Four Strategies for Using QR Codes To Integrate Your Mail Campaigns

While QR codes may have felt new when they popped up in restaurants in the 2020s, glued to your tabletop to connect you to your paperless menu, the technology has been around for more than thirty years – since 1994, to be exact. From 2021 to 2023, their usage increased 247%, and in 2022, we saw QR code usage increase by 301% (think: Super Bowl ads, billboards and drones).

In the world of direct mail fundraising, QR codes have offered exciting potential because they allow for more innovative ways to integrate with digital, inviting donors online from the folds of their envelope.

Today, QR codes are most commonly used by direct mail fundraisers to take supporters to online donation pages – but there is a whole variety of innovative and creative possibilities for nonprofits to use QR codes to support engagement and deepen relationships.

I’m excited to share some exciting creative ways to incorporate QR codes into your next integrated fundraising campaign – as well as how adding digital integration elements like QR codes to your next mail campaign can connect you with discounts through the U.S. Postal Service’s 2025 Promotions & Incentives Programs:

Four Creative Strategies for Using QR Codes

For a number of nonprofits we partner with, we find that campaigns that fully integrate across online and offline channels tend to drive stronger results. With that in mind, QR codes can be an exciting way to connect your integrated campaigns and allow your supporters to interact with more of your dynamic storytelling and compelling content. Especially considering that engagement messages in the mail can be prohibitive for your budget, offering your donors an opportunity to learn more about the impact of your work online can deepen their relationship with your mission and even increase your valuable list of multichannel donors.

Want to try a fresh creative approach to your application of QR codes in the mail? Here are a few strategies worth testing:

Interactive user journeys: Consider how a QR code linked to interactive flows like those you can build with our proprietary tool, Sign For Good, can offer both engagement and upsell opportunities. With sign-the-card, donor wall and long-form visual storytelling, you can drive supporters online to learn more about your mission. With our partners at Jane Goodall Institute USA, we invited supporters to “Take the Chimpanzee Quiz” through a QR code that takes them directly to an immersive quiz full of compelling photos and information priming donors to make an online gift.

Personalized content: Try segmenting your digital content into cohorts, with QR codes that direct to different landing pages, personalized based on the unique audience. For health care and hospital organizations, this might look like unique landing pages for patients, or donors giving in memory of someone, with content that matches the person’s unique connection to your mission.

Borrow from e-commerce: Major e-commerce companies often customize their QR codes to reflect their branding – could testing a branded QR code with your nonprofit logo offer an opportunity to boost response?

Optimize QR code placement: Think about opportunities to test different approaches to QR code placement and prominence in your campaign. How does response rate change with a QR code added to the outside of an envelope? With our partners at Humane World for Animals (formerly called the Humane Society of the United States), we placed a QR code behind donors’ membership cards so that once they removed them, they uncovered an easy way to make an immediate gift toward a mission they were committed to.

As we continue to work with our nonprofit partners to build compelling campaigns across channels, we’re excited to see what impactful and innovative ways QR codes will continue to connect supporters with world-changing missions across online and offline channels.

How Using QR Codes Can Drive Discounts From USPS

With no postage increases in January 2025, the USPS introduced its 2025 Promotions & Incentives Programs to support direct mail campaigns’ efforts to enhance engagement, drive innovation and mitigate postage costs. This means direct mail fundraisers can get significant discounts on postage by integrating their campaigns with digital landing pages.

Using their Integrated Technology Promotion, you can redirect your audiences to pages that include videos, virtual reality, a donation page (which must include a reply mechanism or mailed response) or mobile shopping to unlock a 3% discount per month for six consecutive months. Using a QR code as a technology trigger to connect supporters to donation pages is an effective way to integrate your mail campaigns and meet the requirements of this discount, all in one strategy. What’s more, when you combine this promotion with one of USPS’ Add-On Promotions, you can get an additional 1% discount on postage.

For more on recent trends and strategies in direct mail fundraising, check out Year-End Direct Mail Fundraising. For a look at the latest creative strategies in digital fundraising, go to Building Your 2025 Creative Toolkit.