Right-to-die advocacy group Compassion & Choices is boosting direct mailings from four to six times a year despite the difficulty it's had getting conservative lists.
“We're getting ready to start a new fiscal year,” says Jane Sanders, director of membership and planned gifts. “We're doing this because everything about direct mail tells us that if you mail more, you can continue to get good results.”
Although there will be more mailings, Sanders stresses that the organization — once known as the Hemlock Society — is not about to dump an unwieldy amount of material on donors.
“If you give to us in July, we won't mail to you in our next [drop],” she says.
Compassion & Choices sends some 1 million pieces of acquisition mail and about 160,000 to donors each year. Its house list contains the names of 40,000 two-year contributors who gave an average of $45.
The response rate? Around 0.5%.
“Unfortunately, like most direct mail groups, our numbers are not as good as they were 10 years ago,” Sanders laments. “Some lists might work better but we've milked the files that work the best for us.”
Compassion & Choices raises about $250,000 a year from mailings to outside lists and about twice that from its own donors, she adds.
Many contributors are well-educated Caucasian women, age 65 and older. “I have donors as old as 90 and some who are 100 years old,” she notes.
For lists, it turns to groups that are similarly minded, “which means organizations that tend to be a little more liberal and are willing to trade with us.
“We're sort of a controversial issue and because of that some organizations don't want to share their lists with us,” Sanders says.
That includes conservative groups.
“What bothers me about our direct mail is that we unintentionally skew our donor base to a specific political bent, when in fact 70% of Americans believe people should have access to aid in dying,” she says. “So we ought to have an equally proportionate number of conservative people on our database. But I can't get the lists.”
Compassion & Choices seeks to help terminally ill people who are mentally competent decide if they want to voluntarily end their lives, an act that is legal only in Oregon.
The group also provides counseling and information about hospices, pain management and related matters.
— LR
