That familiar feeling: fundraising goes national by going regional.

When the American Lung Association (ALA) in New York City tried to streamline its fundraising efforts by eliminating local references in their mailings in favor of a generic nationwide message, it saw donations drop 12 percent from the previous year.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Quickly, the ALA reverted to the old ways, making sure that an appeal had something local in it, even if it was only a post office box for sending a check.

At the American Red Cross (ARC) in Washington, D.C., however, one size still fits all. A test in three major cities using locally-tailored appeals attempted to persuade donors to national relief funds for victims of the Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina to contribute regularly to local chapters. It yielded inconclusive results. At this point, said John Perell, ARC's officer of direct response fundraising, the Red Cross will continue to test territorial appeals, but the results didn't justify the added expense of doing it on a regular basis.

Powerful computer programs and increasingly sophisticated donor databases have increased the allure of customizing direct mail campaigns to local audiences. A number of national retailers, for example, have adopted the technique of sending customers promotions based on their spending habits.

But the results have been mixed among nonprofits. Many organizations, including the ARC, have long run much of their fundraising through local chapters and see no reason to change. Yet the idea of customizing mailers from the national headquarters to local tastes has not drawn a mass number of converts.

"It's wonderful to have all this technology at your disposal and be able to slice and dice everything," said Christopher Dann, president of Drakes Bay Fundraising in Larkspur, Calif., that assists or manages nonprofit campaigns. "But if you don't have to jazz it up, you probably shouldn't"

Before deciding to localize an appeal, he advocates running a campaign through a matrix of long-established guideposts, including an organization's relationship to donors, factors that trigger responses and the objectives, such as retaining donors, boosting their contributions or bringing in new ones.

"We have 120 years of experience in nonprofit fundraising to tell us what works and what doesn't," he said. "We can't let ourselves get captivated by technology"

Craig Zeltsar, an account director at the fundraising consultant and manager Thompson Habib Denison in Lexington, Mass., sees the value of localization in selecting who receives a mailer. In this role, he has had the ALA as a client.

"Geography makes a difference; he said. "There are chapters next door to each other in the same state that perform differently."

Sorting donors into tightly defined categories, generally called segments, can help an organization boost direct mail's effectiveness by pinpointing likely donors.

However, he noted, building an effective model that turns up useful patterns is just as important as the data itself. From that standpoint, human judgment remains the key element in not being overwhelmed by massive mounds of data.

That is the approach taken by the AIA, according to Craig Finstad, assistant vice president of direct response operations. Each donor is placed in a segment according to the recency, frequency and monetary value, or RFM, he said.

Each mail effort is broken into nearly 65,000 segments, with more than 900 segments for each of the 70 local chapters the association had in 2004. This automatically puts some people on the mailing list and rules out others no matter where they live.

For donors in between, geographic analysis steps into the equation. "For a $10 donor who has lapsed a couple of years, the national view might be that soliciting that donor would just break even," said Finstad. "But in some areas, it only costs 60 cents to raise a dollar, but in other areas it is $1.50. You just need a pair of eyes to determine where the line should be drawn,"

The lesson of localizing what the donor sees was driven home in 2004, said Finstad, when new management attempted to improve efficiency by trying a generic national appeal. This saved money by eliminating such things as local post office boxes in favor of a national address.

As contributions sank, the association quickly re-established the local connection. Tests showed that in Hawaii, Puerto Rico and certain parts of the South, contributions jumped by as much as 40 percent when donors saw a return envelope with a local address.

But the experience at the ARC was not so definitive, according to Perell. People in Chicago, New York and Philadelphia, who had written checks for national disaster relief funds in 2005, were sent two sets of newsletters urging them to begin regular contributions to local chapters. Only in Philadelphia did the response rate of donors to a locally tailored newsletter exceed the one to the generic one sent nationwide, and then only by a small margin.

Likewise, the ARC experimented in 2004 with sending localized newsletters to mid-level donors at 20 chapters.

"The results were inconclusive," said Perell. "We could not justify continuing the test but we will try others. We will definitely continue testing."

Print Get the Mag Weekly Updates