Nancy Jo Houk, direct marketing manager at the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, discussed a direct mail campaign called Helping Hands that involves soliciting existing donors to send appeals to friends and family members.

A telemarketing firm calls house file donors to get volunteers. Those who agree receive a kit of preprinted appeals and envelopes to send to five to twenty people of their choosing.

The 2002 campaign yielded gross revenue of $3 million and 78,000 new donors with an average gift 15 percent to 20 percent higher than the society's usual average gift.

Session speaker Chris Paradysz, CEO of list brokerage ParadyszMatera, discussed using the Web to acquire new donors.

"The good news is that there is more good news than bad news regarding online donations," he said, adding that 9/11 raised awareness of what the Web can do as a medium for donations.

Paradysz suggested things fundraisers can do to develop the online channel, such as using search engine optimization to get prospective donors to their web sites. He also advocated getting cost per donor deals for those services as well as buying Spanish language keywords to get Spanish speakers to the Web sites.

Another session speaker discussed how the American Civil Liberties Union learned that 7 percent of U.S. ZIP codes hold 50 percent of its donors and generate 71 percent of its revenue. Prior to analyzing its file, the ACLU faced decreasing response rates, limited prospecting lists, limited testing success in new markets and no data on the life time value of its donors, said Donna McKay, the group's director of development.

"We wanted to create a more integrated marketing strategy," she said.

Based on the analysis the ACLU did last year, the group built a ZIP code model to better target prospective donors. In an October test, 37 of 39 prospecting lists performed better when the ZIP model was used.

At a session about tracking and analyzing the expenses of a nonprofit organization, Kory Christianson, director of development at St. Joseph's Indian School, told attendees about an appeal called the Emergency Fund that explains the cost of heating the school, which is inn South Dakota, during the winter.

It was a basic appeal in a standard telegram format and mailed at a cost of 18 cents per piece. The campaign dropped for the first time in 1999 to 275,000 people with a 4.73 percent response and $26.93 average gift. It has mailed yearly since with similar results. The 2003 results were not complete but in 2002 there were 400,083 mailed with 4.38 percent response and $30 average gift.

In other conference news, Lee Cassidy, former executive director of the Nonprofit Federation, received the Distinguished Service award from the DMA at a dinner Wednesday night.