Nonprofit List Icon Carol Enters Dies at 82

Chief Marketer was saddened to learn recently that veteran nonprofit list broker and manager Carol Enters died March 8 of complications from breast cancer. She was 82.

She began her career in the 1960s with the Coolidge Co., working side by side with Marcie Coolidge, Walter Prescott and Clem Schwartz. Soon thereafter, her husband Bill Enters received a job offer from an organization in Northern Virginia. He decided to take the job, so Carol resigned from Coolidge and went with him to Washington, DC, according to Tony Murray, founder of TMA Direct and former business associate.

That job didn’t work out, so they returned to New York, where she went to work for Walter Prescott at Prescott Lists. She concentrated on nonprofit list brokerage at Prescott, and soon became one of a very few specialists in that area during the 1970’s, Murray said.

Enters left Prescott in the mid 1970’s and founded the Carol Enters List Co. (CELCO). She convinced her good friend and client, Judy Jones to join her as vice president of sales.

(In 1989, Murray bought CELCO, which later that year was integrated with Tony Murray & Associates and Affinity Marketing Group in Fairfax, VA.)

In 1993 Enters retired to Florida where she decided to put her theatrical talent to work by attending a clown school. She performed in children’s hospitals and retirement homes in the Clearwater area for many years, he noted,

“Carol Enters was both a friend and a business colleague of mine for over 25 years,” said Murray. “She lived and breathed the nonprofit fundraising mailing list business. In many ways, her clients were the most dominant factor in her life. She had an incredible ability to empathize with their various causes and because of her intelligence, market knowledge and personal commitment just about all her clients succeeded in their fundraising efforts.”