Meet the Broker: Donna Mallinson

Today we meet Donna Mallinson, president of List Counsellors Inc., a three-person company in Allentown, NJ, where she does the list brokerage work.

Mallinson started there in 1994 as an office assistant working in list management and brokerage. Now she focuses on brokerage and accounting, she says. “What I love most is researching lists and dealing with people.”

She brokers boating and aviation lists and recommends files for nonprofit fundraisers. Her clients include Ehlert Publishing Group, Belvoir Media Group, Chesapeake Bay and Offshore magazines, Overton’s catalog and the Deborah Heart and Lung Center.

“List brokerage has gotten a lot harder in the last few years,” she says. There’s more pricing pressure, a declining universe of names on response lists in some markets and it takes longer to get information from list managers, which squeezes brokers trying to meet clients’ deadlines.

“Technology has ironically made our lives harder. We used to be able to accomplish everything in a 10-minute phone conversation. Now we have to deal with a dozen e-mails going back and forth and it can take four or five days,” she says.

Requests submitted online for counts can take two or three days for a response, considerably longer than five or six years ago, when list brokers and managers communicated primarily by telephone, she adds.

When she finishes work, Mallinson relishes her free time umpiring high school and college baseball games. “I’m also a big Yankees fan.” She’s married and has three adult children.

How can brokers protect clients?

“Well, if somebody tells me they have a list with 6 million names, I’ll know something may be wrong,” Mallinson says.

It’s a broker’s job to know which list managers, service bureaus and list owners are honest and reputable. This means checking with the Better Business Bureau or a postal inspector before dealing with unknown companies, she says.

Telling a client “no” is important too—this may be necessary if a client wants to use a list from a “bad list manager” offering files not regularly updated or who cannot explain the source of the data.

What difference does it make if brokers and list managers communicate more by e-mail than phone nowadays?

“Everybody has gotten so bogged down with e-mails,” Mallinson says. “Nobody knows anything about the lists they manage anymore.”

It used to be easy to get an answer to a question from a list manager on the phone, but now more often the answer is ‘I don’t know. I’ll have to check,'” she adds.

Few list managers still proactively initiate calls to brokers letting them know about new lists, which she adds is unfortunate because e-mails can slip through the cracks. “I know that I do more business with list managers who keep in touch by phone,” she says.

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