Charities Try Rented E-Mail Lists

In the early days of the Internet, many nonprofit organizations thought, or at least hoped, that if

they built Web sites that could accept online donations, donors would come in droves to make their gifts electronically. With the benefit of several years’ experience, charities now realize that they need to be just as creative and aggressive in their approach to the Internet as they are in the rest of their fund-raising activities.

As they try to figure out what works on the Internet, a small but increasing number of charities are renting lists of e-mail addresses of people who have no prior ties to them in an attempt to raise more money online and to reach out to new donors.

While the number of organizations that use rented e-mail addresses is unknown, a handful of groups have employed them for several years, and nine of the 197 large charities that completed a new Chronicle survey reported using e-mail addresses that they rented from list brokers.

Many in the nonprofit world are intrigued by the possibility of applying the lessons of direct mail to the Internet, but the technique is controversial.

Citing Internet users’ concerns about online privacy, a number of technology experts question whether using rented e-mail addresses is an ethical approach for charities to take in their efforts to raise money online. At the same time, they and some organizations that have used rented lists wonder whether the practice is an effective way to raise money.

The Internet has developed a distinct culture and set of values that make raising money from new donors different online than it is in direct mail, says Dan Geiger, executive director of eGrants.org, a nonprofit organization in San Francisco that processes online donations for charities.

“Embedded in the Internet culture are ideas about respect for privacy, and a reluctance to commercialize the Internet,” says Mr. Geiger. “It’s a different emotional experience to get a spam e-mail than it is to get a piece of junk mail in your mailbox at home.”

Elizabeth Walker, online marketing manager for Amnesty International USA, in New York, echoes his point. She thinks that Internet users’ “visceral reaction” to unwanted e-mail stems from larger concerns about the potential uses of technology.

“There’s the implication that you’re on someone’s master database, and that there’s the ability for them to track you,” Ms. Walker says of e-mail. “With mail, they may have your name, but they don’t track whether you open the mail or not.”

‘Built-In Brake’

Another difference between e-mail and direct mail is cost, says Nick Allen, president of Donordigital.com, a technology consulting company in San Francisco. He says the cost of direct-mail appeals acts as a “built-in brake” to prevent organizations from sending them indiscriminately.

“Every piece of mail costs 30, 40, 50 cents, so organizations aren’t going to spam you with paper mail, because it’s just too expensive,” he says. “They’re only going to send it out to people who they think have an interest in the issue.”

The temptation to take advantage of that cost savings may be too great for many organizations, says Michael C. Gilbert, founder of the Gilbert Center, a nonprofit organization in Seattle that studies how charities use communication technology. He worries that charities may be on the verge of a “spam epidemic,” and that they have not thought about the consequences.

“Nonprofits stand a chance of severely damaging not just their private reputations, one organization at a time, with potential stakeholders, but of damaging the reputation of the sector in terms of people’s sense that nonprofits are different than the for-profit organizations that they’re used to getting a lot of e-mail from,” says Mr. Gilbert.

His solution: Rather than renting e-mail lists, charities should seek a “chaperoned” introduction by the organization that manages the list.

In the scenario Mr. Gilbert proposes, the entity that owns the list would send a message to the people on the list in behalf of the charity, rather than simply selling the charity a list of addresses. The message, he says, could say something like, “This organization does stuff that we really care about, and we think that you would care about it too. We encourage you to visit this page and sign up for its newsletter.”

While Mr. Gilbert is not aware of any nonprofit organizations that have sought or offered such an introduction, he thinks that the arrangement would benefit both parties because it would be more transparent than a list sale behind closed doors.

Beyond the ethical considerations, charities also are asking whether rented e-mail lists are effective at raising large sums.

In December, the Nature Conservancy, in Arlington, Va., sent an e-mail appeal promoting its “Adopt an Acre” program to 800,000 people whose e-mail addresses the organization rented. Even though the organization chose lists of people who had indicated an interest in environmental issues, the response to the campaign was disappointingly low.

Noelle Wagner, the organization’s director of interactive marketing, speculates that the lists may have been overused by other groups that had rented them or that the people on them weren’t a close enough match to the Nature Conservancy’s donor profile. Or perhaps, she guesses, the time around December holidays is a bad time to send e-mail appeals.

Whatever the reason, she believes that the Nature Conservancy will see better results from its own list of 53,000 supporters when it is able to tailor e-mail campaigns to their individual interests than it did from the rented lists.

Looking back, she doubts that a mass mailing to people who don’t know the organization is a smart use of what the technology has to offer. “The power of the Internet is to provide information to people that’s relevant to them,” she says. “When you have a list that big and you have the same message to everybody, the question is, How relevant is it to those folks?”