Charities Divided Over E-Mail Address Services

As charities try to encourage more donors to visit their Web sites, one stumbling block is that most organizations do

not have e-mail addresses for the majority of their donors.

To overcome that obstacle, an increasing number of nonprofit groups are turning to new services available from companies, often called e-mail appending, as a quick way to expand their lists.

Businesses that offer e-mail appending screen the names and mailing addresses of an organization’s donors against master databases of e-mail addresses. In cases where matches are made, the company sends e-mail messages to let people know that the charity would like to contact them. For donors who give their permission, the company provides the e-mail addresses to the charity, which then “appends” them to its other donor contact information.

Thirty-six of the 157 large charities that provided data for The Chronicle‘s survey of online fund raising reported that they had used e-mail appending.

But these organizations have had very different experiences in the match rates and quality of the e-mail addresses they have received. Fund raisers also are divided on the ethics of the practice and whether it makes sense to send messages to donors who haven’t volunteered their e-mail addresses.

Two Methods

Companies offer two approaches to seeking addresses of donors. In some cases, donors are asked to reply only if they would like to receive information from the group — typically called opting in. In others, donors are asked to respond only if they would prefer not to receive e-mail messages from the group — called opting out.

In the first case, the charity receives the e-mail addresses only of people who say they want to receive information from the group. In the second case, the organization receives the e-mail addresses of those people who do not specifically say that they don’t want to hear from the group, which usually results in more e-mail addresses than the opt-in method.

When the March of Dimes, in White Plains, N.Y., used a screening service to try to find e-mail addresses for more than 70,000 donors, it obtained 5,000 addresses, or roughly 7 percent. But the charity soon discovered that many of the people whose addresses it received did not have much interest in giving online.

Robert Prisament, the charity’s manager for direct-response Internet fund raising, says that when the charity sent an e-mail appeal asking donors to make an online gift, the results were negligible. Few of the messages were returned as undeliverable, so Mr. Prisament assumes they were accurate matches to donors who had previously supported the charity in response to other types of appeals.

“It definitely warrants more testing,” says Mr. Prisament of e-mail appending. Next time, however, he thinks the organization will seek e-mail addresses only for a specific segment of donors, such as those who were being sent a particular direct-mail appeal, so it could send e-mail messages that reinforced the print mailing.

Concerns About Accuracy

Some groups have been far less pleased with the accuracy of the e-mail addresses they have received. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington, dumped the results of its first attempt at e-mail appending when fund raisers found that a sizable number of the addresses were suspect.

“When we started looking at the e-mail addresses that we got back, some of them were offensive e-mail addresses, and in no conceivable way could they belong to the donors that the company linked them to,” says Carsten E. Walter, director of membership at the organization. “That started raising red flags for us. What were we getting back? And no one was able to answer that question to our satisfaction.”

Nick Allen, a fund-raising consultant in San Francisco, is leery of e-mail appending and advises his clients to proceed with caution.

“There are a lot of disreputable companies doing it who say they are using permission-based names, but are not,” he says. “It’s very hard to tell, if you’re the buyer.”

Mr. Allen believes that even the lists used by reputable companies include many people who didn’t realize they were giving permission to be contacted by charities. Often, he says, people end up in a company’s database because they checked a box — or failed to uncheck a box — indicating that they would like to receive e-mail messages from third parties.

If just a few people on such lists get so angry after receiving e-mail from a nonprofit group that they contact a spam watchdog organization or the press to complain, that could damage a charity’s reputation, Mr. Allen warns.

Raising Ethical Questions

Toby A. Smith, Internet strategist at CARE, an international-development group in Atlanta, acknowledges that e-mail appending runs “slightly afoul” of generally accepted best practices in e-mail marketing. But he believes that nonprofit organizations have a responsibility to keep their communications costs as low as possible and that e-mail screening services offer a potential way to do that.

When the charity was deciding whether to use a screening service, it reasoned that if its donors cared enough about the organization’s mission to give their hard-earned dollars, they wouldn’t mind if the group attempted to start an e-mail conversation with them, says Mr. Smith. The organization received a relatively small number of negative messages from the people whose addresses were appended to the list, which he says proves the charity’s assumptions were correct.

The list CARE purchased included e-mail addresses for 20 percent of its donors — but only about half of those e-mail addresses worked. Even so, with the e-mail addresses that were valid, CARE doubled its overall e-mail list.

Since the organization expanded its e-mail list, the rate at which people are opening the charity’s e-mail messages and clicking on links in the messages has remained steady, which leads Mr. Smith to believe that the recipients obtained from the screening service are responding at roughly the same rate as supporters who gave their e-mail addresses to the organization directly.

“If I were ranking the ways to grow an e-mail list, appending would not be at the top,” says Mr. Smith. But he says that it’s a tool that the organization will probably continue to use.

Getting Help

Rick Christ, a fund-raising consultant in Warrenton, Va., agrees that the approach works well for some groups.

“If you have 100,000 donors, but you only have 5,000 e-mail addresses, there’s only so much you can do,” says Mr. Christ. But, he says, if such an organization screens its other 95,000 names and gets an additional 10,000 addresses, then the charity has enough names to start to put donors in different categories and test e-mail approaches in earnest.

He says that organizations can expect to pay at least 25 cents per e-mail address, usually with a minimum charge of $2,000, for e-mail screening services.

Catholic Relief Services, in Baltimore, got an earful when it started to communicate with the people whose e-mail addresses it received from a screening service.

The organization’s first attempt garnered 115,000 e-mail addresses. Catholic Relief Services decided not to use the 30,000 AOL addresses that it had received because it didn’t want to run afoul of the company’s strict privacy policies. But it sent the other 85,000 addresses its monthly e-mail newsletter.

Kevin Whorton, who oversees Catholic Relief Services’ direct-marketing program, estimates that the charity received 2,000 negative responses — some of which were virulently anti-Catholic. But he says that the group was not deterred.

“Most people’s feelings would have been hurt,” acknowledges Mr. Whorton. “But the analyst in me kept looking back at that and saying, ‘Hey, that’s only 3 percent of the file.’”

While the first experience with a screening service netted e-mail addresses for 20 percent of Catholic Relief Services’ donors, subsequent efforts have produced match rates closer to 5 or 6 percent.

At first, says Mr. Whorton, he was upset and called the company that ran the service to complain. But then he realized that the rate would most likely be lower given that most of the names are people for whom a match could not be found during the previous attempt.

A year later, only 25 percent of the donors identified from the first screening are still active contributors. Mr. Whorton believes that is because the people whose addresses a screening service finds are most likely young, first-time donors, the kind of contributors who have the highest attrition rates.

Despite the organization’s sometimes rocky early experience, Catholic Relief Services plans to continue using a paid service to obtain e-mail addresses. “In marketing you have to take advantage of all channels that are economically feasible for you,” says Mr. Whorton. “To not use e-mail to its maximum effectiveness would be taking one arrow out of the quiver. I don’t think we can afford to not do it.”