Grizzard - First in Fundraising

History

For almost 90 years, Grizzard has pioneered and helped revolutionize what is now called “direct marketing” — offering service, quality, innovation, and value to a growing number of local, regional, and national clients. In fact, innovation is part of Grizzard’s very DNA.

The company started in 1919, when Atlanta businessman Neil LeGette founded a small production-oriented company called Legette’s Letter Service. In 1928, Claude T. Grizzard purchased LeGette’s business.

A visionary entrepreneur, Grizzard could see the untapped potential of using mail to achieve greater marketing results. In 1932, he changed the company name to Grizzard Advertsing, Inc., and boldly started adding in-house strategic and creative services that quickly led to effective results-oriented “sales letters” — as direct mail was then called.

In the process, Grizzard didn’t just change his business, he helped change an industry. And he did it by teaching businesspeople new ways of thinking.

Marrying Market Research to Direct Mail

By the 1930s, Grizzard was among the first to use market research to design a direct mail campaign. When a leading furniture retailer hired Grizzard, he personally phoned and surveyed 1,500 people from the retailer’s customer list.

Through this research, Grizzard discovered that nearly two-thirds of the retailers’ customers reported making incremental furniture purchases from as many as five different stores. Worse, less than 10% of the customers returned to his client’s store where they made their first purchase.

Grizzard, however, used this research to design a direct mail campaign that would bring those customers back and create new brand loyalty to the retailer’s products.

Pioneering Retention Marketing

Grizzard also pioneered what is now called “retention marketing” when he placed a hidden microphone behind a counter where customers made their monthly payments. The employee behind the counter asked these customers specially designed questions about their interests. A salesperson secretly listened to their amplified responses and used that information to decide which new merchandise to point out to them as they left the store!

Revolutionizing Nonprofit Fundraising

Claude Grizzard was always a brilliant business marketer. But he also wanted to help organizations committed to building a better world. And he believed that the innovations and techniques he developed in the for-profit world would work equally well in the nonprofit world.

In 1944, Grizzard launched into nonprofit fundraising and created the firm’s first campaign for The Salvation Army. And over the next seven decades, Grizzard continued to revolutionize direct marketing, creating cutting-edge innovations that have helped raise billions of dollars for some of the world’s largest and most effective nonprofit charities, including The Salvation Army.

Creating the Cooperative Mailing Model

In the early 1960s, Grizzard was working with several different Salvation Army commands, creating separate appeals for each one. But seeking to save on production costs, Grizzard started creating similarly themed appeals and then applied them to the different Salvation Army commands at the same time, leading to substantial savings.

This practice, called “Cooperative Mailing,” completely changed the way fundraisers used direct mail and is now commonplace in nonprofit fundraising.

On the Cutting Edge of Computerized Donor Data

In 1968, Grizzard computerized its donor records and eliminated the need for the old manual donor-file cards. This early innovation laid the foundation for the database-management programs that Grizzard uses today.

In fact, many of the database-management strategies used by nonprofits today were originally pioneered by Grizzard, well before computers became commonplace. One of these strategies is the merge/purge function, which removes duplicates from donor and prospect lists.

Untangling the Web

Today, the Grizzard Communications Group continues to alter the course of direct response with cutting-edge technologies and services.

In the late 1990s, Grizzard was among the first to recognize how the Internet was changing the marketplace, giving more power and control to consumers and placing a priority on building relationships.

Seeking to tap in to this new reality, Grizzard helped the American Bible Society create ForMinistry.com. This site offered churches the chance to build their own personal websites for free — and at the same time syndicate content directly from the ABS. In this way, thousands of churches across the U.S. not only consumed ABS products but marketed ABS content and products to their members.

Later, in 2000, Grizzard organized and produced a webcast of The Salvation Army’s 2000 Millennial Congress, which broadcast over the Internet worldwide, symbolizing how Grizzard has not only kept up with the times, but has strived to stay ahead.

Innovative Integration

As technology advances, so does the way in which Grizzard leverages its possibilities. Today Grizzard is leading the way once more through Integrated Direct Marketing.

This strategy involves integrating and synchronizing the messaging in our appeal campaigns into various media channels, including advertising, direct mail, Internet, and telemarketing to achieve maximum exposure and financial results.

The Grizzard Communications Group is confident that direct marketing will continue to grow and flourish in the 21st century. And we will remain a leader in this industry by investing in new technologies, attracting enthusiastic talent, and adapting to meet our clients’ changing needs.