Donor mail made easy.

If Zeffy is free, why does Donor Mail cost anything?

Because a physical letter has a real unit cost and Zeffy does not pretend otherwise. You pay a flat price per letter, shown on this page above, and it covers printing, stuffing, postage and posting. It is also the one thing on Zeffy you can ever pay for. Everything digital stays free: your donation forms, your supporter database, your emails, your receipts.

It is close to what the job costs you anyway, once you have bought the stamps and the envelopes. The real difference is not the money. It is that nobody spends a Saturday at the kitchen table.

What does the per-letter price cover?

Printing, stuffing, postage and posting, all handled for you. You pay for each letter you actually send, there is no minimum order quantity, and there is no subscription underneath it. Your logo goes at the top of the letter, and you can pull each donor's first and last name in as a variable. You can also add a QR code that links straight to any live Zeffy campaign, so a reader can give without going to find your website first.

Can I send one letter, or does it have to be a batch?

Either. Pick a saved contact list and send to the whole group, or send a single thank-you to one major donor. You pay per letter with no minimum, so one letter costs the price of one letter and a 300-supporter Christmas appeal costs three hundred times that, with nothing changing in between.

That is the part print shops usually cannot do. Their pricing tends to start above a minimum order, which is why a charity that needs twenty personalised letters ends up doing them by hand.

Will my contacts actually have postal addresses?

Worth looking at before you plan a mailing, because this is where most charities get stuck. Letters go to the address held on each contact's record in your supporter database, and anyone without a complete address, postcode and all, gets flagged before you pay. You can then either fill in what is missing or leave those people out of the send and email them instead.

The usual reason a list comes up thin is simply that your forms never asked for an address, so you can have years of donors with an email and nothing else. The other common cause is collecting addresses with your own short-answer question rather than Zeffy's built-in Full address field: those answers do not reach the contact record, so Donor Mail will not see them. Use the built-in field and the addresses land where the letters look for them.

What happens if a letter cannot be delivered?

It comes back to the return address you set, the same as any post. Zeffy makes sure an address is complete before you send, but it does not verify that a complete address is still current. Supporters who have moved will bounce, so correct those records before the next mailing. Plenty of charities treat the returned envelopes as their gone-away list and clean the database from there.

There is no test print, and once a letter is sent it cannot be recalled, so read it properly on screen before you pay. Start with a small send if it is your first one.

Do I need Donor Mail to post donation receipts?

Probably not. Zeffy already issues receipts digitally and automatically, attached to the confirmation email at the moment of the gift, at no cost, once receipts are switched on for your form. See donation receipts for the detail.

A UK donor giving at the basic rate does not need a receipt from you in order to get the tax right. What matters is the Gift Aid declaration, which is what lets you reclaim 25p for every £1 from HMRC. Higher-rate and additional-rate donors work from their own records when they file their Self Assessment return.

So posting receipts to your whole list on principle means paying for something you already have, and something most of your donors were never going to need on paper. Donor Mail earns its money on the thank-you and the appeal, which is the letter a supporter actually reads twice. If one particular supporter does want a paper copy, you can send them a single letter and pay for just that one.

Can Donor Mail replace a direct-mail agency or print shop?

For thank-you letters and appeals to your existing supporter list, yes. You write the letter, Zeffy prints and posts it, there is no contract and no minimum order, and you are not waiting on a quote.

Two limits are worth knowing before you decide. Zeffy sends letters, not postcards or folded formats. And it does not clean your address list the way a mailing house does, so a large cold appeal to bought or ageing data still belongs with an agency. For a warm list you already talk to, the agency is not buying you much.

What is the difference between Donor Mail and emailing a donation letter myself?

A printed letter physically arrives, which reaches supporters who do not read email and tends to hold attention with major donors and with older ones. Email is free and instant, and Zeffy does both.

Most charities use each for what it is good at: email for receipts and regular updates, post for the Christmas appeal and for the thank-you that matters. A common approach is to split the list by generation, keeping paper for members in their seventies and eighties while everyone else moved to email. Both runs come off the same contact list.

Can I put my logo on the envelope, or only on the letter?

Your logo goes on the letterhead, at the top of the letter. The envelope carries the return address you enter, which is what tells a supporter who it is from before they open it.

Whether the envelope itself can carry branding is not something Zeffy documents either way, so if that matters to your appeal, ask before you plan around it. It is a fair thing to care about: an envelope that looks like a mailing gets opened differently to one that looks like it came from someone you know.