American cancer society kansas city

Big names, big changes: March of Dimes, Cancer Society go state-of-the-art - fund raising - includes related articles

Two charities started during the FDR administration are just now mastering '90s-style direct marketing. Perhaps you've heard of them: the now 58-year-old March of Dimes and the American Cancer Society, founded in 1942.

It took a former Consumers Union fundraising whiz to show March of Dimes the way starting in 1990, and it took the ACS until September of '95 to initiate a database restructuring, similar to March of Dimes, that it says is already reaping considerable dividends.

The ex-Consumers Union executive spearheading March of Dimes' database work is Carol Portale, an 18-year direct marketing veteran who spent 10 years at the nonprofit watchdog group, ultimately as director of fundraising.

In that post, she helped Consumers Union acquire 800,000 donors from the Consumer Reports, mostly through telemarketing. She was recruited by MOD to resuscitate a direct mail program that it was ready to scrap in the late '80s in surrender to the U.S. Postal Service's cost increases (the same thing that had put Consumers Union into a hole before Portale aided its rescue.)

It appears that MOD, based in White Plains, NY, was wise to continue with direct mail and to bring in Portale. Since the revamping began under Portale's supervision, the charity's direct mail revenue has increased from about $22 million to $29 million and its mail costs have been slashed by a good $5 million.

A long-neglected resource - five years' worth of coded donor transactional data gathering dust in the Phoenix warehouse of its former lettershop - played a big role in MOD's turnaround. This data was cleaned up and added to a relatively raw mailing list in a six-month project that gave MOD 5 million good names and freed it of 7 million dirty ones.

Six years later, the database is just 400,000 names short of the 12-million-name count it had when Portale joined, except now all 11.6 million arc spic-and-span.

After it spent six months cleaning up and purging the file in 1990, MOD hacked away at its mailing schedule - a reduction that just about recouped the $100,000-plus it cost to make the database state-of-the-art.

It also began appending a wide range of variables onto its donor names and factoring them into its mailing strategies.

One result: the March of Dimes traded emotionally charged solicitation letters for plainer pitches and modulated the number of mailings it sent to different types of donors.

"We were able to get information about what kinds of packages people wanted," Portale says, noting that most donors knew the March of Dimes well and responded much better to simple, plain-white-paper donation requests than to the more elaborate, maudlin appeals.

More recently, MOD bolstered its national database with the names of its "Mother March" volunteers, who solicit donations door-to-door for local chapters. The program began two years ago and has given MOD an extra 2.2 million prospects to work with.

"They're a lot better than cold prospect names but not quite as good as those on our donor base," Portale says.

Solicitations to the volunteers bring in nearly $700,000 a year, while the volunteers' door-to-door canvassing takes in close to $300,000 a year.

Meanwhile, the big-money direct mail programs are accelerating: the organization has boosted its mail-based revenue by 11% a year the last two years. (MOD's 1995 revenue totaled roughly $140 million - 30% via direct mail and the rest through planned giving and such special events as Walk America.)

Another reason the organization decided to stay with direct mail was that other direct response media didn't seem to be working out.

MOD's average gift is low - about $5 - and "television is an expensive buy," Portale explains. "We would have to have an average gift of, say, $25 for it to work for us. Television would probably be best for charities with continuity programs."

Discussing other fundraising avenues, Portale says MOD has ruled out centralized telemarketing, but "some of our chapters do it."

The data-bathing continues at MOD. Portale, along with staffers Allen Nigrello and Maryann Diette, has isolated hundreds of segments - according to recency/frequency/monetary value, appended lifestyle data and other criteria.

Putting It Together

The American Cancer Society began its database makeover 12 months ago as an attempt to reverse several years of flat revenue.

"After analyzing our program, we realized we could only identify donors by source code - and nothing more," says Beth Athanassiades, the Atlanta-based organization's direct marketing director.

ACS spent 1% of its multi-million-dollar annual fundraising budget to centralize its once-unwieldy database - bringing together information that had been housed at 54 divisions (which are sprinkled across the country and until recently were known as chapters).

The consolidation has given ACS greater latitude in tailoring fundraising offers according to its donors' giving history. For instance, it helped the organization recognize and act on the opportunity to solicit people who've participated in special events that it sponsors, including the twice-yearly Relay for Life bicycle race.

"If somebody gave $500 to play in a golf tournament, we send him acquisition mailings asking for the usual $15, $25 or $30 contributions," Athanassiades explains.

The ACS mails 22 million renewal pieces and 13 million acquisition offers a year, and raises approximately 12% of its funds through direct mail. (The lion's share comes from planned-giving bequests and special events.)

Is the makeover going over? If you believe ACS, it is. Athanassiades says "most of the divisions are reporting double-digit revenue increases," and the organization is projecting that targeted mail will help its revenue grow by 30% to 40% in the next couple of years.