Printed donor letters, mailed for $1 each.

If Zeffy is free, why does Donor Mail cost $1 per letter?

Because a physical letter has a real unit cost and Zeffy doesn't pretend otherwise. That $1 covers printing, stuffing, postage and mailing, and it's the one thing on Zeffy you can ever pay for. Everything digital stays free: your donation forms, your CRM, your emails, your tax receipts.

It's also close to what the job costs you anyway, once you've bought the stamps and the envelopes. The real difference isn't the money. It's that nobody spends a Saturday at the kitchen table.

"I had to go out and buy stamps, like, in the prior years and it was just a hassle. I'm sitting there and I'm putting stamps on five hundred envelopes and I have to have, like, my family help."

A nonprofit leader, on the year-end mailing

Will my contacts actually have mailing addresses?

Worth checking before you plan a mailing, because this is where most organizations get stuck. Letters go to the address on each contact's profile, and contacts without a complete address get flagged before you pay. You can then either fill in what's missing or leave those people out of the send, and email them instead.

If you're a US organization, turning on tax receipts doesn't make the address question required on your forms the way it does in Canada and Australia, so you may have years of donors with no address on file. The other common cause is collecting addresses with your own short-answer question rather than Zeffy's built-in Full address field: those answers don't reach the contact profile, so Donor Mail won't see them. Use the built-in field and the addresses land where the letters look.

What happens if a letter can't be delivered?

It comes back to the return address you set, the same as any post. Zeffy checks that an address is complete before you send, but it doesn't verify that a complete address is still real, so people who have moved will bounce and you'll want to correct those contacts before the next mailing. Several organizations use returned envelopes as their list-cleaning method.

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

Do I need Donor Mail to send a tax receipt?

Probably not. Zeffy already issues tax 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. For most organizations that covers the whole obligation.

So if you're planning to post receipts to your entire list on principle, you'd be paying for something you already have. Donor Mail earns its money on the thank-you and the appeal, which is the letter a donor actually reads twice. If one particular supporter wants a paper copy, sending them a single letter is $1.

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

For thank-you letters and appeals to your existing donor list, yes. You write the letter, Zeffy prints and mails it, there's no contract and no minimum order, and you're not waiting on a quote.

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

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

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

Most organizations use each for what it's good at: email for receipts and regular updates, print for the year-end appeal and the thank-you that matters. One organization we spoke to keeps paper for members in their seventies and eighties while younger members moved digital, and runs both from the same contact list.

Can I mail a letter I've already designed?

Yes, you can mail a letter you've already designed. Upload it as a single PDF, PNG or JPG file at US letter size (8.5 x 11 in), and Zeffy prints, folds, stuffs and mails it the same way as a letter built in Zeffy. Multi-page PDFs work too. For a sharp print, use a file of at least 300 DPI. Word documents and iPhone photos in HEIC format aren't accepted, so export to PDF first. Letters only: postcards and other formats can't be uploaded.