Soaring on Simplicity

“As you know with insurance, you always have a fair amount of exclusions and technical information to communicate,” Paul says. “And the extra two pieces were helpful in doing that without incurring the costs of an expensive brochure that we already knew wouldn’t fly with this audience.”

The Barrys employed a unique, four-digit response code on the lower left-hand corner of the reply form to help the organization sort returns. With each response, AFA easily can discern what type of member replied: age, year joined, second solicitation received this year, etc.

With so many personalized variables to account for throughout the piece, the Barrys went to great lengths to assure database integrity. When the package first launched, for example, AFA did not have a salutation field in the database.

The complexity of some compound military titles could potentially have created gaffes if the data lacked accuracy. For the purposes of this effort, titles appear as “Lt Col” and “Maj Gen,” for example. But as Paul cautions, “You better not address a Lieutenant Colonel as ‘Lt’ or a Major General as ‘Maj.’ That is a real sensitivity of this audience.”