Meet the Broker: Leslie Pulford
Today we meet Leslie Pulford, senior vice president and general manager of fundraising at LDS Group Inc.. She feels that previous experience as chief strategist at nonprofit direct mail firm Barton Cotton gave her special insight into the needs of both nonprofit mailers and list brokers.
In her current role, Pulford brokers lists mostly for Roman Catholic organizations such as the Society of the Little Flower, Trinity Missions and St. Lawrence Seminary.
“At this point my focus is on Catholic fundraising. I have a couple that are non-Catholic,” she says. “But I think where I can bring a real level of expertise is in the Catholic area because I’ve been working in it for so long.”
Like most in the business, Pulford is trying to make it in tight times.
“I think things are way more competitive just because clients are pulling back, budgets are tightening and everybody is trying to get a share of the pie,” she says.
And the Catholic market presents its own special challenges, she notes.
“It’s very hard these days to make anything other than a Catholic donor file work for a Catholic fundraiser,” she says.
Just the same, “there’s a really interesting dynamic that’s been happening in the Catholic fundraising arena for many many years. [Because of their source,] prospect names tend to react to acquisition packages almost like house files.”
Even though mailings to those lists are not responding as well as they once did, they’re performing a little better than some non-religious direct mail, she says.
She attributes this partly to the generally high level of awareness the Catholic mailers have established among their recipients.
One of Pulford’s proudest professional achievements took place several years ago.
“I have an organization that I’ve worked with for many years and they wanted to somehow expand their donor base,” she recalls. “It’s a Franciscan organization so what I did was focus on developing a program around St. Francis and animals. And we stepped away from the typical Catholic donor file and went out to animal cause files,” she continues. “This program has been a success for probably the last seven years.
“All that it is is thinking outside of the box
