Direct-Marketing Awards Honor Fund-Raising Creativity, Success

Eight fund-raising appeals by charities have won honors in the 71st Annual Echo Awards Competition, sponsored by the Direct Marketing Association, in New York.

The winners, who will receive their awards at the association’s annual meeting this week,

were selected based on creativity, marketing strategy, and financial results of their appeals.

Top honors in the competition’s nonprofit category went to Mercy Home for Boys & Girls, a Chicago orphanage. The organization sent a select group of donors a seven-page letter from the Rev. James J. Close, the charity’s director. He told recipients that the charity was just about to start a $9-million campaign to build a new home for orphaned youngsters when he learned he had cancer. Rather than abandon the campaign, he asked the charity’s most loyal donors to pick up the cause he held dear.

The “Legacy of Miracles” appeal netted more than $5-million; the same set of donors had contributed only $250,000 the previous year.

World Vision, in Federal Way, Wash., won three awards. Two covered the Spanish and English version of an appeal containing a birthday card for a child in a developing country; the other winner featured a videotape and a letter seeking donations to help people in Honduras who had lost their homes to a hurricane.

Hale House, a New York charity that helps sick youngsters, won an award for a Christmas ornament mailing sent to 5,000 donors. The ornament, a cameo depicting the charity’s founder holding a baby, was intended as a thank-you for past gifts, but the appeal also invited donors to make an end-of-the-year donation. The mailing netted $92,878.

Hale House won another prestigious direct-mail contest last month: the National Postal Forum Mailing Excellence Award for nonprofit groups. The charity sent a mailing with a diaper designed for infants that weigh five pounds or less, with an appeal asking, “Do you have any idea how little a five-pound baby is?”