The mission of our retreat center is to provide a place of hospitality and peace for individuals. Print and direct mail helps us to accomplish this mission by keeping our past guests (and potential guests/groups) informed and educated about La Salle Retreat Center; the benefits of self care, reflection, rest and prayer; the importance of growing your own food, pollination, beekeeping, composting, and healthy cooking/eating.

How has your organization used print and direct mail? La Salle is made up of beautiful, historical buildings and grounds open since 1886. We are a destination for retreats and youth programs. We are inclusive and try to make our fees affordable so ALL groups are able to afford to have retreat, workshop, youth program. On our property, we have bee hives, gardens and native grasses/wildflowers. We also provide field trips for schools to teach them about pollination, gardening, composting and eating healthy. In addition, we partner with the YMCA and provide a location for their day camps. We also partner with Equine Assisted Therapy to provide retreats for mothers with special needs children. This retreat is free for the moms who attend so they don't have to worry about the expense and can completely relax during the retreat. We provide our services for free (or for very little) AND maintain our buildings and grounds making for a very, very tight budget! We use print and direct mail to mail newsletters, fundraising communication, and we print brochures to have available for all our guests. It important for us to communicate to our past and new guests the services available, for education purposes, find new guests/donors and for fundraising needs. It is our number one communication tool.

How does your nonprofit plan to use print and direct mail? We HAVE to roll out a capital campaign in 2023 to fund deferred maintenance needed on our buildings to remain open and able to serve our guests. We plan to expand our annual giving appeals to include four major appeals annually. This can be very expensive especially for a nonprofit with a very tight budget! We will use print and direct mail a lot this year just to make our capital campaign successful. This is in addition to the newsletters and brochures we currently print.

How has print and direct mail helped to promote the valuable message and great things that your organization does? Direct mail is so important to us! It keeps our guests informed about La Salle Retreat Center -new programs, services, educational articles, fundraising needs. We also print a calendar each year with beautiful pictures of our property. This calendar has sold out each year and has become a favorite item in our gift shop! It keeps our guests excited about the beauty of La Salle! It keeps our donors excited about what their contribution is supporting. We also do a lot of printing for the brochures we offer our guests to educate and inform about our gardens, grottos, wildlife and hiking trails.

Printing and direct mail is crucial for our organization and can be very expensive! Any help is very much appreciated. Thank you for this opportunity!