Another example of people’s response to handwritten notes, marketing, or any personal connection in today’s world.

Detroit Free Press: Help revive a long-lost art — Write a letter

I used to write letters, lots of them.

Back in high school, the boy who would become my husband wrote letters to me, too. The real deal. Ink on paper, unique handwriting, his a mix of print and script, lean and leaning to the right; mine with the straight, fat letters. We’d leave letters for one another at our lockers and devour the written words in class, when we should have been listening to our teachers.

We were young and blissful, unaware that we were engaged in art — now, sadly, the dying art of writing letters.

Think about it. When was the last time you put pen to paper or found a handwritten envelope amid the junk that comes through the postal system disguised as important?

My answer is rarely to never, a shameful admission that occurred to me recently as I heard about the multimillion-dollar campaign HBO has cooked up with the U.S. Postal Service to get America writing letters again — and to promote its latest miniseries “John Adams.”

Adams was a proud man of letters, exchanging them faithfully, including more than 1,100 with his wife Abigail, from their dating years throughout his presidency, the nation’s second (1797-1801).

Adams probably would not think kindly of how letter-writing has disappeared from American life. The man who once wrote: “Let us dare to read, think, speak and write,” would probably argue passionately in voice and verse that letters live for lifetimes, though they’re born of single moments in time.

Let’s face it: E-mail is just not the same. It’s faster, but far less personal, no matter how fancy the font. And once you’ve run it through a printer, it feels more like evidence than heartfelt correspondence. And text messages? These days, once sent, you hope they disappear.

Yes, you saw that correctly. Not only is handwritten correspondence the most effective direct marketing you can use, it might just be worth something someday. That is, if you ever become President of the United States.

Lincoln’s emotional reply to petition calling on him to free ‘all the little slave children’ up for auction | the Daily Mail

The stirring letter - written in the year preceding the President’s assassination and the ratification of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution which formally abolished slavery - is the highlight of a 111-lot collection of Presidential and other historic American manuscripts being sold the Dr Robert Small Trust at Sotheby’s in New York next Thursday (April 3).

It is estimated to fetch between £1.5 million and £2.5 million. If it finds a buyer it will become the most expensive Lincoln manuscript ever sold at auction.

Sotheby’s manuscripts specialist in New York, David Redden, said yesterday: “This is Lincoln’s most personal and powerful statement on God, slavery and emancipation. No piece of mail touched Lincoln as deeply as as did this petition.”

The £6 million sale include other significant Lincoln manuscripts as well as those signed by George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Ulysses S Grant and Robert E Lee.

We recently joined the Seattle Direct Marketing Association (SDMA) and have been very impressed with the organization and events.

It’s really great to see the local energy and interest in Direct Marketing. If you’re in the area and interested in Direct Marketing I encourage you to attend one of the monthly meetings.

Just don’t ask them if they are a part of the national Direct Marketing Association (DMA).

In a letter about handwriting personal notes in the Kansas City Star, Jeanne Phillips of Dear Abby fame hits on the key emotional aspects of handwritten mail.

Although e-mail is here to stay, handwritten correspondence still has an important place in people’s lives.

Each method of communication fills a need. E-mail is fast, cheap and easy. However, it can often also be terse and impersonal. Handwritten messages can be an art form, an elegant skill that expresses emotions.

Here’s a tip for you direct marketers out there when your clients say, “Handwritten marketing? Really?” The more people email, IM, SMS, and now “Facebook” with each other the more an old-fashioned handwritten letter stands out and gets results. It’s so true!

I’ve had a few people recently ask me variations of, “Well, with all this technology today don’t you think handwritten letters are a little old-fashioned for marketing?” My answer is absolutely. That’s the point!

We welcome the growth of online marketing because our approach contrasts so well with what is frequently considered “cheap and annoying.” Online, people now have to wade through spam, ad-blockers, spoofing, viruses, phishing, and new threats every day. There is a lot of clutter and fear out there precisely because it’s so cheap to produce this type of “marketing.”

