The Responsible Electronic Communications Alliance (RECA) is evaluating opportunities to partner with a larger organization to share resources and costs and to move forward in its goal of setting industry-wide standards for e-mail marketing.
"RECA was originally set up to be a separate entity," said RECA spokesperson Reggie Brady, president of Reggie Brady Marketing Solutions in Norwalk, CT.
"But we feel that we can be more effective if we are part of a larger organization who shares our interests in establishing best practices for permission marketing."
The group, which consists of leading e-mail deployment companies and e-list providers, is currently weighing four different proposals and hopes to have an announcement in early fall, Brady said. Bradydeclined to identify the potential partners.
RECA was formed last summer to address the issue of setting standards following growing concern about Internet privacy and intense pressure from anti-spam groups. A sense of urgency erupted as the Mail Abuse Prevention System LLC (MAPS), a Redwood City, CA-based anti-spam group, listed e-mail marketing company Yesmail.com on its Realtime Blackhole List of alleged spammers and began blocking Yesmail’s mail to its customers. Yesmail subsequently filed a lawsuit against MAPS which was dropped following a settlement.
The group has continued to move forward despite the loss of some of its members last year over the cost of membership, reported to range from $15,000 to $30,000 annually. And earlier this year, the organization’s president Chris Wolf and executive director Peter Arnold stepped down as a cost-cutting measure. Wolf, a lawyer in a Washington, DC-based firm, and Arnold, a former spokesman for The Internet Tax Fairness Coalition, had held the only two paid positions within the organization.
Last fall the group issued a set of draft principles for prospecting and retention e-mails. The group has asked for comments and reactions to those guidelines and has been meeting with both large and small ISPs, the Federal Trade Commission, the Direct Marketing Association, marketers and privacy advocates to solicit feedback. The guidelines can be viewed at the RECA Web site, www.responsibleemail.org.
Current members include Digital Impact, DoubleClick Inc., eDialog, Exactis, NetCentives and Yesmail.
