf — and who have, in the public record, owned that address for more than four years.
Almost no shop runs it.
The query, if you run it, will surface — in a file of seven thousand records — somewhere between forty and two hundred and ten names. The names will skew old. The capacity will skew high. The mailing addresses on the master file will, for sixty percent of those names, be wrong from mid-December to mid-April. The other forty percent are wrong from mid-January to mid-March. The annual-fund team in the development office is, in those months, mailing four-color brochures to empty front halls on quiet roads in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Wisconsin, Michigan, Vermont, and Maine. The brochures are reaching, with quiet reliability, the slot in the front door above the rug. They are reaching nobody at all.
The brochures are not, in any defensible sense, being read. They are being delivered. The two are not the same thing. The board, when shown the year-end direct-mail report, will see deliveries. The donor, on the porch in Hobe Sound, will see a one-page letter from a preserve in Vero Beach.
What the porch knows
The porch knows three things the master file does not.
The porch knows that the donor is, from December eighteenth to April third, in a slow patient open-handed mood the development office in the home state has spent forty years trying to manufacture and has only intermittently managed. The donor is not commuting. She is not, on the porch, half-distracted by a board meeting in the upstairs office or a doctor's appointment at three or a granddaughter being dropped off at four. She is reading her mail, slowly, in the late-morning light through the screen, on the wicker chair next to the small lemon tree in the cracked terra-cotta pot. She is in a season of her life that is, in the most literal sense, her charitable season — the unhurried late-winter weeks in which a donor in her seventies, away from the routines that govern her hometown calendar, actually decides who she is going to give to in a calendar year.
The porch knows, also, the name of the small organization that figured out — three winters ago, very quietly — to mail her in Hobe Sound. The preserve in Vero Beach was, until last March, a forty-dollar donor on Eleanor's list. The preserve, last March, on the porch, became a four-thousand-dollar donor. This year, on the third Tuesday in January, with the grapefruit juice and the felt-tip pen, the preserve in Vero Beach will become an eight-thousand-dollar donor.
The college in central Pennsylvania is, this year, a zero-dollar donor. The brochure is in the bin.
The porch knows, finally, that none of this is a punishment. It is not a referendum on the institution. It is not a withdrawal of love. It is a small clerical fact. The address on the master file is wrong from December to April. The institution mailed to the wrong house. The donor never saw the letter. She was, the entire time, four hundred and twelve miles south, in a wicker chair, with grapefruit juice, on a porch.
She would, if asked, have given.
A small honest note about Rōmy
Rōmy does not mail the brochure to the porch. The development office mails the brochure to the porch. The decision to update the second-address field, to flag the donor as a snowbird, to set the calendar reminder for the second week of December — those are the small dignified acts of an institution that has chosen to pay attention.
What a tool can do is run the query.
The list of donors in your file with a second residence in a snowbird zip code, owned for more than four years, with mail-class history suggesting a forwarding gap in the December-to-April window, is a list nobody has ever run in your shop. It is a list that, in most files, takes a development associate eleven days to assemble by hand, and so it does not get assembled. It sits, the way many quiet acts of attention sit, on the next quarter's projects list, the way it has sat there for nine consecutive next quarters.
What we want Rōmy to do, on a quiet Friday in early November, is hand the director of development a small clean list — sortable by capacity, sortable by length of relationship, sortable by Florida-versus-Arizona, sortable by the cohort birthday already in this calendar year — of the eighty-three donors in her file who will, on December fifteenth, get on a plane.
The mailing is yours. The brochure is yours. The choice to add a small line at the top of the envelope, in the same faux-handwriting, that reads Please forward to winter address, is yours. The kindness is yours.
The list is ours.
A small assignment, with love ♡
This week, before December comes, do one small thing.
Open the address fields in your CRM. Look for the seasonal checkbox. If your CRM does not have one, the second assignment is to add one. Look for the second-address field. If your CRM does not have one, the third assignment is to add one. None of these assignments takes longer than a Tuesday afternoon, and all three of them have been on the next quarter's projects list for, by our rough count, a great many quarters now.
For every donor over sixty-five with a known relationship of more than ten years, pick up the phone or write a short note in November and ask, in the smallest, most undramatic way you can:
Do you spend any of your winter somewhere warmer? We would love to make sure we are reaching you in the right place.
You will be surprised — every shop is surprised — how many of them will tell you, in a single warm sentence in reply, the name of a town in Florida or Arizona or the Lowcountry you have never typed into the database in fifteen years. You will be surprised, also, how many of them will say, gently, with a small thank-you in the phrasing, Nobody has ever asked.
In January, when the bin in Litchfield is filling up with mail nobody will read until April, your envelope will be on a wicker side table in Hobe Sound — beside a small jelly-glass with a thin chip on the rim, beside a felt-tip pen with a soft worn cap.
The pen will move. The check will be written.
The porch is where the giving happens. ♡