On the other hand, our handwritten notes convey the comfortable old-fashioned qualities of caring and a personal touch. This human emotional connection between our clients and their customers simply creates better results and it stands in stark contrast to the alternatives today.

So, while everyone else tries optimized email marketing campaigns, targeted search ads, Facebook ads, and whatever comes next, handwritten marketing will only increase its effectiveness. We firmly believe this and think you and your clients should as well.

Handwritten marketing works wonders for political candidates, but this article points to the longevity of personal handwritten notes in politics. The longevity that can come back to bite you.

Silly us. We thought it was technology – the frantic e-this and cyber-that – that would kill the slow and intimate delight that is the handwritten letter. But wrong again. It’s politics, it seems, that might do the foul deed.

There is some good insight throughout this article:

There’s no denying that such personal, handwritten missives possess power. More than emails, handwritten versions suggest intimacy and honesty and revelation.

“How very human were letters,” Cathleen Schine wrote in her novel The Love Letter. “Only we write letters.” Beasts may grunt or gesture. “But they don’t write love letters.”

It’s not for nothing, so rife are they with meaning, that stacks of them can be bound in elastic and saved, in chest or shoebox, for years, for lifetimes.

An email is quickly scanned, a letter studied. Is the paper an expensive bond carefully folded, or a scrap torn from a notebook? Does the chosen ink colour set a tone, the handwriting reveal mood or temperament? And does that scent of perfume, should a recipient be so lucky, hint at intent?

More:

There seems a yearning afoot for the age of letter writing as a means of communication at depth.

Almost 20 years ago, G. Kingsley Ward had an unlikely bestseller with his Letters of a Businessman to His Son. Modelled, perhaps, on Ranier Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, it sparked any number of copycat collections of missives to young women, young Christians or “to the next generation from people who know a thing or two.”

They’re popular, perhaps, because letters suggest investment of time and thought and heart.

Now, we’d be the first to talk at length about the innate value of handwriting, particularly handwritten marketing, but here is a new angle. Steve Graham at Vanderbilt University, in a new study to be published this month claims that “a majority of primary-school teachers believe that students with fluent handwriting produced written assignments that were superior in quantity and quality and resulted in higher grades.” There is more in this Newsweek article on how Good Penmanship is more than a Quaint Skill.

Handwriting is important because research shows that when children are taught how to do it, they are also being taught how to learn and how to express themselves …

All this matters, educators say, because evidence is growing that handwriting fluency is a fundamental building block of learning. Emily Knapton, director of program development at Handwriting Without Tears, believes that “when kids struggle with handwriting, it filters into all their academics. Spelling becomes a problem; math becomes a problem because they reverse their numbers. All of these subjects would be much easier for these kids to learn if handwriting was an automatic process.” That concern, in part, prompted the addition of a written essay to the SAT, which is graded for content, though not legibility. “If you put something like a writing test on the SAT, children’s skill level will begin to be addressed,” says Ed Hardin, a senior content specialist at the College Board. The trickle-down effect to middle schools should eventually reach third grade, where the trouble so often begins.

While obviously everyone’s handwriting is inherently different, Eileen a “dedicated elementary teacher in the Middle East” has a teacher’s view on the difference between British and American handwriting.

Years ago, one of the British teachers at our school shared with me that she couldn’t understand why all the American teachers’ handwriting looked the same. She told me that she later discovered that we actually have handwriting class in America, where we are all taught the American cursive (extremely different from modern British “joined-together” writing). Apparently in Britain, they let each child evolve their own system of writing, forming, and joining letters. Of course, Americans do see much variation when they look at other Americans’ writing. But these variations are not apparent to British who are not used to looking at American writing.

According to Bob Rosner and Sherrie Campbell over at Workmash AKA the Working Wounded, Ikea has been using handwritten marketing in some interesting and creative ways:

Ikea recently tested an innovative approach for finding great employees. They put hand-written job announcements on bathroom walls at upscale restaurants in Malmo, Sweden. According to the company, the bathroom ads generated four times the response they get from classifieds.

If you get a chance, there are an awful lot of funny cartoons here. Go take a look.